CSB327: Hollywood Is Mine For The Slammin'!

All right.

Hey, man, what's going on?

So, how about those car seats?

How about those fucking car seats?

Are you having a good time?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Just get that level going and then like get the level on each side.

And then, did you force it in hard enough?

Is it secure?

Is it secure?

No, it's not.

Did you get one that

like uses the prongs to lock into your car?

It has the option for both.

Yeah.

Okay, because the prongs are the shit.

Yeah, so that's it.

Like the option was to, if it had no prongs or if you didn't have a middle or positioning thing, then you could be like, all right, let's go with the actual normal seat pouts.

But the prongs are way better and more secure for sure.

But like the setup on these car seats, and I remember, so we've, you know, as I've been kind of getting

prenatal classes and stuff and learning more about it, there's been one of those things that's come up, has been like, hey, have you installed the car seat yet?

You know, and it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, not yet.

But yeah, we're going to do it.

We got time.

Don't worry about it.

And just took the opportunity and like, you got to get your entire body weight on that some bitch and like fight it into the seat.

It's quite a, it's quite impressive, which makes sense given that you're like basically anticipating massive shock impact, you know, security.

But yeah, the amount of like, hey, you should go do that in advance and not while you're on the way home

now makes sense.

You know what?

Yeah, because I don't know if you remember, but me and Paige were,

we caught the car seat, and then the next, then two days later,

we went to the hospital.

Okay.

And so the car seat was sitting in our car in its box

while the baby was arriving,

which meant that the day after the baby arrived, I got to go through the awesome process of assembling the car seat and installing it in the car in the hospital parking lots.

Yes.

Looking like an insane person.

Well, so, no, this is basically what I was warned against because

very stressed.

There was a couple other, we know other people that were in the same situation where they're like, oh,

in the parking lot of the hospitals where you're installing the car seat.

And it's like, the, the, like, after it was done and set and safe, like, full sweat, full body sweat, hot, like, it's, it's all, it's a full workout, getting that all in there and securing it off and back on and making sure it's all in.

So, yeah, you like doing that in addition to everything else going on.

They're just like, this is a bad idea.

So, this is, this is the warning to do it well before you have to think about it, you know?

But But yeah, no, that's good, man.

Good for you guys.

That's smart move.

Mm-hmm.

Because, hey, let me tell you, you're not, it's not a good, it's not a good decision-making slash instructions following slash

rigidity testing mood.

No.

The day after.

This is not the time to

push it to the limit.

No, and yeah, so with that, got those in and got a couple of those gates, you know,

for the staircases and stuff.

Child stoppers.

Exactly.

You know, kid container.

Just lock them down.

No, you don't.

So that's going to be.

Now, granted, that kid ain't going to be going nowhere for

a long time.

For sure.

For sure.

But my thought process is do the stuff that takes energy while I have it

and don't save it for later when I don't.

Right?

So I wish you a very good baby who sleeps through the night.

That is

a genetic temperamental in utero development dice roll that has no basis on what you were like as a kid or

what Punch Mom was like as a kid.

Completely random.

I wish you the best of luck.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

We will find out.

But yeah, I know

that's kind of

a part of what

I got up to.

Had a short week, to be perfectly honest.

What happened?

Went to a

Montreal Twitch meetup.

So, hey, you know, shout outs to that,

to

Castle Runs.

And I ran into some other friends, a Father's Gaming Challenge, is someone that I've streamed with a bit in the past as well, that was there.

And

Sony, this old Samus player from

the melee days a million years ago, that Reggie introduced me to, that was around.

I saw some old faces, so it was nice to kind of just say what's up to some people

and

get a little official Twitch water sippy.

Oh, yeah.

How's it taste?

It's hydration.

It's like hydration.

It's good.

It's good.

We

took a look at Ultimate Sonic SmackDown,

which I talked about a bit last week, which is the 3v3 update to the Sonic fighting game that was made by

the 1960 for too long.

And each time, so I played this game on Get Into Fighting Games twice in the past, and

we'd bring over Uncle Jimmy, aka Jimmy Bones, to come over and play.

And each time we have, it's been an absolute blast.

It's been a great time.

And

we got in there, and shit talk was abound and plentiful.

And

the initial, like,

the demo that they have is a, it's five characters right now.

So they're, they're, you know, converting everyone over over from the original game, which had, I want to say, like 20 something,

you know, to

this new sort of 3v3 rollback layout.

Although it seems like you can also do, you know, 3v2, 2v2, 2v1, et cetera, pick your own team size.

And yeah, no, it's just, it's a, like, whatever they touch, Arcforged, it's just, it becomes a dirty Marvel game.

It's, you know, watching footage of it right now.

It just, it gets so disgusting to just be like, how are you supposed supposed to block that?

You're like, shut up, deal with it.

You know, get motivated, white boy.

You know, like, it's just, it's great.

Um, yeah, just instant fun right off the bat.

And, uh, in this case, they also threw in some of the other music from all the different soundtracks, including Undefeatable, that first boss theme from Sonic Frontiers, which is like a super banger track.

Um,

so yeah, no, nice to, uh,

nice, nice to, to, you know, again, have another contender to the throne, uh, in the form of sonic the hedgehog and and his his crew um i'm watching footage of mechasonic which means this game is good yep mechasonic is my main mecha sonic is the goat i am

collecting tears with mechasonic mechasonic is so sick it's crazy um

gets away with absolute shenanigans there is a like you can do a spin ball and then at the end there's a um

a

uh he can do there's a command grab or there's an anti-air command grab.

So you can put them in like the spin ball blender.

And then if they decide to like stand still or jump back, you can call it out and be like, no, you don't.

You know, I fucking love Mechasonic so much.

Oh, wait,

hold on.

Mechasonic or Metal Sonic?

You're right.

There is a difference.

Mecha Sonic's the larger, spikier, more robotic one.

Metal Sonic is the one that looks like a metal version of Sonic.

Mechasonic is the coolest fuck one from Sonic 3 and Knuckles.

Metal Sonic is the lame one from 2 in the cartoon.

Okay.

Metal Sonic with the

goofy little proportion.

And Sonic CD.

Yeah, it's Mechasonic.

It's Mecha Sonic.

Yeah, no, Mechasonic's the fucking cool one.

Yeah.

And then, like, Robotnik is there.

Eggman's there doing Sentinel summons, calling in the little robot animals to help and to extend combos and shit like that.

Edgy Shadow is just teleport Virgiling all over the place.

You know, it's great.

Yeah, they're busy over there because basically, I mean, I've summarized a couple times, but like, they're literally not only making their own game, but they've been called in to help a bunch of other indie fighters get their shit working as well.

So

looking forward to it.

We also took a brief look at Andy Bogard,

who's now out in City of the Wolves, and he is as sauceless and as boring as he ought to be.

And that's Andy.

Andy is not Terry.

Andy is meant to be dry, unsuccessful, seasoned fucking chicken breast.

I got to tell you, I legitimately fucking thought you were going to say as sauceless, as boring as the game he is coming to.

no i disagree with that but i i you know they they always change him up and try to make him a little more violent with his like ninja techniques and stuff and he refuses to marry my etc

but uh it is just a very clear like

the all the charisma went into terry and arnold

Anderson Bogard just he he picked the wrong master, you know?

And the thing is, too, is like, I guess if you were,

if I were just walking by the franchise and looking at the two, the guy with like the fiery shirt and like the long hair, you'd think would be like the big favorite, the Alan Shazar of the, you know what I mean?

You'd think he'd be like that guy.

Andy would be cooler if he didn't speak.

I mean, the fact that he does speak, he just doesn't say anything of interest is fucking weird.

It is, it is, it is of all the little like, you know, duo brother, whatever, rival kind of pairings and such.

It's like, yeah, like,

he, Joe and Terry are like, you know, wise cracking, street talk, and all that shit.

And you're just kind of like, Andy was the one that got made fun of, right?

He got, he got, he got flicked in the nose as a kid.

And like, he just rather teased.

Boring or homeless.

Hmm.

But homeless and charismatic, though.

Yeah, see?

Right?

It's tough.

And on top of that, and then again, and you, you get Mai.

Mai is there.

She's down for life, but you just, you refuse to give her the time of day.

Yeah, you just won't do it.

Oh, God.

Um, no, those the idea that, like, because I saw the, the artwork in Street Fighter VI of, like, the wedding happening, and I was like, oh, did it happen in another franchise?

Did it, did it actually, and I think it was a dream in the end, you know?

But

But the idea that they would celebrate it elsewhere was fucking crazy to me.

And they kind of stopped, but the

escalation of their intros over the years in the King of Fighters games, where at first it'd be like, hey, Andy, and he'd be like, oh, whatever, let's fight, you know?

And then eventually he'd be like, hey, look, Andy, it's a baby.

And he'd be like, what the hell?

And then it'd be like, ah, it's a, it's a ninja trick.

And then he'd be like, okay.

And then she does it again and is like, hey, look, it's a baby.

And he'd be like, okay, I'm not falling for that.

And then she puts it down and it starts walking towards him and goes, Dada.

And he goes, Ah!

And has a super detailed, like the screamer intro animation all before the fight in, like, whatever, like 2001 or something like that.

But, like,

how would that baby have even happened?

Well, that's the thing, right?

That's that's what he's wondering.

He's like, How is this possible?

This is not

with a ninja drink and shovel cattle product.

This could not, Andy is horrified because this not, this could not have physically occurred.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

I want more updates on the dynamics of this insane nonsense relationship.

And meanwhile, like, Mary and Terry are like barely in the same frame at the same time.

Like, over the years, there's been like two, maybe three instances.

And you know that they're just smashing.

You know, late night, you up,

swing by on the motorcycle, get the hell out of there.

I'm just sleeping in an alley.

Come find me

behind the pow pow cafe under the pizza box.

I'm digging through the pow pow cafe dumpster to see if they have any old fries.

Anton the dog.

Her dog can go find him by smell and be like, yeah, there he is.

All right.

Quick late night hookups and then fucking get out of there before anyone sees.

Anyway,

yeah, that lore.

Good stuff.

Stupid.

It's dumb.

Yeah, so I've been whatever busy with house stuff otherwise.

But we did get to the end of Act 1 of Expedition 33.

Congratulations.

Right on.

Did Reggie like it?

He loved it.

He really enjoyed that.

And right on time, right exactly

as I calculated at the end of the session too, like we pretty much got there right within the hour that I was expecting to.

And

it hit.

And obviously, you know, going into act two of that, where you, you know, no spoilers, but just to say, like, it's a big first crazy moment in the, in the story.

And

to immediately go, like, and now we take a break.

And everyone's like, that's, how could you do this to him?

That's insane.

And he's like, I'm in.

I get it.

You know, I don't care about the audience, but if I was Reggie, I'd be like, I'd be like,

yeah, yeah, no.

And we, I mean, we did discuss it beforehand, but it was one of those moments where I'm just like, if it were anything less significant than the birth of my child, we would continue.

But now, every, now it's, it's clear that, like, this is why I picked this thing and this stopping point, you know?

Um, but yeah, no, that's, that's all fine.

That's all fine.

Um,

though, that act one set of cutscenes, I went back and rewatched them.

Man, those were like completely incomprehensible the first time around.

Just absolute nonsense.

Crazy.

And now,

oh, wow, they're just

love.

Whoa, it's all there.

Love the rewatch experience on this game.

So fun.

So, yeah,

that's pretty much all we got up to besides

other stuff.

Some in-laws came through in town, and we hung out and had a good time.

So, the schedule is a little bit spotty, but

I would imagine.

But we're going to have...

It's about spottier.

It's about to get spottier.

And we might pop back up every once in a while for something if there's like a sponsored stream coming through or so.

Or, you know, we'll see.

But for now,

on the books, I've got two more left.

And this week, we're going to be doing tomorrow a sponsored stream of Mecha Break,

which officially is releasing from its open to now

final form so gonna jump in there

be doing a stream of that on Wednesday if you see anything cool or get any pro tips you can send my way I would appreciate it there you go

such as hey don't buy this buy this upgrade instead yeah I mean like okay go to training to go to try out the mech that you'd like to you know or kind of like preview some of the mech types you'd like but I don't know if you're what I feel like you'd like the

one that's like Epion.

Yeah, okay, you get the Epion.

There's an Epion for you.

I was like, I don't know if you want the grappler.

I don't know if you don't have the drill on its fucking arm.

Yeah, okay.

There's a couple of sick ones.

But yeah, Mecha Break is...

We're going to take a look at that.

And I'm also going to use that day to, like, yeah, we're going to check it out for a couple hours, and then I'm going to switch it up to a different game, which is currently in an open preview preview right now looks fucking crazy this thing out of nowhere called uh mitrea

so how do i how do i spell that i will drop a link over here oh that's much easier actually and um

yeah it is

it is a

action it's a character action style superhero

assault spy

like

follow-up yeah and it's like and it's like taking all the lessons from Assault Spy and going to the next level with it.

Imagine a character from the world of My Hero Academia air comboing through a city in the sky doing character action shit.

Looks super cool.

See, I thought the number one takeaway from Assault Spy is that a guy with a briefcase is a really cool idea for a character action character.

It certainly is.

It certainly is.

And if I had time, money, and the ability to do so, I would expand heavily on that idea.

But,

of course, you know, know, one day, there's also the idea of like, yo, hey, Pandora, are we ever going to make an entire fucking

subsystem character around that concept?

Because you certainly could.

Look at the, yeah, this thing looks really cool, Mitre.

Yeah, just looks like a solid action game.

Right now in Little Playtest.

So I'm going to take a look and see what's happening with that.

It's doing a bunch of fun things I enjoy, which is like massive text on screen when shit happens, you know.

So there's that.

Yeah, it's kind of tricky because I know there's this, and there's another game that was super woolly-coated that got sent my way, which was Dead is Disco, which I want to check out at some point as well.

I need to,

that's another, like, it's

literally rhythm, dance, floor, combat type of shit going on.

Ooh.

And

that looks very interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

On the wish list, it goes.

Super sick.

So we're going to be checking that out.

And then

on Thursday,

I'm going to be joined by one Fox Cade

who's coming over.

Show to Fox for me.

We'll do.

He's going to come over, sit on that couch, and he's going to teach me and Reggie how to play Yu-Gi-Oh!

On the way out

at the buzzer with the ball in the air and the and the

we're going to learn how to play Yu-Gi-Oh!

Master Duel.

So that's the online version.

The online version.

All right, I have a

okay, so here's what you do.

You reach into your pocket,

you pull out, let's assume this is a wallet, it's a phone for visual.

You take your wallet out, you open your wallet,

you take your credit card out.

Oh, okay, I got my ridge wallet right here.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

Okay.

Then

you hold your credit card in your hand.

Okay.

Then,

your left hand.

Then you grab your fist.

Okay.

And then you just punch yourself in the dick and balls as hard as you can a couple of times.

Okay.

And then you put your credit card back in your wallet and you have learned how to play Yu-Gi-Oh!

Master.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Now, does that, do I win when I do that?

You, you,

you,

you won after a fashion.

What you did is that you got all the good parts of the experience and you didn't spend any money.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Okay, okay.

You got the core of it.

Because

it looked like to get to the beginning

to just to enter

the game, so to speak, to enter the door, there was going to be at least five bucks required to get some sort of set, set deck and

jump in and just start throwing things at each other.

So

there's a real joy followed by a real sorrow in my heart that the most fair, least predatory card game that's ever come out was the one that went dead broke, which was Rune Terra.

The one that gave it all away.

It's like by making card acquisition fair and fun and easy and fast, they went broke.

I just the pro I know,

whatever.

I've said it so many times over the years, so everyone knows I'm just repeating myself.

I know that the nature of having an ever-expanding go-collect them all system is what makes people want to buy and expand their collection and customize and do stuff.

But I just, you know, the feeling that you kind of like essentially like have to, yeah,

it's a,

I don't know what the exact wording is, but the economy is based on your continuous,

buy-in participation of the system.

I wish that wasn't the case with these games, you know?

The closed card deck systems, the CCGs, I believe they're called, definitely just sound way more appealing to me as they don't force that purchase.

There was one of those that came out a long time ago called Artifact by Valve, who makes good games, and it was a massive failure.

Yep.

Because

I understand.

People want to buy the packs.

They want new cards.

Yeah.

And

you want to get the little opening pack feeling of like, oh, a rare, and that rare is worth more.

And you want to have a secondary market where you can sell that to people who are collectors.

And like, there's a whole economy system that people legitimately enjoy here.

That is, like, it is predatory, but part of the part that is predatory also means that there's scarcity that scratches itches that make it enjoyable.

So both things are the same thing, and you can't escape it.

You know, this is the nature of how it goes.

So, for example, I'm going to send you a photo here

of what card games are about.

Okay.

Let me just load up this link here.

Okay, here's a yeah, I'm gonna copy-paste this photo for you.

Okay,

all right.

So, this is a photo.

Could you describe this to the chat, you know, for the audio listeners in particular?

I see, okay, I see plastic gloves are holding Yu-Gi-Oh!

cards or Oh, Magic the Gathering cards.

And

they're looking at one, and then

they seem to be, okay, there's the player is in full-on clown makeup

in the corner.

And she appears to be cosplaying perhaps a character or so, and she's holding up her phone

playing.

And imagine the bottom left, what does it say?

Box for zero Emmets.

Okay, so so that is friend of the show rebecca ford director of warframe yes who does not play magic the gathering okay but does play final fantasy 14 okay and is a massive massive uh emmet selk fan okay um who did a stream in clown makeup where she's like i'm just gonna keep opening these fucking packs until i get the emmett selk card did she slowly put the makeup on as none of them showed up

okay you started in full because like slowly putting them on as you continue to not get one sounds like a way to go.

Yeah, all right.

And she got her Emmett Selk.

I believe she got a hollow Emmett Selk.

And then finished the stream by going, gambling is bad for you, kids.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, look, I just, I feel as if, like, every, when I think, when I have these thoughts, I feel like I'm like, imagine walking into a casino and going to someone at the slot machine who's sitting there just doing the thing

going like hey

i want

and or i want to change this to make it to make it more fair and and to so that you don't burn this much money but there's a you know what you're getting in from the beginning and there's a cap on you know i want i want to contain contain this and i and the look they give you as they just piss straight onto the floor is is what i'm thinking of like my colostomy bag's full but i don't want to change it

that look of go fuck yourself and i'm relieving right now in front of you.

When the Final Fantasy Magic the Gathering card stuff was going on, I got to see my algorithm sent me some people's TikToks from the Magic the Gathering

world.

And one in particular stood out to me, which was a guy going, people had been mad at him that he paid like $300 for a single card on eBay.

And he was crashing out because he's like, you people are morons.

And he pulled up a couple of videos of other content creators who had spent like thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars trying to just get the same card, but doing it the right way,

which is by opening card packs.

And how he was actually smart for only spending $300 on the card.

And all I could think of is that, like, one, he's completely right.

And two,

everything about physical card games has become completely insane and predatory to the point of you like you can't you can't get in there it's it's it's for sickos i mean we've been like over the years like every other day there's a wizards of the coast fucking you know thing of just how insane they're getting and and all that all the bullshit that that they get into but uh in this instance i think the plan is to just go in start with whatever you can uh get with a default and and um he's got an account that's full of all kinds of stuff so we can like learn that and i'm not going into necessarily like i think you can I think you can get like a free set deck right off the bat and then you can we can look into it and see like about getting maybe another or whatever the case is.

But the plan is to just like learn to what the game itself is, as opposed to what to buy and how to, you know,

how to feel horrible about

your non-poles.

Only thing I know about Yu-Gi-Oh!

is Pot of Greed lets you draw two additional cards.

Yep, yep.

And

that is not what Pot of Greed does.

Oh.

That that is an anime exclusive style of shit.

Wow.

Well, you also know about Exodia, you know, and then the right hand of the Forbidden One and the left hand of the Forbidden One.

Can I download Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel on my phone?

Yes, I can.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's have a very, let's have a very interesting podcast in two weeks.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the plan.

And it,

yeah, I think you, again, by starting out, you get a couple of points points to like pick a thing or two, and then you just you know dive in.

Are you

do you have a weakness somewhere for this kind of thing?

So I like card.

I

like collectible card games.

The irony, of course, as somebody who loses their mind when they see a card game in a game, liking collectible card games is strange.

I really liked Hearthstone for a while, but I never got any good at it.

I really, really adored Rune Terra.

I loved Gwent in

Witcher 3.

I'm not smart

about card games.

I'm really bad at building decks, but

I did okay when I was playing Marvel Snap.

And all of the collectible card games that I played did one of two things.

Rune Terra died.

They just came out and said, hey, we're just going to fucking not update the PvP anymore.

It's essentially a dead game.

And then Snap and Hearthstone both had this thing where the longer I played and the better I got to it,

the more it was like, well, you got to get

this card.

This card's like mandatory to get your deck rolling.

Okay, how do I get that card?

Wow.

Yeah,

you use

X amount of millions of fucking bullshit.

Or you can buy the treasure chest of 8,000 gems.

Maybe you can buy the treasure chest.

And like the way that, like, I specifically remember

Hearthstone was about liquidating cards you didn't want into cards that you did.

And the rate was just, it was terrible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It took forever.

Burning copies.

With Marvel Snap, every update they made to it made it, made cards you wanted that you didn't have access to further and further and further away and rarer and rarer and rarer.

Because if you didn't get a fancy card during its battle pass when it came out, it would just get fed into a a pool but the pool to pull from would just get larger and larger infinitely

right so like oh so you know i mean obviously i had my my tepend phase where it was just like you know at maximum slop it's like is the sliding jpeg of the character i like moving and the voice lines are playing okay yay activate neuron go you know um and that was a weird one because again it was more timing based than actual like you know set card player or or whatever.

But for the most part, I was like, yeah, I can, I can, if I'm interested immensely, certainly in the theme, I can

carry that forward into, you know, playing for a while on something.

But the other game that I ended up like playing a bunch of, which, you know, I talked about back in the day, was the original Yomi card game, right?

Where it that, I mean, besides the fact that it's like, okay, yes, it's fighting game themed, which I, you know, have that familiarity.

One thing I did enjoy about it was the fact that each character was a normal 52 deck, a card deck, like

playing cards.

So when it came to trying to think of the odds of something popping up, it's like, oh, if this is going to be

an ace or a jack or whatever special move I'm looking for, I kind of just, you're already familiar with like expectation of how often those things will show up in odds in that way.

So like it felt like a bit more comfortable right off the bat in two different ways going into it.

And so I was like, yeah, I like that this whole deck is one whole whole character, and you just got to learn that.

And,

you know,

it worked well with other card game and other fighting game knowledge.

I really wish I liked Tepen, man.

I wish Rune Terra just existed as itself, but with the Capcom casts.

Because, like,

all the pits and pieces and flavor of Tepen, I'm like, yeah.

But the live timing stuff, the live timing stuff, I could definitely understand how that would would turn people away especially if you're like I'm playing this to do something turn-based I don't want to worry about that element even though if you're playing online against other people do you always have to have a timer though yeah the timer is like slow yeah

um the only problem I I foresee a problem already with me playing Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel is that like the art's kind of sauceless oh yeah it's it's pretty

my expectation is the my well the anime art is what I'm my brain is expecting so anything it's anime, yeah, yeah, that's that's pretty much it.

That's all I'm setting up for.

Which, you know, that tap and art was very pretty.

You know, those versions of those characters are shiny and they got some cool stuff going for them.

Uh, Marvel Snap as well, you know, had a couple of those

Marvel Snap had like a really wild variance between good-looking cards and the rest of the cards.

Um,

the

other thing, so yeah, we're going to take a look at that, and I believe that is not the only plan for the day, as

I have been informed that we will also switch, and the last

thing we're going to play before I go on break, once we're done with Yu-Gi-Oh!

Master Duel, is something called

Let me get my glasses on the bridge of my nose here.

I really hope I know what this is: Uma Musume Pretty Derby.

Oh, fuck.

Oh, fuck.

Really?

I'm shocked.

I thought for sure you were going to say Persona 5X.

No, no.

We'll talk about that in a little bit, though.

So, we're going to find

the horse girl game, Wooly.

There are horse girls.

They're barely horses, as far as I can tell.

They're just girls with like little headbands on with ears attached to them.

It's wild what counts.

It's wild what counts as a spiritual animal these days in anime.

It's crazy.

Like you have, you don't have to commit at all to anything.

Back in our day, we used to have furries that were dangerously cheesy.

Right?

And now...

Or it's just like a hat.

Or there needed to be like, you know, you needed to have like, okay, you could still be a human face, but you needed to have some cat-like features going on.

The eyes, and maybe the little nose had to be a little bit cat-like.

You know, you have to kind of commit to some whiskers here and there, and you're like, nah, this is just an anime girl, but we're throwing some little some ears on it and calling it a day.

And I'm still saying that's cowardly shit.

Cowardly shit.

It's really funny, and I mean really funny that Persona 5X and Ume Musume Pretty Derby came out simultaneously out here

because my timeline.

So there's a lot of people that I follow on Blue Sky that are like anime nerds, I guess.

Fucking dweebs.

And I have seen nothing but two things for like a couple days now.

One is

people absolutely crashing the fuck out

over their pretty derby horses not doing what they want.

Or

people just memeing the fuck out of the fucking subway slammer.

Yep.

And talking about the king of the subway.

Oh, yeah.

Slam you.

Oh, make no mistake.

The whole subway is mine for the slamming.

I was going to slam it.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

So,

you know, we're going to get it.

We're going to get it.

We're going to investigate these horse girls and see what the fuck is going on.

But yes, the subway slamming is real.

And I mean, listen, we talked at length.

You're such an asshole.

You have assigned.

I'm now going to download both of these fucking games on my phone

because now I want to be able to talk to you about this.

You need shit.

Yeah, you need slop exposure, right?

I need to know.

There you go.

I found it.

All right.

Slop exposure forced.

Forced onto your fucking phone.

Oh, I don't like it.

That sounds like a tag.

Mm-hmm.

Slop underscore exposure.

My pretty horses are being exposed to slop.

I mean,

that's what they eat, right?

You put it right in the fucking bridle.

The trough, man.

Well, are you a trough guy or a bridle guy?

Well, do horses eat from a trough?

Because I know.

Horses can eat from a trough.

Pigs eat from a trough in my brain.

Horses, you got the bridle, and then you put the thing with the, you know, the oats going, right?

That's what I was thinking more along that line.

So, um,

feedback etc

um

wait no is bridal bridle's what you bite right okay no that's the bit that's the bit never mind okay all right well what's your favorite if willie was his horse was a horse his favorite part of the it would be the bit okay well speaking of the bit um

i mean if we're subway slamming we actually subways i want to talk about we gotta if we're gonna subway slam we gotta slam right now because let me tell you something.

When people started talking about this fucking P5, the mobile game, P5X.

Forever ago.

Yeah.

Forever ago.

Well, I remember hearing about it like three years ago.

Well, because they announced it and people were like, this is a mobile gacha thing.

And then it's like, oh, but it seems to look like a full-on P5 game.

And then it released in China, I believe.

So like with Punishing Grey Raven and all this stuff, you get that like...

That's the first

early preview when it's out in another region.

And then, so now it's getting translated and coming out over here.

And yeah, like we talked at length about how Kamoshida in P5

is the peak of that game, absolute most reprehensible villain, and nothing you do afterwards comes close to like taking that fucker down, right?

It's it's it's actually strangely like

it's it's strange how the peak comes so early, and then dealing with the world and politics afterwards is like, yeah, but and persona 5x is exactly the same

because now right if you haven't heard in this new spin-off the first boss of the game is a subway pusher and the kind of guy that just slams woman over the barricade into the subway and is like i'm like oh my god what a perfect modern

extra hatable person but also he loves slamming people on the subway and he's super into it and this is a real thing that people do it's a real problem in japan but it's a real problem everywhere right here too it happens everywhere yeah and it's this new crazy ass hatable form of like like it's you're you're looking at like you know there's there's people that um

there's just these these fucking psycho like cases where just people are just shoving people swinging punching getting violent randomly at at you know uh um out in the wild and you kind of you these ones where someone just shoves someone into the fucking train is so hey it's so anger inducing and frustrating right the genesis of the subway slammer do you know so i i looked i i i spoiled myself on his his details so i'm not i'm not you know so if anyone is trying to save the backstory of the subway slammer you know you can you can uh uh uh make sure to to wait for the game to to to go dive in on that um but i went to go find out more and then like yeah i read this this the the reasons why and the and the backstory and it's still one of these cases where I'm just like, you, you need to find these petty, low stakes, piece of shit villains in society, because never mind government

reform takedown.

Everyone hates that guy.

Everyone is like, oh, that piece of shit.

And then he slams, he loves it, and he disappears into the crowd.

And the idea that you're just like, we're still don't know where he went.

He's at large.

You're like, fuck these people.

You know, these are the the people that everyone loses their mind at.

And like, they like, no, now you can't, everyone's paranoid.

You can't have nice things.

Everyone's got a, you got to lean back.

You're looking around and nobody knows what's going on.

You know, that type of asshole is the perfect villain for a persona gamer.

There's so much more than this.

There's so much more going on with

the Subway Slama than you would expect.

So the bad.

You know his Genesis.

Yes, I do.

And I don't know if we should spoil it for people that want to save it for themselves.

If you want to play play it, it's so small scale.

No, I'm not going to talk about it.

It's so small scale and petty.

It's hilarious.

Which is it is the funniest fucking thing in the world.

Okay, so don't listen if you don't want to have it spoiled for who for you for the backstory.

Tune out now, all right?

So it's simply because he's a coach

for baseball or so, and like a nine-year-old

baseball player, and a nine-year-old baseball prodigy girl like home runs him.

His pitch.

His pitch and it's so embarrassing as a professional.

He's on TV.

And it's televised and he gets owned so hard that he can't handle it and breaks.

And now he needs to get revenge on all the women.

And then it's like, women did this to me.

It's woman's fault.

And now I got a subway slam all the girls for embarrassing me in front of the nation at baseball.

How dare they?

It's so crazy.

Do you know?

Do you know what the deadline is?

What?

Like,

oh, if you don't get the Subway Slammer by such and such a date,

that, like, this will happen?

The fucking the World Series?

Like, no, no, no, no.

Like, you know, in a persona game, it's like, yeah, the calendar date.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so in the Subway Slammer, it's your character, like, imagines what if they knocked a woman down the the stairs and she dropped her baby?

We gotta stop the subway slammer before he kills a baby.

He imagines that and you see him envisioning the plan?

Wow.

The advanced slam.

The grand slam.

Whatever.

Oh my god.

Oh my god, though.

It's so weird because it's like, wait,

wouldn't the escalation be like, what if he killed a woman?

It's like, no, no, no, we need to kick it up enough.

Oh, my fucking God, Pat, the word slam and the baseball connection are the whole reason why he's slamming.

I didn't realize it.

Down in the subway.

The grand slam.

So there's more.

There's more, Willie, and this is not about the subway slammer.

So,

so, first of all, Persona 5, The Phantom X, I'm probably going to check it out now because we've talked about it and I have to know.

It's a year behind.

And with some games, you'd be really mad about that.

However, with the Gatcha game, game it's actually really really great because you can see hey what characters are actually really strong what you know what what should i save up for whoever and i i guess it's about saving up for makoto but what you also get is like well how did the chinese and japanese audiences respond to the subway slammer yeah answer is is they hated it yeah

hated the subway slammer and thought the fucking subway slammer was dog shit

and the writer for the subway slammer is apparently also a massive pussy and fucking got fired

after getting mad about how people hated the subway slammer.

That's crazy because I'm so compelled, right?

And furthermore, with no context except for what we've seen, like getting memed and released, because we're spending all this time talking about him slamming,

I'm assuming that no, that like he's slamming people into the tracks, but it seems like people are getting pulled out, right?

Like, no one's getting slammed and hit by a train, right?

Yeah, that's the that's kind of the idea.

So you're like, it's this, it's like you're not doing, it's the, it's like, it's attempted murder, but you're doing it in this way where people have a chance to get saved.

You're just fucking everybody up and scaring them and ruining everyone's day and just being horrible.

And you're like, it's that extra petty level on it, you know?

Like you're diabolical enough to do that when it's minutes away from another train coming, but you're going to slink into the shadows like, haha, haha, haha, haha, and slammed another one.

You know?

up becoming the main writer of the storyline of P5X from Palace 3 onwards.

The Subway Slammer is just a brief moment.

It's a brief moment.

What could have been?

I mean, incredible.

Incredible.

And yeah, the shit's going nuts.

I mean,

Dad Asano sent me a clip of Kamoshita.

Did Dad Asano also send you a bunch of unsolicited information about Persona 5X?

I saw Kamoshita walk up

and

Argentine backbreak the subway slammer

and leave Joker speech.

Yeah, you know, so they're going nuts over there.

But I just, I can't believe the perfect parallel of an opening villain that like you nailed it.

And I, this is, this is something that I'm like, okay, for all that I loved about metaphor, which is high concept, right?

Which is high and grand scale, metaphor could never.

This level of pettiness pettiness is is persona and and I really really hope we can find ways to find this exact type of individual in society right now in the current context and fucking Spotlight that asshole.

I need more of this energy.

I love it

What a what a yeah, I mean I'm gonna play all three of these games this week.

I'm kind of wondering like did somebody you know like did that writer did someone just kind of like were they looking at the news and just being like like who's a piece of shit these days, you know, like who's a real who's fucking grinding everyone's gears like what like can we get a boss that is a porch pirate that's just out here and going like yeah i'm stealing a bunch of random packages but that ain't enough i need to start stealing people's medication you know i need to start getting in on the stuff that looks like it's really important

you know can we just find these exact fucking just oh you you waited for the medical equipment that was going to that house to steal grandma's pills you know what i need we need to have a persona villain that is guy who passes the school bus

can't wait to zoom to zoom that business i'm the school bus scooter oh look at him

I love, I love scooting.

Can't wait.

Yeah, it just drives around looking for school buses to scoot by, you know?

And just close calls with the kids who are crossing.

Oh, man, one day he's going to hit one of those kids.

Yeah,

this is the energy I need.

I need like fucking pathetic asshole in society.

I love it.

I love it, dude.

Great.

Great.

Wow, this is a glut

of free-to-play stuff this week for you.

You got Mecha Break.

You've got fucking Subway Slamming.

You've got Pretty Derby.

And you've got Yu-Gi-Oh!

Yeah, also Might Rayo is the other one.

Is that also free-to-play?

Yeah, the Playtest demo is free right now.

Oh, gee.

Oh, well, that's not what I mean by that.

Yeah.

No, it's installing bullshit on your phone that's going to make it get so hot that it hurts to hold it.

Games.

Games that make

your fucking warning temperature message pop up.

Yes.

So we will be taking a look and

fucking blame Foxcade is all I can say on that one.

That's gonna be, yeah, tomorrow and then Thursday over on Wooly vs.

And then again, you know, if you see us pop up at some point randomly, you know, don't be surprised.

But

that's the plan for

Yu-Gi-Oh!

And already I have a guy on Blue Sky saying, hey, just a heads up, starting up Yu-Gi-Oh!

now with no experience is the same as starting up Marvel vs.

Capcom 2 with no experience.

The tutorial in-game is representative of the game as it was played in 2010.

A million years ago.

Amazing.

Should be ignored.

You should watch a YouTube video instead, to which I say, no, I'm not going to do that.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm going to do it.

I'm going to do it via Sherpa, and the whole goal is to just literally find out how the game itself is played.

So I'm, which, you know, Inscription, you know, was with its homages was kind of fun at that.

So I'm not completely in the dark on it, but

in terms of trying to get serious and competitive and be like, I want want to get in now for the meta it's like okay yeah no this is the guy i'm that would be me being the guy from last week going i don't know what a fucking what a what the rules are what's the best card what's the best deck that's all i want to know right now you know and just being like only caring about that that'd be insane um

do not set your expectations for me being like oh what kind of deck am i going to be a control deck player or this or that or no no no no no i'm just like what beats what and how do the point systems work and you know

control decks How does it flow?

Control deck is fun because you can feel

like I like

playing a game in which, even with no voice chat and no way to communicate, you can feel your opponent getting fucking mad as shit.

Just super fucking pissed.

Like playing a control deck in like Rune Terra and just like somebody throwing down a card down and just going, no, you don't get to play that card.

No, you don't get to play that card.

No, you can't.

No.

No.

No, you're not allowed.

No, you're not allowed.

Fuck you.

Is just.

I mean, look.

I don't know that you'll see me pick between being a Timmy, a Johnny, or a Spike.

You know,

within the OneStream.

So.

Hey, Yu-Gi-Oh!

players, is there a Teemo deck where I can just flood my opponent's deck with AIDS?

Because if that's the case, that's what I want to play.

It's my fourth deck I've ever played in anything.

Wasn't there a fourth name that got added to

Wasn't there like Timmy Johnny

or something?

There was like Timmy Johnny Spike, and I feel like there was like another.

Oh,

yeah, I don't know.

Anyway,

apparently there's been a lot.

Okay.

All right.

Well, all that going down over.

Vorthos.

Vorthos, I believe.

Yeah, that's the one that's the lore master.

I believe that's what I've heard before.

You were a Spike, weren't you?

I don't know which one these are anymore.

Timmy is the.

Timmy likes it when

the big explosions happen.

Johnny wants a bunch of complex setups.

Card interactions.

And then Spike just wants to fucking win.

So it's not about win.

It's like, I want...

I would really prefer if all these collectible card games were actually just sets of constructed decks for you to play against each other.

Like,

like, when I was playing Rune Terra, I was playing a lot of like Azir Aurelia, and like, I built that deck according to the Azir Aurelia fucking like template, but I would have been just as happy if I went into a mode and it was like pick a deck, like pick a fighting game,

pick a fighting game character.

It's like, what kind of deck do you want?

And they just gave it to you, and I would just play it.

Yeah.

I mean, look, we can really just, you can look at this and go like, you know, Timmy is going to take Gustav and he's going to build that

overcharge to 10 and he's going to use it.

Yeah.

Right.

Johnny is going to get in there with the like forced pictos that make your whole

you die and upon death you cast and then you resurrect and then you stay at one life and then at one life you're doing extra damage and then all those things feed into your your weapon system which feeds into your stats which feeds into your build and your and your your your you know uh your ap

and then then there's just like,

yeah, literally, what is the meta?

What did they nerf?

What did they buff?

Okay, that's what we're playing over on Spike, right?

Anyway, Wooly versus on Twitch and on YouTube.

That's what we're up to.

What is going on?

So me and Paige watched a Netflix documentary this week.

Yeah.

We thought you might actually like.

It's called Train Wreck, and it's about the poop cruise.

Oh.

2013.

No, not Trainwreck, the Amy Schumer movie, but the Train Wreck Poop Cruise.

That's correct.

We watched this about the poop cruise.

I saw the thumbnail for that.

It popped up in my Netflix recommends.

I was actually going through it.

It's a pretty fast watch.

It's a 50-minute documentary about a cruise in which the electricity went out.

Okay.

Okay.

And

I have

a very crucial, important

question.

Yes.

How much poop is actually depicted in the poop cruise documentary?

There is no poop depicted.

Lovely.

This is merely implied.

Lovely.

Okay.

There is at one point a video

off someone's phone of them standing in what appears to be sewage.

Okay.

But it's not like there's turrets floating around.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Because look, I mean, at the end of, you know, you take me through through a Shawshank redemption, and I'm going, oh, but I get it.

That bit's rough.

It's rough, but for the narrative, you know, we can, we can deal, we can deal.

But, like, I don't need the footage of like panning over

a boat and just having blurred-out brown shapes.

Like, I'm just like,

I'm good, man.

Okay, lovely.

Most of it is told to you via the narrative and the story.

There will be more than enough poop in my life in a minute.

All right.

I don't want to go.

I don't want to get trapped on a cruise boat.

That just seems like a horrible, horrible nightmare.

I don't like it.

No, I do have, I've never been on one.

So I do have that

like curiosity.

And like

me and Punch Mom have talked a couple times about like, you want to just be humongous pieces of shit and just go do a stupid piece of shit cruise.

You want to just give up for like a couple days and see what happens.

And there's that inner curiosity to just

give up and know what it's like once.

You know?

I might do that.

I might do that because I've never done it.

And I kind of want to know.

But then you're going to be a massive piece of shit for a little bit.

But the horror stories.

But the horror stories are very, very likely.

Basically, if it goes bad on a boat, it's really bad.

You know, like minor problems become major problems very quickly.

The energy that I saw from that thumbnail was very,

if you liked Fire Festival, you're going to love hearing about this disaster.

Like,

the narrative actually builds up really strongly to set up, set up, set up, set up, set up, tipping point.

But yeah, it's a nice, easy, fast, clean watch,

which just has a lot of like, oh,

okay.

Oh, my goodness.

Can't believe it.

Yeah, because, you know, like,

there's a couple of times, the times where you hear about cruises, I feel like for me, when it pops up, it's like, you know, there'll be this type of story.

There'll There'll be

the air of circulation gave everybody COVID back in the, you know, a couple of years ago.

And then there's the

drunk dude takes a dare and dives into the water, and everyone just watches.

And you're just like, that's it?

Was that a shark fin?

Bye.

And it's just like, yeah,

there goes a Darwin Award, I suppose.

That's fucking crazy.

But in seconds.

Is that a shark fin?

God, I

Otherwise, he's just going to swim for like a dozen hours and drown.

Like, they're not stopping.

They're not doing it.

Like, they're going to let people know the coordinates, where it happened, and maybe toss a preserver overboard, but you're cooked.

And then also, I feel like back in the day, I used to hear stories about, like,

yeah, I don't know.

You know, old couple went on a cruise, took out a bunch of insurance

beforehand, and then, you know, off the boat.

She just fell.

She just fell.

You know, we

got into a fight, and she just fell, and, you know, there's nothing that can be done about it.

That's just how it is.

Yep.

So

thanks.

I'll see y'all later.

You know, just,

what are you going to do type crazy shit?

You know, so that's whenever I hear the cruise stories, those are the things that circulate in my brain, you know.

Don't fall off the boat, guys.

Don't do it.

Let's see.

Yeah, so watched, I watched about the poop cruise.

I also was it a boat slam?

It was not a boat slam.

This whole boat is mine for the slamming.

Dude, like watching the subway slammer just lurking in the middle of the subway platform, like crouched down with his dick face.

Just like, oh, I can't wait to start slamming.

It's the

dude, like, yeah, just Brian Battler, like, just shoulder charging into people.

It's great.

It's great.

What else I got?

Okay, so

I have played

a high amount of Death Stranding.

You've no lifetime.

I have played approximately 22 hours of Death Stranding 2

since we last left.

Okay.

You're in it now.

So a couple of things.

First of all, thank you very much to one Ludwig Forsel, friend of the show, coming on and chatting with me.

How'd that go?

For a couple of those early streams.

Very appreciated, bud.

Also, shout out to me being a stupid idiot.

So, Wooly, I have

my monitor directly in front of me, which the computer is plugged into.

This monitor feeds its audio into this mixer.

So audio comes from a PC game into the monitor, into the mixer, right?

I have a PlayStation set up there.

The PlayStation has its HDMI port go into this monitor, which then outputs the head, the music, into the mixer.

So everybody can hear everything, and then the mixer leads back into the PC, right?

It's just a very simple loop, right?

So talking with Ludwig on fucking Discord, and then I go to switch to Death Stranding, and I discover something really stupid.

Now that I've switched the HDMI input, the monitor is only inputting the PlayStation.

Correct.

But I'm using the headphone capture from the PC.

Yes.

So I run into the scenario in which everyone can hear Ludwig but me.

Yes.

Yes.

This is the same problem I had when you would call in and I'm playing Helldivers on PlayStation over there or when anyone has to do a Discord call while we're playing a console game while I'm also hearing Reggie sitting next to me and we're mixing all of those together into the thing.

It's a super complicated setup.

So I'm given the task of having this prestigious guest on my show and having to solve it immediately, which is when I messaged you on Discord.

And then I messaged you on Discord and was like, will you help me send me Turtle Beach headphones, please?

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

I fucked everything up.

I'll tell you later.

And it's later now.

So I start sweating

profusely and I start panicking and I start like min-maxing.

And so by the way, as my favorite part of this, Ludwig couldn't get his computer or his laptop to work with Discord, also.

So, he was

the composer audio man behind

to call in with his iPhone.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, that is one way to do it.

Yep, Discord on phone is a thing.

So, everything was just falling the fuck apart.

Okay.

But I did solve it.

Okay.

I solved it by just using the monitor and video output of Aver Media of my capture card.

Of the card directly.

Okay.

So, yeah, you

had some panic solving.

Panic tech support solving.

If you were, so because I have a couple extra steps involved with mine, because I also have the local capture going, it's not just about the stream feed.

There's also a like, you know, local recording for editing for YouTube later and local audio on the side what I ended up doing is essentially getting a a secondary mixer to like take the full call and add it in at a lower volume to the main feed right and you could you have to basically just there's a separate device you can get for that for discord calls that sounds really fun and reliable yeah i mean well it's ever since i i i rewired the whole setup to get it in there and now it's now it's fine but it's like but then we also add the thing of like if reggie's gonna be playing on his own screen next to us or something like that, you know, then we're

yeah, on top of that.

Uh, I'll just get all the technical stuff out of the way because it's death stranding.

On top of that, uh, I went ahead and

you know, a little while ago, somebody made a like snide comment.

I think we talked about it on the podcast where somebody was like, I can't believe Wooly and Pat are still streaming at 1080p.

Like, we're old-ass dinosaurs.

And I was like, Man, who the fuck needs more than 1080p?

That's ridiculous.

Well,

I went and fussed with some settings in the Twitch Enhanced Broadcaster beta.

And I am now going to be streaming in the future at 1440p

with

four times the bitrate

that I usually use.

And it's really good that I did this because when you get to chapter five in Death Stranding 2, there is a sequence that I can only describe as the bitrate annihilator.

There is, I swear to God, the worst bitrate scene I have ever seen ever while streaming.

Okay.

It is genuinely unbelievable.

It is just a nonsense mess of particles

for like half an hour.

I mean, thinking people are not designing their game chapters with streaming bitrates in it.

No,

it is a vampire survivor's level of visual mess

on screen the whole time.

Jesus Christ.

And I happened to be walking into it with a newly upgraded stream.

And hey,

it managed.

It handled it.

Okay.

It actually handled it.

And I was like, wow.

Because then

I did the petty bitch thing.

I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to go look at other people's streams of this exact moment.

And it's like, yeah, no, it's a vampire survivor scenario where it just turns like people's cameras stop working because the bitrate just can't fucking keep up.

And so the bitrate on the camera just all of a sudden puts your face cam down to like two frames a second.

Okay.

It's fucking hilarious.

So there's a couple games I've played where, like, oh, well, I mean, Elden Ring, right?

Some boss fights in particular.

Yeah.

Just like, hey, you want some soup?

I feel like the fucking soup.

I want to say Lord of the Frenzied Flame was getting, you know, kind of nuts with it.

Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, I did.

So over on the, I mean, not on this setup over here, but over on the gaming setup, I did tweak things massively to

hugely increase the bitrate output.

And, you know,

I'm able to get it stable putting out like 11k.

You know what?

Yeah, that's what I was before.

In order to not have your shit turn into garbage on Death Stranding chapter 5, you need 20K.

Oh my god.

Okay.

You need it up there.

Out of curiosity, what is your CPU usage on OBS?

4%.

4?

Okay.

It tops out at 8%.

I have it down to 1.5, and I'm doing 11k, right?

With super duper light, light, light footprint.

Well, I mean, CPU usage is going to be standard across the board if you're using like NVenc as like your code or like AV1 because that's all GPU.

But if I have to double that, oh my God.

Okay.

Well,

you know, I guess we'll see ultimately, but there is a limit to what's possible with our hardware, our setups, our bandwidth.

There's a million little things to consider for sure.

I've also switched to MKVs.

Good for immediate not losing your footage.

Bad for

compression right off the bat and potentially like using quickly because you have to convert a massive massive multi-gig file into a into mp4 man i'm uploading i'm uploading parts of my desk stranding playthrough before my stream is over okay well as uh because i edit because i have edit as a step i have to take i have to get an mp4 done but beforehand so yeah mkviss i stop my recording and start uploading it in the background and just set it to public and it just goes live before the stream is over

i mean fortunately OBS has a built-in system option where you can remux

and that that takes care of a lot lot of the the the issue but um you know but this is also why i just again i capture on a completely separate device entirely so uh yeah i i

i don't need to edit if it's all just good the first time

i i haven't encountered too much of the like you know lol 1080p what the fuck kind of conversation um but i can say that like i i i don't know what's possible with my setup here you know um there's a there's basically a deal where at well, there's moments where there's also like

Punch Mom working from home and stream uploading and multiple things where it's like, this is not a perfect, isolated, pristine, you know,

undiluted internet situation, you know?

We make do.

That being said, how, yeah, I was curious, did

any

like

tad bits from Ludvig or

we talked about like a wide variety of topics not necessarily like specific to Death Stranding.

Did you ask him about the Laurier?

Test Dog.

Well, I know, I spoke to him about that when I was streaming Expedition 33.

Right?

And because he was in the chat for that.

But

one of the things that happened

is that...

So when you have the music man on your show,

everything that comes out of your mouth is perfectly designed to make you look like a stupid asshole.

Correct.

It's just the way that it works.

Yes.

So

Ludi and Woodkid did the music on Death Stranding, right?

So Woodkid

did a lot of pieces and Ludwig described that he did like a majority of like the in-game music.

So like tension music,

some cutscene music, wandering about music, action music, you know, the game soundtrack, right?

The score.

So

I'm doing like a VR mission, and I'm like, wow, man,

this fucking music's great.

You did a great job.

It's like, well, Woodkid did this one.

Cool.

Okay.

Well, okay, good.

And then later on,

there is in the first chapter of the game, there's a big marquee action sequence.

And

I

had my

trike, my tricycle, my motorized motorcycle tricycle.

And the game was like, hurry up.

And I'm like, oh, I don't have time to fight these guys then.

So I just eyeballed it and hit a ramp super hard and just literally flew over the encounter entirely.

Whoa.

And like landed in the cutscene that ends it.

Okay.

And then I hear Ludi in my earpiece just going, God

damn it.

God damn it.

Oh no.

Oh

fuck.

I'm so glad I can have the composer of the meme sound right here.

Yeah.

Just fucking super pissed.

That's real.

Skipping his music.

That's super real.

That's what it's like when you watch someone play your shit, man.

Yep.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah.

It's video games.

It's an interactive medium.

Isn't it crazy?

People play them.

You never know how it's going to go.

And we got to have this fun little moment where,

you know, so chatting about how, like, Ludi helped pick out the voice actors for like Dead Man, for example, because like it's English-speaking gone staff back in DS1.

And then we get to one of the preppers that we run into.

You know, there's a bunch of the artist or the musician or whatever, right?

And this guy's called the Boca.

And

he's a white guy in Mexico.

And

he's like, Yeah,

I'm trying to style myself after the Japanese style porter, the Boca.

And he's like trying to enunciate it super hard in Japanese every time.

And I can hear Ludwig just like trying not to vomit and just getting super upset because he was on a contract basis for Death Stranding 2.

He wasn't like in the studio.

And he's just going like, I could have stopped this.

And every time the guy says it with this super thick, bad Japanese delivery, he's just like, fuck.

Oh,

okay, okay.

Yeah, I could have.

Just sticking your hand out.

My other favorite part about having Ludi on is that I'm asking like questions to the chat.

Like, oh, do you think,

oh, do you think this is a good route or this route?

And Ludwig's just like, man, I don't know.

I never played it.

Yeah.

I never put hands on this game.

It's not what I'm here for, bro.

Yeah.

I did the music.

Do you have ears?

That's me.

Yeah.

It's it's really fascinating whenever I you talk to people that are in game development and there's like a huge swath of people that are like, yeah, I don't know how it plays.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I wasn't part of that.

I did the voice acting or I did the narrative or I did the whatever.

Like, it's not like, you know, everybody going out to see, you know, know the the film release and going oh that was meat back there or what have you um

just super weird or the no the classic i beat the community manager at this fighting game at the press event yeah like did you

yeah because that happened to uh that happened to me with dave lang

where um well there you go i ran into dave lang at e3 when dive kick was on the show for yeah and i just trounced the ever-loving fucking shit out of him

and that was like four round four rounds of dive kick.

And I'm like, all right, Dave, hey, man, I know you're trying to make the game look good and you're not trying to discourage people, but like, okay,

you can turn it up.

Like, let's have a match.

And he looked at me.

He's like, we are having a match.

Yes.

Yes.

This is, this is, I,

this is the real thing.

This is, this is what I got.

Yeah, you know, or like, I mean, we've the bit with like challenging Harada to tech in and stuff, but, you know, there's always been these, these over the years stories of like developers from like, or from anime games or like people on the battle planning team will be there and like sometimes some are down and we'll go to salty sweets and mess around and get games in with players.

But

when there's been one thing they don't want is the situation where like a really strong player or like a top placer is like, oh, I beat the guy who's in charge of making this decision.

Therefore, you should be listening to me.

And I think your decisions suck and here's why or whatever the case is, you know?

And like that whole discussion getting

and shitty means they kind of like steer clear of a bunch of it, you know?

Yeah.

So that's that's yeah, that's cool.

That's cool.

So I'm maybe a third of the way through the Death Stranding 2.

Maybe, maybe 35, 40%.

And

there's two things that are happening at Death Stranding 2.

Sorry, three things.

There are three things happening.

One is.

Climate change?

Hey, no, no, no, no, I don't mean like that.

I mean, like.

Did you like Death Stranding and would like more Death Stranding?

Right, okay.

The second of which is

the story

thinks

that you, the player, are stupid.

Like, do you remember

when Snake would just repeat questions back to people so that they would have an excuse to answer you?

Of course,

metal gear.

Yeah, yeah.

Death Stranding 2, coming off of the absolutely baffling Death Stranding 1, has decided to instead have characters talk to Sam and you like you're a moron.

Okay.

And I say this with all, you know, I'm not that far in the game, maybe I'm wrong.

Might be

the worst attempt at breadcrumbing a twist I have ever seen in my life.

Like, genuinely,

might be the worst.

Who could this character be I have ever seen in anything?

To the point where you figured it out on the podcast multiple times

ago.

Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Wells.

Yeah.

Like, like, might be, like, genuinely unbelievable.

Yeah, all right.

And just more and more and more and more and more.

Like, what's going on?

Hit those sandy points, baby.

Let's go.

What could be happening?

As for trucking and gameplaying,

this is the game that Metal Gear Solid V was supposed to be.

Like, it is.

So you're fighting way more mules and brigands.

They're called brigands now.

But you're fighting way more dudes.

You're sneaking into bases.

You're tranquilizing guys.

They're putting helmets on.

It feels like MGS5.

It plays like MGS5.

But you're just trucking alongside your MGS5.

It is much more aggressive.

There's a much larger focus on dealing with enemies than trucking.

It's still mostly trucking and climbing.

But instead of 90%, 10%,

it's like 70%, 30%.

Are you trucking slash building the network as much as you were?

Okay.

I've built a beautiful set of roads.

Beautiful fucking set of roads.

Excellent roads.

They've done a couple little tweaks that have made a massive, massive fucking difference.

Okay.

The first of which is that you can carry the personal carriers, you know, the little robot floating things.

Those can come with you on the zip lines.

Oh,

nice.

So you can take one of those with you on a zip line.

The second is that there is a second type of road that you can build now.

So you have your proper highway, which is for your triking or trucking needs as such.

You have your battle skeleton or your speed skeleton, you know, just to truck it as you would.

You have your little floating disc that you can throw things on.

There is now

the sequel to the road, which is the train.

Yes,

you are now also building monorails.

Roads needed a sequel.

And the monorail is the monorail is the hidden missing step in between the foot and the road because

there are now a mechanic where you will find mines where you can,

for example,

the material requirements are enormous and become super gigantic.

So you'll go to a mine and you'll be able to be like, well, I'll give you 4,000 chiral crystals for 4,800 ceramics.

Just like 5,000 ceramic, which I'm going to need to finish out the road.

Oh, like ore mine.

Right.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so then you will build out your monorail.

out to the mine and then you can use the monorail on the mine to ship huge proportions of materials back to like a main distro center.

And you can also ride on that monorail as if it were a zip line.

And now you're like satisfactorying basically.

Basically, yeah.

It's all pre-set.

It's all pre-charted out.

Okay.

But like, for example, you can point a zip line to a monorail, and then you can combine them, and they become part of the zipline network.

It's a literal monorail, like one?

It is literally a monorail.

Okay.

So this is interesting because I guess, like, when you think about real history, a lot of the times connecting a nation is based on can we get the train out there?

Right.

That's the that's always been the history, you know, like, I mean, America and Canada, it's always been like, oh, we built the rail out west, therefore now the country's connected.

That's where society can go.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, it's like basically the monorails,

so they do something smart because roads always use ceramics and metal, so there was a massive premium on those.

Monorails use special alloys and resins.

So there's a better use for another half of the materials that you end up picking up.

Okay.

So now, Kojima is the kind of motherfucker that could spend a whole bunch of game design focus on being a train conducting.

No, it's very simple.

The train goes from point A to point B.

You can bring your materials.

You can bring your vehicle.

Okay.

links up to the it links into the zip line network if you're making a zip line network.

But is it only major

drop-off points?

It's from mines to major distro centers.

Okay, okay.

And they'll link up with different parts so that you can use it to navigate.

Because to be perfectly honest, too much train freedom could just invalidate the entire video.

No,

there's no train or road freedom.

It's build it or don't.

Yeah.

Aside from that, the story is better paced and more understandable,

but

it's losing a little bit of the novelty of the absurdity of Death Stranding because it's not brand new.

And they have replaced that with an

ever-increasing cast of zanier and zanier characters.

The

blank man

system

for

characters in Death Stranding is maximum Kojima out of control.

Okay.

It is,

you are, you are essentially assembling like the X-Men

as part of the cat.

It is, it is Sam the boss Cobra is building the Death Stranding Cobra unit.

The unit.

Sure, sure, sure.

Of an increasingly weird group of stupid people.

Now, with all this, I, from the way you're describing it, and from that story about Woodkid being like, Kojima saw the playtests and said, nah, too many people like it, change that shit, right?

What you are describing does sound like a very

conventional sort of sequel where you're like, they built off of what they established

and were making it a bit better.

And when you think about Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, those games barely resemble each other.

So,

as somebody who recently went through 1-2-1-2-3, right, and came to the conclusion that Kojima is just remaking the same game over and over and over and over and over,

he is still doing that.

Okay, okay.

Like, you're going through, like, there's, there's, there's a very specific prepper called the Inventor that I was talking with Chad about it, and it was like,

this is literally a swamp in Metal Gear 2 just recreated in in the Death Stranding universe.

Like the entire encounter is the same.

Okay.

So Metal Gear is about sneaking and infiltrating and being snake.

That's obviously a thing that you're doing in all of those games that is the same thing, right?

Yeah.

The setting in each case is violently different.

and completely different feeling from each other game and what they do and what's going on with a lot of that feels like you're jumping around a timeline and jumping into different perspectives to get a very unique experience for each one of these sneaking missions.

So in this case, continuing to be Sam and continuing to port and build out the rail is our build out the road.

I'm surprised it's not way more different of a like

an entire premise, I guess, right?

You start the game in Mexico and go on from there.

But

the nature of Death Stranding's setting means that everything's going to get ground down by timefall to look like a certain kind of prehistoric type of thing.

The map is way larger and it's much more open,

and that's super cool, but it seems like a fairly standard sequel.

I would say that the storyline is

this is the most

genius kojumbo.

It is ping-ponging between

absolute dumbass, stupid shit

that has me rolling my eyes and like really, really fascinating like philosophical meta-commentary and

really, really like

sweet emotional like resonance

back

to

clown nonsense

within like a 30-second loop.

Okay.

Like it is, it is, it is back-to-back to back

like tonal whiplash.

It's like

a dragon game, but faster.

Like the whiplash.

Side quest into mainline, okay.

But you're saying as well, it's making it easy to understand.

Yeah, the actual plot of sequence of A to B to C

is like clearer and more understandable because you're not dealing with the back and forth of Amelie and Bridget and all that extinction.

And stomaching the abstract of the world itself.

Yeah, things are

a little more clear.

Like, I will describe a minor element that I think really genuinely sums up the clown shit.

So you saw that Luca,

the Italian gentleman who's playing not Solid Snake, is taking Cliff's role in this game, right?

As ghostman military antagonist.

Military dude, yeah.

The sequence that you deal with the

not Solid Snake is incredibly similar to the way you dealt with Cliff.

There's a portal, you fall into an action game level, you fight

the skull unit, basically, right?

So I load into this fantastical, incredible sequence that looks gorgeous, and I start to describe that we're going to go fight Luca Baba Dabupi while he's cooking the pizza.

And

Chat starts to tell me that that's offensive to Italian people, which I say, I don't care.

That's hilarious.

Shut up.

And then when you shoot him,

he goes, Oh, Mama Mia.

Mama Mia.

Yes, yes.

Okay.

Right, right, right.

And I'm like, shut up.

Literal, literal mamma me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Kefai.

He cooked a pizza.

Right?

And it's like, it's this super serious action sequence that's really gorgeous and super threatening and dark and spooky.

And then you shoot the boss and he goes, oh, Mamma Mia.

Right.

And spaghetti's away.

Oh, my God.

Oh, Madonna.

Right?

Like,

hilarious.

Like, pizza tower noises start coming out of the boss as you fight him.

Yeah, okay.

It's so, it's so fucking funny.

And it's like that.

It's like that, back to back to back to back to back.

Like,

also,

it's so, it's so peak cojumbo that I was able to do it, and I'm sure you're going to be able to do it, is as you're playing through it, you are going to be able to tell what people are going to say before the camera even pans to them.

There was a highly specific Metal Gear reference that I joked about encountering before walking into a scene.

And as the camera started to zoom in more and more on the character, I'm like, there's no way they're going to, oh, they're just going to say the names of these things out loud.

They're just going to, oh my God, it's just right on the nose.

Okay, so the sandy senses are still fucking going.

Really sandy.

They're going, yeah, okay, okay, okay.

Great, great, great.

Also, by the way, when you start the game, like the very first sequence is like you going through like a sandstorm.

So like we were right.

Sure, sure, sure.

We were right about Sandy.

Yeah, yeah.

But the final thing, by far the most different, is that playing this game as the man I am now in 2025 is very, very different.

As a parent with a baby

years ago, it's a game about you hanging out with a kid.

That's not fucking...

Well, I broke the tutorial because I'm a dad now.

Right.

So the very first thing that happens in the game is that you open up in front of a vista that looks kind of like the Grand Canyon, and the game wants you to go down the ridge

to, you know, go forth to wherever you're going, right?

And Mr.

Norman Reedas is got Lou, who's a little older now, and he's got Lou

in a little baby carrier on his chest,

like I've had with my little baby man on my chest.

And

I

started to

scope around the edges of the area

For five, six, seven minutes around the edges of the ridge because I'm like, well, that's way too steep to carry over.

Of course it is.

That's crazy.

Why would you do that?

Also, Lou in the carrier is front-facing.

Yes.

And I'm like, Lou's too young to be front-facing.

Lou should be backwards facing,

especially when you're going down ups and downs and hills.

But that's not good for the shot or the camera or the motor.

No.

And so

I got got stuck in the chat to be like, go down the fucking slope, dude.

I'm like, it's not safe.

Okay, you don't get it.

It's bad for Lou's neck.

Yep, yep, yep.

Totally.

Nope.

Yep.

Not wrong.

All right.

Yeah.

Yeah, there you go.

I'm very much enjoying videos.

It's a video game.

I've been splitting my time there in between two forms.

One is, let's truck out to the next four, five, six shelters and distro

areas,

meet this character, meet that character, have a story moment, meet this person, hang out with Heartman, etc.

And then the streams I've been doing late, late, late at night is like, hey, all right, it's time for infrastructure.

It's time to build these fucking roads.

It's time to add some ziplines.

It's time to build up these stars.

It's pretty convenient that the,

you know, having the, you have the whole BB in the artificial womb thing as like a weird, interesting, unique

mechanic the first time around, and then, you know, flash forward a little bit, and it's like, oh, yeah, carrying a baby on your chest is like a normal thing.

That's, that makes sense.

That's what you do as a parent.

I'm going to enjoy seeing how they figure out how to have a teenager strapped to Norman's chest

in the future and what the mechanics will be around that.

Did you see any of that puppet shit yet, by the way?

Has that happened yet?

Define puppet shit.

Do you mean Dollman?

Yes, yes.

Just the existence of Dollman and everything about it.

That's who I mean.

So Dollman shows up very early.

Dollman is a core part of the gang.

All right?

And on top of that, have you played God of War or seen God of War?

Mm-hmm.

God of War?

Mimir?

Mimir?

Yep, that's Mimir.

Yes, Dollman is Mimir.

Dollman hangs out on your belt and goes on adventures, and there's a reason why that is.

It's so that Sam has somebody to fucking talk to when weird shit is happening to just talk back at him and be like, so he's not just muttering aloud to himself.

Yeah, no, Mimir was there for dad and boy to have a third dynamic.

What's also weird is that Mimir's actor is also in the game.

Aleister Duncan is playing a character in the game,

which is super weird because Aleister Duncan Duncan also played a different Metal Gear character named Senator Armstrong.

Oh,

oh, weird.

Damn, I didn't know.

Good range.

Nice.

That's pretty super fucking.

That's pretty incredible.

Nice.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, overall, yeah.

If I had to sell Death Stranding on one thing, I would say that the most impressive thing by far is their new progression.

So

in the first game, you would get stars from delivering to people, right?

And after a couple of stars here, a couple of stars there, they'd be like, here's a new type of grenade, or here's a new type of boots, right?

Everybody

has

something for every star.

Like, I have more upgrades and items and toys to play with now than I had at the end of Death Stranding 1.

Do you get all of them if you do it the best the first time?

No.

In fact, you can only you can only get one star per trip maximum

if you travel to a location and you are just packed with cargo split it up when you deliver it and deliver it multiple times so that you can actually pass the single star threshold whoa okay okay

you you unlock so much fucking shit it's crazy i have holographic grenades that will will show BTs to human enemies and scare the shit out of them.

I have an electrified bola.

I have a sniper rifle.

I have a battery pack for my fucking backpack that solar generates battery power.

I have a

sticky gun that you can mount on your truck that automatically grabs cargo near you on the road.

Okay.

Like just

non-stop upgrades over and over and over and over.

Which sounds like a good way to deal with the sequel feeling of like, I had so much shit I could do by the end of that last game, and starting from scratch, I have nothing, and that feels bad, right?

Yeah, I know you have, you get tons and tons and tons of shit fairly quickly, I imagine.

Yeah, cool.

That's a yeah, that's a good way to do that.

It is really, it is, it is, and it always feels like a really good value going to deliver to out-of-the-way places because even if it's not good for you, like, you know, I'm not going to use a decoy grenade.

I don't give a fuck.

It's still interesting and could be of purpose to someone.

So, one other thing I just

crossed my mind,

by getting through the first game, you ultimately get to a point where, like, you're not scared of BTs anymore.

They're just in your way, right?

They're trivialities.

But the first time around, you're like...

crawling, shit in your pants, afraid of the invisible and not sure how the you're using the

detector and you're it's all just

yeah

so like that completely changes entirely, and the feel of the game changes as a result of that.

Now,

going in with the trivialized BT kind of concept, are there I guess you're talking about fighting more humans or so?

So, they're they're no longer trivial, trivialized.

There's two things: one, you run into BT boss fights more often, the second of which is you run into BTs themselves less often,

but they are scarier and tougher.

There are new types of BTs.

Okay.

Like, and by types, I mean like the way they interact with the environment and catch you.

Yeah.

However, I have dealt with

human mules and brigands more often, like in general.

And I have recently gotten to the third enemy type,

which is not humans nor BTs.

Okay.

Okay.

Which

is very different

than the others.

That's kind of what my curiosity was, was like, okay, the tension got released from this type of enemy.

Do we got new shit to kind of like

is really intense.

Okay.

Nice.

And is also

flagrantly the skull unit.

It is like...

Like the way they move, the way they act, the way you can like counter their sword strikes in the same exact way that boss could in MGS5.

Like, it is, the more that I play it, the more overwhelming it's like, oh my god, this is like the finished MGS5,

but with, but with infrastructure and trucking and more ghosts.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know,

like, Okojima has had the opportunity to, quote unquote, you know, finish MGS5 before in this context, but like, taking ideas, certainly I can imagine, or things that perhaps never got fully realized and carrying it into the middle of the future.

Oh, sure, but like, I'm just saying, like, playing it, like, dude, this feels like a fucking sequel to MGS5.

Like, it feels

the same.

Like, specifically, like, the way that you, like, you know, the FOB system and upgrading that and the way you would kidnap dudes from, you know, the Fulton shit.

It's just like that, but instead, it's trucking, and it's, you're stealing the materials off of their bases instead.

You're rolling in to steal all their surroundings.

You are doing like a sneaking mission and getting out

type of thing.

Okay, okay.

And if you just, and if you take out everybody at a base, the base will be weakened for a certain number of in-game days.

And if you don't take out the base after a certain amount of time, the base will get stronger.

Probably the weirdest thing about dealing with people is that lethal weapons are just not available to you anymore.

You can switch them to lethal, but like the assault, the assault rifle and shotgun and grenades that I have are just default non-lethal.

And they work against BTs too.

Like you have a much more unified like armament.

I mean

yeah, well I'm assuming for plot reasons, right?

Yeah, no,

they just made it so that they figured out how to make synthetic piss blood.

and put them in your bullets.

Sure, okay, but you're not trying to cause void outs.

No, no, no, no.

You have rubber bullets for everybody.

For yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

And the rubber bullets are also covered in synthetic piss and blood.

Yes.

So they also can shoot ghosts.

Perfect.

Okay.

All right.

So it changes the way you deal with BTs dramatically because in the first game, it was like stealth kill them or throw grenades at them.

And in this game, it's like, no, open up on them with your fucking anti-ghost shotgun.

Fucking shoot them.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, I think.

Um, I think I'm what's probably gonna happen for me with this game is uh I'll be playing it on my own in the gap.

I think uh there's an extremely um

when would you be doing that because there's a very different game here for you this month or next month.

Well, it won't basically what I'm saying is that I think it won't be on camera, you know.

I think no, no, no, I know that for a fact, but I'm just saying, like, emotionally, this is a very different game for you

in the month of July.

Whether I'm holding

a baby while playing it or not.

Yeah, I don't know.

There are some parts of this game's narrative that affected me dramatically more because I am the version of myself that I am now rather than the version of myself that I used to be.

Well, realistically, I think it'll be a gradient.

I think I'll probably start it beforehand and finish it afterwards.

Yeah, probably.

Very cool game.

Very good.

I like it.

I think it's very cool.

I cannot wait to build more infrastructure.

Like, I'm ping-ponging also between, like, man, you know what, Sam?

That's great and all, but you need to get a thousand metal down the fucking road so we can get this highway all the way out to the fucking ocean.

Right.

But are you building the infrastructure of Lou's mind?

Are you?

No.

Okay.

There's, you're not, there's no dad mechanics to game.

Oh,

there's still some dad mechanics.

They're very similar to the first game.

Also, Higgs.

Boson?

Higgs.

Higgs is the fucking

beach slammer.

This motherfucker

is.

This motherfucker is.

It's my beach for the slamming.

Dude, I swear to God.

Dude, like,

like,

sucks

so bad.

Like he is he is like from a he is like from a different fucking style of game or story.

He is so stupid and he is so bad and dumb

and

like

interactions with him are nonsense.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Like,

he fits more in a devil may cry than he does into fucking desperate.

I've got jonkling questions, but I just won't ask them.

I've just asked.

I will say one thing about him, about his jonkle.

Oh, hold on, hold on.

I accidentally hit my

head.

Oh, no, you can't hear me.

Oh, no.

Give me a second.

There we go.

Jonkle away.

Okay, do you know that drill tweet about wearing my V for Vendetta mask and then

pulling it off to reveal my Joker makeup underneath and everyone in the courtroom groans at my shit?

okay.

That is like straight up actually the character.

I'm so serious.

Like, Sam meeting him is like, uh,

like, uh,

wonderful.

Hell yeah.

Okay.

All right, all right.

That game is so,

so stupid.

Like, it, it, it is,

it is peak stupid.

I hope, honestly, I have no, there's no real, I'm open for whatever this is going to be,

but I hope there's a cool.

I feel like it'd be sick to get, like, a nice, like, Ludens outfit.

You know, yeah.

That'd be fun to, like, rock on.

Also, um,

well, I don't know what to call it, Kojumbo Hollywood maxing

has hit the absolute apex.

It can't go go any higher because people are showing up without lines just to be in the game.

Holograms at

like

I was doing just a late night trucking stream.

Oh, yeah.

I was delivering animal rescue paint to the animal rescue shelter.

Yeah.

And someone in my chat just goes, is that the entire band churches on the hologram?

The whole thing.

That's it.

I was about to say, just like you go deliver something, and then a second person on the hologram is Timothy Chalamay, just going,

you know, on top of that, on top of that, like I'm doing a mission.

It's like, rescue a dude.

And it's like, okay, get the guy, and he's unconscious.

And you put him in your little backpack, and it's just his face showing.

And people on my chat are like, is that the director of RRR?

What?

That has no lines and

unconscious as a fucking...

Wow.

Wow.

Okay.

Like, it is.

Hey,

I'm delivering

stuff to this fucking base.

Is that that big Korean guy from train to Busan?

Oh my God.

The star fucking doesn't stop, dude.

Hollywood Max Star Fucker.

Let's go.

It's ridiculous.

All of it.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm sure, because that's the thing is, you have to imagine all of these meetings, there's a little like,

we do the

pretentious discussion.

Whenever we get, we put it out in the air, and then it's like, can I do a, would you like to get scanned?

Let's do a 3D scan of you, you know?

And that's kind of, that's basically what the meeting is about.

It's like, I'd love to have you as a face in this game.

So let's do that whole thing.

And then we need to hang out for the whole day.

And it's like, okay, what time is the scan?

The scan's at 8 p.m., but we need you on set by noon.

There's different people that have different levels of inclusion.

So, like, the director of RRR, like,

there's no lines.

Yeah.

Like, he's, like, literally just an unconscious body.

Um, and then you have a bunch of characters that are like, like, like, um, a dollman is also a movie director, right?

Uh, and he's not voiced by his, his, himself, he's voiced by a voice actor, right?

And you have characters like that.

And then you have, every now and then, you'll run into like a random prepper

in a location that gets a wildly disproportionate amount of screen time

for no reason.

And it's and it's because

they're a musician and they want to sneak their music video into the game.

Oh my God.

Hell yeah.

Hollywood is mine for the slamming.

Did you see the incredible comments by Kojima as to why he doesn't feature Japanese people in his games?

I did.

That is wild.

That is.

Why is it, Woolly?

Why does he not?

Oh, my God.

He's on some Ubisoft fucking, like, Assassin's Creed shit.

Apparently, it's because the Asian skin texture is difficult and

the engine has not been optimized to

I'll clean it up for you.

Kojima was asked, hey, why don't you feature a lot of Asian or particularly Japanese characters in your newer games, right?

And he says, well, you see,

Asian, particularly Japanese people's skin is so smooth and perfect, technology has a difficult time depicting it without making it smooth and doll-like and CG-like because it's just too good.

What the fuck is happening, dude?

All right, so

I'm going to stop you right there.

All right.

So here's, here's the.

I'm so glad that that interview came out the three or four hours before I ran into the game's only Japanese character that is walking around and talking.

So, first of all, I laugh my ass off because it's not like there's like entire studios like RGG that spends their entire budget just creating old man Japanese guy skin.

Yeah.

So is Pekko the only Japanese character then?

What's that?

Is Pekko the only Japanese character then?

I'm talking about, I forget her name, but there is a lady who plays the character of Rainey.

Ah, okay.

Death Stranding 2.

And she was the actress who played Yukiko.

Is it Yukio or Yukiko?

Anyway,

the girlfriend in

Deadpool 2.

Okay.

The Negasonic Teenage Warheads girlfriend.

I think it was Yukio.

Could be.

And

someone in the chat has it.

It's Shioli Kutsuna.

So he describes that she's in the game because she's from Australia and lives in LA.

And thus actually fulfills all the criteria for English-speaking role, yada-yada, right?

Sorry,

this lady on camera talking to Fragile,

despite being scanned in with the same technology,

does look CG and doll-like next to Leah Sadou and El Fanning

and Norman Reedas.

Like, her skin is perfect.

Like,

the actor's skin is perfect.

And her face is perfectly symmetrical.

And she kind of looks

unreal

next to the other characters.

Pat, are you saying that he has a point and there.

He does actually have a point.

Oh my God.

Okay, Kojima, I guess we'll have to hold off on the Japanese actors for now.

And it's really, it's really bad when Rainey is talking to Sam because

he's a weathered-looking, nearly 60-year-old white guy who'd never stayed out of the sun.

He's got like noticeable moles on his cheeks.

He's got a lot of wrinkles.

Like, he kind of looks like shit now, which is awesome.

And the engine picks up on that.

Great.

But when he talks to Rainy, she looks noticeably less real than Sam does.

I mean, it's hilarious.

Oh, my God.

Like, but as you just described, right?

So we can get like Kuze in there.

Like, you've got textured

old man skin ready to go.

He doesn't want to do that.

He wants to cast the prettiest actress he can find.

Yes, yes.

We need to have those little photo shoot cute moments, you know, ready to go.

So, oh.

Someone in the chat got a photo of said actress.

And, like, yes, no, she's a person that has like immaculate, perfect skin without a single blemish, mark, wrinkle.

Yeah, yeah, but he doesn't he doesn't i don't want to cure cancer i want to make dinosaurs

okay all right uh all right sure

the the game is so fucking funny uh the the these

these characters are so weird fuck

oh yeah i i don't i can't believe I can't believe you're saying, wait a minute, hold on, let him cook

on that

fucking

woman's anatomy is harder in Assassin's Creed type shit.

And you're saying, no, wait,

they actually have a fucking point here.

Okay.

Like, hold on,

let me get a fucking photo of this character.

Yeah, here's a really good example

of, like, actually, like, you know what, you know what Horman Reed is fucking looks like in Death Stranding.

Okay?

Right?

Here is what Rainy looks like in fucking Death Stranding 2 in the engine.

And it's like, hey, she looks exactly like her actress.

But because she doesn't have a single mark on her face, she actually looks unreal.

The lighting is weird.

The lighting is hitting her face a little strange.

You're not...

Damn it.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Like, hey, guys.

She looks kind of plastic.

The Decima engine wants your characters to be fair.

Oh, no.

She actually looks

and blemishes.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

And they haven't figured it out yet.

Yeah, here's a...

I'll get you a...

What the hell?

Here's a different shot of Rainy in the rain.

Right?

And it's like, you can literally see what I, what, what, like, what's the same?

Yeah, I don't.

Well, then just make it different.

I don't know what to say.

Do it different.

Get the artists to try again in a different way.

This is crazy.

This can't be.

No, we're just

perfect.

This actually can't be the reason.

I refuse this reality.

Do it different some other way.

Fucking figure it out.

I don't know.

Change the tech.

Start from scratch.

What are we talking about here?

You know?

They eventually got

the Kinect to detect me.

You know, they figured this out.

These new cameras with the extra ISO settings and whatever working great so that you can stand.

Kojima says that technology has not advanced far enough to realistically scan in a Japanese person and find a flaw with them at all.

And then he put a character in his game as proof.

That it can't be done because he picked one of the prettiest Japanese actresses he could find in his life.

Like, it's it's so fucking funny, dude.

It literally took, like, until recently with the whole camera ISO setting thing, where if you and, I don't know, let's say your significant other are very different skin colored and you're taking a high contrast photo outside and it tries to grab one or the other and the camera just goes, I don't know, man.

Here's you doing.

It's like, do you want to be married to the sun wearing glasses, or does your wife want to be married to a floating pair of teeth?

Yeah, it's options available.

And it's you, you open up the settings and you do it because the camera says, I give up, right?

That we finally started getting a little bit past that point.

Back to the fucking drawing board.

I don't know, Kojiba.

Do it different.

It's crazy.

It can't be done.

It's crazy.

All right.

All right.

Okay.

That game's so cool.

It's also so stupid.

It's so dumb.

All right.

And

what's the plugs on that?

What's the plugs?

Oh, yeah.

You go down to twitch.tv slash patstares at.

I'm streaming that a bunch.

I'm going to stream Mecha Break on what is it?

The third?

Friday is going to be more Death Stranding.

And Saturday I'm going to go back to the backlog.

So I had anticipated playing the alters this week because I thought the alters was really cool.

And I still feel that the alters is really cool.

However, I have pulled it from my schedule, and I have made all of the videos I recorded of the alters unlisted, because it turns out 11-bit got super motherfucking caught using chat GPT to translate that game into a bunch of languages

and then hid it from the Steam disclosure and then put out a big pussy.

Let's get into that after the break.

Yeah.

All right.

That's on the docket.

So let's.

I'm not going to keep streaming the alters.

Let's take a quick break and we'll come back.

And that is one of the topics topics for sure.

All right.

BRB.

Hello.

Let's take a quick word from our sponsors.

This week,

Castle Super Beast is sponsored by Shopify.

And that is the commerce platform that is,

yeah, perfect for when you are ready to get an online business or an online shop set up and you want to figure out how to start selling if you got merch, if you got a t-shirt, if you got any sort of simple idea and you want to figure out how to start getting that shipped to people and how to

keep track of where your sales are going, how they're making it out there, where

you should be focusing and all of your inventory, all of that stuff.

It can be very complicated, but Shopify is the best checkout and behind a lot of household names.

Mattel, in particular, is one of them that you know uses them.

And yeah, they're behind millions of businesses online as well.

When we got started and we were trying to figure out how to turn something like talking at a microphone or camera into figuring out a t-shirt,

that's exactly the type of situation that Shopify was helpful for.

And

they have a ton of simple-to-use tools to help you with

getting your shop connected to your social platforms so that people can find you.

There's a world-class expertise support behind the scenes to

keep track of all your data, all your metrics, to help you out with any of your international shipping needs and processing returns, managing your inventory.

There's a lot of different steps that go into setting up an online shop.

And Shopify is

a pretty simple way to take care of the complicated parts.

I'm a big fan of the shop app.

Like I said, I use that on a regular basis for keeping track of when my shipping things are coming through.

And having it all in one place is very handy.

So

get on there, try them out, turn your business ideas

into reality with Shopify on your side.

You can sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/slash superbeast.

So go to

slash superbeast.

S H O P I F Y dot com slash super beast.

Thank you, Shopify.

Thank you, Shopify.

This

episode of CSB is sponsored by Rocket Money.

And that is the service that is

becoming very, very necessary these days, where essentially when you sign sign up for online

monthly payments from various services, it becomes very difficult to keep track of where your money is going.

It's very easy to not be aware of how much you're spending in subscriptions, to forget about, you know, what you're necessarily subscribed to.

If you are not keeping track of even just like delivery and takeout, things like that, there's little, little expenses that get carried away from you.

And on top of that, there's situations where it gets hard to unsubscribe.

Some of these places have very convoluted setups for

how you can stop subscribing to their service.

I remember when I...

connected Rocket Money and took a look, I saw there was stuff I didn't recognize by name at all where the company behind the thing was a completely different thing.

I've been set up to have to email in a brief window to go to a website.

It was just so nuts to kind of disconnect my monthly subscriptions um for this one service in particular so uh yeah rocket money is basically able to help you find all of that very easily it helps you cancel unwanted subscriptions uh and uh it can even help you monitor spending and lower costs on your bills so you can figure out your budget and uh get that get that together um it's important to not lose track of like small little expenses as they add up but i know that between having a credit card and a paypal account and all these different places, I have things that I super am not aware of on a regular basis that

I would love to just be able to cancel very quickly, seeing I'm like, I haven't used that in months.

Another one as well is that sometimes the prices will chump while you're not paying attention.

So you'll get an alert on an increase in price or anything unusual going on with one of your subscriptions as well.

So

yeah, five million members of Rocket Money have saved a total of 500 million in canceled subscriptions.

Members using all of the app's premium features have saved up to $740 a year.

So

cancel your unwanted subscriptions.

Reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money.

Download the Rocket Money app and enter

the show name Castle Super Beast on the survey so they know that we sent you.

Yeah, don't wait.

Download the Rocket Money app today.

And yeah, when they ask about how you heard about it, let them know.

Castle Super Beast.

All right.

Thank you, Rocket Money.

Thanks, Rocket Money.

And this week, the podcast is sponsored by Boot.dev.

That is the gamification of your education and

your future.

It's a pretty smart way to go about things.

I wish this was around when I was getting into learning how to,

you know, do art or when I tried to learn how to program.

But boot.dev is essentially the best way to master programming um

it's gonna help you with online learning's biggest hurdle boredom i tried to learn how to program a long time ago because i wanted to make my own games and i was having a very hard time reading thick textbooks and doing examples and keeping up with it it was just it was i was bouncing off i didn't have any support as well and i i could not do it i couldn't keep up um the most i ever got was to make a couple of characters in mugen you know very very basic but that's very different.

Very, it is, it is, because learning a language in

with boot.dev in particular,

you know, is something that you can, you can choose between going with Python, Go, JavaScript, Git course, Linux courses, memory management in C, SQL databases.

There's a lot of options for what you can learn.

And if you do,

you have the ability to not only make your own projects, of course, and get better at your own programming, but like working as well as a programmer.

According to Stack Overflow, in 2024, the median salary for back-end developers was over $100,000.

So that's a pretty solid job you can get into with the ability to, you know, workplaces and or do cool things for yourself.

And the whole gamification process, as I mentioned, is basically

the way the learning lessons are set up, they're all like an RPG.

So you go through, you have xp as you clear challenges where you learn a programming uh um you know technique in each level you get through the levels you unlock achievements you complete quests there's a leaderboard where you can compete for the top spot and there's even raid bosses for every season with a story that you all compete and or that you all collectively contribute to like defeating as the as the whole uh um

section moves forward.

So yeah, pretty cool, fun way to set things up.

You've also got, if you're a student and you want to, you know, preview what's going on because, you know, things can be expensive, you definitely want to be able to check out the 30-day no questions asked refund policy and a free demo of every interactive experience on the course.

So you want to make sure you're getting your money's worth.

Check that out and preview everything on the website

first.

You've also got a Discord community with tons of real humans to help you if you ever get stuck.

So

yeah, boot.dev is a a real curriculum.

It takes,

you know, around 12 months if you want to get serious about learning to code.

And it's not just a get-rich-quick scheme, it goes properly in depth with theory and practice.

So

go check them out.

If you ever get stuck, you can see how the code is written.

There's solutions available for every challenge on the site.

And

yeah, again, the gamification of cool skills is

something I wish that I had access to when I was much younger.

So

what you need to do is

go to

boot.dev

and use the code CastleSuperbeast, and you'll get 25% off your first payment

at boot.dev.

So

yeah, your entire first year, if you choose the annual plan, the code CastleSuperbeast Beast will get you 25% off.

And again, you can go try out the courses for free.

So yeah, that's boot.dev, code CastleSuper Beast.

Thank you, boot.dev.

Thanks, boot.dev.

Alright,

so yes.

I mean, right, you started talking about it, so like, let's go straight to that.

What do you think about this Hans Moleman in dog form?

Oh, you hate it?

Oh, good.

There was more than just Subway slamming going on this week.

There was fans.

There was much Subway Slimin.

There was, but the alters developer, 8-Bit Studios, is also getting slammed.

11-bit studios.

Excuse me, 11-bit, is also getting slammed

because folks discovered some AI subtitles and flavor text in the game.

The flavor text specifically literally has the prompt to ChatGPT.

It's like, hey, translate this or show a bunch of whatever.

And it's like, whoa, that's obvious.

Well, so what'll happen is you'll see when ChatGPT answers are copied, you'll see things like, sure, here's a thing you're looking for on this thing, right?

It'll answer you and then actually put the thing you're looking for in.

So if you are not paying attention or you're just kind of quickly going about, you know, copying and pasting without using proper translators, then you get exposed like this where

Crunchyroll got caught doing the same thing like a couple hours ago.

A couple hours ago, huh?

Jesus.

A fucking anime episode aired and there's a fucking chat GPT prompt on a fucking channel.

So

I was I forgot a while ago, I basically was talking about, I was calling that we're gonna very, very quickly just enter a realm where it's gonna be like you you are going to be using things that have it in it and just not know.

And it's gonna not be about like, oh, these people are using it out front or whatever.

It's gonna be like, no, no, no, they're hiding it and trying to keep it secret.

And you're gonna occasionally have these moments of they fucked up and it got exposed.

But the, it's going to get further and further.

We're gonna further and further enter a situation where you're like, they're already using it.

It's already there, right?

In this case, in particular,

what's noteworthy about it is that you need to tell Steam when you use anything generative or

live generated in terms of AI on the Steam distribution agreement.

And so that'll be published and it'll be a part of the Steam page for it.

You know, larger companies, they will do that and they'll put that out there.

And you kind of just have to fully expose it so that everybody knows it's a part of it.

They did not do that here.

And when people started contacting them about it,

it obviously there was a while where they were not answering.

And people who translated for them then

came out and were like, yeah, we didn't know anything about this, right?

So

they kind of spoke to

one of the Korean translators.

They spoke to

you know, some folks that worked on the team that were saying, essentially, they worked on the original script and handled translation.

But what people are suspecting is that

there was a

update that or something that happened after they were done with their job that introduced new words that needed translation.

And instead of going and having the process done by contacting all the translators for the new text, it was just a quick shove it in the prompt and see what happens.

And then

update it yourself

in the build.

And then you're doing that.

And like up until this point, you had not made the declaration anywhere on your Steam page.

And so the idea was like, yeah, we could just do this quickly, hide it, no one will ever know and it'll be fine.

But clearly not really, because if you're not proofreading, if you're not checking, human eyeballs aren't finding it.

And you have these moments where there's a screenshot of the computer generic text

that

at the top of like what looks almost like a DOS prompt, it says,

yeah, sure,

here's the revised focused, focusing purely on scientific and astronomical data.

And then in the Brazilian Portuguese translation, there's subtitles that read, sure, the text translated to Brazilian Portuguese is, and then the actual line.

So, yeah,

you should

not be one, hiring people, and then

if you're going to cut a corner afterwards, you know, not fucking follow up and

at least tell

an update that you're adding this

to the game's declaration page and to hide it from users because you know that this is the kind of thing that'll happen when they find out about it.

Obviously, is

implicit in how you're kind of like taking a while to answer and get around to this shit.

So that's shitty.

Don't do that.

So

hot on the presses of this

is

a follow-up that there were two textures that someone on social media found from

Expedition 33

that

in the Lumiere area where they have like newspapers pasted on the walls that they suspected were Gen AI.

Couldn't confirm it, but suspected.

And those textures were hot-fixed out of the very first patch the game ever received.

So this is the part

where

we rationalize why we're not mad at Expedition 33,

but I am cutting the altars off.

And it's very simple.

I can't confirm that that thing in E33 is AI.

It's gone.

And I don't feel that that was, like, I don't know until I know for certain.

But the second of which is that it's really easy to not take 11-bit at their word because they also had a bunch of generative AI promo events for the alters that I didn't know about where you could talk to the characters through chat GPT and shit like that.

That company wants to do AI stuff and actively promotes it.

I see.

Okay.

So what's the problem?

Oh, we didn't know.

Oh, we didn't know at all.

I'm like, I don't believe you.

Okay.

So you're going on deniability.

If Bush came out and said that one of the fucking Unreal Engine textures that they used or whatever the fuck turned out to have been AI generated and they didn't know, and that's why they cut it out,

I would be inclined to believe that.

And part of that is because I really like that game.

I'll be very honest.

Right.

But

more importantly, I look at 11-bit and them going, oh, we didn't know that was the wrong call.

I'm like, you fucking, you knew.

You actually just love AI and you got caught.

And

well, what you described of that game last week was also sounded phenomenal, right?

Like it was a very excited

thematic core of the game is about how the unethical use of of technology

to copy things is maybe going too far.

So it's really genuinely astonishing that this is the scandal we're talking about with the alters because the alters is like a fucking cautionary tale against Gen AI run amok.

Or

just ethical use of tech in this instance where you're like from the jump, the whole thing about what you're using in that game is evil immediately.

Yeah, I mean, I'm reminded of the studio that made,

what is it, Genvid that made Silent Hill

fucking

whatever

Ascension

and how they have a ton of like all these like AI forward like like announcements and things that are all about it and then it's kind of like no no no this wasn't used what made using it and you're like but you guys are so excited about the technology what do you mean you're not it this is not it it feels like it it looks like it.

It smells like it.

It quacks like it.

This is also the same week that I don't know if you saw, but Microsoft is coming down and saying, hey, you have to use it.

AI is no longer

optional.

And it's like, well, why are they mandating the use of AI over at Microsoft?

Oh, is it because they can't get any of their engineers to use it?

Because it fucking takes more work to include it than it fucking doesn't?

Oh, my God.

A ton of people doing

doing different jobs use it as a reference point already and a ton of like p and use it as a insert your code or do whatever here cleanup and then and then spit it out it's elsewhere um forcing it to be mandatory makes me immediately think that microsoft is like we need you to feed ours and make ours better so that we can replace you.

Like, it's a very clear-cut case of if we're hiring you and we want this to replace you, then if you tell it what you're doing often enough, we can eventually get that info.

So start fucking using it.

Feed it.

Yeah.

It's so they can say, hey, look, all this good new stuff we made was made with AI, but every time that happens, it's actually not very good and people turn on it more.

So

I mean, look, for me, at the very least, the way I kind of look at this is like, we are going to,

we are not, we're not going to.

We are already in a world where I guarantee you that tons of things that you uh currently like

will have or will be using AI in places and you just won't know about it right because they'll they'll have spent the time to correctly hide it and that's it and we will continue forward into this world where you're just gonna need to understand that somewhere there's gonna be shit that like if they slip up and fuck up and you find out then oh we know about it and then you get these things but otherwise um they know that they don't want to declare that or tell people about it because of this exact like fuck you kind of reaction but it's it's already out there and it's already a part of the things you're enjoying just just know that to be the case right so here's the thing right that at the bare minimum i i just wanted to say that i want to say that like um

if you decide you know that that's your line in the sand or whatever your case is i just think i'm like at the bare minimum the studio as like in these moments just fucking admit it right don't play coy don't lie and twist and wring your hands we just right we get it

you hired the translation team and they came out and they put out the word on it, right?

They said, they basically described what happened and said themselves, like, yeah, it was a lot of words.

The count is high.

There was a placeholder texture that was not meant to be seen by people.

And then there was this extra stuff where the movies that got licensed added extra words to the script that weren't originally there.

So they didn't hire back all the translators and localization teams team.

They just were going to do it through the prompts instead.

And it's like, if you're going to do that, then put that in the thing so that people know, right?

If you're, if it's a, if it's a decision you're making based on budget and cost and all these things and you're going to cut those corners, people are going to feel, some people will be okay with that.

Some people don't give a fuck.

And some people feel that that's shit and hate that.

Let people know that that's the case so that they can make their decisions.

That's it.

You know?

The more you pretend like you didn't do it is like that's the that's a way bigger problem because you actively know some people that would have their purchasing decisions affected by this.

And that's why you're trying to be duplicitous about it.

So I think you're completely right.

And I think that people who go, oh, it's totally pointless, it's like, no, the purpose is to complain so that they have to spend the resources to hide it and they have to spend the resources to fix it.

And those resources end up costing more than they could possibly save using the AI in the first place.

So they stop using it.

And I have a small piece of

insider insider information, I guess.

I have a friend of mine who

works

at Microsoft, who is watching the show right now.

Hello, and decided to reach out for an internal statement about this topic.

They say that everyone here fucking hates AI and Copilot.

Every single slack is filled with AI mishaps or telling people how to disable Copilot.

The union has

specifications against AI in their contract, and Microsoft is trying to figure out ways around it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

this is not so much a, we want to increase efficiency thing as much as it is a, hey, this new intern that you didn't know existed is now sitting behind you shadowing with you for

the day, the week, the month, forever.

They're going to shadow.

And, you know, your job's fine.

You're fine.

But just make sure that they get copied and CC'd on everything you're doing.

Make sure they can see.

And if they ask questions about what you're doing, you explain to them why.

All right.

And they'll be sitting behind you.

Don't worry about it.

It's fine.

That's

company-wide, you know?

There's kind of gee, I wonder what they're up to.

In that AI is like kind of useless, but what it's really good at is sounding like it's really good for things and does that in just such a way that it just cracks the brain of the C-suite executive class.

Oh, thank you.

Oh my God, we can replace everybody with this fucking thing.

But it's not just that, it's not just the appeal of.

Sorry, go ahead.

And what I have been seeing, and I follow a bunch of people in tech, it's like what happens is they go, hey, we need to replace these people with AI because AI doesn't cost anything.

Oh, my God, it's basically free.

And then they do that or they start that process.

And then the remaining staff have to spend all of their time trying to fix the AI output until it becomes clear that the actual method of generation isn't reliable for anything, and you'll always have to increase.

Like,

I'm going to go on a real tangent here, right?

Okay, I'm just going to make a mental note of what I was going to say.

Okay,

so artificial intelligence, in terms of generative work for coding, art, et cetera, has the same problem as slavery.

So, slavery is not just ethically wrong and morally wrong and an affront and a stain on human dignity, it's also really bad as an economic form of work.

Part of the problems with long-term, like chattel slavery, is that you need to increase the amount of labor you are associating to keep the slavery machine running.

Longer and longer, and more and more time, and more and more resources have to be ascertained to guards and maintenance and keeping the system from flying to pieces because the system wants to fly to pieces.

Oh, so no one's having a great time in slavery historically ever.

Pat, every time you say thank you to your field slaves, you're wasting time and resources.

That's true.

Exponentially.

Stop saying thank you to your slaves.

Yes.

Now let's go.

Precious time.

But But

that's a different discussion.

But yeah, basically, the slavery system is constantly

falling apart economically because you have to get more and more and more and more resources into keeping the system running, right?

AI is like that.

As you scale problems up for AI, someone has to maintain them, but it scales infinitely.

If you have an AI output a whole video game, you need a fucking massive team of people to go into the guts of that fucking thing and just pick it apart and try and fix the millions of errors that it created.

The larger the scale, the more maintenance you have to do.

And so we're going to see people fire their workforces to replace them with robots, and then the robots will have to have entire teams hired to fix them to put out shittier output than they had before.

The problem is that the ability to resist this trend is nigh impossible because oftentimes there will be something that is either a really efficient way to

either, you know, take if you can, you can, if you can outsource something from where you're currently paying people to somewhere where you can pay people less to do more, great.

And if you can pay them nothing to do all of it, wonderful, right?

And the only thing better than that is just not paying them at all, completely getting rid of them.

There's an infinite downward scale in that way.

So that's what your C-suite, like, you know, interest is, right?

The fantasy of getting value for free.

Right.

But that doesn't always necessarily reflect what's going on in terms of what investors want to do or what's a trend in the market.

But here, because this is also really great for getting that cost down, but also it's like as a whole, it's a brand new tech that has a buzz around it on the outside because it has these different applications.

Just using the word, just saying you're using the word is now mandatory in quarterly reports, right?

If you're not saying it, if you're not implementing it somewhere, someone on in the call will be going, when are you going to start using AI?

How come you haven't started doing it yet, right?

So it's the Venn diagram overlap here that is a perfect thing of like, it's a massive attraction grabber.

It's a lot for C-suite and investors perfectly.

Perfectly.

The overlap of what they both want is pristine.

And asking people to resist that is like, it's impossible.

So you're not going to get it.

Right?

We're not fucking happy.

Yeah, of course.

Where there's no cost, there's only profit.

Right.

So, and again, you have it on the, you know, whatever, like art, writing, music, whatever, voice,

all the things, right?

You can do it on all fronts.

Now,

the

thing that happens often, and this is kind of what I was first talking about a while ago, was like the

argument where you see basically you're like, look at this soulless piece of art, nothing.

Look at this thing with five or seven fingers, right?

Look at this weird,

all that, all those little, all those problems with the quality and what, even to what you were just describing,

you cannot expect that that will stand in the same place because over time, those things will get corrected, right?

The idea that you will always be able to know is, that's a, don't get caught in that.

You're not.

There will be a point where you will not know.

There will be a point where you will get fooled and be like, I like this thing, this thing was great whatever and you just never knew right don't set yourself up for the idea that i will always know that this has no that this has a human element missing to it

that will disappear over time as we go into as we go into the future i promise you right to the point where as we're talking about today it's already the case there are things we are playing and watching and getting into and and that are already using it but just not declaring outright that they are so i've heard some countries put yourself out set your expectations accordingly accordingly for that and expect that you're going to encounter these like mind sweeper line minds on things, not just the things you hate that are garbage, but the things you already like and things that appear to be good initially.

And that will increase and

become more difficult to perceive over time.

So one of the funnier things is that country music has a ton of AI generated shit for it.

Sure.

Oh, yeah.

And one of the reasons for that is something that Paige has been saying for years and years and years is that country music is the single most formulaic style of music that's ever existed.

I saw an article about this.

Yeah.

It's literally, it's insane how every single country music song is exactly the same fucking song.

And so as a result, AI has actually done like a pretty decent job at emulating a bunch of fake songs that don't exist.

But there's a problem with that.

And the problem is, it's really simple.

When you feed AI-generated content back into the AI plagiarism machine, it starts to freak out and die.

Like the whole, the whole like AI forever system where there's no cost only works if you keep feeding new shit.

New things into it.

Into it.

Oh, yeah.

Forever.

Yeah, yeah.

You actually get to a point where the thing works fine and you just start feeding itself into itself.

Yes.

It's going to fucking fall apart.

The model is learning on previously generated content as previously generated content becomes more and more of what it was trained on.

And eventually

that training amount goes, increases in percentage year after year, and the slop becomes unrecognizable and completely inhuman as you fast forward in time exponentially.

100%.

If you do

a CEO perfect future, where AI has replaced all the artists on a movie, you'll have a couple years of that, and then the movies are going to start eating each other and generating

complete fucking nonsense.

Because now you've destroyed the movie industry.

So good luck getting people back.

It is literally AI incest.

It is inbreeding, and the output over time is going to get worse and worse as there's nothing

external entering

that

environment.

Now, granted,

we have The Mouse woke up and is suing Midjourney now.

And we'll see how that goes because that could totally change the scope of this conversation dramatically.

Well, I mean, yeah, but because The Mouse wants their fucking money.

But Midjourney was also being sued by a billion artists whose names were ripped from DeviantArt and fed directly into it because some hundred thousand people could look their name up and see where they were in the prompts.

Absolutely.

But the mouse,

the mouse is the mouse.

Oh, yeah.

In terms of economic power and legal strength, the mouse is infinity times all of those people

together.

The difference, I suppose, is that they're much more in line to cut a deal, make an agreement, and be like, how do we get in on this?

I don't know.

Because those types of of things

want all of it.

So it might be.

We want to do it ourselves, but just take the Netflix thing where you're like, we will be a part of your service where everybody's paying attention.

And while we're on your service, we will be making our own until eventually we rip everything off and put and launch our own version, which is, I mean, the ace for the race for AI models that are like GPT competitors and all that.

And then the deep seek and all those things that are currently happening.

Like, yeah, of course they want their own version in the end, right?

Any lawsuits you're seeing are basically just like

preamble to them making their own version of it, right?

Just back on the whole thing with the country music, there was an article I remember that was like, here are the genre, there's like a list of genres that had like the most predictable like words that were used the most in the top songs over the years.

And like, yeah, I think they kind of just had a giant list of like...

It was like, it was almost like a not a pie chart, but it was like a bar graph or so.

And it was just like song, like how many of the top 10 songs or top 20 or top 50 or top 100 in country contemporary and all these other things used like truck right and it was like fucking 70 like how many use dirt road daisy dukes you know like all these little bits and like and like yeah and there's a couple of genres and that's one in particular i think r b was another where it's just like oh this is 100 ready to get fed to the robot because you're already listening to it

people have just been doing the robot but manually they've been manually doing it already

music has just been like i'm sitting down and i'm gonna be the gen ai i'm gonna just scoop up all of the country music that exists and i'm gonna just spit out my truck and my dog my truck a couple of beers

yeah

you know it's it's yeah yeah so that that's been the case for a minute um but anyway you know i i just i just think it's this is a very just like you know

this is going to keep happening, right?

And set your expectations accordingly for the future we're entering where you're not, like I said, you're you're not always going to know and they're going to they're going to try to hide it and you're going to get these stories where up someone fucked up look at that here's an embarrassing thing right and you know you have these cases where like i mean shit look at the literal uh week-to-week story we've been telling about um

uh marathon right that's not even ai that is a stolen that's old-fashioned

direct theft from the one artist right you are able to pick out the one who got their shit stolen and you're like, uh-oh, that's a, we got to hide all this footage and, you know, this fucking game is going on the shelf and we'll figure out what the fuck's going on, you know?

But like, I guarantee you, like, yeah, you're, this is just, expect this to be, um,

to blindside you consistently and expect that you will not be able to catch every single instance or every time, you know?

I foresee that what we're going to see.

I foresee the downfall of AI is going to be really simple.

And I feel that the downfall of AI is going to be due to a labor shortage.

I feel that we're going to see a bunch of companies go all in, like all in,

suffer like disastrous effects because they're going to put out dog shit.

So there's a really, so there's a non-AI example that I can bring up from the phone industry service.

So

I had a buddy of mine who works at TELUS, right?

And he described to me that when Bell Canada outsourced their entire customer service department to India in the 90s,

just the cheapest Indian guys with

the most bare bones script you could ever find, that it tanked

the

it tanked every phone call you would make to every phone service for decades because it taught people to get on the phone and get super mad.

It literally trained the entire millennial generation that if you have a fucking problem and have to pick up your phone

that you're gonna get super fucking pissed off for like an hour.

And they then eventually lost a bunch of business because of that decision because if you wanted Bell Internet or something and you had to fucking call them, you'd be like, oh, fuck,

this sucks.

And you would go like Videotron or fucking Shar or something.

And then they rolled it back.

But that cultural, like, I don't want to call my internet service provider feeling continues to exist in us

because of this thing they did like 20 fucking years ago.

I see the analogy.

I, unfortunately, I think your timeline is correct.

I think your outcome is wrong.

And I'm going to disagree with that simply because you are correct in that

the quality will go to absolute unrecognizable dog shit.

However, I don't think that spells a downfall.

I think that just means that people will get used to dog shit and dog shit will become the norm.

Oh, I don't know about that.

That's a very that's a very unhopeful view of the average person.

I think there's a depends on what the meat, what the space we're talking about is.

Depends on whether we're talking about its usage for movie trailers versus its usage for

background code versus for like gate.

There's a lot of places it's being used in society.

And whether it's trucking or fucking stocks,

there's a lot of places where you can go, oh yeah, it's doing a lot better in this industry.

And here it's fucking garbage and everybody knows it and hates it and it's never going to work.

But I think on the whole, you're gonna see industries where the quality going down becoming the norm and then eventually becoming what a certain generation of person is just used to this level of dog shit quality.

It's just like, yeah, that's what it is.

You know, especially if there's big enough money to sustain the dog shit existing long enough, you can just wait out people's eventual exhaustion and habits till you're like, nope, that's just how it's been for as long as I've known it.

It's always been this shit.

I think

that that only makes sense in a context in which cost is not a factor.

So we're, we're, I'm going to limit this part of the discussion to video games.

Okay.

Right?

Um,

I guess all games are terrible now.

Fuck.

Isn't like the like isn't the give up when games are going to cost like $120?

Right, right, right, right.

Like, people aren't just going to, I guess it's terrible.

Here's $130.

Like, no, they're just going to not.

And notice how there's always the, when we talk about games, we talk about AAA.

Triple A.

We talk about quadruple A.

We talk about the UBs and the EAs and the fucking Acta Blizzards.

And then we talk about the Indie

studio trying to make something that's much more sustainable.

Right.

And

even, and in this case, we're talking about a small, the altar is a fairly small game.

You know, we're talking about Expedition 13, like these double A experiences where they're like, is there a creator there that's going like, oh, I can get some shortcuts taken care of, you know,

versus the Microsoft version of this, which is you must start using this because the future is now and get the fuck on so that we can you know fire you in a minute, right?

It's like it's like different ways of setting of pushing it in a way.

I think that, you know, in the in the

way that a um

again, like a movie trailer kind of gets cut for like putting up the annoying little habits, anything that gets more annoying over time as technology has learned, as the internet in particular has learned that like annoying you is the, is a great way to market to you, I've hoped that there would be, you know, pushbacks against annoyance-based browsing, but it feels like it's actually a long-term locked-in commitment now where you're like, no, things that get you upset are all we're trying to make you see.

Things that are annoying and based on your, you know, you just scrolling by and getting your attention, showing you something weird and all these little dumb things that have been like, what the fuck is that?

Is now just like, it's become norm.

It's become the slop, right?

The fact that Google research results are like completely dog shit because before you even had the AI part of it, you had the quora farming and before the quora farming, you had the SEO generated pages, which were putting up non-answers and just hyperlinking the keyword you had to feed you a thing that you're like, I asked a a question and I'm not finding out.

And then on page three might be someone with an actual answer for what you're looking for.

You know, like people will gamify that shit.

And if the big corp is doing it and successfully making money off of that, then there's going to be a bunch of people trying to emulate what they're doing and gaming the system, which is why things like algorithms and YouTube, why they have to keep changing that up.

We don't know how that necessarily works over the years because there's always going to be someone trying to do the

like the lowest amount of effort to get the highest amount of return on it, which means you're always going to have some version of this in your face.

If there's an alternative group of people that are like choosing to reject it and make their own shit over here and you can support that, that's fucking hot.

That's fire.

That's optimistic.

And I would love to see that.

But I bet you there will always be a giant, for the most part, turn your brain off and ignore it, never going away ocean of dog shit that we're in for from here on out.

I don't see a complete collapse and reversion.

But I'm guessing.

I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.

I know DA and Microsoft are going all in.

So I'm expecting

some real good data on that.

It would not shock me to see Elder Scrolls VI use a bunch of AI-generated garbage.

And

game players, at least the vocal ones, have been extraordinarily hostile to it.

And every single time a game comes out and gets caught with it, they get shouted down.

If you're trying to sell AI

to the gaming audience with something like Elder Scroll VI,

that shit better knock it the fuck out of the park so you can say, see, see?

Yeah.

I don't think Bethesda is

in a good place to knock that shit out of the park and sell this concept.

Let me one-up you there.

Replace the game you listed listed with Grand Theft Auto.

Yeah.

Right?

Imagine if there's any part of Grand Theft Auto that they can then champion up as something that AI was responsible for.

Imagine the fucking fall, like the aftermath of that.

So the costs are down, so the game's going to cost less money, right?

And it'll come out faster, right?

And then we can play, and it'll be more affordable, right?

Right?

Right?

Yeah, and again.

Man, we're in this process where Switch games increased in price.

And one of the stories we have this week is that the Switch is going to, the Switch One is going to increase its price in Canada next month.

And it's like,

there's only so far you can cut costs and increase price before a consumer just goes, fuck it, dude.

I'm just going to buy weed instead.

Like, dude, I can get a can of weed from the weed store and just blaze for fucking four hours off of drinking my Cherry Cola for like $8.

I'd rather do that than go see most fucking movies.

I am

anticipating and

British Columbia now, by the way.

Mark my words.

As a complete fucking internet fool with a microphone in front of him,

There will be a game or perhaps a movie or some piece of media that we enjoy that'll come out and be critically acclaimed and beloved.

And then

I used AI to make all this shit.

And you'll find out way later and it'll be way more of it than you are comfortable with.

And there's going to be a very, very fucked up conversation afterwards where a bunch of people will be like, that is a humongous bummer.

That sucks.

Fuck that thing.

And then there will be another group of people that'll be like, oh, well, I already like it though.

And hey, we're already there and it's not that bad.

So I guess it does work.

And you're going to have that discourse occur.

And it's going to get fucking garbage.

It's going to get real shit here real quick when you're like, oh, we already got you.

You found out after the fact.

Now what?

You know?

Just wait for it.

I don't know.

I don't know.

It'd be awesome if it didn't.

Someone in the chat says, imagine if FIFA does it.

Listen, one of the things that we've been talking about about

the acceptance of slop is people go, well, what about Madden and FIFA players?

I'm like, Madden and FIFA players don't have any brains.

Like, the people who are buying those games every single fucking year are doing so out of like an addiction to sports.

And if there's enough of them to put money into the system and basically be like, yeah, I don't care to the people who are going, don't, that sucks.

I'm putting my hands up for audio listeners.

Hey, Wooly.

Yes.

I have a question for you.

I might not have an answer.

Let's say you're running a video game company

and

you're not going to use AI to cut costs, right?

But you need to make more money this year than you did last year because you have an ongoing game.

Infinite growth.

You need infinite growth, right?

Well, what happens if

everyone in the entire world who plays games has heard of your game?

And everyone who would ever get into your game is either out of your game or is already playing your game.

Where are you going to get that extra money?

How are you going to get that extra money?

When complete global saturation has occurred?

When everyone in the whole world knows about your game.

What is money?

You can't drive down costs more.

You have to charge more, right?

But let's say you already charge too much.

Where can it come from?

Can it come from gambling?

Do you have the League of Legends story on this week?

I don't.

Hit me up.

Riot is going to start allowing and endorsing sports betting

on Riot Games.

Wow.

Official.

Oh,

really?

You weren't putting enough money into League or Valorant?

Why not get into sports betting on esports?

Officially sanctioned, endorsed, and integrated by Riot Games.

Why we're opening betting sponsorships in esports and

how we're doing it responsibly.

So I don't know if you remember this, Wooly.

But, like,

this I missed.

Three or four years ago, whatever it was, when we were talking about like League of Legends, maybe it was two years ago, and the spin-offs, like Sunken King and 2XKO and stuff like that, and Arcane, it's like everyone on the world who plays games has heard of League of Legends and decided whether or not they want to play it or not.

The actual advertising of League of Legends is over.

It's a known quantity.

They have gotten everyone they will ever get into League of Legends, especially since people who play League of Legends tell you, hey, bro, don't get into League of Legends.

This game sucks.

So they got to get the money somewhere.

Yeah, there's a couple of veins you can tap for monetization.

And, you know, I've talked about how monetization experts will consult and show up on a project and be like, oh, yeah, here's how you can, you know, you could, here's how you can squeeze some more blood from the stone.

And fuck, there's one of them.

How do you turn inward, right?

If there's no money outside, there must be money inside.

I bet I can get more blood from this stone.

Oh, yeah.

If we can make the people that are already here just feel it a little bit more,

that's a line going up.

Mm-hmm.

That's reliable.

Definitely.

And if you're, if you're, and, and,

you know,

the part of it that I always yeah what if at Evo

you could use your riot sports betting app

to put a hundred dollars on who you would win who would win in the fucking top eight blah blah blah blah 2K XKO

it's disgusting you it's disgusting

so

there well I'm looking at I'm just kind of scanning over the article here and

oh that article is complete shit.

It's

fucking nonsense.

What I kind of want to know is what it used to be in the past,

you know, and was it before, was it simply this is not allowed?

What it used to be is, is, hey, hey, let's take Evo, for example.

What it used to be is, hey, Woolly,

I bet you Jay Wong's going to win Marvel this year.

And you go, I'll take that bet.

And I'll go, what do you want to do?

Put 50 on it?

And you go, okay.

And then we shake hands and put 50 bucks into a little pot.

Wait.

And that's it.

It exists between you and I as individuals.

What fucking

riot is talking about is fucking

2x KO sponsored by DraftKings.

Right.

So this is DraftKings to fucking set up your bets.

So

this is specifically announcing it for League of Legends and Valorant teams is what is what I'm looking at here.

And basically, the esports teams for League of Legends and Valorant

are opening up sponsorship opportunities with betting brands to generate additional revenue for financial health.

That's the phrasing that I'm seeing here.

Right.

So, yeah, that's, and so I'm kind of like, so I'm going to infer then that prior to now, they were not allowing,

you weren't allowed to use those companies as sponsors.

Yeah, okay, right.

Which is, this is the first part of what, like, you saw with Counter-Strike, where Counter-Strike had all these fucking third-party betting websites to run your skins on and they would have guys who would stream and they would stream oh man i'm doing so good on my betting website by the way i i didn't disclose that i own this betting website and that i jury-rigged all of the roles to make it look really really really good and that's why you should go to it um

well now i'm just kind of wondering like what the inter what the like internationally every country has its own laws on this stuff that in some cases are much more exactly stark than others.

So, that's not a clean thing you can roll out without hitting into

some countries' laws on get the fuck out of here.

No, you don't.

We do this podcast, and every now and then, someone's like, Do you guys want to sell cigarettes?

I'm like, Are you stupid?

We can't do that.

Are you insane?

It's a Canadian podcast,

but yeah, find out of our asses.

Yeah.

Oh, hey, good news about vaping.

It's more toxic than cigarettes.

Good news.

This week, it's substantially more toxic than cigarettes.

Okay.

Because of the lead.

Humanity's friend lead once again.

Oh.

Lead has to come for round two.

Lead poisoning.

Yeah.

So male.

And Gen Z dodged the lead, but here comes Gen Alpha with the disposable vapes.

Boomers and alphas connecting in the middle with the fucking Dylan son of a bitch.

You got this.

New study: Gen X is the most lead poisoned.

Wild.

Wow.

Wow.

Huh.

Explain.

From their parents blowing it in their face.

I mean, from sitting in the back of the car.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

In the peak of the gasoline

gasoline era.

God.

I'm sick of lead, Woolly.

I'm done with lead.

I don't care how how sweet it tastes.

So I was trying to remember my point from.

Oh, yes, that's what it was.

It was that

when it comes to these situations where you're like, how do you find new monetization avenues where there were none in the past?

I always love when you factor in outrage and go like, yep,

we know that this will take,

there will be significant blowback.

Kind of like unveiling something crypto related.

You know, it's like there will be significant blowback, but if if the profits can out

fucking flank the outrage

then it's worth it you know if we can i want to see where's a cape man

that's a that's a cool dog yeah

you're lying you don't want to see a superman dog you hate superman dude hey listen hey listen don't be full of

i'm excited to see that superman movie because holt is going to throw the fucking most pants shitting baby tantrum about superman he's going to lose it and cry and just fucking go fucking hate Superman, and I'm going to be there for it.

And that's why you wanted to.

And I'm going to be like, That's me.

That's me.

I hate him.

Okay, so a couple other things.

Real quick, I would say two big ones.

One, there was the Capcom Spotlight event, and they showed off some, you know, stuff going on with Monster Hunter.

They showed off nothing, man.

My takeaway was: hey, look, it's the Resident Evil Evil outbreak spin-off details or so.

They showed fucking nothing, man.

Yeah, well, you're right, because those costume four characters were wearing nothing.

Yeah.

They sure did show off nothing.

You can see Cami's fucking gyno info.

Like,

it's real slim.

They know what the goon slot bucks are coming in hard and fast.

Okay.

And I tell you what,

there's already been edits to Luke being like,

why are these shorts not banana hammocks?

It's crazy.

So I have something brave to say about the Street Fighter Outfit Force.

A bunch of bathing suit outfits are really cool

when you're getting 10 costumes a year.

When this is the only costume these characters are going to get for an entire year,

if you're not playing a female character that you're desperate to goon on, or you're not playing a male character you're desperate to goon on, it's like kind of a wasted thing.

Like, yeah, what are you going to put Zangie Finn, guys?

He wears a fucking like he wears shit all.

Sounds spoken like a fucking broke boy who don't want to spend money on the goon.

The you know, Wally.

The, the, like, it is, I want, I want those real costume fucking things to come through but boy is the money gonna be generated from costume four

the only one of those costumes i think looks good is jamie's i think jaimy's costume looks by far the best

um

i'm imagining i'm imagining it's like you get you there's

There's probably again the amount that you can you look at some of these characters and you're like you can you could reveal even more on some of these dudes Urien set a trend that that

he's basically naked, right?

I just think that costume four will pay for costumes five through ten.

Okay, make them faster then.

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Get the team that's doing the world tour assets to jump on board and fucking do it.

Agreed.

But yeah, that was it.

And they showed off some more Pragmata and

so on.

And then that was followed up by the Arc System Works Showcase.

Oh, boy, I watched that.

That was so exciting.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Okay, so

there's

like,

there's the bit, and then

there's the real, right?

It's ultimately the worst direct I've seen in like five years.

Okay, so

joking, not even doing it, not doing a goof.

So here's

the bit, the bit is, the bit is as follows.

Anytime you watch a live event and you're just like, what the fuck did I just spend my hour doing?

Just picture me catching a dub.

That's Woolly

enjoying life.

I am on a beach sipping a margarita.

I'm still doing this.

Right?

Oh, you missed me.

I am J.

Cole.

You know, I am chilling.

Every time you're like, what the fuck was that?

Just think of me right here.

All right.

Okay.

Second.

Oh, man.

I'm so glad.

I just saw the exact comment I want to respond to.

Yes.

Sorry.

after you.

Oh, no, no, no.

Go ahead.

So

Jimmy Chams in the chat says, sucks when a company tries new shit and the universal response is, ew, stop.

So that is a very common response to this kind of thing.

And I completely agree with you.

However, very importantly, is that people weren't going, ew, stop because

that shit looked fire, but it was different.

People went, ew, stop, because everything they showed looked like dog shit.

I was just going to this part of it.

Okay, so then

there's the real, right?

They showed off a couple of things that were

legitimately, depending on what you're looking for, interesting and might be great games.

They showed off a visual novel for older Japanese women who can't read.

That's made by the people who made Hotel Dusk.

Weird, weird idea.

Right?

I know.

So they're advertising to women who can't read.

That was a really, really strange angle to pitch that game on.

Dear me, I was, right?

I am also a fucking Bubble Bobble mark.

I love Bubble Bobble.

I have told many a times about how that was the game that my cousins had, and I had to fucking run and do chores and buy shit from the stores and whatever to get more time on it because I fucking love that game.

Bubble Bobble is great.

I also like Bubble Bobble.

Yeah, right.

You will never hear me talking shit about Bubble Bobble, Sugar Dungeons, or, you know, whatever.

And then Daisuke, Ishiwatari, comes up, and then he says,

a very noble, understandable goal that is essentially in line with what we've been describing, with what we think games ought to be, which is, hey, we want to make quality mid-range action games.

The industry has become very difficult, and we want to be able to move with the times and figure that out.

So we're going to be trying out things that are not fighting games and trying to expand, right?

And you're like, that's cool.

This is absolutely a reasonable, noble thing that ought to be done.

Great.

I applaud that.

What's happening is you have the expectations of, you know, everything that Arc is known for coming in where they don't do themselves a favor.

So you mentioned the quality part.

I'm coming at it from a different angle.

People, one, one, they showed off Tokan.

So everybody's already got that in the...

That's the last thing they showed off.

That's already at the front of everyone's brain is you showed off the sickest looking fighting game announcement, right?

You showed off some crazy shit and everyone's like, boo, right?

Locked in for that.

Then

you have

the thing that they ought to have done, but they didn't do, which is if you're not going to meet those expectations, you can tell people in advance, like Nintendo does, with not in this direct you know nintendo will sometimes literally before a direct comes out about something they will tell you you're oh it's not going to be about the switch 2 you know and like straight up Set your expectations.

We have some shit we want to tell you about, but if you're waiting on the big mega tons, that's not going to be this, right?

That would have been

a really good idea.

Daisuke Ishu Atari Project.

But what it should have said is new Daisuke Ishuatari project bracket.

Not a fighting game.

not a fighting game, right?

Right, and so this is the mistake you make by not being forward about that element,

you know, not reading the room on that.

Um, and then there's a there's another factor to this with the disappointment that I feel because this game, Damon and Baby, it might be, it might be, it might be good, right?

It might be great, it might be a really fun game.

I don't know, we'll see when it comes and drops, but there's a there's something that I realize it happens specifically with fighting game fans as well, right?

When you show a game that is not not a fighting game during a time where fighting game fans are expecting to see one there is a direct correlation between how disappointed people are and how zoomed out the camera is on the game you're showing okay so dude

not just this

but this this is something

you know we we don't do the the let's watch this together anymore but i'm sure you remember me doing this when you when you're when you're showing a trailer and particularly an announcement trailer it is the first taste it is it is like the first bite is with your eyes right it is it is it is the first thing you're ever going to see this is going to tone set it so it is definitely the media person's responsibility to put out the most banger trailer or screenshot or whatever possible and so when you load in to this super zoomed out damon and baby and then it does that smash cut with tons of screens and most of them are running like guards.

15 frames per second.

Super, super terrible as you're zooming away.

It's like, this is the worst first impression you could possibly get.

So you're obviously.

Trailer made that on purpose.

You're obviously early.

in this game's life cycle and you're showing it off to like prove it exists and kind of introduce the idea but you're having those issues with it and then you have that thing that yeah what we talk about at game show ward shows and stuff where you're like a new mobile game of some kind with some characters that are doing some sort of magic with their weapons, and I can't see them because there are tiny little glowing things moving with a cursor around them.

And I'm just like, can you get a cloak?

Can I see the character?

It drives me crazy when it's so fucking zoomed out the whole time.

And like, there might be an up-close model at some point with a bullshot, but in some cases, they're like, no, we're not going to show you that.

Go download it in the fucking iOS store today, you know?

This was also like right after they had a game.

They had like a five-minute thing where a guy came up and said, this game's going to be really crazy.

and then showed the logo and said, Thank you.

Right, right.

So, yeah, you, um, that was the uh, uh, Demon's Night Fever Embrace being evil,

which were like, we got an art style.

I feel like they didn't have enough to actually show, maybe.

Like, it seemed that way.

Well, when we take five, ten minutes to spend on Double Dragon Revive, which has been,

we've been,

I'm going to go ahead and say, yeah, probably.

You know, we've been watching that one, and you're like, Double Dragon is such a amazing, hilarious franchise because it must there the the rules like God himself has declared that a double dragon must alternate between dog shit entry and banger, right?

It has to it has to ebb and flow, right?

There must be a balance.

And so we are currently on the flow part where oh boy, oh, do we have to watch a bunch of this double dragon revive shit.

You know, and and

you know,

as as there are, there are,

we know some folks that are massive Double Dragon fans that might be very excited about this game.

I can, I can think of, I could think of one.

And, you know,

shout outs to you.

But for the most part, yeah, you're filling out the time while people are going, where the fuck is Blaze Blue?

Where the fuck is Tokan?

Where the fuck is all the things I'm expecting to see?

So when a new game comes out, If it's, let's, for example, you show off, and it's not what, it's not a fighting game, but you show off a brand new game and you see a really big, bold, strong, cool character design, and then it goes to third-person action and then they start doing stuff.

You go, okay, this looks cool, you know, but there's still a little bit of something.

It's just not what you're looking for, but you're still getting a little bit of what you enjoy here versus just the complete...

dot on a map and and lighting effects are flying out and blowing up things and points are happening which sucks because i believe i am like i definitely believe dice game could be cooking something cool, but let's not forget too that he was cooking Overture and Overture was like the true guilty gear until it wasn't.

You know, this is the real sequel.

He was ahead of his time making a MOBA when nobody had a MOBA.

So here's the thing, right?

It's like, hey, I'm gonna make something that's not a fighting game.

It's like, oh, all right, wow, me, because the last thing you made that wasn't a fighting game is one of the worst fucking pieces of shit I've ever played in my life, Daisuke.

He might be cooking.

Oh, this looks super cool.

Might be cooking.

Let's wait and see.

But like, hot on the expectations is not the time for it.

Yeah, they should have just straight up told people, hey, not in this direct.

You know, I hope they learn from that.

And I hope they...

They don't do these, right?

Arc System Works Showcase is not an established thing.

Like, you know, we're starting to see

from all these other companies.

So

the

absolute palpable disappointment from everybody, on top of a message, which is good, which is we want to make again mid-range games.

It sucks that that gets diluted because that's absolutely worth, that's an effort worth being like, yeah, good shit, but don't fucking doing it like this, guys.

Don't, don't do it like this.

It says

it says a lot because I'm thinking about like, oh no, it's because they did a new thing and people don't want double A things.

I'm like, well, I remember when people showed, when Capcom showed off the trailer for Knitsugami, which is a very clear double A weirdo game.

It's like a fucking tower defense game in Japan that was one of Capcom's cheaper games, and people went, Oh, that could be cool

because it showed well.

Where, and by the way, that game's great, Konitsugami is incredible.

Um, and when people saw Damon and Baby out of any context, they went, ah,

not because it's new, but because that the trailer they showed looked like ass.

Yeah, um,

no, No, I really, I think this is a case of your marketing team and your,

you know, your outreachers, your, you're, all the people planning for this and how to announce this and how to tell people what to expect and what to show and showing off something impressive.

All of that failed.

And that needs to be, you need to make a first impression, even if we support the idea behind why you're doing what you're doing, right?

Like I said, the Hotel Dusk team making a visual novel is fucking sick.

That's cool.

Why did they make a visual novel for people who can't read?

Like, I keep saying it over and over, and no one is...

Like, I've been saying that every time I talk about this game, and no one is willing to engage with me on it.

I don't know why.

It's like, why

are they making...

Like, it was so weird.

I mean, rotoscoping is cool.

I think it looks pretty.

Jan asks, why do I keep saying that?

It's because it's a game that has no text.

It has no text.

It's all a visual novel that has absolutely no text at all.

Yes, it's rotoscoping and it's, I guess, an emotional silent story, which there can be awesome, compelling, silent stories.

In fact, there is a really good comic book collection of stories

called Flight, which puts together a bunch of stories from artists from

many years ago at this point.

And there's a couple of those that are wordless and really, really cool.

I like stuff that finds ways to be interesting while being, you know, narratively putting a little kind of weight on yourself like that, you know?

But

this is just like, this is an interesting thing that would probably have gone over really well in the middle of a Nintendo Direct, right?

That could have gone over really interestingly in a Nintendo Direct that's been going between a couple of cozy games and then the latest Donkey Kong Bonanza amiibo.

You'd be like, hey, check out this new interesting visual novel.

If you played Hotel Dusk back in the day, you might be like, oh, yeah,

that's cool.

They can't call it that.

Okay, well, it isn't.

It is a.

There's no words.

It can't be a novel.

It is a visual.

It's a visual, visual.

It's a visual story.

It is a visual tale.

Anyway, so yeah, that's just, that's the issue, right?

With the, with it.

Set the expectations of the audience accordingly.

Pop-up.

Yeah.

Look, I mean, beyond that, the only other things I thought were just kind of like, you want to raise your eyebrow here is a classic case of just, you know,

silence is an option, Randy.

I'd like to call this segment silence is an option.

He's so stupid, man.

He's so funny.

So, you know, Borderlands 3 gets a massive 95% off discount.

And every sale, it gets kicked down like $4.

And so, you know, letting people know about that, it's like, oh shit, the game is three bucks.

It came out in 2019, so it's been out for a while.

But if you're somebody that wanted to get your hands on Borderlands 3 for as cheap as possible, it's currently $3,

right?

Cool.

So,

yeah, he announces that and basically tweets out, you know,

sales like this and Borderlands 3 showing up on a console subscription programs took over five years from the game's launch to happen.

So take advantage while it's here.

It's not even true.

It was like that, like last year, dude.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Stop lying, Randy.

Well, either way, it's like, okay, cool.

People are like, oh, shit, look at that.

That's great.

And then following that, and to set expectations,

it'll be even longer before this kind of thing happens on the next cycle with Borderlands 4.

You're just like...

Like, you didn't have to be like,

let me drop some disdain on the poors.

You could have just been silent on that.

Even if that's the reality, even if that's the truth, there was no reason.

There was no reason to say that.

So I'll tell you what the reason to say that is.

So Randy Pitchford comes out and says, hey, the game's going to be $80 or $100 or whatever the fuck the price was, right?

And then when people got mad at him, he's like, well, that's not my decision.

That's not my decision.

I didn't do that.

That wasn't me.

And then the publisher saw the backlash and went, yeah, okay, it's going to be 70 bucks.

Like, they kicked it back down of the price of a normal game.

And what that means to me is that Randy actually was part of the fucking decision to kick it up 10 bucks so they'd make more money.

And now he looks super dumb.

So, hey, how does he not look super dumb to say, listen, we're not going to be charging extra, but you know,

it's going to take a really long time to come down to price.

So, I think that it's, I mean, I go a little more ockam on that one.

And I kind of think that it's like, I don't want anybody who sees this to think that they should wait before buying our next game.

You know, I think the thought is simply, hey, if you're waiting for a bargain, uh-uh, you should buy the Borderlands 4 right away.

And then this is what comes out.

This is what that thought turns into.

Which to me says

that Borderlands 4 has to make tons of money.

And the best way to do that right after release, if you haven't hit your numbers, is to put the game on sale right away, like a Tomb Raider, for example.

Like, listen, we got to shift this amount of fucking units, we got to make this amount of money.

Fucking cut the cost two months after the game comes out until the numbers fucking go.

So I feel like it's actually more likely that this game's going to go on like fucking 30% off on the winter sale.

Either way, that has been silence is an option.

Just shut the fuck up, Randy.

Every time he speaks, he is actually taking a sale away, even just one.

And then, just as a curiosity on the other side over here,

there's been some

revelations coming out of Tim Kane, who was the lead on Fallout

back in the day.

And basically, he's described how the process of finishing

projects at Interplay was one where they directly would tell their employees to delete original source code.

They specifically did not want it to be preserved.

They specifically gave instructions and

this was their, they basically had a scorch earthed policy so that they could avoid IP theft.

And

he had, he had like localized, he had local copies of some stuff he'd worked on because he knew that like some companies were like more insane than others with it.

But overall,

yeah, yeah,

there's a bunch of companies where their entire policy was once the game is out and done, fucking delete, delete the code.

No one will ever have access to it.

There will never be a preservation of this.

A lot of people

are stupid to do.

A lot of people that wanted and were actively that wanted to preserve things were threatened with potential lawsuits by not doing so.

Right.

So this is one of those bits where you're like, it depends entirely on the company and how stupid they are, obviously.

And I mean, this is from the past.

This is literally from Fallout 1 era, you know?

But

we've seen and heard about this entire concept and so on going forward.

If you're, all I can say is if you're working at a company that's this fucking stupid and you're like, if you're in the pre-mastering department, like

write a letter.

Call a meeting.

Do what you can.

You know, it might not go well, but

give it a shot because like the people in charge of pre-mastering in particular are the ones that are like handling this and managing builds and directly going to be responsible for security of where those, that code goes after,

you know, different phases and such.

Just give it a shot for the sake of for posterity, literally for posterity, you know?

Yeah,

we always laugh at the craziness of the stories where they're like, oh yeah, we lost the code.

And here it's the like, no, we were told.

The code was destroyed after this.

You know?

Jesus Christ.

And then interplay ran itself into the ground because their decisions were super good.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Ran itself into the fucking dirt.

And then years later, when somebody has to do a remaster of something, they're basically like doing it from the outside in.

And if you're a really good company, then you're, and you're dedicated and love the thing, then you'll put the, you know, you'll put the work in and they get it done.

But boy, does it suck.

I mean, shit.

What was the, I was thinking of what was the, um, there was another big remake.

Was it a blue point game or so?

Where they're like, oh, we don't have the source code, but we just have to build around.

Final Fantasy Tactics.

Was it Tactics?

Yeah, okay.

That's what I was doing.

Yeah, yeah, there you go.

There you go, right?

They're like, we lost it.

And like, it's so obvious that it was destroyed because Yoshi P was like, listen, we don't want to blame anybody.

Just sometimes you lose things back in the day.

I'm like, oh, yeah, okay.

We just lost it.

Sure, buddy.

That Bloodborne port.

Every single day, I become more certain that Sony loves Bloodborne.

I'm so certain.

No, well,

no.

What you need to know is every day they're deleting one file.

They're wiping one file from existence slowly but surely.

Bleed it out.

Let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

All right, we got one coming in over here

from Colin.

Dear letters and numbers,

what are some weird instances of magical thinking that bug you?

For example, after the announcement from

last week, well, I guess a little before that, I decided to check the Woolly Will Figure It Out podcast

before the inevitable fatherhood episode, only to discover that he stopped at 12.

Make another episode fast so that fatherhood doesn't become episode 13.

Please think of the children.

Okay, also something, something Mathic the Gadgering X cross Final Fantasy cards cost way too much.

They do.

They sure fucking do.

I don't have many of them, but there's one that stands out.

I'm going to think of one big problem of magical thinking that you have.

Okay, well, you know, I mean, I'm open to it, but like the one that we've touched on many a times is real simple.

If you're setting the volume on the TV.

Oh, my God.

It has to be an odd number, an even number, or a multiple of five.

I think everyone knows knows this.

Similarly,

similarly, if you're setting time on the microwave,

you know, I kind of follow more or less multiples of five on that.

But, you know,

you turn up the volume and you get that number on whatever the volume is, just even or multiple of five.

Just put it in the right place where

you can arrest.

This isn't magical thinking, but I have a question.

Sure.

If you walk into a room and you look at your microwave, and the microwave says like 002 on it, frozen in time, do you walk over and be like, fuck, and hit the clear button to set it back to the clock,

cursing under your breath that the person who opened it up so that it would have two seconds to go so the alarm wouldn't go off, but then never cleared it?

Is this too specific?

Not only do I clear the time on the microwave, I have gotten a microwave that has muted buttons and no beep so that we can stealth that shit.

It is

absolutely not cool to leave that number on.

So someone in the chat says, is this a secret page story?

And it's like, technically, but this is actually every person I have ever seen use a

microwave in my entire life opens the door with like two seconds to go and then just closes it and walks away

every single time I've ever seen someone do it.

It makes me so crazy.

If you're standing there and you don't want to hear beep, beep, beep, you know, then you're like, okay, but then you just leave it on one or two.

Yeah,

mute setting, mute, you know, mute setting on that.

What's yours?

I don't have a lot of magical thinking.

No, there's no, there's the big one.

Not many.

Just not even bother.

I know somebody who has a magical thinking pet peeve, and it drives me crazy because whenever I say, wow, things are going really great, they go, shut up, oh my God, and start running around knocking on wood.

Whenever I go, wow, what an amazing day.

It's like nothing could go wrong.

I just, I see every alarm go off in Paige's head.

today's been a really great day actually I'm having a really good day so far okay

um

yeah I mean I'm trying to even remotely get to something that would come in like third place and it's it's tricky I'm I'm I'm

I'm like I'm just I'm thinking like oh when I open the fridge I like when like the cans or bottles are like you know on the shelf organized to one side a little bit more but it's not magical it's not a big idea yeah i'm like i'm like i'm trying to i'm really i'm trying i'm like no there's that volume number one is really that's the biggest that's the biggest one magical thinking is like i have to wear my lucky socks or else i'll lose the playoffs you know that that's like right like full-on belief in sorcery

i mean some days i'll

match

my underwear with my outfit if I'm feeling particularly fancy.

Yeah, no, that's just

no one's going to see it.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

All right.

Well, anyway, there you go.

This is a podcast for adults.

Thank you.

We don't have magical ideas.

All right.

Let's see.

Hello, Castle Super Dead.

What are some games where certified freak status is appreciable, but it's for someone else?

Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, NetHack, these are for a kind of person that I know isn't me.

The closest I I come is Football Manager.

Try as I might, I'm always left feeling like, damn, some freak out there has to love this, but it ain't me.

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say the big one for me is Disgaea.

Going into the item world to level up your items, only to discover a better item and then go into that item world is so unhinged and disturbing to me that I just don't know that I can interface with the game at all.

Literally every management game.

All of them.

All of them?

All of them.

It's for someone.

Yeah, not me, though.

It ain't for me.

All right.

And one last one over here.

Hey there, Blue Eyes, White, Boivain, and the Dark Magician.

I want to tell you a tale from Russia.

Is Caboose the Dark Magician?

Ah.

I mean,

is Dark Magician strong?

Well, he's not.

Oh, I love you.

I want to tell you a tale from Russia, where in 2007, a 10-year-old writing prodigy took the literary world by storm with her high-fantasy novel set in the rich magical world of Agremont, an ancient land plagued by an evil demon king.

The author, Valeria

Spirande, Espirande,

became an overnight sensation, apparently appearing for regular interviews on national TV, and then sparked debate as to whether the schoolgirl's debut work could be comparable to the likes of Tolkien and C.S.

Lewis.

While obviously, at 10 years old, her writing style was not as standard as an adult writer's, people were blown away by the richness and depth of the fantasy world she had created, and big things were expected from her future.

Turns out, Valeria was unfortunately not a literary genius or expert world builder, but she simply ripped off a well-known video game by the name of The Legend of Zelda, The Ocarina of Time.

Her book had no hint of originality or plot in or lore.

It was not an original fan fiction.

It was not an original fanfiction story set in Hyrule, but a complete scene-for-seen clone of Ocarina of Time, complete with characters named Princess Elda, Gonandorf, Lord Vabu Vabu, and Salia.

The similarities between the two works were not noticed due to Ocarina of Time's relative obscurity in Russia at the time and the lack of overlap between serious literary scholars and video game fans.

Needless to say, Valeria did not quite reach the literary potential shown in her youth.

Hustle or scam.

Now, I mean, look,

let me transport you back to a time not too long ago when a work known as diesel

was

an enemy stand,

right?

When diesel was brought to the masses, and diesel with stand

users

and

you know, these these battles as a Western comic book simply was not ripping off JoJo's bizarre adventure.

It was knowing that Jojo would never come out in the West, so they were going to copy the story and homage it so that people here

so that people here could appreciate how cool it was.

That's all.

If this girl's 10 years old, like, this is the parents' fault.

I'm going to fully just blame the parents on this one for pushing the media campaign and going as, you know, as nuts as possible.

I don't know.

I mean...

The argument that you're like, it'll never come out here, therefore I'm going to steal it, and then everybody can appreciate it fucking sucks.

But you get a bunch of passes from me me for being 10 years fucking old.

But what everyone else around you is doing in light of this is absolutely fucking to blame, in my opinion.

Right?

That's how I say.

You know what she did?

She plagiarized the old-fashioned way.

Didn't need no AI to do it.

Hmm.

You don't need a robot to steal for you.

You can do it yourself.

Even a child can do it.

Could have been a prompt.

Also, the idea that it would get to the point of being on TV and shit.

And

nobody got it.

I mean, like, if Ocarina was a hard thing to get at the time, you know, if shit was like, you know, prohibitive, then that's how it go, you know?

But god damn it, man.

At least, like, Turkish Spider-Man and

was it, or, or was it Turkish Star Wars, I think?

Turkish Star Wars is pretty good, good, too.

Yeah, like, and and and

I want to say it's like

Kenya Devil May Cry, you know?

Like,

that is

Ghana, I want to say that Ghana, Ghana, okay, okay.

So Ghana, Devil May Cry, and Turkish Star Wars, they take inspiration, but then they

go to a different direction with the work, you know?

And I think that's what's crucial.

Say that.

That's a thing that you could say with your mouth.

Yeah,

they're inspired from the same source, but the creators wanted to ultimately, you know, they had a different message they wanted to express.

So, you know, they get originality points on that.

Um,

yeah,

someone said children can't scam.

Fucking disagree.

That's not true.

That's no right and wrong.

That is patentedly untrue.

Absolutely not.

You know, if I could hustle back in school with my soda cans, then scamming was always always an option.

100%.

Come on now.

100%.

Children can lie.

Therefore, they can scam.

See you next week.

Oh, wait.

We got confirmation of that thing.

Oh, boop, boop, up, up, up, up, up, up.

Did we get confirmed?

Oh.

Oh, whoa.

Whoopsie doodle.

Here, hold on a second.

Why does that layout even exist?

That's for when we have a guest.

All right.

Such as

next week,

that layout will be used for next week's guest.

What guest would that be, Wooly?

I believe we have confirmation here that we can announce that next week we will be joined by Maury Kaliope.

Yay!

Looking forward to it.

Hell yeah.

See you guys then.