CSB321: Empty Nest Gaming

Hello.

And hey, Wolves, how you doing, man?

Yeah.

Welcome to Fucking Video Games, am I right?

Yeah,

that's the other name for the podcast.

Is this going to be the fourth week in a row in which we go, man, Expedition 33 is so sick?

It's so fucking sick, bro.

Oh, shit.

At least until credits are hit.

Yes.

guess what it is

it's the best bloom age it's ever been in anything yeah

there we go

anyone to bring me a better bloom age there we go there we go okay i that is a shadow hearts character that is a that is a shadow hearts character that is a playstation one era

like niche character that is great i've never played anyone with a um card rotation systems like that so that's i found that to be pretty fun that's interesting um

Yeah, I don't have a ton to say personally this week in terms of like, oh, it's good.

Yeah, progress.

And, you know, again, no spoiling.

But I'm just enjoying the

little, the little, you know, scenes and hangouts and conversations between all the characters.

Those are fun.

The skits, as a Tales game would call them.

I'm enjoying continuing to break the build and the game open.

And I'm also

very, so the

the difficulty that comes from

creating a build that just stomps everything into the dirt and then uh I increasing the difficulty to expert and then it's like, it's not enough.

It's not nearly enough.

I have found myself now like basically, I've, there's, there's been some points I've hit where like big, cool fights happen and I stomp it without getting touched, right?

I like without, and I mean, like, without the boss getting a turn,

right?

I have setups where the boss doesn't get to act, and then

reloading my save and standing there and watching them do all the cool stuff, and then watching them say stuff, and watching the phases change, and then being like, okay, okay, got it.

That's what it actually looks like, you know, because

it's really fucking feast or famine, and that does not lighten up as you progress.

So I talked about this on my stream, and I had this weird moment where I was like over-leveled for the stuff I was doing.

And

I had, you know, built up a build with my Pictos in the Expedition 33.

And I was like, and I said the phrase, I don't understand what's happening.

I didn't even do anything.

Why am I so much stronger?

To which someone at a later point in a comment said, Pat's saying he doesn't do anything when he spent the first 40 minutes of today's stream fighting a boss he was too weak for and then beating it.

Yeah, yeah, and then

getting the XP and the picked up rewards from it.

And

it made me think a lot about what the purpose of side content is in games anymore.

It used to be in

my recollection that the side content was there to get you up to speed for the main content.

The main content was always the hardest, and the side content was the easy stuff that could get you a numerical advantage to help you with the main content.

But in today's world of the critical path, those have been inverted.

Now the main stuff is what they want everyone to be able to get through.

is by far the easier path and the side stuff is its own internal progression of difficulty.

And it makes me think of like FF7 Rebirth, in which like all the stuff on the side was harder than all the stuff in the main.

Yes.

You choose, because you choose to subject yourself to those challenges versus wanting to just get that narrative, you know?

And it makes me think about how like it's strange because like, okay, I am loving the game, so I want to see more of it.

So by doing, I'm doing all the side content to see more of it, I don't want that to then make the main thing.

The guts of it go faster.

But this is unfortunately,

it's a side consequence of an understandable change in the way games are made, which is just we want more people to be able to play them and handle the difficulty and progression as you do.

And there's definitely a lot of people who are like, well, I don't need easy, but I also need something less than that super boss.

You know, so if that super boss requirement is mandatory for progressing, that makes me feel bad versus the idea of it just being optional.

And then you getting an outfit for it.

You get a silly hat when you beat the super boss.

And the game's curve is like flying all over the place.

So that's actually.

I fought a very important boss, and I did not stomp them into dirt.

Like, I had a boss fight, right?

Like, and I was very happy with that.

But prior, I had a boss that was built up as just the boss of the Forgotten Battlefield.

That's built up as the coolest.

And I'm like, man,

like that.

Yeah.

Like, nothing.

No, no, no.

Okay.

So the Forgotten Battlefield boss was one of the largest, like, dissonant moments of all that buildup.

And what a bitch.

You know?

Oh, yeah.

And he was a cool bitch, but wow, you went down like nothing.

You know?

I liked what he gave me.

The sword I got was pretty good.

I'm never taking it off.

But yes, the buildup for what you actually challenged.

And to be fair, there's like a a couple of lines the characters have that more or less underline that.

Like, huh.

They're like, oh, this is so hard.

Will we even make it?

Or whatever.

No, no, no.

No, like, after the fact, there's a, oh, I guess it wasn't that bad after all.

No, he literally goes, guess it wasn't that bad after all.

So, you know, but anyway.

So what you're describing is actually like, this game is kind of exposing some inner truths that we already know, but like...

It has the strangest difficulty curve.

because we are discussing it amongst ourselves as we know each other, and then now everyone else is hearing this conversation.

I saw

a great

that they were that you saw that?

Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure I know what you're about to say.

Where someone was like, I've been listening to technically talk about Expedition 33, and it seems like the most miserable.

Oh my God.

I don't want to have anything to do with it.

They're talking about their fucking builds and all these fucking nitty-gritty mechanical things.

I just want to play RPG.

And the difficulty curve thing that I'm talking about doesn't exist for a person who just wants to play RPG.

And I think the thought was also like, it seemed, yeah, it seemed like the most miserable thing ever and so brutal.

And then when I,

and I'm having, and it's so simple and dumb.

And when I played it, I'm having a good time.

And it has nothing to do with what they're talking about, right?

And it's like, right.

So what we have here is like, if you are playing games for a certain thing, if you're if you're conditioned a certain way in your brain, right?

If you walk up to a boss and the boss in its first combo wipes your team and you go, huh.

And then you take a swing at it and you see a little pip of damage go away and you go, huh?

And you're like, is that about 20 minutes?

Okay.

I can do math on that.

Right?

And then you're like, and what about these, this pattern?

Can I do it?

And you kind of walk back in there, right?

If you don't immediately, like, like, if you don't immediately turn around and 180 and be like, I'll be back later, that's probably intended, you know, but you can also like go like, ah, is this real yet?

You can get that in-between point.

And in this game, obviously, since you can just fight and beat something that you're way underleveled for through sheer grit, your grit determines how far you fucking go and how far you, how fast you level up.

There's no such thing as, in this game, an intended median user path right it feels like it's completely up to you how much punishment you're willing to take

in this moment right now yeah you know and and it's i've if it's been really like

it's very rare that you encounter a game that that's that's that open and you kind of think about that and then you find out something about the director and then you go something very important you find out two things about that director

number one number one is what are your three favorite video games?

In order

fucking

Devil May Cry 1 to 5,

Dark Souls slash Elden Ring, Final Fantasy VIII.

And then it's like, depending on how you want to play this game, you can make this turn-based Devil May Cry.

If you'd like.

You can make this turn-based Dark Souls.

If you'd like.

Or you can make it turn-based Final Fantasy VIII.

Like, the Picto system in Lumina is based off of the draw system and junctioning.

It's just junctioning.

So made for me, finally.

And the second piece of information you find out is that Monsieur Guillaume Brioche, the director of Claire Obscure.

Could that be a Frencher name if you try?

I'm like, I have to go back through my mental roller desks to see if I'm like, do I know this person?

Because I might.

Like, it's crazy

how much that sounds like somebody that I know.

We've known many Guillaumes over the years.

I have known many Guillaumes.

Yeah, it's the French way of saying that.

But it's Guillaume French bread, really?

Really?

Like, wow.

For anyone that doesn't know, it's the French way of saying William, right?

So anyway,

he has a YouTube channel from years ago.

What's on that YouTube channel, Willie?

It's called Don Poco, and on that YouTube channel is nothing but no-hit triple-S runs of DMD devil may cry boss fighting Virgil runs hey what what's uh what's uh mr.

Brioche's favorite style for Dante Royal fucking guard

that's crazy and that's it

and you're like oh oh brother brother where have you been I see who you are I understand now you have revealed your inner soul to us and it's the thing that we have been screaming for for our life for our entire lives in front of microphones right i a kindred spirit has arisen and made a video game and you're like are you are you and then you see the little secret history and you're like ah

there it is

and then and this this puts part of the game's dna

in a very very clear thing that's why you have parry which is royal guard

and that's why you have dodge which is dodge roll

um i don't know what the timing is on Dodge Roll.

I don't know what the invincibility on Dark Souls' Dodge Roll is.

It's definitely more than their parry, but I can tell you

that

Dark Souls,

sorry, Devil May Cry's Royal Guard

Guard is six frames.

And Expedition 33's is nine frames.

So it's not Royal Guard.

It's a different genre.

You know?

Yeah.

But it's there, and the idea, of course, is that you know, you've got turns and turns to learn what's coming at you and feel it out.

Um, and then also let's add some free aiming to the system, you know what I mean, like a little thing, and then fighting bosses that make you use that a little bit more.

But, like, all of that, it's just like, oh,

yeah, no, this is what you love too.

Okay, well, fucking, you're okay, get in, you know, and this, uh,

this, we were destined to like this game, there was no way around it, yeah, you know, it was built for us, it's kind of insane, you know,

you talked about this maybe last time, but I've hit the point of the game where I'm functioning under Predator rules.

And if you remember, that was something that you also did naturally when we were playing Dark Souls way back in the day, which is,

when I hit it, does gray appear on the life bar before the health ticks down?

It does it bleed?

Then it can, then you

can do it.

And so I've run into a couple now and they don't believe

like I hit them with everything I got and I'm like I'm staring at pixels and I'm like I don't think it actually moves yes I think it didn't move at all and furthermore there's an even more pure indicator of like when it's time to move on if you decide to and that's where you're also like because there's a damage cap right yeah the damage if the damage so I ran into two bosses on the overworld that I was blowing out damage cap numbers on every strike and I made

imperceptible changes to their health bar.

And I'm like, oh, and I'm running the mental map.

This is at least multiple hours of perfect play.

And so, like, that damage cap is in place as a like, it is, it is a limiter for how much you can,

yeah, how far you can go, right?

You know, we'll see how that goes into the future, but for the moment, it is, there's, there's still a time hard limit on that, um, even if you have perfect dodging and stuff.

I fought I fought a

Optional enemy last night that was called a dancer

I don't know if you're oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely

and That experience was okay gray life happens when I hit them and then it was wipe wipe yep wipe yep, yep, yep, wipe yep parrot everything Parrot everything, parrot everything, 11 minutes later, it's done.

Yeah.

Just like once I'm like, okay, what is the actual timing?

Is it duh duh?

Just get the rhythm down, right?

Find, oh, okay, the boss is over.

Find your tells, yeah, you know.

Um, it sometimes is a little part of the animation that you're like, oh, look at the axe, go back, and when it starts to disappear behind it a little bit, it's coming at you, you know?

Um, and I think the game does a great uh uh uh mix of its mechanical and statistic issues here because there was a much more important boss fight that I fought in that area, like a storyline boss fight against

something

important.

And

my damage was way better than it was on Dancer,

but I couldn't fucking parry it for shit because the moves were so much more like fake out

full of shit.

I actually didn't fully parry it like once the whole boss fight.

I had to fight it like a goddamn army.

Yeah, just taking the damage.

Which was like, oh, wow, I haven't done this in a while.

Right?

Yes.

So two things.

one uh kudos to uh yeah kf tragic posted a video of just like in in like in expedition 30 with the bunny with the buddy yeah you got it's like all right i just gotta parry this i got no life here we go and the buddy's like ah ah fake out what you got oh i'm walking away hey

oh

fuck you nigga what you got

that's great like how am i supposed to parry that fuck it's it's it's great um

funny skit the uh So, the other thing, too, is like, what, what's but what I kind of caught right around that area you're looking at now and stuff is like, I'm putting, I have the build set up, and I'm, and I've reworked everything around the weapons and the damage and such.

So, I'm swinging.

I'm at the point of the game where I just max out whatever the most important stat is for the weapon.

But I'm fighting things, and I'm hitting that damage cap.

And now, what becomes important is the number of hits in the move.

Yeah, no, yeah, no, that's the exact point.

I hit that last night where I'm like, okay, I'm hitting the damage cap on average if I put roulette on.

So now single target hits that are big hits don't matter at all.

I need that move that that guy has that does 13 hits.

Thank you, right?

Yeah.

I'm looking at this shit and I'm like, you know, what you're relying on stops being

the big, the big chunk in single hit.

And now you need combos.

You can't stand up like stacks of status or something.

You know, no, Mayel, Virtua Stance, she's got that big three hit.

You walk multiple hits and each one to max out, you know?

Phantom stars.

Like anything that has multiple hits is going to be super crucial.

And yeah, this weird, like, this weird thing.

Now it's like starts to shift back over towards multi-hit after, oh,

if I can hit 9999, oh, that, that'll destroy any boss.

And then it's like, no, that's, that's free now.

That's, now I have to, now all that matters is extra hits.

Or extra turns, right?

And, you know, many extra turns.

And then, and now you get to, and then speed and so on, right?

The ability to buff all that and cast.

And then all of that is coming together while

we're talking about it.

And like, I don't want the, I guess, don't get the wrong impression.

You don't have to do any of the shit we're talking about.

You have to do nothing, right?

In fact, not only do you not have to do you don't have to do nothing, I ran a full dungeon with nothing equipped and no pictos.

Wow, okay.

Just my stats.

And like, I got through it.

Okay.

It was a lot harder, but like, I just, I just parried and dodged and played it like a regular RPG.

This is that moment where like a bayonet item got used, and we're like, what the fuck is that animation?

Like, what was that?

What just happened?

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

It really feels like the distribution of abilities in this game is so perfectly tuned for you to pick up an item and go, sorry, a picto.

And the picto will be something like,

I recently got one that was like, returns 25% of your health on counter-attack.

And I see that and I go, oh,

what if Mayelle was using the skill that forces every enemy to attack her?

She could be at full health forever.

You know, and just it constantly makes you just go hey wait a second that's actually oh but also

but also the like i have stuff that does like double damage here double damage there double damage on a stunned opponent whatever and it's like at some point that double is actually a worthless picto because i'm already at 9999 roulette is uh is the is the picto of choice for every hit in the game until you hit damage cap and then it becomes a damage loss because you can't go higher than the damage cap for now.

So I used, to be perfectly honest, I used roulette like once for that challenge, that first challenge, and then I immediately stopped using it.

And now I, well, it's the math on it is that it is better as long as you're not hitting cap.

Yeah.

So I found a way to cap using other stuff and using a different build, you know, essentially.

So,

you know, setting stuff up, like take a shot and that adds your base damage up.

Do this and increase your base damage, et cetera.

There's different ways to go about it.

But yeah, you really...

feel

go ahead.

You feel like a game is like looking into your ass and just staring at you and like listening to you and building itself around it.

Because I had that moment.

I had that moment where I got the whole team.

And I think the way that they give you the whole team is incredible because right before

they join the team, the achievement for, hey, you got the whole team pops up.

And I went, I am never,

ever switching off this team.

And the game said, guess what, bitch?

You are switching off this team right now.

Shut the fuck up.

You can't do anything about it.

And I went, oh, no.

Shut the fuck up.

I spent

so long

tweaking them so that I never had to change them every, oh, darn.

Nah.

Nah.

Like, level, like.

Play your team and level them out accordingly.

You know, if you don't like anybody, you can bench them.

But for the most part, you know,

keep yourself ready at the very least.

um

yeah i i uh and you know and like what for me at this point there's just like a massive open like

go to the corners of the map and walk into random holes and see what's going on in there you know like stuff's going on over there there's tons of just like explorable full-on rpg asks you know just yeah what's that i don't know just just head to it hit it up see what's going on um and then you then and and upon doing so you know getting constantly just hit with like all right, like, this is a

Chroma Nevron.

It's supposed to be a super rough, challenging thing with a big reward.

Danger.

And I just killed it without it ever taking a swing.

You know, and you're like,

okay.

There was

the demon wall boss that I fought that I was supposed to figure its gimmick out, and I didn't figure its gimmick out.

I just blitzed it.

Yeah.

But there are still things in there that are like, that are like, we know you're a style beast right now.

This is, we're still going to make this fight real.

You know, it's still doing it, but it's a very strange feeling, you know?

And

yeah, I get that.

Right now, at the very least, I'm kind of like,

I walked into

like, there's a, I found a beach that is just like

go fuck yourself level

damage coming off of everything on it, but

also

like you can do the same, you know, and like if you're willing to just sit there kind of thing, it's a, it's a, it's a, you just hang out with a bunch of like, yeah, this will be about a half an hour boss fight with each one of these encounters, but they're all just, but they're grunts, you know?

And I've uh I've built all my characters so that their health values don't matter.

Yeah, sure.

So

you can even build, you can even build around the idea of like, fuck health.

I have pips, right?

I have.

That's what I've done.

Yeah, you put shields up and go, I'm allowed to fuck up three times.

And everybody has three shields.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And

that is my, my, my range to learn the boss fight before dying.

And if I die after taking three hits, that's on me.

That's my fault.

I shouldn't be taking that much damage.

100%.

I got.

So first of all, we were not supposed to get that picto.

That picto is you had to do some creative running around two tough enemies to get that, but whatever.

We got it.

And I'm sitting there and I'm looking at this picto called In Media Res.

And

I know what it is.

I know what it is.

I know what it fucking is.

It's like, okay, listen,

I put this on.

I have almost no health.

And I have three tries before I die.

That's DMC4 and DMC5's hell or hell counter.

Health counter.

Where you have three lives instead of a health bar on those modes.

Mistakes you're allowed to make at all.

Yeah.

And it's like, oh man, this is a very direct throw.

But it's just so interesting because like

for a long time,

when describing, you know, these action games and stuff, there's always the threshold to beat the challenge to to get through the game and then there's to exceed with style you know to do it with perfection and to ace it or so and so you like you to build a game around both of these things is a tricky dance you know um especially for somebody is like like okay you're not gonna make it so that if you you're not playing the game in such a way where you're like um

i have to be flawless in every run,

but you could, right?

You could decide to play this game in a way where you're like, I'm aiming for

you could no hit it.

And you see the stats after every fight to be like, you sat here for 30 minutes fighting this thing, you parried all of it, you dodged none of it, and you took no damage, you know, like you, you can do that.

So here's 20% extra XP for you.

And

everything in between the bare minimum to beat the thing and crushing it untouched is a variable difficulty that all depends on your burning soul.

The fire in your spirit decides the dynamic difficulty.

What I've done is I have built out my party right now and

I know I could fine-tune them further.

I know I could fine-tune them further.

But what I have done now is I have built them to every single thing they can do will just generate AP.

I want full AP

on every turn, every time.

I could fine-tune it for burn.

I could fine-tune it for low health.

I could fine-tune it.

But I'm like, no, I'm going to keep this

state for as long as it works

because I can't keep outpacing it.

Though I have hit the damage cap wall, like the game has stopped me numerically and said, no, you actually can't get that much stronger than you are right now.

Have you, like, uh,

for now, have you,

um, so you fought the dancer.

Have you fought the things that hang out with the dancer dancer that are like also in that same area?

Like that have little uh little turrets?

I fought all uh no, okay, because there's these, there's I forgot there's something that hangs out right next to the dancer, and it summons little laser-zapping like funnels at you.

You sure?

I think we're thinking of a different area.

Perhaps we are, um, yeah, okay, well,

you will encounter more dancers, I guess, you know.

Um,

but the uh

ah, okay no, but nearby that you there's another area anyway.

Gotcha.

Um

so

yeah, well don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not worried about it.

Good.

I'm glad you had some fun.

Um, but all this to say that there is a thing that an enemy that popped up that's like, I'm gonna summon some shit that shoots at you, right?

And you can deal with the floating threat and like fight go back to fighting the boss and handling it or fighting the enemy and handling it in its own way.

But I kind of noticed something around after fighting a few of them and getting the timing down.

Um, the there's this the enemy when it's when the laser of the gun of the uh thing shoots at you, you can parry it, and then the laser will shoot again.

And then oh, it reacts to your parry?

No, it like it gets a priority turn, and when you parry it, it it gets to act another time.

So then you see a sequence where you're like, time to get good and delete this entire fight, right?

Your perfection determines whether the fight even takes place or not, you know?

Yeah.

And it's, and it, like, there's

a little side door

path on it.

I'm sorry, I do.

No, no, it's just, it's just like, you can have the fight or you can, there's a little side door over here if you feel like going in, if you feel like sitting here for real, real, and just being perfect.

And as long as you're perfect, you're going to crush it, you know?

I also discovered that there's a priority targeting system for the NPCs

because one of the characters I have has a move that will drop them down to one HP.

And if I use it,

fucking that's the only character anyone's going to attack.

Really?

Oh, I haven't noticed that yet.

Oh, that's what happened.

Okay, whoever's closest to dying takes in the most

aggressive.

The Blue Mage has a green move that drops their HP by 90%.

And after using it, they become the target.

That would explain some moments.

Incessantly.

Yeah.

But that means you can plan around that by giving that person the low health abilities and the parry abilities.

Oh, I mean, at least three party members have an ability that's like drop your health to one and and power the fuck up in exchange, you know?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, you don't need

to.

Wait, what is health?

Yeah, yeah.

Why would I use health?

What an interesting RPG.

What a strange, different.

Yeah, because you and I have basically turned it into like Dark Souls, but with like more equipment.

And that's it.

And if, and if anyone's hearing this, it's like, yo, I just wanted a Final Fantasy game.

It's right there.

It's right there.

Right there.

We are sick.

We are sick.

We are sickos.

Do not.

And the game's like, do you want to play it sicko style?

And I'm like, I do want to play it sicko style.

Do not listen to what we have to say unless you two are a sicko.

Fantastic.

Like,

dude, you can boost up your health value a lot.

And apparently the game has healing skills.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, for sure.

I've been told by sages on the mountain that there are characters that can heal themselves and heal others.

I mean,

and I don't know how that's supposed to work when my characters have like 400 HP.

There are wonderful abilities to like passively heal your team or do stuff.

Also,

you know, there's also like, hey, like you got these little pocket healing items you can toss at your party.

Yeah, so make that a status clearing picto and then

and now you're clearing statuses, which is the real use.

You know, that's all like for the only healing skill I've used in the entire game, genuinely, is the one with

that

Sael has where you

can heal everybody just a tiny bit.

And I put the Picto on that

if you heal somebody, it gives them rush.

So I'm not doing it to heal them.

The heal is immaterial.

Okay.

It's so that during my attack rotation, I can just put rush on everyone every turn.

Okay, I see.

No,

I definitely have like the, I have used a heal in...

in moments where I'm like, I am on,

like,

you're watching, the team gets wiped or something after like a thing, and I'm like, like I could get back up and finish this fight, you know, I still have the resources to finish this fight as long as I put all my my

focus into like like, you know, my biggest hitter being able to stay stay alive and like go getting through it.

So hey Mayal, how you doing?

You, you, you still the biggest hitter?

Yes.

Not not for me anymore.

Oh, yeah.

Not for me anymore.

Yeah.

She started to, she started, her, her viability started to start to drop a little bit once I saw that she didn't have a 13-hit 13-hit combo

that she could bust out.

The burn's still really good.

Burn's nice.

Burn's nice.

Burns consistent.

Yeah.

You know what's inconsistent is critical hits and bonuses from them.

Did you know that that's not true?

Oh, crit builds.

I made one last week, and now I've got a couple.

And

100%.

It's like, like, oh, this weapon does really cool things every once in a while when you crit.

And I'm like, every once in a while, you say, huh?

What if it was 100% of the time?

What if I had more stains than I knew what to do with

every time she comes up?

You know, oh my god, I can't hold all these stains.

Yeah, I started to get to the point of the game where Lune was getting weapons that just passively generate stains in the background.

I'm like, okay, so I'm not using her a lot right now, but that shit seems like it can go some places.

Yeah, critting, crit builds are fun.

High luck, high luck builds, you know, with a, with a.

Well, no, no, that's the point.

They don't have to be luck based.

No.

You can just make characters crit 100% of the time.

Yeah, you can also just, you can put the pictos on that just go like, yeah, plus this to crit.

I, I have

to have at fucking

83%

crit for hours.

Oh, yeah.

And it was like, okay, well, you just get a crit every single fucking time.

You can go over 100%.

percent.

I mean, it's yeah, it doesn't work, though.

It doesn't work.

It allows you to, you know, yeah, you could look at it and be like, ooh, it should

give you a little pat on the back and be like, okay.

No, okay, so there you go.

That's it.

All right.

All right.

So there, you know what?

There was some stuff to talk about with that.

That game's so fucking sick.

It's really sick.

I, in fact, you distracted me because I wanted to take care of business up front, to be perfectly honest.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

That's okay.

No, I mean, shit, it's dope.

And I, and, and, hey,

maybe

this is a good thing, progression-wise or so, but like by patting out all these little extra things on the map that I'm doing,

I've like avoided some progress because there's just like a lot of other interesting things going on.

And like

it's not pushing,

it's taking its time with

like how much you're, it's allowing you to do a lot before like pushing into whatever further acts and things like that.

You know, you can slow this down.

It does a really big backup of like big story thing and then goes, hey, maybe you want to go hang out out there

before the next important plot beat.

And the whole time I'm walking through this game, there's little things where I'm just like, I've played video games before.

I know that when I see a weird textured object or door throughout the game on my way through it, that I keep seeing, it's going to ask,

it's going to ask you.

And I'm like, don't do it.

Don't make me go back to these weird assets.

There are so many of those blue tree things.

I swear to God, you feel it in your soul.

I don't remember where a single one is.

There was one or two that were like in the deepest, off-beaten path of a weird corner and a weird level.

And I'm like, I swear to God, video game.

And then sure enough, yeah, man, absolutely.

I don't know.

100% you get to go back and find all those.

I'm going to look into my camera and I'm going to go, okay, guys, by

we're going to take a week-long break from Claire Obscure.

And when we come back, I will have gone down and gotten every goddamn single one of those, which is actually great because it gives you an excuse to get all those Blue Mage abilities from the early parts of the game.

Sure enough, there's stuff back there that's worth going back to get and check out, exactly.

You know,

little areas where, and even like little activities you might not have done, or

you know, money you might not have had.

I would like to point a finger at Mr.

Guillaume Brioche for a lie he told in which he said it is a shorter RPG, maybe 20 to 30 hours,

maybe a little more if you go off the beaten path.

You fucking

Guillaume.

You lied on me.

You are full of shit.

Even a cursory scrape

is like, no, this ain't proper fucking RPG.

Saying Monter.

No, but it's, it's, you can, you can, I, I get the feeling, though, that if you mainline everything, it comes together quickly.

Um, I'm probably going to play the game again, and I'm probably going to just go, like, how, how, how far can I get in a straight line before opening a menu?

Good question.

Good question.

Just like, just like you want to treat it like a souls game or a Devil May Cry game?

Okay, let's soul level one this thing.

You know what's even awesome, too?

You know what I like?

There are mechanics.

So there's like, you know, there's the super parry I've mentioned before.

And it's really cool looking.

And very cool.

I feel like it's there

for anyone that is like, I'm just not going to parry.

It's too hard, right?

It's just not my, it's just not my thing.

I'm going to give you a super slow, easy, really cool.

Feel good.

You too are allowed to feel good.

All right.

If you can't get those parries off, it's okay.

Here's a sick mechanic that pays off for using it, and it makes the fight awesome, and it's a nice big, like, explosive moment, you know?

But also, I get hit by those because I've muscle memoried my ass so hard on R1

that I've tried to use the wrong fucking button.

Oh, oh, okay, okay, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's because there's that, but the animation matters too, you know?

Yeah.

But um, that, and that to me is just like, oh, that's just great game design.

That's a team playing through it going, somebody who is deciding to just play this as a traditional RPG is going to miss out on this cool part of the game here and might feel like, you know, that's a bummer for them.

Let's make stuff that allows that to not be the case.

And like, just a little nudge.

Yeah.

Just nudges it all.

Because I'm like, it's a super easy parry, but I'm still popping the fuck off when it happens in a really hype way, especially when it's like the final blow of the fight, you know?

It's really well thought out.

I think I said this last week.

It's been a long time since I played something that was just like

overwhelmingly incredible at all aspects every time I sat down.

Like, I have not walked away from that game anything but sparkling with joy

every single time.

Unless I was walking away with like

dread and ennui and boo-hoos.

yeah right no but it it's it's just it's just a joy it's just a joy um

and

i it it it yeah i mean to say we've talked very little about the story because there's there's you know it's a very light but um it's light on dialogue but it's but it's so vibes based but it's so important all right the you know everything that you everything that you say to everybody everything that they exchange with each other is all learning about the world and exposition but like everyone has like great dialogue that I feel like is just very human and believable.

Like the people react

not like characters in times where I expect a character to say a character line and they actually just say a human line.

And I was like, oh, yeah, like, I like, I appreciate that.

I like, you know,

it's just,

yeah, it's that, it's that quality where you, you, you know, I mean, after a while, I, I, you, when, when you first heard, like, whatever, you, when you first hear Tarantino dialogue, when you first hear James Gunn dialogue, when you first hear, you know,

Joss Whedon dialogue and stuff like that, there's that little like, oh yeah, people do kind of like talk like that, and you hear a bit too much of it, and of course things can get, you know, flanderized, but all this to say that, like, I appreciate that a couple of moments characters have had with each other, like, that stung that I've liked from the beginning is continuing forward as well, with people kind of just, like, having these little exchanges and understandings and moments with each other and being like, ah, okay, hold on, wait, hold on, maybe let's look at this a different way and stuff, you know?

I love it.

I will say, though, I love, love, love the script and the acting in this game.

I'm going to point a finger at a particular voice actor for being the only person to actually spoil me on something in this game story.

And I was like, oh, you.

So there's a popular, uncredited in the marketing voice actor

who decided that what they were going to put on their TikTok, which I follow,

a shot of man, when you're in two of the hottest games ever and zooming in on their different statues that they have, and one was Expedition 33's collector's edition statue.

And I was like, wait a second, you're in this game?

I immediately know what character you're going to play.

Fuck.

Fuck you.

Damn it.

You cannot stop Dan Southworth from posting a Devil May Cry 5 logo on his Facebook page.

You can't do it.

You can do whatever you, you can try, but when that game is happening and nobody knows that Virgil's in the game yet,

he's going to fucking post it.

And you can just, Capcom is like, God damn it, Dan.

And he's like, ah, catch me.

So, you know, yeah.

You'll never,

I'll spoil it every time.

Damn it, Dan.

You'll never stop me.

Yeah.

Anyways,

great stuff.

Great stuff.

Okay.

Okay.

There is our, there is our.

on to housekeeping.

Yes, our weekly Expedition 33 fucking suck off because it's so good.

Yeah.

I mean, we're going to be talking about the game for years, right?

Might as well.

We're going to be talking about the game until at the very least December of this year

because

I see the clear front runner for game of the year

as I play this.

I definitely do.

And I even see

like

so

that thing we we've touched, it's like, does Final Fantasy have to stop being Final Fantasy?

And the answer is no, it doesn't, you know, this is I have like, I like the chain, the new stuff they were, they've tried, but this is also really cool, too.

You know, this is the this is closer to FF8 than any game they've ever made, and it's closer to FF16's ideas than FF16 is in reality.

Have you found yourself, like, at any point after fighting a really cool enemy, sitting on the

experience screen because the extra layer of music that kicked in for the victory is amazing, and it's only going to happen here?

I've let a couple of those screens sit.

to just hear the whole thing loop multiple times because I'm like, oh, fuck.

It's the

victory variation of the theme.

Yeah.

All right.

Expedition 33.

Done.

So, uh, no, what I was going to originally open with is the Twitch VOD Pocalypse has occurred.

Oh, no.

And what that means is there is no longer an ability to highlight

videos on your Twitch

over a hundred hours total.

So people stream for dozens of hours a day.

For decades, in fact.

And, you know, the whole bit has been, it's also, it's, it auto-deletes

everything.

And

they have, and they've been basically putting in a thing where it's like, yeah, the highlight system is not meant to do this like video archive thing, right?

If you've been doing it, which we have, then that's nice.

Everyone has.

But you're not supposed to.

Well, they, they, but they make sure to put out the thing that says 0.5% of users of streamers are over the limit on this or whatever.

All right.

So

for the least disruptive solution for

Castle Super Beast, I've made a YouTube channel that's called the Castle Super Beast Archive.

And you can, it's, it's at youtube.com slash at castle superbeast archive.

And everything

that gets deleted after that 100 hours from the Twitch, is going to just go over there.

So quite simply,

right now, like the stuff is, you know, there's the uploading, and I said, like, the episodes still have to be like titled and dressed and everything.

So, oh, man, I used to be way fat.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

Oh, I feel it.

Shit.

Oh, I feel it.

That is an incredibly unflattering angle, too.

Oh, shit.

But, but, so, as of uh,

Jesus, yeah, the, the, yeah, you know, it's fine.

Hey, look, look how far we've come.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

I've seen myself in some, some, like, I'm like, like, ooh, is that a stretched out image?

It's like, it is not.

It is not.

But anyways, that's not the point.

The point is, is that,

yeah, the older stuff is going to just end up there.

And

as we record a new episode, you know,

there's going to be less space on the Twitch.

So then whatever gets cleared off, you'll just go back.

You can go catch it on the archive over there.

So

everything else is pretty much going to stay the same.

And yeah, that's at at youtube.com slash at Castle Super Beast Archives.

CSB 002.

Randy No.

No.

Allegedly.

Allegedly.

Yes.

How appropriate for me to see that today?

And,

you know,

beyond that, like, there's

stuff, you know, there's a couple times where the show got broken up because of like disconnections and whatever.

So I've had to like stitch the parts together to like get the whole thing done so you know there's stuff that's you're doing god's work over here some of it's gonna take still take some time um most of it's is is is set um breaks are gonna be in there because this is the unit it's the raw stream edit thing so there's gonna be fucking breaks i ah

you know there's only so much we can do here but um in terms of the proper we were never have to supposed to have to do this at all well no the the the mp3 is always the proper final edited thing that that you will be able to hear.

But just to say that if you want to catch those archives, they'll just be going up to YouTube now.

And then, yeah, Twitch says their policy.

Whatever, you know, whatever they decide to do,

okay.

But

that'll be what's happening there.

And to some degree, tangentially to this, but still related, of course, same thing applies to

our respective channels as well.

So everything, like we had

the CSB channel had like fucking over a thousand, had like 1,500 hours or so.

But like Wooly Versus had like close to 5,000.

You know what I mean?

Where am I at right now?

I like to go to the fucking content manager and it yells at me every time I open it.

It's like, okay.

Yeah.

You are.

It yells hard.

You are 3,000 hours above your 100-hour limit.

There you go.

Damn.

So, no, that was definitely one where I'm like, okay, make sure I'm not losing any history and stuff because

it sucks to

lose stuff forever, even though the the Twitch prop

platform is kind of like encouraging you to permanently lose things, you know.

Um, but it's all ephemeral, man.

But yeah, any everything that's that's saved and backed up and whatever is

going to continue existing.

So, um, just a heads up for everybody there, and of course, you know, more posts and links to follow.

Um,

do you want to jump in from there, or should I?

Yeah, hey, so I've been playing Expedition 33 a lot.

Do you want to talk about that?

No.

Okay.

After Expedition 33

comes, I played a little bit more Doom the Dark Ages

and I quit on it.

Oh, no.

I have created a habit in myself

that is

interesting to me.

I don't know if it's interesting to anybody else, but I was playing Doom the Dark Ages and I was like,

This isn't

like when I played Doom 2016 and I played Doom Eternal, I was like, like anime sparkling out of my fucking eyes, right?

I was like, oh my gosh, Doom!

Oh, mama, kiss it.

And I just didn't have that feeling about Doom the Dark Ages.

And there's always the point where I go, well, am I older and shittier and jadeder and whatever?

Or is it not hitting with me?

Or is it a taste thing?

So what can I do to figure out these emotions?

Oh, well, I got to boot up 2016 and Eternal

and fuck around with those.

This is an hour or two.

This is your diagnostic.

You did this with Monster Hunter as well.

Yeah, I did.

You go back to look.

I spent...

like hundreds of hours doing this with Monster Hunter.

Yeah, this is a thing you're doing.

You're kind of, you're hitting the new thing and you're going, something's off.

What quite, what is it exactly?

And then you go, is it me?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then you take a trip back in time to make the direct comparison.

And so when I loaded up 2016 in Eternal, the thing that shocked me the most, so for the difference between Eternal and Doom the Dark Ages is they are polar opposites in terms of style.

And since I love Eternal style, it is no surprise that I'm not a fan of Dark Ages style.

Like double jumping, air dashing, weapon switching versus I'm going to plant my fucking feet and parry God.

That is two functionally.

Very different games.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can see that.

But what I did notice when I went back to 2016

is that that game looks the best of all of them, which was not something I was expecting.

Interesting.

From a visual perspective, Doom 2016 is the best looking game because it has tight areas with like lab corridors and super intense lighting everywhere.

So I would guess it's because you're making your way through the UAC for a whole bunch of it.

Yeah.

Right.

As opposed to just

hellscapes and like moving lights.

And the levels in Doom 2016 are a lot smaller and they're a lot more considered and they're a lot more unique internally.

Doom Eternal has a lot of fucking video game levels.

Now, I really dig stuff like the Super Gore Nest.

Sure.

And I really dig like

the fucking uh the like the third level in doom eternal has like mario brothers spinning fireballs

yeah yeah but i'm it's ridiculous but there's also like coliseum arenas you know like

um and dark ages is a lot more like medieval and uh a lot the areas are way more wide

like they're very very very wide okay and so like

i just like doom 2016 like shocked me in its like portrayal.

It was so slick and smooth and considered.

And it also made me be like,

why is Dark Ages not as in love with the fact that Doom is a goofy ass video game?

And I remember that in the old Wolfenstein games in Doom 2016, you get secret levels that were

the original games from the early 90s.

Yeah, they made me sick.

Oh, they made you sick.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, I thought it was good.

The old textures

placed on the new environment, something about that just didn't hit my stomach right.

And I look at it and it's and like I've been like hemming and hawing over it and I feel like

they did Doom 1, Doom 2, Doom 3 again.

Like they did the exact same progression

of technical and gameplay decisions in a row.

The first one.

Then the second one, which is more, more, more, more, faster, more.

And then the third one, which is slow, slow, slow.

But look at the lighting, look at the lighting.

Can you see the lighting?

Hmm.

I wonder if, like, I'd love to hear the discussions internally on this type of thing, right?

Where you're like, is because think about the way you just described how Borderlands is going and how this is like a return in a way to like that first one.

It's a loop at this point.

And you have to wonder if there are folks that were like, yeah, Eternal did something that went way out and way different from people that fucking hate Eternal for the differences, right?

People that fucking hate Eternal because it's so much faster and all

the weapon switches.

And if you weren't signing up for an arcade game, then you got something different.

Then those people, Doom the Dark Ages, is going to be like their most favoritist

by far.

So the answer is: one, Doom 2016 is a shining fucking jewel.

Like, objectively,

it's unbelievable how how good that game is.

And then after that, it's like, well, season your Doom game to taste.

I want it faster with more weapons.

Some people are going to want it slower with more defense.

Though I did check one thing that I laughed really hard about, which is I went into the options for Doom Dark Ages, and I turned the parry timing down to the

absolute minimum.

Oh, right.

You can customize your style.

And the parry timing on minimum is

like, I don't know, it's like 10 frames.

It's like what we're used to as a parry, like what Expedition 33 thinks of as a parry.

But

it doesn't decrease the parry sphere that extends off your character.

So while the timing is tighter, the full

space that actually acts as the parry is the same, which means it's still super easy because you're parrying things that are five feet in front of your character's face.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Okay.

I see.

I'll keep an eye out for that.

So I bought it, but I haven't booted it up yet.

Interesting.

Oh, and that just reminds me that when we were talking about Expedition and I was having the stuttering issues and stuff, turning down the

internal resolution made that problem go away.

So that's a solid fix to that.

Okay, so you...

Give me more frames.

If you want me to parry, I'm going to need every frame you got.

So was there a moment that made you go that's it i'm out

it was um

seven levels in a row that are like more or less the same kind of like doom eternal style like space nights kind of dark ages area and then you get to like an evil forest

and in the evil forest i would it like it's the widest areas i've ever seen in doom game like just absolutely ridiculous And I was going through it and I was getting the pickups and I just hit this moment of like, oh, I don't care.

Like, it just fell off me.

Like, the music wasn't hitting.

I was just going through the motions.

And I was suggested, we'll turn up the difficulty.

And I did turn up the difficulty.

And what that ended up with is it would be exactly the same, exactly the same gameplay experience.

But if enemies caught me between them and a wall, I would die in four milliseconds instead of 10 milliseconds.

Okay.

Interesting.

Okay.

If I had to say, like, there's one objectively bad thing about Doom the Dark Ages that is the only black mark is that the music just isn't there.

Okay.

The music described as

okay.

I'm already tempering my expectations without Mick.

That's going to have to be the case.

I also think, I think, as well, too, like, when I'm thinking about recently,

one, because there's like, one, there's always, there's tons of games to play, and two, obviously your time is much more precious for when you can jump into things.

I feel like you have gotten more stringent with like, am I going to bother writing this through to the end?

Because even like, you know, with Monhan a bit earlier, and then like with like Garrow and stuff, it's a little bit like, okay, yeah, if this is just not hitting

like a perfect use of the game.

I don't live in the world in which I get to go, you know what, I'll just bang it out over two 16-hour streams on the weekends.

Yeah, I don't live in that world in my life.

The drop cutoff has gotten a lot looser, I've noticed, in the recent recent months.

Because, like, dude, I beat Elden Ring 100% in nine days.

I can't do that now.

What?

Holy shit.

Completely understandable.

No, just pointing out as well that

externally too, there is a difference between

now when that

goes to school,

it's time for depressing ass

sad boy hours.

Okay, sad days.

Like, hey, Elden Ring, too, we're going to do it until my boy comes home because I missed him.

Just like, you know,

time to run

a random item

build run.

And again,

fill the time.

Empty nest gaming.

Hey, what's up?

It's your boy like comment subscribe.

Oh, I hate it.

Damn.

Yeah.

Oh, that nest is so empty, but um I've gotten a little more astringent on it, but also like there's a lot of stuff coming up.

Death Stranding's coming up.

Expedition 33 is happening.

The Switch is coming, right?

And so like I'm looking at my schedule.

It's like I'm probably going to end up streaming like 23, 24, 25 days in a row.

Do I want like 10 of those to be doom the dark ages where I'm just kind of not

mid mid?

I called it doom the mid-ages, which I'm pretty happy with.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, night rain.

Oh, fuck me.

I forgot about night rain, huh?

But yeah, so, yeah, doom.

What's up?

What do you got?

No, Joe.

This is just happening in your brain.

Yeah, just like MTS gaming.

Your loading screen as the Twitch is pulling up is just the cats in the cradle and the Sylves food.

Fuck off.

Oh, come on.

You can't do that.

All right.

So

me and Paige went back and did Deltarune chapter one again.

Hey, it's still good.

Still charming.

Still great.

I'm very, we're going to do chapter two this weekend, same as we did this past weekend.

We'll just do Saturday, Sunday, banging out.

I would like it when chapter three and four of Deltarune come out on Steam.

I know that Toby is now working with a team of people that is helping him make the Deltarune because it's a little too big.

I would like it if some of them helped him clean up the actual Deltarune application a little bit so that it doesn't crash your stream when you try and full screen it because it does that really hard full screen, that really hard full screen that makes every app on your computer freak out.

Yeah, I've got some bad news news for you.

Toby likes his applications running like PC games, like old PC games.

That is an aesthetic feel choice.

So what I'm doing is I'm running it in a window and then I'm using borderless gaming, a wonderful app you can get off of Steam to

borderless window it manually.

But that allows you to discover that Deltarune thinks it's a different application depending on whether or not it's the save game stream screen or the intro screen or the game screen or whatever because they constantly re-minimize because they're technically different apps.

I don't know why he makes the game like that.

Because at the end of part four, when the minimizing window is part of the boss fight, it needs to have some special programming for like changing its window size.

You know, like fucking, come on.

Of course it's going to do some bullshit.

I can use special K to force it.

Okay, you know what?

I will probably use Special K.

Yeah, but then you miss out on the lore that comes from your windowless.

Bro, I am broadcasting here.

The lore is for nerds later.

Because it's windowless full screen, but what you're not seeing is the window actually extends, and there's a character that's been there the whole time, just outside the frame.

And if you drag the full window back onto your desktop, you will see that extra character that's been there the whole time

talking off camera.

Speaking of Special K,

I used Special K this past week on the Devil May Cry 3 Crimson mod

by

Earth Rage and Friends.

One of those friends being friend of the show Hitchhiker, who's the person who turned me on to the DMC3 Crimson mod.

I saw that that got released.

It's unfortunate that the Switch version of DMC3 is is not just everywhere as a standard thing because of all those cool features we saw that got added to it.

Well,

but here's the next best thing.

I would say this is a dramatic improvement on the Switch version.

So the Switch version has the local co-op, I think, and it has in Bloody Palace, and it also has style switching.

In the DMC3 Crimson, it has the style switching mod that was built for it, and it utilizes like DMC4 voice lines and has special effects for switching between all six styles.

It has a wide,

wide variety of accessibility options, such as hold to shoot

and hold button to crazy combo.

It has a built-in combo break sound effect and flash.

So there's a very slight visual effect on Dante for during his combo, what the breakpoints for that combo are.

Ah, nice.

Practice timing.

Which is pointless for me and you, but for somebody who's new, that's actually really, really good.

That's great.

That's great.

I saw that there's a character switch as well.

There's a character switch.

There's also local co-op through the whole game.

There is, oh, God.

There's arcade mode.

There's air stinger, etc.

There's every feature you could want.

And I know there's every feature you could want

because

I don't know what three-quarters of the options that it turns on are.

So it's like better cancels, and then it has like a little exclamation, sorry, a question mark next to it on the you mouse over, and it says a bunch of shit that I don't understand, and then it goes adds inertia, and then it says adds guard fall.

Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, here we go.

Who let them in?

Who let these fucking freaks,

These DMC4 freaks have been let in, I see.

When you turn it on to DMC3 Crimson and it automatically works and you just don't fuck with any of it, it feels

way better.

It just feels like consistently much, much smoother and better and cleaner and great.

It also includes a fun feature that I was talking to Hitchhiker about this morning because they're testing it, where they add the DMC 4 and 5 camera into DMC 3 I was the behind the back I was

actually going to ask that as a joke oh no it's a word that's

impressive in areas

That are nice and wide, it works incredible in areas that used to have essentially pre-read like fixed cameras it boy, you're not falls the fuck apart

Yeah, you are, oh my god.

Like, you know, the very first hallway outside of Dante's office that goes to like the bar.

Okay, yeah.

Like, there, there is no continuity.

You just look through the world if you turn the camera just a little bit over here.

Um, oh, man.

And uh, I was talking to a hitch about it because I, I fought, I played it, I fucked around with uh, Nevin and I fought Cerberus.

And I'm like, you need to force a camera on these because that spinning camera on some of those boss fights that like kind of lock the camera just completely fall to pieces.

Oh, I mean her herb her fight, it's like the perception of the wave coming at you in the room is crude.

You need it to be pseudo-locked.

So they're working on that right now.

Like Cerberus to be pseudo-locked and Nevin to be pseudo-locked.

And like the other thing is like the camera would be behind Dante's back when you go to do the light puzzles instead of the camera moving to above so you could actually do the light puzzles.

I see.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

So not maybe they were also chasing down some bugs where you would lose blorbs

by going through missions and certain like shop bugs.

So, it's not done, okay.

But it is really cool and it feels really good.

Okay, and within a couple of months, it will be like the definitive way to play DMC3 with Style Switcher.

That is more than the Switch version, that's fucking great.

All the fan stuff ever, it is a lot more.

It is a lot way more playable, lady

very

broken, but yes.

Interesting.

Okay.

Cool.

It's very not finished.

Yeah.

You can turn it on, but it's

work in progress.

It doesn't even jump style, like playable.

I don't know.

I didn't find.

I didn't bother turning it on because the option next to it says, like, very unfinished work in progress.

The classic move where it's like, okay, so there's a last boss of this fighting game.

We've made a playable version.

He can't crouch, block, or jump, but here he is.

If you want to just slide, if you want to slide a sprite around the screen and press buttons to make big bullet waves shoot out, then I guess you can do that.

I see.

So, yeah, DMC3 Crimson, super cool.

Very thankful to get reached out by.

It's always fun to speak to somebody on a mod team and be like, hey, somebody fucked this up.

And they go, that was me.

I fucked that up.

Important question.

Did they replace the title screen with a sharp, cool

nice, yes, thank God.

It's the same basic title screen, but it has like a red background and higher res images.

Okay.

Okay.

I could probably the worst part about Devil May Cry 3 is that fucking title screen of all time.

Unbelievable.

Of all time.

It's just crazy.

The most hideous, horrible title screen I've ever seen.

Dear God.

Here's your new title screen.

It's functionally very similar, but it it has like a gradient at the least.

All right.

All right.

And we got a logo in there.

And yeah, all right.

We're fine.

Fine.

Okay.

You know?

God-awful fucking title screen.

Just terrible.

Yeah, panning through little artwork in the future in 4 or

over Fortuna or whatever.

I'll take anything.

Just JPEGs.

Anything but white background.

Like you can see the dithering over the fucking PNGs.

Anyway,

sick.

Very cool.

I would recommend you personally, Woolly, check it out.

Also, parts of our audience that are freaks.

Right now, it's for freaks.

When it's completely like version one and all bugged up, it'll be like for normals as well.

Showing the flash timing on when to input stuff is huge.

That's big, yeah.

And I was like, I hate this.

Can you make it so you can turn it off?

And then they were like, okay, here's a toggle so you can turn it off.

And I was like, I really appreciate it.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, you know, at a certain point too, like, it's kind of like with training when you're doing combo trials and now you get the little rhythm beep for like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

And you're like, oh, yeah, okay, there, I can hear that.

So that's that's that's always a really helpful thing to learn from.

Oh, also, if you run uh this version through special K, uh, it doesn't crash every single time you all tab.

So that's fun.

Okay, I like that.

Nice.

Uh, all right, moving on.

Uh, me and Paige beat Split Fiction.

Oh, yeah, okay.

You want to talk about the other game in the running for Game of the Year?

That big, huh?

Me and Paige are sitting there

in awe

at one incredible finale, just absolutely inventive, genius, fascinating, mechanically interesting finale.

And then afterwards, I'm just sitting there going,

that must have

so

technically difficult to achieve.

Like, you know, we see a lot of games that have fancy lighting and we see a lot of games that have, you know, nice graphics.

The levels that they put you through at the end of Split Fiction are so.

complicated from a technical level, it is unbelievable that it works and it got made.

Interesting.

It's so funny how, like, just when you're just looking at it from the outside without knowing who made it, you could just pass over this game.

Absolutely.

Right?

Just on cover and name and premise in that pitch, you know, but it's all in the in the bones of like, you know, that who made it makes great shit.

It's about the Ferris and the Ferris.

The Joe Ferris and the Ferris Ferris.

Yeah, yeah, you know.

I wish it didn't have that effect, unfortunately.

I wish that it was like also as catchy on pitch, you know, compared to everything that I hear about it, but great.

It is, it is, it's so incredible.

Like, it's, it's so incredible.

It's so amazing.

Okay.

I don't really want to say much more.

Okay.

Do you remember how when you remember the ratchet and clank game that came out a while ago?

That was like the rift in space, rift in time.

Of time time, or yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, yeah.

And like, they showed like the action sequences where he would like fall through a zone, okay, okay, and it was like, but that was all like cutscenes, yeah, more or less, yeah, yeah,

the things that split fiction does is an order of magnitude more impressive than that, okay,

in a way that I can't believe it's like just

jaw drop, you know, it's kind of funny having these moments because like I had it with cyberpunk, where like with the montage things, where like if you don't like knowing a bit about how the sausage is made allows you to go to point out to somebody that doesn't what they just did is really hard to do and is really impressive, right?

Or even in film when you see like a camera shot like like anytime you're if okay, the classic is like you're watching uh uh goodfellas and you and like you got the one shot, right?

Oh, yeah, you know, or um um anything what's the big deal?

They just walk through a restaurant.

How hard could it be?

You just you get your cell phone out and you walk behind them, right?

Scoursey like this.

Oh no, that's really hard.

And you're like, do you like working with film and the planning of everything and every moment in sync is so technically impressive.

It's a huge.

So, yeah, in games, I feel like those moments are,

it's easy to not, to, for those to be lost, you know, to not realize when something technically hyper impressive is happening.

So one of our favorites that we've talked about forever, forever is like.

characters handing each other objects, characters being under, under the covers.

The bread.

The fucking bread.

The bread.

Yeah, like, what's the big deal?

You just ate a bread.

I'm like, no, you don't understand.

No, you don't understand.

You don't get how hard that is to do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

100%.

It's really hard to do.

Yeah, incredible.

Recommend to everyone.

And one of the other things, and this is

unkind to the developers, but I don't care because it's their publisher's fault.

Something that comes to mind about Expedition 33 and Split Fiction is that they cost less than a regular game.

And they are easily the standouts for me this year.

Meanwhile, when I look over at the Doom and the Doom Eternal and the Doom the Dark Ages, Doom the Dark Ages

costs significantly more than a regular game.

And that doesn't affect how hard people worked on it, but it affects on how much of it has like an objective value.

Like Doom costs twice as much.

You could buy Split Fiction and Claire Obscure for one Doom in the Dark Ages.

And that is like just a really,

really unfortunate comparison.

The best, potentially the best game this year cost 50 U.S.

And maybe the second best game this year cost 50 US.

And we can all argue about which ones those are.

But hey, Pat,

true fans will find a way to make it work.

Crazy Ken is back in the form of the Randy Pittsford.

But I guess we'll get to that in a little bit.

Yeah, that's it for me as to what I was doing this week.

You can go down to twitch.tv/slash Pat Stairs at.

I'm streaming seven days in a row until I run out of things to stream or the Switch 2 comes out.

So this week is going to be Expedition.

I'm going to be covering an indie showcase on Thursday morning.

And then on the weekend, me and Paige are going to beat Deltarune Chapter 2.

All right.

Over on my side.

So, yeah, we talked about Expedition already.

Not much else to go into there.

I did just want to touch on one other thing that I.

Oh, can I touch on one thing with Expedition 33?

I think

maybe

I'm crazy.

Maybe I'm crazy, but like, I'm playing the game and I'm looking at like

assets on characters,

and I'm just overwhelmed by like, I don't think I'm supposed to immediately clock that as being the same asset.

I like there's this big mysterious thing and/or character.

I don't think I'm supposed to be able to look at that at a glance and go, oh, I know what that is.

Hmm.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'm not sure, but

I guess we'll see.

Yeah.

Or maybe I'm just doing it.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

All right.

So

yeah, one other thing I just wanted to

mention.

So

you were talking about Doom Eternal and how much you love that game and how

the

feel of Dark Ages was not bringing back what you enjoyed there.

Not the vibes I needed.

Okay.

So I have a game that is not 100%

doom eternal vibes, but

is doing stuff that reminds me of it in a completely different genre.

All right.

Have you heard of Kill Knight?

So

yes, I've heard the name.

Kill Knight

is a

twin stick drop into

the room and kill all the shit coming at you

and it's a bullet hell

last year

uh it's a it's a you know not bullet hell but just like yeah drop into the room and survive the twin stick you know you got your gun you got your sword you got your dodge etc

um

it's simple enough in that uh

you're not doing it's not a vampire survivor style thing where it's like i just you just want to move the stick around and then random pick up items and go um it is it is an active you must play this game it is it is requiring you to be a a very very uh cognizant participant um but what's happening through for the most part is uh you've got a regular gun

and then uh you're killing everything around you and when because you're the kill knight you are the kill knight and you have a big old intro that is like the demons and the bra and you must face that and you're you're just you literally you walk in and you jump into a portal to hell as everyone puts on your holy sword on your back and you die like it's just you know you're we're we're doing it right we're we're we're dooming it um

and uh

you have your gun that you shoot everything surrounding you with and when you run out of bullets you get a little active reload gears of war style minigame right um if you actively reload in the right time you get your shit back faster you get a little boot that boost on your you know your your shot or whatever and then you get get back into it

You've got a sword you swill you swing around you kill things with the sword and you build up a sword meter that eventually

After killing enough things with the sword you get a big sword super explosion moment right that clears the the screen and and and makes a an energy orb around you

You have a shotgun with limited ammo and it clears things really wide and fast, but you eventually run out of ammo.

How do you refill that ammo?

You use the sword kills.

Sword kills give you back shotgun ammo.

Okay, what happens if you run out of ammo?

This sounds like goddamn fucking modern doom is what you're describing to me, right?

What happens when you run out of bullets on your main gun and you have the little active reload window during that active reload window?

If you swing your sword instead of pressing reload, you get an enhanced sword slash that kills things faster and buffs up that sword meter faster.

Okay, what happens if you press you have an absorb button to absorb pickups around you for

bullet strength and health and whatever,

or anything picking up on the ground.

You can absorb things and shoot a big orb out that breaks armor.

So an armor-breaking orb will blow things up.

And when an armor-breaking orb blow things up, health drops on the ground.

Okay.

I don't even look at this.

In the middle of an active reload,

if you hit the absorb things button, you quickly absorb everything in even faster and max out how quickly you can shoot that shit back to heal yourself.

Okay.

when you uh when you start killing things with the sword and you build back your shotgun ammo, which then use you use to clear the screen faster to then absorb things faster,

you see what we're doing here, right?

The game, every system is super duper synergy like

synergized with every other system in a way that like as the hordes increase and come at you and enemy types are coming at you and requiring different things you can do you can feed your life you can feed your damage you can feed your dps you can feed your melee you know um and and you have to on the fly while being surrounded and running from the enemies make the right split second decision to survive and and and you know pick one or the other or the other um Occasionally, enemies that are extra tough will come at you and do a big, flashing, unavoidable attack, unless you use the sword swing to parry it.

And if you slash and break through at the right time and hold down the sword button, you get a big slowdown moment where then you can kill everything faster in the slowed time.

You get a few seconds to get your bearings out.

Or if you disarm things and go behind them and use the sword swing, then you get a locked in animation where you get an execution, and that gives you better rewards as well.

And so now all of the ways you manage killing the horde around you.

feed into each other in a really smartly designed system.

The rotation is really, really fun and really well thought out in this game.

The visibility on

this is way higher than I would have expected.

Yeah.

Because like you're any game from this new, I guess the vampire survivor's perspective,

a lot of them have like real readability problems.

Because there's just so much fucking shit.

Yeah, as long as you're in a this looks clean.

Yeah, you have a big knight with a with a, you know, your guns and you're, you're, you're in the middle and everything's coming at you and they're all demons, you know, and the environments change as you, as you Google further in and survive longer and stuff.

And, you know, you eventually get overwhelmed and then you get back in there and like you're going to have different types of guns to unlock, different swords, different builds, different whatever, right?

You can, you can see where it's going with some of that stuff for like a completely different, perhaps, style of character.

But like that initial one, and it has like, you can go through a couple tutorials to just like break down what each system does.

And there's like at basic, you can just stand there and twin stick your way through the, through the challenge.

You can run and avoid and shoot everything.

But like seeing how you feed every system into each other, you get these really fun moments where like Doom Eternal, you know, a split second like

decision to use your active reload for a sword thing will then allow you to do, to take out the sword required enemy or at the very least or like parry this right thing.

Or if you're like, fuck, I'm down on health.

I'm going to go for that instead and sacrifice my DPS for a bit for that.

And you're just managing all of that while being immensely tight on the screen being filled with shit and surviving and bullet hell avoiding and dodging, etc.

Super simple, super fun.

Kill night is what it's called.

And yeah, you just drop in and go.

Everything about Doom Eternals, you know, like flow state is concentrated heavy here into a twin stick setup.

Take a look.

I will report back more when I go a bit further into it, but just from the jump, I can see very promising.

Yeah.

So, yeah, that's pretty much it, though, on my end.

I saw someone in the chat say as I was looking at footage for Kill Knight that I looked like a baby seeing an iPad for the first time.

Yeah, no, that I can I can file Kill Knight under dopamine annihilator

as a genre,

baby destroyers.

Yeah,

you know, definitely seal it away.

But it was, you know, in going through all the advanced tutorials and seeing the one where it was like, during active reload, you can press different things for different outcomes.

And I'm like, that's pretty good.

Ooh, what are we doing here?

Yeah.

Anyway, so

this week,

yeah, I'm not too sure.

I don't think

I'm going to jump in with a cyberpunk stream.

I think I'm a little too busy for it, but I'm not too far from wrapping that up.

We are firmly in the end

I suspect perhaps a

cleanup stream or two, and then we're going to hit that point of no return.

So, yeah, Cyberpunk going to be wrapping up shortly.

Wow.

Great stuff.

Very enjoyable.

Very good.

And then I believe this weekend on Saturday, we're probably going to take a look at the Capcom Fighting Collection 2.

I've already

jumped around a a little bit, but I have a friend,

Rami, who is a professed

Plasma Sword expert.

Who's going to tell him he's not?

Yeah.

So...

Like, who's going to come out and go, no, I am?

We have a professed Plasma Sword expert that's here to teach us about Star Gladiator.

So

we will probably be taking a look at that over on Wooly Versus on Twitch.

They redid the music in CVS too, man.

They redid the music in CVS2.

And Forced EO as the online ranked mode.

So,

meh.

That's a swing and a miss.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is a swing and a miss.

I said it with all the previous collections, but it's like, your goal here is to win over Fight Cade users.

Don't do things that fight cade people users are not going to enjoy it's also to bring a new generation some classics and have them accessible on a current platform but like for the active online you know come on

um

anyways anyways uh

all right let's take a quick break and we will be our b

let's do it Hey, everybody.

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All right.

So,

yeah.

Fucking video games, am I right?

Fucking video games.

The only thing more fun than video games

is talking about how the sausage is made.

There's not a many.

there.

There are moments in time when we cover stories and

I get blown away by things.

But when

it's not often I can say that I get stunned, guffawed,

flummished

even.

I would say it's fairly rare that we would describe anything in a video game industry, which is like, you know, it's business making toys, as

disaster.

So for the last couple couple weeks,

you've been reporting on

Marathon and bunch of Midathon, yes.

And play and how that's been going.

And I, as somebody who's looking at this from the outside, have always heard cool things about Marathon, the original series, and Durandal and Durandal, whatever, however you correctly spell it.

And so this new version has...

Whatever...

pronunciation I gave you, it would be wrong.

I don't know how to say it.

And so

um this new version that has been launched is one of those things where if anybody's a fan of the older series they've kind of given up hope on the fact that they're going to get any more of that this is a completely different thing and uh it was like okay but then I saw that game trailer and I was like oh this looks interesting at least from the

fairly unique it's got that art style going and it's and then you've got um the the the gameplay elements where you played it uh quite length and saw that like it just didn't have it didn't have what you were looking for off of the people that made Halo and Destiny.

And

just missing that sauce.

And then I saw that kind of like that more story-driven kind of trailer or cinematic kind of tone trailer that was like

showing off, you know, some more of that, that, that whole like concept.

And the whole time, I've just been like, damn, it sucks to hear about all these aspects not hitting

because this art style is so fucking cool and is definitely a standout.

And, you know, I was preparing for a situation where I'd come in and then basically say something to the effect of, well, like, shame about this.

You know, you've called that, like, this studio is probably not going to be able to handle their next big release doing poorly, but at least somewhere, a really good art director is about to have an amazing thing for their portfolio because this game is.

And you'll get some cool wallpapers at the bare minimum.

This because this game is visually full of my aesthetic.

I love that the color shit and the way it plays with it.

Um,

and so your aesthetic, huh?

I couldn't believe it.

Like the one thing, the one thing I've been like, yeah, but look at that, though.

Look how fucking cool this world looks.

This is your aesthetic?

No,

it's my aesthetic.

You made this?

I made this.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

Marathon

has been accused of and has been proven to have stolen

a ton of art assets from a designer, Antireal, who has posted about it.

and basically held up side-by-side screenshots showing you exactly where their textures were used, exactly where their, not just their design language, but like the to the point where their name itself in the graphic design text has been put on textures in the game.

The um the entire sort of aesthetic that you're looking at, when you go to, you can just go to the artist's website, you can go to our website, antereal.info, and all it is is just a bunch of posters and you can just scroll the wheel down and see stuff that got used as textures in the game Marathon.

And it's fucking crazy that, like, you've in the industry, like, you definitely know that people will look at that and they'll create a style Bible for a game.

And sometimes you'll look at the style Bible and see, like, oh, here's artists we were inspired by.

Here's stuff that we kind of, you know, took some inspiration from, some inspo on the wall or so on.

But to then see the actual final textures just be the exact things dropped in.

Like the posters that I'm looking at right now, just transplanted directly over.

And Anti-Real kind of pointing out that, like, hey, um, no one ever contacted me about this and had a very tone that was essentially like, it's just tiring because it's like, I don't have the resources to like pursue this legally, you know, like it's, I don't have the time to, it's like, it's, they're just an artist, but just what the fuck, you know?

And then everything after that,

follow people follow up to different elements where you see, oh, the art director and numbers of members of the Bungie team have been following Anti-Real

from before the game is in development in 2018.

2018.

Right?

So

there's a whole trail there.

There's

stuff that gets to the nitty-gritty where when you see a lot of Anti-Real's work, one thing that they've done is they've hidden loss, the control-alt-delete comic references to it in their work.

You know, it's a big meme.

here's a screenshot of the exact goddamn squiggles on a wall in Maryland.

If you know the lost meme, you know what the lines look like, and here they are dropped straight into the game.

You know, it's pretty blatant.

And

yeah, and so, you know, it got so blatant that, you know, Bungie basically had to come out and speak on it.

And to that, they have said that there was a former

artist that is responsible and that, you know,

they don't work for them anymore, I guess, And that the um

this is uh yeah, so I have I have slightly more details on that.

So the logic that they have

is

that

um they had an artist that used to work with them

who basically scanned all this shit in in to get to like the base level texture sheets.

And then the general artists and the environment artists would just use the provided texture sheets to paper over the assets and all that.

And

people immediately went, but you're fucking head of art and a bunch of your artists were like following the place where this came from.

They didn't notice that it was like the like one-to-one exact fucking thing.

But also like

Anti-Real's name.

Is on some of these textures and it's been like like scuffed up like looks like it's weathered, so it looks like old graffiti.

Like it was intentionally hidden.

I just

like you look, and the thing is, when you go to anti-reel site, you can see this is a professional, super sick designer who makes shit that is it's basically what I wear when it comes to tech wear.

Yeah, it's it's woolly, it's woolly.

Yeah,

my clothes look like that.

I love it, right?

Barcodes and numbers and geometric shapes and you know, large, large, bold bold design blocks.

And

the weirdest part about all this is like

you could have hired this person to just

work a masterwork of their design aesthetic for you original.

But I guess the idea was it would be too expensive or we don't we want to cut corners or we could do it ourselves or we could just steal it and hope we get away with it or you know whatever the excuses are, it just seems like the way that Anti-Real worded it when talking about it was like, hey, I'm open to, you know, working freelance for people.

I don't know why nobody reached out, given how much you clearly like my work.

This,

the answer to that question.

represents a kind of ethical tipping point in terms of benefit of the doubt.

So I can't keep track of all of these, but I have been following this for a while.

So, the thing about plagiarism is that when people get outed as plagiarists,

the eyeballs come out,

right?

And you start looking at other stuff and you start finding, well, oh, whoa, oh, this, this too, and

this too, and this too.

And it turns out that plagiarism is a style choice rather than a, oh, fuck, I don't have time, right?

So of note is that we have talked about

bungee plagiarizing stories over and over and over and over on this podcast.

And we missed a couple.

Off the top of my head,

they stole a fan artist's rendition of the primary villain of the Destiny series for a cutscene upcoming in their thing.

From fan artists.

And they promised.

Oopsie.

Oopsie.

Oopsie.

They also took a fan artist's rendition of the Ace of Spades as a Nerf gun and then put that into the game as a skin and then got caught and then said, Oh, don't worry, we'll compensate you.

And then fired their entire legal team.

So now

there's no one to actually go through the compensating thing.

They're currently being sued by a gentleman who alleges that they stole the Red War storyline from a fanfic he wrote, which may be valid or not, but they can't prove that they didn't because they deleted those parts of the game

during the vaulting process.

And a judge says that that's not that

people's YouTube videos of that content is not a primary source, isn't good enough.

So instead of getting it dismissed, they're going to trial over it because they can't prove it.

And now we have this, and this is like the furthest reaching.

This is lots of assets.

this is possibly a significant amount of the total art style for the game the entire style bible um which i'm sure this has it it must um anything this pronounced and strong has a guide that they follow that is that everyone is looking at um so what you're saying is there are five examples in recent time past of smoke yeah

I also have to mention that somebody in the chat points out that Destiny always called vaulting content, but that lawsuit has shown that it's not vaulted.

It's deleted.

It's never, it's never coming back.

It's not sitting away for a later revival.

They deleted it.

They can't even pull it up for a court case.

So, you know, a pattern of being willing to just fucking take shit certainly does not bode well.

And

this is now led to, I guess, so one, it looks like, yeah, shout out to Gene Park Park got to sit down with Auntie Real and do an interview to talk about it.

There's a quote that she says in there that really stuck with me is that as an artist, they got so tired of people stealing their shit and speaking up about it because they began to be known as a complainer first in an artist.

Oh

God.

Oh God, that sucks.

It sucks, man, because you're just that talented, right?

This is, so, okay, I just had a version of this conversation with a couple friends

because

this is, this reminds me so much of, do you know Art Germ, Stanley Lau?

Yeah, I heard of him.

I probably

looked at it.

Third Strike

online edition character artist.

So all the new Third Strike portraits.

That's great stuff.

Amazing stuff.

Art Germ has been a fucking fucking GOAT artist for years.

And from back in the QA days, me and Schmupp got patent stuff, our desktops would just be like rotating through

his DeviantArt page because

it was incredible.

And he'd have the best render you've ever seen of Chun Li, the best render you've ever seen of Sakura or of Morrigan.

And he just had like all these characters that are like wonderful.

There's a very distinct, bright,

smooth style to them, and it's powerfully lit.

And motherfucker, if every single ai generated thing doesn't use his name in their prompt right every

generic ai thing you see these days uses bracket or uses comma art germ comma stanley lau as one of the prompts in there and now his work people see it and think it's ai generated because the backbone of everything generated is using his for all the most popular prompts it fucking sucks sucks to see reality catch up and unmake your entire catalog, you know, that you've talented with over the years have been able to, you've done such a good job that you've done too good of a job, right?

And this is

you're now the bank to steal from.

Right?

This, and, and you just, you can go look at it, go look at Art Germ's work and see how everything is just cribbing this.

And so now this is it, right?

Um, the anti-real has done such a good job with this style that it is too good a job

to be known as the complainer first, you know?

Fuck me, that sucks.

So, yeah,

the follow-up then, you know, with all of this and for the whole game identity, the only thing, the only thing I was holding on to that I thought was interesting here being just stolen.

And then there's a history of this behind the company.

Yeah, when you were like, you know, how long does this company have?

It's like, who the fuck knows?

And so we have this article from Forbes now basically going like morale is in the fucking gutter.

Like the entire studio is worried about launch and there's no talk about delaying or anything like that.

But

internally, shit's on fire because it's quite clearly understood that Bungie cannot handle a major release like this being released into a hostile environment, quote unquote, and flopping.

so we need to we need to pull back a little bit timeline wise because of note before Paul Tassie posted that over at Forbes

which was

in my opinion the the game's like overall successes like nail in the coffin is the live stream they did the day after the plagiarism accusations

which had so this live stream yeah

Which I'm going to send Wolf.

I know.

I've seen it.

I've seen it.

I'm aware of it.

Oh, I'm putting it in there anyway, so you can look at it.

Plagiarism will make me a god, says Duranda.

No, I saw you.

I sent you a different one.

I'm posting my blue sky link to it in the chat so people watching it live can get a look at what I'm talking about.

So

of note is the backstory behind this stream.

So what they were planning to do with this live stream was not have necessarily Joseph Cross, the art director, on the show.

What was actually much more important is they were going to show off more gameplay stuff.

However,

the level of plagiarism involved and the timing associated with the stream that had been delayed multiple times meant that they could not show any of the game at all because they have no idea how much of the game's art assets are lifted.

And what the fix for that is.

Like the fix is you got to go through every texture in the fucking game and cross-check it and audit it.

And bro, that is a lot of work.

That is a lot of work.

Or it's going to take a bit.

Or do you cut a check?

Like, it's too bad.

You know what I mean?

You cut it again.

Yeah, no, but it's like...

Just do it.

Yeah.

But, like, it's still stolen.

So instead, what happens?

So instead, what happens is they

wheeled out Joseph Cross, the senior art director, the man in charge charge of the art department, to fall on his sword and read a prepared statement

and have him sit there

and explain that it was a former employee and they're no longer there.

So he's not the former employee.

No, he's the boss of the art department.

Who has been following since 2017.

Yes, and he says that it's a former employee that they let go a while ago that had essentially tainted

the texture pack with with this stuff even though and this is my favorite part every time bungie gets caught they say that it was because of a unnamed former employee

no one who still works this has been used before

a person that used to work here and we they're gone now could it be who are they they're gone could it be someone who used to work but then comes back but then used to work but then comes back and then in and out for a while Could it be an in and out the door?

It's been their excuse like one time.

It's been their excuse every time.

It sucks as an excuse.

I mean, like, to be perfectly honest, like, it is kind of wild to just be like, go on stream and handle this, as opposed to just like, you know, getting rid of the people involved and, you know,

canceling a stream like that.

They, they put him up there, and he read the statement off of a sheet of paper.

And then

there's lots of screenshots of the guy looking at the chat.

This is Plagiarism Will Make Me God and Concorde 2 and all this stuff.

And he's like,

he's not a media guy and he's trying not to cry.

Yeah.

And because my heart is black and evil and dark, I think this is the funniest fucking thing I've ever seen in my life.

I think it is, I think like telling someone to go out and die on camera because it happened underneath is

hilarious.

It is the funniest thing that's ever happened.

Okay, all right.

Yeah.

But from like, I work somewhere and they asked me to do this, that's crazy.

That's what I'm trying to say.

That's that's that's the whole that's the only part I'm like, how was this the official

move

to be like, no, no, no, officially go out there and just die on camera

as the word of the company.

Like, this is it.

This is what we have to do.

You fire these people.

The HR company.

Right.

You don't send them out to die publicly.

The HR department and anyone involved in whatever crisis management, whoever they hire, like, that's what

they make.

Look so cruel.

It's insane.

It's so insane.

It makes them look so cruel.

Like, okay, so the part where this person, like, is, again, like,

whether this ghost employee exists or doesn't exist, and this, and, and this art team and everyone involved were following Anti-Real.

So, like, you clearly have, like, there's lies.

That's crazy.

You guys made a lot of textures look just like him.

That's nuts.

You did it from scratch.

If what you're saying is the truth, it's very weirdly suspicious and doesn't seem believable based on the fact that there's this other part of the story, right?

Whether you are bad at your job and you willingly willingly let it slide under the radar because you didn't want to know or you knew.

Those are the only two options here.

So, blah.

Damage control.

But

when it comes to like, and so

we walked out and beheaded,

you know, the traitor for everybody and spilled the blood and said, feast, masses, feast, and let the crows pull it apart.

Like, he still works there.

That's in, that's the craziest shit I've ever seen.

I can't can't believe that was the official move you know like just cancel the stream and put out a statement like i what the fuck i can only think of one reason why they would do it like this and it's they want him to quit instead of firing him so he doesn't

like severance it's exactly what it looks like it's a it's a go it's a fuck you this is your fault right you you you started this fire you go put it out yeah i guess so but the the knock-on effect of that is that when this is a company with a ton of people who are working on a game, who's like, you know, again, their futures are attached to how this performs.

And everyone that had nothing to do with it.

Are you telling me that if I screw up something on the, they're going to put me on the live stream to fucking stutter my ass and explain it to the are you serious?

Just, you know, and like, and are the programmers over there just like going blood, blood, blood, and the fucking QA team is like, ah, like, you know, like, how is that the move?

That's it.

It's,

I don't see how the thought was, yeah, this, this will,

you know, this will solve it somehow or so.

Um, so the plagiarism stuff actually distracts to some degree from a bunch of other shit that happened during that live stream that also sucked ass, not from a moral perspective or an ethical perspective,

but from a, do you really expect people to buy this perspective?

So the game has had two primary complaints.

One, it does not have what's called proximity chat.

I don't know if you have personally played a game within.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you walk up to people and then you can hear them and talk to them while you're close.

Right?

This is Call of Duty shit.

Feature one

of

Extraction Game.

You need to have the ability to proxy chat to your team so that it works like human players, and you also need the ability to overhear people.

It is like the single single most defining mandatory feature it is a fighting game without a block

lethal lethal company and and yes all that's exactly there um

and the second one is that man on top of the proxy chat thing the game is so stacked for teams of three playing by yourself is miserable um

why

and it's not free to play so getting your team of like four you got to convince your friends to buy the fucking game and all this.

And the response to both of those issues was to treat them as if they are either non-issues or like, well, that's an impossible technical challenge or gameplay thing that we would have to spend ages prototyping.

The proximity chat one is extra insane from Bungie because

Halo 3 has proximity chat.

Halo 3 was the first game I ever played that had proximity chat.

Bungie knows how to do proximity chat.

They've already

them acting like it's something they would have to figure out is insane because you figured it out back in 2006.

Halo 2 has it also?

I didn't even know that.

Yeah, so we're Zacy Zacy says: if there's no proxy chat, you can't tell that it's all bots.

Oh, no.

And

on top of all this, it's like they're not going to delay it.

The game is three and a half months away,

and we have to see an internal audit of every art asset in the game.

Holy shit.

We're talking baseline features aren't going to be there.

And for Marathon fans, people that love the story and narrative of Marathon, when asked about,

hey, are the four going to be P-H-F-O-R, the aliens of Marathon, are they going to be in the game to some degree?

The response is, well, we don't want to, you know, everybody wants to get to the aliens right away, but we want to leave ourselves room to grow.

And it's like,

you're like kneecapping your release so that you have like season pass plans later on this thing that no one gives a shit about.

What the fuck?

But more than all of that is is Paul Tassie is saying that talking to people over at Bungie that in order to make ends meet on this, this has to be like top five selling game of the year.

They got to do millions upon millions to break even on this shit.

And it's not.

And moving.

That's not going to happen.

And moving dates around is not a possibility.

I believe the description is morale is in free fall.

And the vibes have never been worse.

So

yeah,

it's real simple.

It looks like you cut the check or die.

There's no in between.

And when I say die, I don't mean die on arrival.

I mean studio over.

Cut the check or it's over.

I don't see any other solution here.

If there's no ability to delay and replace the assets with your own original ones, another thing we'll get to.

If there's no ability to get AI, perhaps, voices to talk for proxy chat, maybe Darth Vader will be the one talking when you run by a bot,

you know.

I can't wait to hear what he calls me, like, oh, actually, proxy chat's fine.

Actually, it's working great.

James Earl Jones is right there.

Um, listen, so I, I, I would like to cut the check or die.

I, I can't see

a solution, I see nothing else here.

I, I'm not gonna stack in time with you for a second

to uh, Destiny 2, uh, because part of Bungie's mindset about the proximity chat is present in in Destiny 2.

They are like so,

so hostile to basic social features at Bungie.

It is crazy.

I don't know if they added it since I stopped playing, but you know that Destiny is like an MMO where you raid.

Could you imagine that there would be like no in-game looking for group option of any kind

that you had.

How do you

find through Discord

or forums exclusively?

Destiny is the most confusing fucking thing that has happened.

Like, I've spent the last 10 years listening to you and everybody talking about Destiny and Destiny 2, and I don't understand what this thing is.

Like, I know what it is, but I can't.

Is it popular?

Is it good?

Barely.

Do people like it?

Do they play it?

Is it making money?

Is it not making money?

Is it not?

Is it a failure?

Is it

what is destiny?

Like, what is this thing?

Why is it so

unclear?

Why is everything about Destiny and Destiny 2 so unclear every time you talk about it?

It is because they lie about it.

That's the reason.

Okay.

It is popular.

Okay.

And it does make money.

Yes.

And it makes way,

way less money than they say it does.

Okay.

The correctness.

When they spoke to Destiny and got, sorry, when they spoke to Sony and got their like 3.4 billion evaluation or whatever the fuck it was,

Sony just took them on faith that the numbers that they were providing were real.

Like one of the things that really stands out is that if Destiny was making enough money that it was doing gangbusters and it was something to chase after for their whole industry, Activision would never have allowed Bungie to buy it back from them.

Activision would never be able to get away from it.

It would have been an essential idea.

They had to get into the ground the hardest.

They would have death gripped that shit.

Yeah.

Okay.

Destiny keeps the lights on,

but it's not a smash profit success.

It's not like a fucking FF-14, this pays for fucking Forspoken and Foam Stars kind of thing.

It's not a the whole rest of the company can burn down, but World of Warcraft is still here type of success.

I just, the like, but the absolute teeter-totter, bipolar way that all aspects of the game are discussed is so confusing.

You know?

In conclusion, destiny is destiny then.

Destiny is destiny.

Destiny is destiny.

That's a totally unique thing.

Meaning a wide variety of games and genres that you have not played.

The only part of destiny that you you have meaningfully interacted with and you've interacted with a lot is classic Halo feels really good to play.

Destiny feels really good to play in a highly similar way that Marathon doesn't, which is the weirdest part of this whole thing.

I should specify that I did get Destiny 1 and I did play a couple hours of that.

And I, on the, on the pitch of the, I saw the cool traveler art and I was like, ooh, a floating planet moon above the planet seems like a cool concept.

What does it mean?

And I, and I did a couple of missions and I played it.

So I know what destiny is as a video game.

What I mean is its place in the industry and with people following it as like like avid players over the last decade is what it confused.

That's the part that I'm

baffled by.

Everybody in the industry goes off of what Pungy says, which is destiny is the most exciting and most successful thing ever, and we're rolling in money.

And then it's not.

And everyone wants to chase Destiny.

And tons and tons of games want to be the next Destiny.

And they all fail

because they don't make their games shoot as good as Destiny.

And then Destiny is doing

okay.

You see, because when you describe it, because the first part of that, you had me in the first half, because when you say that, that you usually go, oh, that means that it's the, everyone wants to do what it's doing because it's the best at what it's doing, treading water, right?

It's the, it's the best at what it's doing, and everyone's like, damn, that shit's cool.

We got to like get into that space of what they're doing because there's only room for the second to third after that, right?

Now, remember, Wooly,

let's think about this.

When Sony hired Bungie, they did a couple of things.

They said, we're going to, we want, we want to go live service.

And you know who's going to teach us how to go live service?

Bungie.

So Bungie was the people that oversaw like 14 fucking different live service things come in and die.

They were the ones who then also said, hey, Last of Us 2's multiplayer mode, no, that's a bomb.

Cancel that one.

Out of all the ones that got killed in the beginning, the one that would have been by far the best is the only one that died.

And so the thing here with Marathon now, it's yeah.

Like, hold on.

Then, then Sony gave them like a billion dollars to retain staff during the merger.

And then the, what's his fucking Pete Parsons

used that money to buy stock off the employees and then fire them.

And then went and bought out more cars.

And then when he was interviewed about taking a pay cut, he said, said, well, we're just not that kind of company.

Baby, I love you.

That's why I beat you.

Because I love you.

Because you're the only one for me.

And if you ever fucking turn around on me, I'll show you what's what.

Like, just

what even the

we spent this much to keep them in place to then...

I don't know how they didn't write a contract that mandated that they had to actually do that.

Okay, but

abusive relationship of a fucking IP.

Yeah.

You want to talk about how fucked up Bungie is?

I feel bad for Sony management.

She got fucked out of like billions of dollars.

They got posed, man.

They got tricked.

Poor little Sony.

Poor little board of directors.

I know, like, crazy.

They didn't know what was going to happen.

They got taken for a ride.

It is crazy.

Yeah, I'm, I, I, oh boy.

All right.

The unpack is nuts on this.

But um,

but what I, what's hand

what I see here, what I understand here at the very least regarding Marathon is that like the timing for the genre and what they're doing is not off.

Even though it's using the name of a thing that people that are fans of or they hate that that's not what they wanted coming back.

Um,

There is

like this, like hitting this genre and

getting a running start on it, and it being actually really good and fun and engaging, and everybody talking about it could be like the thing that keeps the company alive and going for, you know, however long, right?

These are these open-ended projects that can last for decades.

I have a bad news about that.

So, Cliff Lazinski did once say one thing that was genuinely prescient and genius, where he's like, every large genre or game has room for the winner and then the runner-up and a third

place, third place.

Yep.

Third place.

That's what I was quoting earlier.

Yeah.

For extraction shooters, there was Tarkov

and then came Hunt Showdown.

And you're done.

It's done now.

It is too late.

But more than that,

more than that, is that

an extraction shooter is unpalatable to non-freaks.

The entire genre is based around the type of freak that is going to obsess on a game and goes, yeah, I lost every single thing I built up until this point.

Ah, whatever.

Let's let me get back at it.

That is a hardcore, that is like an arm player.

That is like a caves of cud player.

That is a dwarf fortress savant type person.

It is for freaks.

And they said, hey, you know what we can do?

We can sand off these edges because we're bungee and we make games that shoot good.

And we can make it palatable to non-freaks.

And what they have made is a game for no one.

It is still too vicious and mean and cruel for regular humans.

And it doesn't have any of the stuff for crazy freaks that the crazy freaks want for freaks.

And I know what you're going in many of your brains right now.

What about Duskbloods?

That from software game

of some way somewhat similar.

Well, unfortunately for people in the games industry, from software has gotten to a point where they are kind of like rockstar games in which the company's name is its own fucking genre.

That is a from software game.

We can look at it.

It doesn't matter what's inside it.

It says from software on it, and it has some moody-looking sad people in a gothic Victorian architecture.

That could be fucking anything.

Also, also, Night Rain's about to drop, and Dust Bloods is coming.

Those could both absolutely tank, and like, they're fine.

Oh, what?

Can we just coast on 10 more years of Elden Ring sale sales?

Guess we.

Oh, we tried.

We tried some shit out.

Okay.

Here, I'll say this, though, right?

Potential counterpoint if they didn't steal all the art and the game felt fun to play when you played it and you could play it solo

that would have probably been gone a long way these wow hey

like if oh boy

yeah you know and and maybe and maybe also if like I don't know, like, if you go on it, you know how you go on a losing streak and every streak and everything sucks and you just get nothing because it's the game where like you lose it all, slip and fall, and eat shit forever.

Like, maybe if you think about that part of it, where you find a way to design it where that people who are not the Tarkov freaks but still want to get in on the show and on the fun can have something for them.

But for the most part, if you didn't steal the whole look and if the game felt fun to play, it might have had a place.

And if it's not that weird third, it's still something where I don't know, the studio's not in dire, dire fucking trouble, right?

There's a couple of other things that happened during this that were

of note because

so

Ark Raiders

had an alpha alongside Marathon's alpha.

And Ark Raiders got rave reviews.

And every day that that alpha was live, their Twitch numbers of viewers went up.

Marathon, I streamed that

the day of the alpha release and got decent numbers.

And then by the end of the alpha, that the worldwide Twitch views on that had cratered to like 2,000 people.

Okay.

Like every single day that people watched Marathon, they wanted to watch less marathon the next day.

It's just not hitting.

It's just not hitting.

Because like, what if the game was good is like

crazy.

But like, but like the

thought process behind why I, why I even ask that is because I'm like, when we talk about the genre

and I wonder, I'm like, do you have like, is this something when you look at the genre and go, like,

it's full, room's full, sorry, right?

Do you have the example of the game where like, oh, that came out and nothing's wrong with it, really, but it just wasn't the right time and it didn't have the marketing budget, or you know what I mean?

Like, it's not the game's fault, it's just everything else about the space and time that it released into,

et cetera, like that, that from time to time, you know?

Um, I don't know, like, I feel like when you talk about like Monster Hunter style games and stuff, you know, I mean, beforehand,

there was the early era of like, I think, Tokedon, right?

And, and, um, yeah, there were tons of those clothes.

Right.

And then.

And they had limited success because they were cheaply made.

And then later on, we have like Wild Hearts, which, which, you know, was there and stuff.

Much less cheaply made.

But, like, in terms of sticking, in terms of actually sticking.

Yeah, people are saying Titanfall 2 is the example of what I'm describing, right?

I'm like, if extraction shooters had that or so, then like you're kind of, you'd look at it and go like right this this this genre being for freaks has created a small space and a limited amount of money and time and resources and fan base that are gonna like invest heavily into

unseat the throne no but you can't you can't but like anything you release that stole all the art and plays like shit is going to like fart its way into it like that you know

there's there's

there's one little extra detail that um anyway that's the point sorry there's two little extra details.

One of which is, as you have worked in game dev, particularly you have worked in QA,

uh, on that stream, uh, they talk about um

weapon balancing, they talk about revives, they talk about, you know, all these types of nitty-gritty things, and they keep using this weird phrasing of like, yeah, we're workshopping some ideas and we're playing around with this.

And

like, I

thought I was nuts, so I went and talked to some people.

I'm like, it

feels insane for them to be talking about a game that is three and a half months away and talking about like core systems and going, yeah, we're thinking about maybe completely overhauling this and maybe that.

And it's like,

how was this shit not locked down like 18 months ago?

What the fuck?

Because we and I know the answer to that.

Is it because of the answer to that?

Okay.

Like, can I guess?

Article from is it because

I'm going to guess that is it because of with something like destiny where you're like, we'll play around with it in season one and by season three, we'll probably figure that part of it out.

So that is what it is with a little underneath is that there's an article from 2024 in March, I believe,

interviewing people working on marathon.

So what's the vibe around marathon?

Well,

it will not be the this is from March of last year describing there will be no delay ever under any circumstances because everybody feels that the reason why the date is so locked in is that the game just needs to live just long enough for the summer of 2026 bonuses to be paid out to the execs, which is the final payment date for the Sony acquisition, at which point they will all quit and just leave us hanging with the fucking whatever that we have built then.

Fuck everything about this, dude.

Oh,

so the marathon appears to be

a scam

being perpetrated on Sony

by like Pete Parsons and

the C-suite.

Oh, we can't even claim husbands.

So they can get out with golden parachutes.

And they just need to, they just need the game to continue to exist until the summer of 26.

We can't even claim hustle on this.

Oh, yeah.

No, this is

you can't claim hustle.

Oh, my God.

Oh.

Okay.

Well,

yeah, steal those assets then, I guess.

Yeah, who cares?

Like, the game, I'm going to leave.

I'm going to quit.

I'm going to get my golden parachute and my Sony money.

And on the way out, if you're a fan of the old franchise, here, have a kick in the balls, too.

Just so Sony is

C-suite in 26, and then by the end of 26, I feel that Sony is going to fucking absorb Bungie directly into them under their management.

And then Marathon will continue to exist

under Sony management until it is canceled

probably in late 26, early 27.

And then Bungie will make whatever the fuck Sony tells them to fucking make.

And in the meantime, the streams will continue.

And each week we will progressively

cart out someone else tied to the cross

and ritualistically

the animation on the assault rifle you didn't like, huh?

And you'll do that little, it looks like a C with the little circle in it.

You know, the little marathon logo.

We'll carve that into the chest.

And then Jim

over at Sony is responsible for might be the single largest loss of money for that company in Sony Computer Entertainment's history ever.

Doesn't over a dozen canceled games.

And then this fucking Albatross, they are going to get nothing out of this, man.

They are in the hole on it right now.

By billions.

Billions?

They paid three-something billion dollars for us to be talking about plagiarism.

So, can you imagine buying plagiarism accusations?

They cut the check to anti-real and it bounces.

Oh, man.

Wow.

Wow.

I, I, this fucking game, this is crazy.

This is absolutely nuts.

And from where we were just a couple seconds ago, you know, like one or two episodes ago on this, to like,

yeah.

Um,

whatever, I guess, whatever.

We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll see.

You know, there's no stopping the train, as has been said.

They're probably like, for all the panic and morale shit that we're hearing about,

the part where Anti-Real's like, yeah, I don't have the energy to actually pursue this legally or resources is like

a bit of an unclencher for them.

So I don't think it is,

because

They could always change their mind, certainly.

Someone could step in and

a bunch of people could be like, yo, I'm a lawyer.

I'll do this pro bono and like take my pay off of the winnings.

You know, there's always that type of thing.

I don't know.

I wasn't being sarcastic earlier.

Bungie did, in fact, fire their legal counsel.

Their legal counsel was hit with the layoffs.

They don't have anyone who works there as a lawyer anymore.

Ah,

good.

So they're using

these people.

Good, good, good, good, good.

This is good.

This is

good.

Okay.

Can we get Saul Goodman?

I do have some good news coming up.

You know, Marathon,

it might do really bad.

It's probably going to be really bad, but it'd be a disaster.

But I don't know if you even have this story on your docket, but I do have good news for Sony.

They do have one remaining live service game coming out after this.

Are you familiar with Fair Games?

Oh,

flashback to dollar sign fair games.

That's right.

It's dollar sign fair games.

Fair games.

Yes.

Yes.

Correct.

Now, do you know what the two sticking points of fair games are in terms of like it's it's sell here?

Jesus Christ.

Oh, dumb.

The only reason I know is because it's funny to me.

Well, it just, yeah, I'm like, Tay,

what event or award show was this revealed at?

It was game, it was the game awards, and it was like a CG trailer.

Okay.

I don't think it's ever been seen.

Okay, all right.

Um, so Fair Games

is a Sony live service game, and it's gonna be hot.

And you know how hot it's gonna be, it's gonna be like heist game, like payday.

Payday, uh, it's gonna be hot because uh, they're using Gen AI

to design art assets.

Ah, yes, that's gonna save

lots of money.

Um, and do you know what else is gonna save them money?

Uh, the head of the studio making Fair Games, one Jade Raymond,

has quit

from back in the Ubisoft days.

This past week.

I remember that name.

And so they don't have to pay her anymore.

So that's money in the pocket.

And Fair Games is definitely a game that is absolutely going to come out.

For sure.

Definitely not going to get canceled

in the next three or four months.

I see Jadraymond left the studio five days ago, and in February, it got delayed till 2026.

AI, yeah, AI-powered.

So, caveat is that anything that has that word in it can attract outside investing because it's a buzzword to throw money at, right?

Yeah, okay, sure, yeah, sure.

But

that, right.

And I think the craziest thing after all of this is they're like, oh, we need a live service hit.

What do we do?

Is

the squids are attacking Super Earth today.

And Helldivers 2

is just as successful as it ever was.

You can now go to Super Earth.

I did see that.

And it's like...

Anyone with eyes could have looked at Helldiver, like these games and states of development and be like, oh, no, that, that one.

that Helldivers won.

That's the one.

And you could tell that because the first game was a success on its own on the PS3.

Yeah, but really, using AI to get yourself masks generated in your game, why do that when all the kids are out here getting Darth Vader to drop slurs on him?

That's what I say.

I say clearly the kids are trying to

hang out with Darth Vader Vader and watch him rank the races.

I have to admit a certain thrill in what you just said.

Because I'm curious now.

I'm curious.

I'm curious about the ranking.

I'm not going to look it up.

I'm sure it'll be wrong.

But I'm curious as to what the robot would think.

Well, it's real simple.

Like, any way that you can get around something like ChatGPT's like politeness features is the same way you can get around it for a Vader AI.

Oh, yeah, totally.

So, you know, I think it sounded in the clip like they just asked them to rank the color on its own and then the colors that they happened to pick, you know, were

white, brown, and yellow, you know?

So

Vader can give his thoughts on that.

And this AI generated thing is so cool.

I love how every story we bring up that they're like, this is so cool, it's going to save tons of money, is like a complete unmitigated fucking disaster that is assuredly lost.

Yeah, so you know, you always get that bit where you're like, okay, like as soon as you see this, everyone's going to race to get their content because how hence, how heinous can it get immediately, of course.

Immediately, right?

But then the official, there's an official, there was like

some, one of the, there was a stream that was like, somebody who had a model in the game that was like essentially doing like, you know, more or less promotion got slurred at in the process of using it normally and got swear sword at and um the the list people have is multiple slurs swearing threaten to kill someone in real life um

uh calling pride month for the delusional um

going into

yeah call color racing um discussing chunli's ass making a tier list of races um saying

spanish is a language used by smugglers.

It has gone on and on.

Do you think Disney okayed that when they signed that

for Fortnite?

Well, so

James Earl Jones, before he passed, they worked out all this contractually so that his voice would be used legally by Disney for whatever purposes.

They've come up with their, they've created their own deal where the estate is fine with whatever it gets used for.

Yeah, apparently James Earl Jones and the family are all like, yeah, do what they're doing.

Yeah, they got paid.

I mean, they worked out,

yeah, good for them, sure.

They worked out their money, they got paid.

You know, it is, it is what they signed off on, and so be it.

This is, this is what we, this is what it is.

Um, Fortnite rolled out a patch half an hour later to like tighten up on that stuff, but there, there's always more.

Um,

the

the part then that that comes after this is um, Sag Aftra uh uh filed a claim, and it's not because like there was a like any legal issues for using it or or you know because of the the the context in which it was used because both of those things are entirely between the estate of james earl jones and and disney and whatever they james was no longer a sag member when he signed that contract um also you can't be a sag member when you are dead that you dead people are you know that's

unless we have some new stipulations coming uh i i you know i'd love to see um Fran Drescher explain how corpses are members.

But in the meantime, no,

it seems that

the main deal is that over the years, Disney has had to work with various SAG Actra members who have been sound alikes for Darth Vader.

Yeah, like Chad Vader.

And that has been a known thing.

And whenever you do something like this, you are supposed to negotiate with the union to say that, oh, we're changing the deal or we're changing the contract or you would have a heads up about going in a different direction or whatever we would change, as opposed to the people who have done this role before and the expectation that comes with to which Disney said, I've changed the deal.

Pray I don't change it further.

Correct.

So,

so here we so here we are.

No, for real,

Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager, the guy who played the Darth Vader in that skit, has been the voice of Darth Vader when James R.

Jones has not been available for a long time.

I think he was Vader and fucking

Force Unleashed and a bunch of shit like that.

And

he should have been the person to negotiate through the union.

For this shit, it should be Chad Vader calling me a slurk.

Yeah, sure.

If that's what Disney wants, Chad should get paid for his work as Vader.

Now, the problem, of course, is Chad would then have to sit down and record every single possible permutation of all the things we're describing.

Money's money, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No.

The whole thing is often...

It seems to be this is a soft launch to test out a like Star Wars companion type of character that you can talk to back and forth, which I'm sure Disney will then unveil at their park or in some other capacity or so.

But this is.

Yeah, don't use AI for that.

Don't put, don't put

AI Vader in a suit at Disney World.

The deal has been signed and the man is in the ground and the money has already been spent.

One day.

That thing will be in the park for literally a single day.

One day.

Some little fucking kid's going to walk up to him and he's going to start mail Gibsoning out and that's going to be it

You know, it's funny because, like, I feel like

recently there's just been a little,

oh man, Andor's so good.

Energy in the air.

Because, you know, Star Wars fans are like, oh, we can breathe for a second.

Star Wars fans keep never breathing.

You're not allowed to breathe.

Never.

Dude, so I kept hearing how good Andor was.

And then for the first time,

for the first time,

I discovered like two weeks ago that Andor is the prequel to Rogue One, and my brain just deleted any interest I could think of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, that was, that was, that, that was the trailer pitch when it came out.

It was related to that.

Andor's purpose is to give backstory to that guy in Rogue One.

But according to everyone that I've been hearing about, talking about it from a while back to now, many people, it doesn't matter.

It's still some of the best Star Wars storytelling that

i totally understand regardless of what it's connected to it doesn't matter one of the things that i i become annoyed by in star craft it's star craft star wars is the desperate need for every piece to latch into another piece and fit nice and perfect and like

Like they want to create a fucking movie universe in which every single thing that you watch naturally leads into the next one, like to the scene.

So, if I want to understand a new hope, I guess I got to watch and or because and or leads into Rogue One, and then Rogue One leads into the beginning of a new hope.

And it's like, God, it's mandatory viewing now.

Um, yeah, so I guess, well, every time they don't, then they would announce something like when they had the big High Republic announcement, where it was like, we're introducing a new era and a whole new series of timelines and stories and things taking place.

Like, you make a big announcement for the fact that nothing's connected or so.

But at the same time, nah, I mean, if a thing is written well, if a good writer and someone who knows how to tell a story tells a good story, I don't care what it's connected to, I don't care where it comes from.

Good is good, you know?

And one of the first things was just like, yeah, it's based, it's connected to that, but it doesn't matter.

It's completely solid remote.

I'll tell you what, though, I've seen some clips, and Andy Serkis is circusing the fuck out.

Okay, okay.

Like, he's, he's, he's

he's killing it.

Andy Serkis is really underrated.

Because, like, I mean, the golem was his.

Gollum was the big thing, and then

Apes, right?

He's just really good.

Every time.

I just, I just, I will always, the problem is that in the middle, in between, there's always that

fucking

Journey to the West

PS3 game.

Oh, enslaved.

Enslaved is always like, I'm like, Andy Serkis, Gollum, Enslaved.

Good God, what a piece of fuck.

Planet of the Apes, and then everything else.

And there's just, I love, like, I'm like, oh,

oh, there's always that.

I always remember that part.

So, you know.

Anyways,

yeah, good stuff.

Fortnite, good stuff.

Vader.

I can't believe I remember the name of the girl in that fucking game.

Which was?

I can't believe I remember.

It's Trip.

Monkey and Trip.

Let's go.

Andy Circus is talented, though.

Correct.

You're right.

Beyond that,

only other things

to touch on were that,

of course, the most Kojima story possible.

When he dies, he will leave behind a USB stick with game ideas for Kojima Productions to continue making games without him.

It's kind of like a wig.

One, they will work on it for four four years, go bankrupt, and all fade into the ether.

I just hope they're one-sentence descriptions like, um, they totally are, you know,

vampires, but you must go outside in real life to play.

You know,

you, when you die, your save gets deleted.

Like, just the simple.

It's a USB key of like one-sentence titles of the premise of a black mirror episode.

Every time.

And

he'll like hand them to the team on the deathbed and they'll all look at them and go, I don't know what that means.

I don't know what that means.

I don't know what that means.

Let's just make a Metal Gear type game.

Like at the wake,

people will be reaching into the jar and pulling out these like small pieces of paper and have to figure out as he's just lying there smiling.

So he's talked about a game he wants to make where the main character forgets things, like core mechanics, if you don't play

the game for a long time because they have memory problems.

But the line in the USB key is just main character who forgets things.

Like, that's it.

That's the whole, that's the whole fucking thing.

Jeff Keely will be the keeper of the Philosopher's Legacy, and it will be his job to get these story, these game design ideas to the team.

Yeah.

like

god poor Ludwig just I don't know what the fuck that means, but I'm gonna start writing music for it like yeah sure

like let's go

uh anyway um

no he uh uh um he basically that's that's the idea is like he wants he wants uh koji pro to not to not be uh unable to make stuff uh if if he ever does pass away but uh he then don't die yeah well

we've already done this

we've already done this.

Make it.

People who weren't following Metal Gear at the time don't know how embarrassing it was.

Hey, make a game where Ryden cuts things.

Can't figure it out.

It's impossible.

It can't be done.

Oh, it's hard.

I don't know what to do.

Yeah.

In retrospect, though, it's almost like, hey, guys, do that thing you do, but also make cutting a part of it.

You know, it was like, oh, yeah, okay.

Impossible.

Yep.

Can't be done.

Anyway, so there's that,

you know, and

speaking of things that can't be done, you know what else can't be done?

What can't be done?

Shutting the fuck up.

That's true.

I've heard that shutting the fuck up is a lost art known to no one.

Oh, boy.

Oh, here we go.

This could be like multiple stories.

I know which one you're talking about, though.

You're talking about Bionicle.

Bionicle fan game, The Masks of Power, shut down by Lego after eight years of work.

Now, to be fair, to be fair,

basically,

I've come to learn through, you know, slop streaming and chatting with the audience quite a bit that a lot of...

A lot of the audience that's a little bit younger than us, super into Bionicle, got way into that as a formative

core memory.

I encountered a very aggressive Bionicle based reaction.

Yeah, it was quite interesting to find this out because I remember when it came out as a thing and I was like, oh, that's Lego creating their newest, like new whatever IP, right?

And that's, and I was like, right, it was a, like, a kind of cooler looking thing.

And it was a lot kind of like Maudi inspired with the names and everything.

But it was like, yeah, there was a bunch of them.

And there was also Lego Technics.

I remember when they brought out the like, get your wrench out for the Technics, you know, and I loved Lego.

I love building them.

And so they just had all these things.

And, you know, I was like, it's just another one of those.

And it turned out it was like, and there's a show and everyone got super and it's a big deal, you know?

And then diving into it with the slop stream as well, like people were like, rah, you don't know.

And it was a whole thing.

I was like, oh, oh, like, this is sacred, sacred cow territory, you know?

So.

With that, there was a fan game being worked on, and

it looked, you know, like it was everything that a Bionicle fan would want the game to be.

It was a, you know, third-person action game where you could do and use masks and do all the cool things that, you know, seem to be what the show was about.

And

because it's a fan game, something that fan games do, you always know, you always know a fan game when you go to look at a trailer and it's like eight minutes long, right?

Because fan game trailers never do the like, like the marketing team show you everything.

The marketing team

at a studio will always be like, you have a minute and a half of player attention tops for a social media world.

And

sometimes if it's a highly anticipated super IP, you can get two minutes.

But that's it, right?

If you hear a pleas special logo in something, you're going to get two minutes tops following that.

The thing, every fan game is like, I'm showing you everything that I've been working on, and it's going to take you 14 minutes, and you're going to watch all of it.

You know?

And they're going to show off a whole level.

And you're going to be like, yeah, they're proud of it because they did incredible stuff.

And in this case, it's eight years worth of work dedicated hard to this project.

And what the team involved seems to suspect is that Lego has, they had like a fair play kind of system for people that are like publishing things that are how to not get sued by Lego while being a fan of it or talking about it or doing things relating to the brand.

And

it seems like as long as it's sufficiently amateur looking enough, they're kind of cool with it as long as it doesn't look super duper impressive.

But

because Masks of Power looked like it was basically an official release, as it got time and closer to them releasing, they think that's why they got the shutdown order because it just looked too high in quality, you know?

Which it's an unwritten thing, but I can totally see that.

I can totally see a team looking at like, okay, did like a a 12-year-old and some of their friends get together and make a little

leave it alone, whatever, whatever, fuck it, right?

Versus when people Google this, is this like a looks like a real product that kids are going to get confused by?

Nah, fuck that.

Shut it down.

It looks too good.

So yeah, they did.

They put out a walkthrough of the two-hour video or so, seeing all of it and explaining all that.

And, you know,

I've, whatever, I, I've, I've, I,

there's a video out there somewhere with, who knows?

I, you know, I've said a lot of things over this, this, this this career I've had in front of

microphones.

People are

dropping that left and right over all kinds of things.

I can't say when it's relevant or not, but something that is clear is that the game shut down.

That's it.

Team is like, yep, okay, goodbye.

And now, completely unrelated on Steam, there is a

project called Project Rustbound by a team called Unmasked Games.

And who knows what that will be?

But it has a Steam page.

And

it seems like some folks that formerly worked on Bionicle Mask of Power will be working on

this new project.

So I think this one is of particular note

because

They were like, we're going to do this the right way.

And they got permission.

And then they took too long and the permission lapsed

i don't know if it was explicit permission or if it was it was explicit permission from some guy at bionicle and lego

it wasn't a contract

it was a oh no that's cool don't worry about it in 2017.

okay

but like

like

Permission isn't even good enough because permission can always be taken back.

Yeah, unless you have it in writing and

a long and a clear term

designated on that, you know?

But also, then you're like, if you get a shutdown order from the permission granted, are you going to then challenge?

Do you really want to go fight Bionicle in court and fight Lego in court over?

It would have been better to just shut the fuck up.

They should have listened to Wooly.

Well, hey,

Project Rustbound

coming sometime.

Take a look.

A new original world

from Unmasked Games.

Original.

There you go.

I mean, to be like, anytime, if I see within

a week a speedy new project has been announced, I'm like, okay, well, somewhere deep inside, y'all fucking,

you, you got it.

You understand that every time you post about something and go into it.

Or you're really fast.

Or that.

But hey, Nightmare Card is still pretty great.

Sure is.

Yeah.

And

beyond that, I guess, is, you know, we touched on it earlier, but Nightmare Card's pretty great, as we said.

And how much did that cost?

It was

fucking nothing.

I believe it was free.

$3.99.

$3.99.

Yeah, not bad.

Randy, I

just.

Yeah, Borland Spore was having a lot of good swell of good vibes.

You got to just touch your tongue to your finger and hold it up to

feel the pulse every now and then.

You know?

That's right.

Randy, USB Key Gone Missing Pittsford has something to say.

On $80 price tags for video games,

true fans will find a way to make it happen.

If you're a real fan.

bro, shut up.

Now, the price point out

the price points he added is not ultimately his decision.

That's up to take two.

But yeah, but do the do shut up.

Shut your mouth.

But all the more reason why it's like, you know, if something like that is happening and you're like, yeah, I'm not setting that price.

But in the meantime, though, fucking

suck up and learn discipline.

You know, yes,

get the Ken Kutaragi style

doctrine back out here in a world where people are looking, where every story is about, will GTA fuck over the industry?

Yeah, you know,

as publishers are along the side licking their chops,

hoping that GTA just

pre-fucking up the industry before GTA even gets here.

You know, is what we've been talking about for a couple of months now.

And

just, it's just tone deaf to be like,

yeah, no, though,

figure it out.

Remember when Randy Pittsford said that he won the name Gearbox from Gabe Newton.

In a poker game?

But you know what?

That was a long time ago.

I bet Gabe doesn't even remember that, so don't ask him about it.

We got to be the gearbox while gabe had to be the valve

totally happened this is so it's so like shut up but also you're the ceo of the company so there's no one that can tell you to shut up

yeah

um

you know what's i mean it's just again speaking of shutting the fuck up yeah like you could have just said nothing you know um people understand.

Certainly, these pricing, fucking, this pricing bullshit is going to continue to be a problem for the rest of this, you know,

generation.

People that are just going to straight up not buy Borderlands now.

Or they're going to wait for it to go on.

Like, dude, okay, Borderlands comes out in September.

By the second week of December, no, fucking Thanksgiving.

By November 21st,

it will be $10

off.

Do you think,

straight up?

Like literally wait until the fucking turkey sale on Steam

or at your local place.

I wonder.

It will be $10 to $15 or $20 off.

Which probably, who knows, maybe by that point, Claude Obscure Expedition 33 will be like 35 bucks or 40, you know?

Yeah, so one of the fun things about digital distribution, like one of the genuine, like, wow, this changes things a lot.

And backwards compatibility is that if you're like, hey, I would like to play a video game.

Oh, man, Borderlands costs $80.

I sure hope Witcher 3, one of the greatest games ever made that lasts 195 hours, doesn't cost 110 cents

today.

Like the availability of everything,

prices should be going down because now now you have to compete with everything that has ever come out.

And yes, I bring up Witcher 3 because Witcher 3 is on sale right now for a sixpence.

Whatever the fuck.

A shilling.

What is it?

I was like, it's fucking

$5.59 Canadian.

I kind of want to give Expedition 33 more money.

There's no way to do it.

There's no DLC.

There's no transaction.

There's no extra shit.

But I would love to.

I kind of, maybe I'll just buy another copy.

Buy a copy for a friend.

Yeah, just buy another copy.

I guess that's the move.

You know, I would love to give it more money.

Yeah.

OST, buy the OST.

There we go.

Yeah.

Great.

I have been informed that plushes of SKA are coming.

All right.

So

I just want to say, I love him so much.

I love him.

Okay, I like SKA.

I love SKA.

Some of the lines over World,

he talks so much.

He just won't.

He won't stop talking.

I love him.

Yeah, he will not stop.

I love him.

Also, he sounds like someone on the team just used a voice slowing machine.

Absolutely.

Someone on the team who can barely speak English.

World's fastest ball.

Yeah.

It's great.

It's great.

Altuca.

Let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send in a letter, go down to castle superbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castle superbeastmail at gmail.com.

Maybe write in about games that you would like to play rather than 80,

dude.

I'm going to grab this for a second.

When games are costing $80 plus tax,

and you can look at your Steam wish list on a sale and just be like, How many of these do I have to buy to get to one of these?

It starts to get crazy.

Things you can do with $80.

Yes.

You know, is American, that is to say.

Yeah.

But

a part of this involves, and this I think is probably might be the hardest part for some folks, is to divorce yourself from the cult of the noob.

You have to just let that part of you die.

It's not that important.

Now, for you and me, it's a little more important than the average person because there's some things like, hey, Wooly, do you know that

we'll spontaneously combust if we don't play Night Rain the week it releases?

I know that.

It's true.

But, like, even I, you know, I told you I went back to FF14.

I did the story content and I have not kept up with it.

That's weird for me.

I should be out there grinding my ass off in Cosmic Expo, but it'll keep.

Just, like, don't let FOMO dictate your life or your

wallet, you know?

Well, the problem with FOMO is that it's designed to dictate your life and your wallet.

Yeah.

So fucking beat it.

Like,

like, I don't know what they're like, you know, that, like, the, like, like getting, like, that, that freedom from that, even if a little bit, can, can go a long way, you know?

Simply stop being affected by people's psychological manipulations.

Just be better than it.

Or, you know, realistically, I guess it comes down to like, you go, well, which, like, what, what, what matters to me from what's coming out?

And what do I actually, like, what, what can wait a little bit or whatever the case is.

I mean, shit, dude.

If Doom hadn't been sent to me via a review code, I wasn't going to fucking look at it.

Like from our perspective, the new price thing is like, well, I'm not going to spend a hundred fucking bucks to stream a game once.

That's insane.

That's fucking crazy.

Are you serious?

Yeah,

it really just depends on what you're, you know,

where you're at with it and

what you care about the most, I suppose, you know, to some degree.

But I just feel like when you get to looking at how there's so many fucking good games that are not going to fucking bilk you for 80

that continue to populate Steam constantly.

It's like, yo, we need also

to find ways to

get that out in the public eye and make sure people know that there's great shit out there that's not that expensive, you know?

On top of that,

and

even I have been doing this, and I'm the crazy person that's obsessed with the cult of the new.

It has never been a worse time in the history of the business to play games the day they come out.

Like

even waiting like a couple of days, like Doom is a good example.

I got the

review code I got sent was the version that you could play early.

Massive performance patch like day of release.

It gets better later.

And Baldur's Gate or like Baldur's Gate is like this version, but positive.

Right.

But think of every game that comes out and it's like, I was a little fucky.

Like, dude, I like burned out almost on Kingdom Come Deliverance and then went right into the second one.

And then went, hold on a second.

And I'm, I, they've put out a DLC.

I'm still not playing it.

I'm waiting for all of it to come out.

Same thing with Alcat's Warhammer game.

Like, why play it now and get like a much worse version of the experience when I'll play it later and get a cleaner, smoother, more, like, it's.

I am, I am playing cyber fucking punk.

You know?

That's the funniest one because they released shit shit during your playthrough.

If, like they said, don't worry, guys, it's totally done.

It's done for realsies, except for this.

I mean, but just

into you want to talk about like

you know, each shit you get punished for early adopting, you know, you get more stuff that's better quality later for cheaper in a lot of triple-8 game release cases, you know.

Um, anyway, um, castle superbeastmail at gmail.com.

Let's see, Over here.

Rick says, Dear Indigo Profa Woolley and Patrick become human.

What do you think?

Oh, I win this.

Oh, yeah.

What do you think it would take for the Quantic Dream Star Wars game to even get finished and actually be good?

Thanks for the show.

I think.

So for it to get...

Sorry, after you, I gotta do my thoughts.

I think that like

watching us over the years follow David Cage with a fucking magnifying glass has been,

it's been quite clear that the quality of, you know, the team around him, the assets, what's going on has increased and increased and increased to the point where when we finished Detroit, we went, that's the best game they've ever made, right?

It's not even close.

It's like, there's a good game in there.

Yes.

Like it's like, that's a good game.

It has like stupid story problems, but but Detroit Become Human is a good game.

And so, and so it becomes less and less about the Omicron the Nomad Soul style.

This is absolute suffering, second to second, just getting into a fucking car and pulling out an item and saving versus that game where you're like, this story is embarrassing and tactless and cringy and makes no sense and is awful.

But wow, that's a pretty good asset.

That music is fine.

You know,

the the technical is all there.

There's no issue there.

I think that if you have the team that's working on that, that's that capable, making Star Wars stuff and whatever, like your art's going to be fine, your music's going to be fine, all of that.

Quantic Dream is, they're very capable.

It's the writing and directing that you need to rip out of the hands and hand to someone else.

And here's the thing.

So what we saw over time with Quantic Dream is they've clearly, every game, has built up a larger insulating layer of managers around Cage to mitigate his level of control.

Yeah, that's what they said in an interview, literally.

And on top of that,

Detroit had actors, like proper actors, going like, yeah, fuck it.

We're going to do whatever.

No, we're going to do it our way.

Nah, nah, we're going to do it this way.

And to great success and frustration.

But on top of that, like, it's Star Wars.

Now, granted,

we talked about earlier today that Star wars may not have the most stringent content controls on some of their characters but you still have to answer to them for your storyline so like you can't like are we gonna see a force ghost possess someone's husband and then cuck them with their own body doubtful

doubtful not impossible but doubtful

I'm going to say something.

I have something I want to say.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, hold on.

All right, I'm ready.

I'm ready to receive

what you want to say.

I have a thought.

I have a thing I want to say.

Platinum Games at its best

is directly comparable to Quadic Dream.

Because

if you take

them and have someone else involved with the story and writing and what's happening and just give them the rest, I think you'll have a fine video game.

You know, I remember when you rolled your eyes at me when I said, do we even need platinum anymore?

What you just said was so much meaner.

Metal Gear Rising Revengeance.

I can't believe Metal Gear Rising Revengeance was made from two teams that just couldn't do part of game development at all.

They just complemented each other in just the right way.

i mean like like i near automata like i'm like quantic dream

based on detroit can absolutely do a star wars game who's writing and directing it that's all i need to know that's it

all right so what we need to do is have quantic dream build the game and have platinum's writers make the story

Is that what you're saying?

Oh, and we've finally come full circle.

This is our whole career.

This is the whole thing.

That's it.

This is it.

This is the Ouroboros.

The Ureburos has ended.

There's nowhere left to go.

You know, the two most flanderized things about us

have now inverted

and eaten each other.

Done.

Yeah.

Done and done.

Dude, that one sucks so bad.

Where's my...

Am I lying, though, Pat?

Am I lying?

Oh, no, you're not.

You're not.

No.

All right.

And let's take one over here.

Sam from Minnesota says,

hey, Pat and Woolly, after some much-needed spring cleaning, I dusted off my PS2 and PS3.

Went back to some of my favorites back then.

Demons, souls, folklore, Buddha Kai.

What's an underrated folklore mention?

What's an underrated PS2 or PS3 game you'd recommend trying out?

So if people say, like, I actually mentioned this a week or two ago, but like, yeah, no, if I want to talk about like an obscure PS3 game that no one's played, I usually bring up folklore.

So, I'm going to have to fucking move my brain over a bit.

Am I the only one who, every time I hear that,

it auto-corrects to folks souls?

What?

What the fuck?

No.

Wasn't that originally called folks souls?

I don't know, man.

Am I crazy?

Was it?

it was yes it was originally called folks no

saying yes you are the only person who thinks that

well it it was a thing i okay i swear to god if it was it was renamed to folklore after a while while it was happening while when it was in development the whole time they were talking about it was called folk soul

anyway i think that game's cool all right well i'm not lying it's right there you can look it up

if i would like to point out uh a game that is near and dear to my heart very much

that I have never encountered a single, you might have played it, maybe, but I've never encountered a person

in real life that's played it is Silent Bomber for the PlayStation 1.

Oh boy.

Yeah, well, you've talked about it a bunch.

So, yeah, Silent Bomber for the PS1 is incredible, and I think I might be the only fucking person that played that game.

Like, it's

so good.

Um, hmm, you know what, man?

Battle Fantasia was fun.

I got no beef with Battle Fantasia.

Well, Battle Fantasia is mostly interesting because it's like a preview of fighting games for 20 years.

Yeah, it's got some busted dumb shit going on, but it's also kind of quirky and goofy, and it's got an interesting cast and art style.

And I mostly enjoy, I had a lot of fun playing that.

Battle Fantasia is a little hidden, forgotten one out there that

I'd throw at you.

If you just want to

blind pick something out of the wild.

Cool.

All right.

That'll do it.

And by the way, there are people in the chat saying games, and I really need to point out something that when we're talking about like,

you know, maybe forgotten or less popular classics, first of all, if you mention a game that has a number in it that's not one, you're insane.

Because it got sequels.

It can't be that unknown.

And second of all, I saw someone go, oh man, siphon filter.

Are you insane?

That was a first-party Sony game that sold millions of copies.

What the fuck?

Folklore is the Japanese title for Folk Soul.

Sorry, Folk Sorrels is the Japanese title for folklore.

Oh, that explains it.

But I'm pretty sure on first announcement, they announced the Japanese name only, and then we found out about the translate thing afterwards.

There was a transition point that I definitely do recall.

So, if you want to get all semantic about it, you can fucking do that.

That game's cool, it's very unique.

Takes place in like Ireland or some shit.

Yeah.

God, I had another one.

I mean,

name a video game will like Otogio Game Otogi 2

has a number in it

why is that game never come why is that

I don't know but the jumping is rad and you you can play as a wolf band it's sick man you know what game's underrated fucking no one can stop mr.

Domino how about that um

uh

Sakura samurai fucking super cool punch-out like samurai game very fun no one played it it's great.

And

I don't know.

Fucking Dylan's Rolling Western.

How about that?

Hey, what was that game that the 3DS had

where you bought games with real money from a really pathetic old loser and you had to haggle him down for real?

Oh,

Rusty something.

Oh,

Rusty's real deal baseball.

Oh, Jesus.

Okay.

Okay.

Might be the weirdest game I've ever seen in my life.

Didn't play it.

Yeah.

I didn't either.

I watched people play it because it was fucking weird bullshit.

3DS got real weird towards the end here.

I love

all the stupid shit that was on the fucking 3DS.

It got weird towards the end.

Kind of like this podcast.

All right?

Take it easy, everybody.

Hey, have a good week, everybody.