CSB320: Getting Queerbaited by Danganronpa is Like Losing Chess to a Dog But the Dog Has Been Training His Entire Life For This and You Never Played Chess

Howdy do

hey man, what's up?

Not much, not much.

I got a sleeping dog in my lap.

He's dead ass asleep.

Yeah,

so um

did you did you celebrate

last week?

Yeah,

wait, last week

may uh May 5th to may 9th is uh short king week

it's a whole week

five five to five five five to five nine

i'm five two man

i don't even qualify for that shit

It was actually from Monday to Friday.

It perfectly lined up right in the week.

I don't even qualify for that.

Damn.

I'm too small for short cameras.

You've been holding on to that.

For at least one week.

You've been rubbing your hands.

For seven days, approximately.

Well, thank you for

five days because it's shorter than the full week.

It's shorter than a regular week.

Yes.

I understand.

Ah, all right.

You fucking asshole.

All right.

Well, thank you.

What's going on?

Thank you for thinking of me.

So I played a little bit more of that Expedition 33.

Yeah, so have I.

And

I ran into...

So I remember there was like a little interview a little while ago where

the director was like, these are my favorite games and he listed out a bunch of games

and i did not know how literally we should have taken that list of games

because that was a fucking blueprint yes

straightforward like there's like the ff8 and the dark soul and the devil may cry we are not a good game we are not mincing words we are wearing our hearts on our our sleeves with what we love.

It's very, very obvious.

So, quick, let me touch my tongue to the wind, to my finger, hold it up here.

Where are you?

I beat the first act.

Okay.

And then, after the first act, I ran around for 10 minutes

pushing buttons.

Okay.

Going, is this really what I fucking think it is?

Are you fucking serious with me right now on this?

Are you fucking my ass on this yeah okay all right there we go so uh you that's ridiculous so you just you tested the waters on act two i tested the waters and i remember going into the menu and i'm like surely this does not like because i go to the menu first before i go and try it out and i'm reading descriptions i'm like this

reads familiar it's and it can't actually

mean what I'm reading here.

Yeah.

So so the the fun stuff that this game is doing and we're we're going to still, it's still really new, and we're going to still talk around things for people.

Yeah, unlike someone in my Doom fucking stream last night, I had to edit the VOD around that.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Big spoils.

Totally unrelated game stream.

Someone came in at like at midnight and was like,

hey, man,

sorry I was being annoying during the Expedition 33 stream.

I just didn't want you to have all the silly costumes on during incredible

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Okay, so completely.

I read it out without thinking because I was like, it's like 11 p.m.

and I'm tired.

And then I was like, ah, fuck, ah, shit.

Completely.

Then I had to go cut all the videos and delete VODs and shit.

Yeah.

Shitbag move.

There you go.

People have been like insane about this game in terms of like spoiler content.

It has been like one of the worst I've seen ever.

So

I'm being particularly careful and stuff because like it's one of these like that you're from the moment you start it, it's an Attack on Titan style setup where you're like, we know there's a problem.

We don't know why or what's going on.

So everything you're doing is discovering more about the problem and the world and whatever it is.

Everything is new, you know?

But to that end,

that's fine.

I can say this.

There's a whole lot we can talk about that's just mechanics based, right?

Yeah, so like

in this game, you think it's about French ennui and getting older, and what it's actually about is turning that teenager into a super weapon that can destroy all.

Yeah,

maker a nuke.

Um, so yeah, I am, I am, uh, I'm not in act three yet,

so I'm still working my way through, um, but uh, I've, I've made some good progress, and I'm chipping away at some really hard challenges.

Um,

the

absolute, like, straightforward, okay, we're not going to mess around.

This is what we're referencing continues, right?

Like, they are very, very blatant about that.

I can't believe how overt it has been.

Like, every character is

like, you know, what game is really cool?

Yeah.

This one.

So, what for me, what, like, there's, you know, so you often, oftentimes, the way tutorials work in this is like you get into a fight and then like it goes like, hey, or you pick someone up or or something and it's like, hey,

you want to do a tutorial or so.

But in this case, it works in a way where you have a good chance to like go through the menus and like examine a whole bunch of stuff about a new character before you get into a fight.

to actually use them.

So I see a mechanic called perfection.

And I'm just like, and then I read,

one of the descriptions on the skill tree references, you cannot drop lower than this.

Yes.

And I was staring at it and going, that can't mean what I fucking think it means.

That would be nonsense.

How would that even integrate into this?

Oh, and then I turn into fucking,

what is it, Captain Canuckles with the dog doing a backflip?

Oh.

I sure hope you've been getting good at the game's mechanics and what it's been trying to do because

I have a problem with that.

I have a real problem with that.

I have one I want to get to too as as well, actually.

Interesting.

Let's hear yours.

So, the game has, so many games have a difficulty curve, which starts off easy and gets hard.

Other games have, like the Witcher series and Cyberpunk, have reverse difficulty curves in which the very beginning is like the hardest magnitude harder.

And then once you get your kit, you're just like, oh, there's nothing that can touch me.

This game has both.

This game has a sine wave difficulty curve.

Yeah.

Of, man, this is a joke.

This is a joke.

This is a joke.

Oh, that has hands.

That is the realest adjustment.

That's jokes.

Back to humor.

Back to humor.

Oh, that has hands.

Yes.

So there are

people and things standing around on the map during act two where you're like, I don't know if you're real or not.

You know,

like, sometimes it is, sometimes it's not.

But what, and then, like, there's times where, like, upon first glance, you'll be like oh, that's real as fuck and then it'll be like actually if you think about it and strategize a little bit It's manageable and then there's other times where I'm like okay, I've spent uh another however like I've put another however many hours and levels past the last time I took this challenge on right.

Let me go back now that I'm so much buffer and see what oh God, I'm wiped

Still got nothing and like you know, you're just you can't you're trying to gauge early challenges for when to come back to them later.

And like, you go back way later and still get rocked.

It's such a wild feeling.

It's really interesting because it has one of those things that Elden Ring has and the Soul series has, where it's like, there's multiple different kinds of player expression through character power.

So one of the things that Expedition does really well is like, okay, old-fashioned style.

Listen,

I don't know how to do this.

This seems really tough.

I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna hit the gym, and my characters are gonna fucking get huge.

And I'm gonna dump points into them, and I'm gonna just bump their stats and upgrade their weapons, and we're gonna see how much of a difference that makes, and it can make a significant difference.

There's also, hey, I'm gonna really actually dive into the picto system.

Yes, and I'm going to

like take my L and I'm gonna like what I did as I build her around burn

and just like throw 40 burn burn stacks a turn

down and see what's going on.

I'm just gonna, and me figuring that out and just putting the dots together.

Okay, now this encounter is trivialized.

And then there's the third one, which is one that I found myself relying on for two of the

roaming, you know, chromatics or whatever in Act One, which is: if I just never make a mistake once in the entire fight, it can't kill me and I will eventually win.

Yes, there is a that is really satisfying.

There is a very clear and but and the thing is, as far as mistakes go, it gets dirtier and dirtier and dirtier.

And I'm like, now I'm seeing scum level sucking shit that is so like, ooh, that's evil, because you know that players can try again and eventually whatever you're looking at, you will be able to memorize.

So let's be as dirt as possible on it, right?

There's,

I'm going through, like, there's an area that's a like fuck you area, right?

Fuck you optional

each shit zone, right?

And everything in it is basically like a boss.

Every encounter is like, oh, you're, you know, you're in it for for a, for a minute.

And

you start seeing things where like, yes, defensively, you can

parry and avoid and dodge and jump and do all the things, right?

But if you don't do the right thing in the right way and approach the fight like still tactically while being defensive, you're going to sit here forever and not get anywhere done.

It'll basically be a stalemate.

Yeah, the enemy numbers can be extraordinary.

So it's not even.

So there's things like that.

I mean, like, just HP.

Like,

yes, yes, the amount of damage you take is extraordinary.

But there's other things we're getting into.

So we're getting into things where the team, the enemies you're fighting, will start healing each other at a rate that your DPS is not output, it's not outracing.

Right, okay.

Right.

We're talking about mechanics where the affinity of the enemy you're fighting will switch to something that, oh, you, your Mael loves fire?

Cool.

Heal me with your fire then.

Switch it up.

What else you got?

And like, you have to basically be like, oh, fuck, if I do a parry right now with Mael

on the I'll heal them a lot because I'm doing a ton of damage and that's bad, right?

So you can't just be like autopiloting it.

You actually have to approach it in the right way and strategically.

And this is where messing around with your builds and experimenting pays off heavy dividends, right?

What's cool too is the encouragement to experiment because you get so many

re

um

whatchamacallit um

respec respec uh uh uh points recoats yeah recoats, you know.

And I've been sparing on them, and I'm glad I did.

I was like, I'm like, let me just save these up.

I don't know, but I don't need them for now.

And I've been going through it and getting this really, really cool feeling of like, okay, every once in a while when I choose to dive in deep into the Picto system, I'll do it with a character to create a build because I see a particular advantage that's that's really worth building around, right?

So, um,

for example, like Lune, I'll see

a weapon where it's like, hey, every time you cast a free shot with her, you build up

a random stain, right?

Okay, cool.

How can we build around this idea?

Well, she's now somebody who's going to use her AP to fire four bullets every turn, right?

And then cash them out.

So knowing that she's going to be firing every turn, let's gear all her pictos towards the shoot, the shooting, the marking one, the burning one,

right?

And then suddenly you're like, I've got a character that's more concerned about taking shots and getting and building that up and doing, you know, and then supporting the team while taking those shots.

And like the AP reward on everything you're shooting is then trickling into, like, ah, you're setting up a mark for the next person.

And that, so that's really fun, you know?

Um,

and the feeling has, I've gotten a couple times now has been like, oh shit, I just picked up a new weapon that's worth swerving my entire playstyle around.

Yeah, I got Mael's fucking purple katana.

Yep.

Yep.

And I'm like, oh, my, oh, my God, this changes her whole character,

even more busted character.

Time to switch it up, right?

And then so you start working heavily through like, yes, rearranging your pictos to become about all about like, oh, I'm starting in virtuoso, let's go hard, right?

And then

you get like that, like, so I did that.

I picked up

a sword that was like really good on base attack damage, right?

And I was like, oh, that's sick.

Let's work around the idea of making base attacks as good as possible.

And then

I started seeing some busted numbers popping out with that.

You know, there's a,

there's like a picto that is like your base attack swings twice, for example, which is like, ooh, okay, what can we do there?

Getting the ability to play again and just, you know, like forcing your character to get more turns in before anyone else can act, you know, starting first and so on.

And then I picked up,

like, after crushing it really hard with that, like not even barely a couple steps later, I picked up a weapon that was like

your

like when you do crits, amazing things happen using this sword.

Right.

And then it also scales A with luck.

Yeah, all right.

So I'm like, time to throw all of my build out.

Like not just go back and redo the

pictos, redo your entire character's points heavy into crit, right?

And then redo your skills and consider going in a completely different direction built around critting.

And so now

I have a character swinging for 92% chance at crit per swing.

I was able to figure out a way to get CL.

So CL has an ability that doesn't cash out her resources if it crits, crits and it's a multi-hit.

Ah, interesting.

Okay.

And I was able to push some numbers around to get her to 100% crit.

Okay, okay.

So I could just cash the thing out

infinitely over and over and over.

So that's it, right?

I look at it and I go, let's put on the pictos that'll push my crit even further and then shove a bunch of points into it.

Now I'm swinging it.

Yeah, you're basically every single swing is a crit.

All the good things that you get, all the good bonuses happen, double damage, et cetera, et cetera.

And then on top of that,

what was the other thing?

You.

God damn it.

I got lost in the...

Anyway,

that just becomes like the main way to play.

Oh, yeah, that's what it is.

I see an ability on the skill tree that is like, if you land a crit, you're going to add to your perfection points.

Right?

So let's hit a, let's grab a multi-hitting, multi-critting move that you do one swing and you go perfection, perfection, perfection, and you watch your style shoot through the roof and you're like, this is the fucking build.

And it feels so good to just immediately be like, I can't choose which way to go.

All these builds look and feel amazing.

I think it's probably the only

JRPG style game I can ever think of in which there is like a legitimate case to be made for not even using your full party.

Yes.

Like, genuinely, like,

what if I just fed all of my resources to myself

forever?

So, you can certainly decide to put as many pictos on one person as you want for, like, maybe 90 minutes with like just one character.

Because I wanted to, so I got a character and they were underleveled compared to the rest of the cast.

I'm like, oh, I'll swap them in just by themselves to see, you know, to catch them up a little bit.

And was immediately rewarded with just

the requirements and the resources I needed to make that work, which then worked really, really, really, really, really, really fucking well.

It's pretty fun putting on all that solo stuff and seeing it just

numbers go,

right?

So I will say the Picto system is totally overwhelming.

The menus for it are terrible.

You can sort it.

Setting favorites is saving my life.

Okay.

Like, once I discovered setting favorites,

I had a big sigh of relief.

I'm like, okay,

this is

something

you need to be able to make sets.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For sure.

That is like maybe the singular big flaw of the game is that like, I would like to be able to have this version of Myel and this version of My L and this version.

Locked in as a group.

Yes.

Also,

the ability to be like, I want everyone on my party at minimum to have these.

These are where we're starting.

Yeah, I would like an equip all on parry damage up.

Right.

Or start with plus one AP.

It's going to be on everyone.

It costs three points.

It's going to be on every single character ever.

Everyone is starting with plus one AP.

Everyone is starting with 50% damage extra on the first swing.

Like every, yeah, just right across the board.

Yeah.

So that's all pretty huge.

There's

the and then yeah, sorting sorting into the smaller categories as well, but then but then admittedly, you're switching to as well from like a list of pick to it to equip to like a second version where it's like now you're the skill, you know, so that with the points managing

it's kind of a mess.

It does, yeah, uh, it does get it considering how deep you have to go into it and how much time you spend in it, it could have been a little clearer.

So, when you're talking about the um the solo uh uh stuff with your characters and how good you can play you can do though um so you have

uh i get yeah so you've been you've been you you have the the party that you're playing with have you messed around with what happens when you you wipe out and you've got people in reserve yeah hey you want to send them in yeah okay the last stand system right yeah and now

we can start talking about you want to you want to build up someone to be solo okay but you don't have to send them out first in fact send out the red the people you want to use and if you've got somebody in the back who's going to come in on the last stand and it literally says the expedition 33 last their final stand you know and all of their solo shit just goes

yeah and i had um well you know i had the girls out and i i put all that solo shit on gustave and i'm like gustave i love you but if you're coming out it's dire So here's every here's every solo buff you could possibly have

and then you know it worked out a little bit.

Yeah.

It worked out quite well.

You fight a boss or a challenge or an area, you know, and then like you're like, damn, I took it down most of the way and I learned the defense, but I slipped up on something.

And then you come back in.

You can't just clutch it out.

Ah, right.

And it feels really good to have one person come back in.

And, you know, and you get the XP reward for it as well.

And, you know, obviously dead characters make less XP, backbench characters make less XP, you know, but they're not, it's not a like all-or-nothing situation where you feel like, god damn it, I almost want to restart and not beat it with that person, right?

The reward you get for benched and dead is still worth it.

What's interesting is that like, you know, I tend to obsess over everybody equalizing.

You know, I think that the XP gradient they have in this game is the second best XP gradient I have ever seen in that characters catch up quite reasonably.

Each level is like more than twice as much as the one before it.

So, you just they really just equalize to some degree fairly naturally.

I think the only game I can think of that has a better experience curve is Lost Odyssey because Lost Odyssey has a overtly fake experience curve in which each major dungeon area gives like 10 times as much XP as the last one.

I remember every dungeon in Lost Odyssey, I would hit like the magic level that they wanted me to fight the boss at, and I would go from getting half a level of fight to one one hundredth level per fight right okay okay and I would be like oh okay I see here you're you're hitting you actually want you're hitting XP tax brackets where yeah

it's it's exponential yeah the um and and you know shout outs to the um the the point system in in um metaphor as well where you can you know max out a character and then use their points to go spend on whatever you want on other people uh other characters uh um archetypes

Something that's really fun here, too, as well, is

the

I'm going through.

So, what you're talking about, I'm really feeling it because I'm going through this area where all the enemies are giving tons of XP, and I'm leveling up super fast.

And I'm seeing how quickly the ones on the back are getting left behind, and it really is like they're not trailing too badly, you know.

And if, and I had a point,

yeah, so I had a point where like I had a good stretch of fights that like kept like a like almost like a five-level gap between my highest and lowest character.

And then

the boss fight worked out so that the benched character stepped in instead and took the kill and evened it out.

So that feels really good.

I'm having, I had, so this is one of those things that only affects like a very specific personality type, and it's a personality type like mine.

But this game handles it extremely well.

Where it's like, okay, you get like colors of Lumina, which are like give your characters like an extra skill point to use, right?

Which is really powerful.

And then I'm like, well, what if I, you know, what if I don't end up liking this character?

What if I don't like Lunae and I put like 40 points into her and now those points are gone because I can't pull them out, right?

Does that mean I'll be behind?

Well, I got a fourth party member and

had enough fucking spare color of Lumina to bring them right up to alongside the rest of the cast in like 10 minutes.

Oh, yeah.

Like they were like two Lumina behind.

It was like 39, 40, 40, and like 35.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

And I was like, oh, that's great.

But then I'm like, well, what if this system compounds?

What if I get, you know, for there's probably like six or seven party members, blah, blah, blah.

You know?

And

so I asked somebody, I asked a friend of the show, Gene.

It's like, okay, so, you know, what's the cap on these?

Right?

And his answer was, like, I don't know.

My highest capped character was like fucking 370.

Oh, Jesus.

And I'm like, oh,

it doesn't stop at 99?

It doesn't stop, huh?

Oh, well, then fuck it.

So, well, here's one thing I saw, right?

So

got a party member moving through and new party member, of course, comes in a little bit shy compared to the others.

And I'm looking at their number of picto points or so.

And it was like everyone is in their 40s or 50s or so.

And this person was at like 25.

And I was like, yeah, oh, that's their way behind.

Right.

Go back,

do some cleanup, and finish off a side quest.

The reward for that side quest is 40 points.

Got it.

Great.

Done.

Excellent.

So the game has ways that are intended for you to make your team catch up and hit parody.

Excellent progression curve.

Old, you know, with weapon upgrades, like old resources become trivially free.

New resources become more and more common.

And there's a good reason to like go back and do those things with new parody members that you didn't have anyway.

You see shops around the map that are like, hey, unlock an expeditioner to come back here and get the cosmetic.

I'm going to sell you stuff.

Having so many of

the items be like cosmetics is super exciting.

I love it.

I love it.

I love it.

I love it.

Super exciting.

Like,

I do a really hard challenge, and then the reward is not like a big sword or a piece of armor.

It's a fucking shirt.

And I was like, yes.

I remember.

this is a minor spoiler for a type of side content in the game that in act one I got to a beach

and

I saw that the beach was not a combat challenge it was a platforming challenge that's the that's I was telling you about the water

it is a platforming challenge that is fairly extreme.

I think it is it is like way past what you would expect the game to want from you, especially considering the game is kind of slippery and doesn't have a very good jump.

For the engine it's built in, this is what I was talking about when I said it's asking you to platform, and you're like, guys, this is not what the game is made to do.

Music sounds like Fall Guys.

And

I'm sure those are going to get harder.

That first one did not take me long.

And

I was overwhelmed by like

the obvious inspiration that it took from both Fall Guys and FF14.

That is a Final Fantasy 14-style jumping puzzle.

The summer event every year has a beach

platforming puzzle that looks like that fucking thing.

Okay, and I just had Fall Guys when I saw it.

The types of like

the jumping isn't super good, so you have to learn this dumb shit to deal with it is more or less the same.

So I was, I was so fucking ready to fucking do it, and the reward is like an ugly swimsuit.

And I'm like, fuck yeah, ugly swimsuit.

That was so worth it.

That was so worth it.

Early 1900s, you know, bathers beach suit.

And just have this like fucking massive package bulging out.

out.

Like good for you, buddy.

Oh,

I got one for Lune.

Yeah.

So

I mean, to be perfect,

it might just be the way it's modeled or so, but like the

same almost applies.

There is a very distinct

mons pubis that is

that is visible.

But anyway,

one of the challenges in one of the fuck you hard areas is coming at you with like become a parry god right now.

Right now, right?

And like sit here and just like fucking do it.

I'm going to do it.

Don't worry.

I got it.

And you do it, and then it's like, you fucking crushed it.

Here's a dress.

Yeah, that's my period.

And it's such a cool dress.

I love it.

You know, I'm so excited by that.

So

little bits of

little bits of,

I guess, future advice from the future, from the year 2000.

If you

there's some characters, or the rather, there's some challenges that are around the world that you're, yeah, you walk into and you're like, okay, all right, I'll be back, you know?

Sometimes it'll be like, um,

it's within grasp, but like, maybe

there's stuff that you can miss

because

something that you, uh,

someone that you will meet later effectively is a blue mage.

And if you want to get blue mage abilities, you have to fight the things that give you those things.

And if you kill those things before someone is available, then you're going to miss out on that opportunity.

So consider that.

But at the same time, if you are able to kill those things,

that means you're you're cruising you are you are and and so you know I don't know about the completionist

Sake you know feeling I don't know if there's necessarily perhaps a ways in chat here So I'm gonna maybe it you know, maybe there's a way in the future to deal with that I guess perhaps people that might know okay.

I'm seeing a bunch of nays, so maybe there's a way that you can collect things that you've missed or so.

So I hear braying and whining from the animals in the pen.

But the initial

thing I kind of was like, oh shit, I got something here that I saw, and I was like, ooh, I'm glad I waited for that challenge to get that way to lock that out.

All right, wait a sec.

Are you saying there's a character that's like a blue mage in this not Final Fantasy game?

Yeah, there you go.

So I'm going to be blunt.

I have, it has been a long time since I played a game that I was so consistently impressed by its universal excellence

in every single aspect of its presentation, design,

visuals, sound,

etc.

And I, and

I ran into Ben Starr.

Yep.

And I don't believe

the interview that I saw where they're like, Clive was written after this character.

I don't believe you.

Yeah.

I mean, that is a lie.

At the same time, like, I kind of, you have to wonder, I'm like, is this just Ben Star now?

Is this just Ben Star being Ben Star?

Ben Star voices like 10 different characters in this game.

But Clive is Clive, and

then, like, are we going to just be

Cloiving it up forever now?

Because I'm down for more time with Clive.

And I'm taken away by a controversial opinion.

I'm like, you could have just put the name Final Fantasy on this game.

Don't sully Claire Robson.

No, no, that's not sullying.

That's like, that is like the goal.

These people wanted to make a goddamn Final Fantasy game, and they made one of the best ones.

That's crazy.

It's amazing.

It's their first game.

They're amateurs.

What's interesting is, as well, the fact that it's like so,

it's so RPG turn-based, but

the part that I guess is like asking you to react defensively, you know?

I'm like, there's up to a certain point in the Final Fantasy timeline, I'd be like, hmm, I wonder how much you'd want to lean into that.

But now that we've had a fucking Devil May Cry Final Fantasy game, it's like, oh, yeah, no, you can do that.

That's not a problem.

But also, I say Lost Odyssey because Lost Odyssey is also JRPGness.

Lost Odyssey is not quite Final Fantasy, not really, but it is kind of maybe.

But

in that it's very straightforward with its JRP Genus, and then it's putting some cool QTEs on top of that, and the art style is carrying it and doing amazing things.

I,

with that, though, so two things about this game that

one, there is one unique issue that I'm experiencing here.

And are you playing on PC?

Yes, sir.

Okay.

So

I am having a very peculiar thing where

every once in a while, and it might just be a setting, it might be a video thing or something.

Fucking keyboard shit.

No, not the keyboard shit, because the mouse is popping up and that's kind of annoying, but that's not it.

I'm getting everyone talk about that.

Little frame skips.

Yeah.

And I don't think they would ever matter except for when you're frame skipping me in the middle of a parry sequence.

Yes.

And so I have

turned that shit down so that I'm crushing 100 frames

in all scenarios.

Like it is a gorgeous game.

It is an absolutely immaculate, beautiful game.

And I would love to play it at the highest, most picturesque painted settings possible.

But like I was running around at 80 frames and then I was fighting a boss and it dropped to like 45 and that caused me to like have like a judder.

I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you cannot

do that.

Can't do that.

You do not have this.

And I'm playing, my way of playing this game, as you can imagine, is on the razor's edge, where I'm like, I will defend or I will, I'm feast or famining through the game in a lot of ways.

And so.

Are you playing heaven or hell?

Yes.

And with that in mind, I'm like, if I fucking parry all five hits of this sequence and then like the sixth one goes

and then I take the hit and die, that sucks because that fight took a while.

You know?

Well, I don't think the game.

I think you're still probably better off.

I don't think the game runs at 60 on anything else.

I'm not certain.

I'd have to check.

Hold on, let's just find out.

Let's just type it into the internet.

I need to go play with my settings because I haven't really done so.

And,

you know, now that the parry challenging is getting really, really fucking scummy, like, there are characters who are doing

startup to their animation that looks identical, but like one of multiple things might happen.

You know, so like if you start getting into the rhythm of like, oh, I know what your move list is, or you start getting into the rhythm of I'm just doing this musically, no, you can't.

Because sometimes it's going to force you to

force you to

make sure you are reacting to what's coming at you.

And, like, yeah, I've had a couple hiccups that like stole hits.

30 FPS on the weaker consoles and then performance mode on the good ones is 60.

Okay.

Yeah, I'll take the hit for consistency because timing matters.

This is a game, you know, like

if you have to do parries, if you have to do fucking QTEs that are like really, really some QTEs are really like last-minute placed, you know, the timing on them is very sharp.

So yeah, same thing.

You got to make sure that that performance is rock solid.

And with that now brings me to a strange conundrum I've been having.

This game is excellent by all accounts.

And it's one of those things where when I hit a game that's like that's super solid, I always kind of go over to Punch Bomb, and I'm like, hey, here's one you might want to hit.

You

might want to check it out.

I've been doing the same with Brad.

I'm just like, oh, it's so universally excellent.

It's unbelievable.

There's so much good stuff here for you.

Now, the problem is that for her,

her preferences are such that

if she can put it on easy or put it on something where the execution isn't as necessary, if it's mainly about decision-making, she can enjoy herself, right?

But anytime the reactions and stuff get too demanding,

it becomes like becomes an issue, you know?

And

so now I'm kind of trying to figure out, like, I don't know what the game looks like on Easy.

See if that works.

I don't know.

Just pumping Vit one.

So I was going to say, I don't know what the game looks like on EZ, but I am curious.

I'm like, if you have enough defense, can you play this like a traditional RPG?

I bet you totally can.

I bet you totally can.

Where you just take hits and deal hits?

You know?

I bet you totally can.

Because that would be a that would be one answer.

Fantastic.

Battles would take longer, I assume.

Yeah, for sure.

But I bet you totally can.

Okay.

People in the chat are saying, yeah.

Yes, okay.

Because that's that.

That's awesome.

If you can play it, if you can play it where it's just like, all right, we've removed this timing element from it necessarily, unless every once in a while you want to try it, but for the most part, you know,

then that's great.

There are,

there are fuck you

avoid this or die

like

scenarios.

But I do find the optional challenges to be like much more demanding than like the mandatory ones, you know?

Okay.

So yeah, I need to look up to see what a version of this game looks like or so where, yeah, she could go through it and not necessarily worry about that stuff because there's so much good.

other otherwise and i'm just like like at one point like she walked in while i was like hitting one of these like insane tactical like, you know, making affinity changing enemies and parrying like a sequence of five things and she was like, oh Jesus, is this what you were recommending?

And I'm like, yeah, but but I'm I'm doing that to myself though.

You know, no, I'm going, I'm, I'm, my reach may be exceeding my grasp right here.

So like one of the things that that really stood out to me is that, you know, I'm streaming it and I was fighting a chromatic

and

I was fighting the chromatic for a while because they could take a lot.

They have a lot of

health.

And

the womph noise for parry timing is quite excellent.

It's really quite useful.

But also, once you learn the parry timing, I ran into the situation where a chromatic would start an attack and I would just turn my head to this other monitor.

Yeah.

Because you're reacting to the noise.

I'm like reading chat and I'm talking to people.

It's like, once you have it, you have it.

For those enemies.

For that guy.

For that guy and that move.

I promise you, there are other enemies who are like, this is the startup, but what's coming?

You have to react to the

Elden Ring Margie.

Yeah, it's not about the wind-up.

It's about the beginning of the active frames, and you have to do one or two different timings depending on what's active, you know?

The timing parry for 33 is so interesting.

They want you to parry while the move is inside your character.

It's not, it's not the window.

100%.

It's not the slider for like dodge timing and then parry in the middle.

I'm going to hold up my arm and then the attack will hit my arm in the parry animation.

That counts as a parry.

Yes, if you were looking at a video timeline, you would take the active window and put it right in front of your character.

And then everything before that is like, you know, loose fail state, right?

And here, it's like the parry window goes after you on the timeline.

So yeah, if the sword is inside of you and you're a little bit late, like you can still make it work because it wants it.

Yeah, that's the best way to describe it.

Coyote time, but for parries.

Coyote time.

Are you not familiar?

So Celeste is the first game I play that has coyote time in which you're going to go to a jump and then the jump, you will not fall until your character is like one full character off the platform.

Oh, Donkey Kong Country.

Jump off of nothing.

It's like Wiley Coyote suspended in air.

Okay, okay.

Donkey Kong Country jumps.

It's a way to give you just a little bit of extra leeway on tricky jumps.

Yeah.

So

it's so weird to see in action where I'm like, I know I was late on that parry, but you still gave it to me.

And

it's.

There's like, I don't, I'm trying to think of like, I think sometimes in souls, right?

There's like

there's, there's attacks that come at you at such a speed where you're basically

you're aiming to press the button on the impact, not before it, type of thing, you know?

Yeah.

And then, yeah, there's this, so what you get here is this weird mixture because there's, there's stuff where there's things, there's enemies coming at you and you're doing that timing we're describing.

And then there's also stuff where it's like,

this is only ocular.

There is no visual cue for you.

You just have to hear it type of thing.

that's not true.

The accessibility means that you can visually react to it.

But it's not as obvious as a big arm going up or so, you know?

This game is so fucking awesome.

And I got to some bits.

Like, yeah, I finished act one.

I got to some bits that were like,

God, if you couldn't figure out it was French before,

get ready for this fucking

film-grained 4x3,

black and white, audio-distorted,

sad, operatic French lady in the background cutscene that I know won't make any sense until I have to watch the movie again.

I'm like, just so fucking French.

Oh my God.

I am choosing to wear the baguette on my back, and I am choosing to play the vinyl of, you know,

Lumiere.

And I'm listening to my beautiful boom bado.

And I'm like, like, yes, I'm enjoying the Frenchness of everything happening right now.

It's so fucking, it's hilarious.

And like they know

that French stuff is hilarious.

Leaning in?

Like that you run into Esquier

and Esquier is French.

And

that's the joke.

It's that he's French.

That's it.

Yeah.

No, you're looking around at these big gargantuan creatures that are completely inhuman, and one of them has a beret on, and

you're like,

yeah, okay, let's go talk to you.

I bet you I know what you're about, you know, and like, just like fucking cave of beasts, and of the beasts, one of them is just like, why hello, you know?

I'm a big fan of the strongest ice attack ever.

I don't know if you remember that.

There's an enemy that attacks you with the strongest ice attack ever.

Okay.

That is the name of the attack.

Okay, I don't remember.

And I was like, how strong.

Oh,

man.

Like, just, all right.

The text on these attack names are not lying.

And something I've been waiting on too that I want to see a bit more of is there's been a couple, but they're definitely the one thing that needs needs to be dialed up heavily is more characters need to be explaining, exclaiming how much they could use some wine right now.

Right?

Just like, ah, you know, in boute, just how much they would want a ver, you know what I mean?

Like, it would be so fantastic.

Because there's once or twice where they're just like, oh, man, I could use a bottle.

You know, but

that, that is truly the mark.

But yeah, Expedition 33 is like an easy standout for a Game of the Year contender.

And more importantly, for this new studio, it is apparently on track to sell like millions and millions and millions.

Beautiful, wonderful.

Congratulations.

Also,

we're going with our impressions

so far.

And last week, I was talking about how

the linear nature of

the progression and stuff and that kind of hallway, and then it opens up and stuff.

That motherfucker opens up proper, big, big.

I believe I'm at the point of the game where

proper, big, big.

Big opens.

never mind,

you know.

Still like zones where you go in and it's just like big, it's still kind of like, oh, just go pick up a record over there.

It's like a big area of just music to pick up.

So there's still some big empties, but shit opens still shit still opens up quite a bit.

So

yes,

I'm happy to

continue

pushing and chilling for this game because it is fantastic and deserves all the accolades.

Claire Obscure.

Expedition 33.

It's so good game.

Okay.

So on my end,

only other thing, the Evo Japan Watch Party went down.

I think that you really made the right decision by not being in that venue in person.

Well, it's in Japan, so, you know,

that would have been very difficult.

Apparently it was pretty hot.

Oh, Japanese summers are brutal.

Yeah, apparently, it was pretty hot.

I heard

the Strive Finals had like equipment failure overheat.

Overheating PS5s is, I've been hearing.

I've been hearing as well.

That's brutal, man.

That sucks.

Because what are your solutions?

Do it somewhere else?

The whole point is to do it here.

Yeah,

that's a problem that needs to be addressed.

And

that can't be going down like that, for sure.

That's crazy.

But

the brutality of a Japanese summer cannot be avoided.

It's kind of like

you know going in, you know.

I remember like shit.

I mean, back in the day, like watching Genshiken and just like the lineup of the from like real life of Comiquet, people just on the

a bunch of dudes just lined up on the wall corner with their towels.

And it's just like, this is the fucking towel zone.

We're going to just sit here for a while and,

you know, before you can go back in.

So we did the, but yeah, we did the watch party.

That was a lot of fun.

It was very cool going through it with everybody just kind of like watching highlights of the best moments and

everything from the day before.

Essentially, you know, because it's Japanese hours, we would

start in

Eastern time zone.

We did 12 to 5 and just like went through each game through like all the best moments in pools and everything up up to top eights and stuff.

Um, a lot of fun too, as well, because yeah, it was the main games are Street Fighter VI, Tekken, and Guilty Gear Strive, uh, Grand Blue Fantasy versus KOF-15.

But there was a Virtu Fighter V

uh Revo 5v5 Teams bracket and a third strike teams bracket, and those were a lot of fun to watch, like still doing it.

You know, we talk about the old salary men that just post up and play these games.

They are, it's like, okay,

you are someone that's been playing forever and you're a beast, but you're a family man and you're not going to take a trip to Vegas, but this is in your backyard.

Tarot, get the fuck up, head down to Evo, Japan, and whoop some ass, please.

Thank you.

And yes, there was some, there was some good shit.

It's always fun to see that.

And a lot of names as well from like way back in the day

competing and doing doing

well.

So fun, fun stuff.

Shout outs to Evo.

We had a good time with that.

There's some news that came out of Evo Japan, but we're going to talk about that a little later.

There certainly were some announcements.

But yeah, no, thankful for the opportunity.

That was very cool.

Everybody that got to tune in,

you know, that

on the main channel proper.

It was just a nice opportunity to kind of put that fucking get into fighting games intro out there, blast it out for everybody, and then to have me crawling back into the garbage for the outro as well.

Oh, that's nice.

Yep.

That's nice to put on a big stage like that.

Yeah, I'm not going to run the Bible Black outro, but at the very minimum, I'm going to crawl into the garbage so we can get that going and, you know, keep it, keep it professional to some degree.

Indeed.

You know, if I, if I, uh, if I ever would like the ability to, to return here, I suggest maybe not having edited hentai show up up on the Evo main channel.

I mean, maybe, maybe not.

You never know.

I don't know.

Yeah, they're cool.

Are they cool?

Who knows?

They're very cool, but

I just, you know, in a world where once upon a time certain Armica costumes might be an issue,

you know, it just might not be the time.

You know,

also,

the, you know, that the, the, uh, I talked about this with Sacred and Terrible Air, but the sad hilarity of

irony being misconstrued for earnest,

right?

Um,

when I, when the

get ready for your daily red pill Sigma mail clip goes up,

you know, how many, like a non-zero number of Evo viewers will be like, Really?

Or worse, you know what, you know,

yeah,

So,

yeah, yeah.

So there's that, right?

But anyways,

fun stuff.

And yeah, if you want to catch any of that, that's up on the Evo events YouTube channel as well.

Me and Reg had a good time.

And then, yeah, we'll get into some of the announcements from that a little bit later.

But

that's pretty much the deal.

It was

a full-ass weekend, you know.

So, uh,

the

this week we're going to do

um

I was going to do two sessions of cyberpunk.

I think I might do one because I still have some work to catch up on that I was not able to do because of uh the the weekend being so busy, right?

Um, but yeah, uh, pushing through to

through cyberpunk, um,

and

I think

um

I'm anticipating hitting act three fairly shortly.

Oh, yeah.

We will see

where that goes.

But I've been enjoying what that story is doing so far, for sure.

Very, very cool.

So tune in this week

about a story that I've been enjoying in a very different way than that.

I've been playing more of Hundred Line.

Ah!

Late at Night.

That's Hundred Line Last Defense Academy.

I am not familiar with Kodaka's works.

I didn't play them Dangin' Rampas,

right?

Or the

Ultra Despair Kids or whatever the Union Grandpa was.

So for context, I am at day 11 of 100.

There's a calendar system.

Yeah, it's 100 days.

Okay.

100-line defense means 100 days.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Also,

100 endings, but that's for later.

I

so maybe, maybe

this is how it's supposed to go.

I feel

like

the

Kodaka-san, the writer, is like in my face telling me I'm stupid

and telling me to just, to just, yeah, yeah, you think this is what the story is?

No, stupid.

No, it's this, actually,

you dumbass.

Like, every single time I seem to start to get a handle on the game's structure and what I think the game is going to be, the game goes, no, it's not about that.

Right, right.

It's actually a totally different game, idiot.

And you know why I think that's probably the case?

Because...

He's been writing games about switching it up and swerving on you for an entire franchise now, right?

Yeah.

When you're M-Night Shyamalan and everyone's like, yes, what's the twist?

I get it.

You are kind of like known for doing this thing.

How do you approach a novel idea with that being your signature and find ways to, I guess, keep it people who already know your tricks from still guessing your tricks?

Yeah.

He goes to a lot of trouble by adding the Dankenrompa mockery character, Dharmi, in there, who is just the fucking dangin romper jonkler,

who is just constantly going off about wouldn't it be cool if we all just killed each other and had a death game trial for it?

And they're being treated as like outrageously unreasonable, and everyone is ignoring them.

Um,

so, like, just the most, like, some of the most unlikable characters I have ever seen in anything.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, actively repugnant, horrible characters.

I kind of am starting to love them, though.

Do you get their awfulness?

Yes, yes.

Do you get to spend time with them?

Yes.

Okay.

Not much, but some.

Okay.

Yes.

This is correct.

You are expressing the correct feelings for a Danganrampa.

Horrible, horrible characters.

Let's go hang out with them next Tuesday.

I was forced to play like hardcore classic out-of-print Aeroj.

Like Aerojay.

Character, and then I got linguistics for it, so that's cool.

awful, just awful people stupidest,

the stupidest nonsense.

Um, but it's it's just like

I don't know what the fuck is going on, and I don't know what I don't know what the fucking writer wants me to think

might be going on either,

if that makes any sense.

I think

nothing, I've been given nothing.

So, I think, again, on the basis of Dag and Rampa and the fact that keeping your expectations blown out of the water, you have to let go of guessing and just sit on for the ride, right?

Just let it take you where it's going.

Stop trying to figure it out.

It is, I would say it's like actively hostile to any

form of media enjoyment other than, I guess I'm along for the ride.

It is.

It is totally fascinating.

Because there's also like, there's stuff that is like,

oh, here's a hint at something that you won't know until you have future context,

which is.

But I don't know if that's true or if it's just nonsense.

I've encountered a couple of things that could just be nonsense.

But that's what I was about to say, right?

That thing that is an indicator of whatever is also right next to a complete red herring.

And you're going to be equally invested in both, right?

And thinking about both as to the explanation of what's coming.

And then suddenly, hours later, you will walk up to the second one and you're like taking it seriously.

And then Monokuma, the bear, will have a big, dumb fart gag in front of it and be like,

and then like it was never anything serious to begin with.

And you were staring at it, getting completely distracted.

Here's an example.

Like the starting point for the game story is like fairly normal.

You live in a somewhat normal Tokyo and somewhat normal students, somewhat normal people.

But then the mascot character that you see on all the art, who is like the head of the school, is like a three-foot-tall, completely

transparent, like jelly bean person with a floating brain.

Sick.

And the fact that he's an outrageous monster freak is never brought up once.

Yep.

Ever.

Would he look cool on a t-shirt?

On a mug?

Probably.

Nah, you're not thinking hard enough.

You're not thinking stylish enough.

Absolutely.

It is so,

it is so hostile to understanding.

And I have been totally charmed by it.

Absolutely.

It's so...

It worked.

It's so consistently interesting.

Every day, I don't, like, every day my character goes to bed and I go, I have no idea what the next day in this game is going to bring.

And

the

characters' interactions are all strange and kind of tropey, but also like anti-themselves.

There's a character that is like very obviously like gay for you

and is being,

I feel like I'm reading like a fucking BL fan fiction here,

but like, I'm also convinced that the story will never go that way.

And then I finally understand

like a tweet I saw earlier from a small Victorian child, which was getting queer baited by Danganrampa is like losing chess to a dog, but the dog has been training his entire life for this, and you've never played chess.

That is fantastic.

And I was like, what an absurd thing to say.

And now I'm here and I'm like, oh, yeah, actually.

Because

this is like a fucking sloppy mess.

And I couldn't be so stupid as to fall for it.

And I'm totally falling for it.

I mean, and the thing is, too, as well, like the fact that the charm is working

is like, it must be also like when

the fact that you're playing the most recent, and this is probably the best version of the roster, you know, from all the ones going forward.

Because again, you did mention, like, you're like, I don't gel with any of the things going on in the previous ones.

I don't know with the dang dagnamic grandpa game.

And I'm thinking about, you know, when we go through, like, we talk about like the metaphor cast and how fucking sick they are, and then you're like, you think about how like annoying like some of the P3 characters were, like Junpei and Yukari and whatever.

And then you go into four and you're like, oh, that's a much better cast.

That's cool.

And then five, you're like, oh, yo, this is, these are, everyone's really great here.

And like, like, you know, there's that, like, that, that feeling of like, oh, yeah, okay.

The, the, the charm and the appeal and the cast getting more fun to hang out with over the course of these games is also applying here where you're getting probably the best version of them, you know, so

I am definitely curious because now that you see what you, what you just described is 100% what all those other characters were about in the previous games as well.

With the exception, uh,

with the exception that, like, they're all like, there's the ones that are like not horrible people

in a

particularly obvious way.

You know, there's people that are like horrible and very subtle, you'll find out later ways.

And then the ones that are normal are just like, yeah, they're going to be a corpse in like seconds.

There are two characters

on that roster that are objectively like clearly designed to make you hate them.

And

they might be like two of the there's a there's the the pathetic Kamia Twitter shithead

and then there is the guy who is obsessed with his sister

and these two might be like the actual worst characters I have ever seen in anything in my life like every time they talk I am actually just taken by oh

oh

and oh shut up i think i think i think i love them i think i love that they are like they are swinging for the moon on awfulness so i think there's a part of this of the the approach here as well that is possibly explained by the fact that

everyone is also really dumb.

Even the smart characters are like smart relative to everyone, but are super stupid in a lot of ways.

And there's a, there's just like people are like, like, like, that, that idiot is a golden retriever of a character, right?

Like, people behave like single-brain-celled idiots while also being like called...

Mindcast have like two people that are like kind of normal.

And they, they are a stark contrast to this cavalcade of fucking freaks.

Freaks.

You know, the idea of like the, you know, at least in Dangen's case, it's like you are the best in the world at a thing, whatever that thing is.

And that means you're a super crazy weirdo in so many other ways in order to be the best in the world at this one thing.

You know?

Yeah, I'm glad that that's working on you because

that's what it is.

It's also a pretty good strategy, RPG.

Like

the defense missions are, they're not super tough.

and I assume they won't get super tough for a good, long while, but they're fun, and they have good presentation.

Um, and it's nice to have, like, this will eventually turn into a visual novel with branching paths.

It's nice to actually have, like, an additional, like, actual game part to it, which is increasing your stats, fighting battles.

Um, there's, uh, there's other types of gameplay in there

that, um,

I had no idea would be there

and had this real feeling of, oh, I'm doing this now.

Oh, okay.

Sure.

Fuck it.

Fine.

Whatever.

Fine.

Fine.

Very weird.

Very weird game.

Aggressively strange.

You know,

you know

how potato girl Sasha in Attack on Titan

is like a wild ass goofy potato girl in the middle of this horrifying, violent nightmare.

That's correct.

And she's hilarious and kind of dumb, but also endearing, and it's just a nightmare.

What if the whole cast?

What if literally every single person?

What if

an entire game of potato girls in the middle of a massacre, right?

Like there's a Gaku character.

That tell that type of character.

Is it Gaku?

I forget his name, but like he's obsessed with being an asshole.

And then when you're like, can you not be an asshole?

He's like, you just hate me because I'm poor.

You fucking you piece of

this dude's hating on me because i'm poor and like i've never seen this type of character in a game before and it's wild because he won't stop and he's awful

yeah yeah yeah

you know when they go for the um

the the the nerdy crazy yandere type character it's like It's like, oh, yeah, okay.

She's doing the,

it's your fault.

I'm not powerful.

I'm not powerful.

I'm not popular style, you know, bit.

And then it, you're like, Yeah, okay, I know the deal, and then it quickly just gets like, Oh, God, what is wrong with you?

Ew, fucking, ah,

oh, God, oh, it's so horrible.

And then you just start with, then you just kind of like come all the way back around to being like, Oh, you,

you, and your gross shit.

Get out of here, yeah.

Give a little

this hundred-line game is super cool.

Nice.

Uh,

only really have a single

complaint.

And that is

that I'm at day 11 of 100, and it feels really, really, really clear to me that this visual novel has no branching paths at all until you beat it once.

Okay.

It is a fucking story

for

a while.

I don't know that I've played, like, I've there hasn't been any branches in the Danganrampa games, like, you just go through them.

There's no see, this is this.

Those are visual novels with solutions to the problems and variability, you know, then that's it.

The only things, the only things that change are how much you commit to a relationship with a character by hanging out with them based on your free time.

Uh, the main thing is that it's also written by Uchikoshi, 999,

Tons of endings.

Yes, yeah.

And

his gimmick

is

that you take pieces of information from one route into another route.

Love that.

But I don't think that is going to be happening here.

Okay.

But yeah, cool game.

Very cool.

Apparently it's got like six million fucking characters of text, which is why it's not going to be localized into a bunch of different languages.

Jesus.

It's like

it's ridiculous.

And

apparently it's doing well, which is good because apparently they're on the verge of bankruptcy.

Oh, no.

Apparently,

they are always on the verge of bankruptcy.

It's voice acted, though, right?

No.

You know what's voice acted?

Maybe one out of every 100 lines.

Okay, okay, okay.

And big

funny moments.

Important scenes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Visual novel text, you go through with the barks and the.

Oh, no.

Yeah, the barks.

But I don't like the barks.

That little Chia laugh.

Okay.

And then, yeah, big scenes.

All right.

Shall we?

Oh, I got more.

I got more, brother.

Excuse Excuse me.

I got

that new Doom game came out.

Well,

actually, technically, it comes out tomorrow.

Whatever.

The streamer tax, dumb idiot tax version of the game came out yesterday.

You got

for $128.99 Canadian plus tax.

Okay.

Well, or

got sent to me in the emails.

Yeah, okay.

I'll grab it on tomorrow then when it's not the stupid fucking

$120.

Well, maybe wait a second.

It tried to kill my computer.

Ooh.

Okay.

It crashed on me multiple times so hard I had to yank the cable out of my PC.

Oh my god.

Uh

yeah.

Maybe on console then?

Maybe.

Jesus.

The other thing.

The other thing is that.

Did you play 2016 and Eternal?

Yep.

Not the DLC of Eternal, but

the main game.

So I love those games.

I think those games are great.

They are.

And I feel like that there was a really strong, cohesive,

like,

like

identity behind 2016 and Eternal.

They're different from each other, though.

Oh, very different.

But I mean, each one of them was like, we're going to make fucking doom eternal, right?

And I feel,

I feel in my emotions

that the core concept behind this game was,

let's go make another Doom game.

Okay.

Like their goal was to ship another game that said Doom on it.

I like

Doom games.

So I know exactly what,

obviously, but

it doesn't have the fucking

spark

that I felt when I played 2016 and

Eternal.

And part of that reason is that it is very different from those two games, which I think is cool.

I think it's really awesome that it's actually extremely, extremely different.

So Doom 2016 was fairly classic, and then Eternal had you

double jumping and dashing and sidestepping and dodging and fucking trickstering all over the place.

Doing the rounds.

Yeah, yeah.

And this game has no double jump and has no dash.

And instead of being an acrobatic Doomman, you are basically a tank with a shield.

Okay.

And

you have a perfect parry system.

And you have what is essentially Stinger.

And you have essentially, you throw the shield to somebody and gets lodged in them, and it's essentially round trip.

Okay, um, as G was describing,

yeah,

and that description was apt,

um,

but you are trading that for no alternate fire on any weapon

and

much slower movement,

and okay,

is mom

is moment-to-moment flow like eternal where you're having that arcade mode style, style like keep the combo going very different okay

uh i don't know how to describe it other than just to play it um it's like it's really good and it's quite excellent

but it's just

i don't it's it's just

missing something it's it's really subjective like more than usual when i would talk about this like one of the things that i noticed right away is the music isn't mixed loud enough which is fucking weird

It's weird that the music isn't mixed loud enough.

So I had to go into the I had to go into the options and max out the music.

And then the music is

not McGordon.

I was going to say, Doom game, Doom game don't have a music controversy issue challenge impossible.

And it's also

even maxed out, it's still not loud enough.

And it's fine.

It's fine.

Is it genting?

I don't know what that means.

Gent and the well,

what the BFG division fucking is doing.

Yeah, it's doing that.

But

there's also not enough music.

Okay.

There are levels that are more wide open.

And

it took me nearly two hours to beat one of these wide open levels.

And when you're not fighting, it just.

The music just fades away into like, like, ambience.

And it's just,

it just doesn't have the same spark.

I was talking to Gene about it when I was streaming it last night.

Remember in Dune 2016 and Eternal, you had like, you know, in Dune 2016, you had

lab, then you had Martian Surface, then you had a different type of lab, then you had a factory, then you had Martian Surface, then you went to hell, then you went back to the lab, then you went to a different type of hell, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

and in eternal you would be like hell on earth

ice magic night zone coliseum weird hell you know and mario brothers level in hell you know all sorts of zany shit uh i just played seven missions in a row of

mostly brown

uh sentinel knights architecture oh okay uh stages thematically okay okay yeah i guess um well because it's it's it i so this is taking place during the wars right yeah um is it kind of limited in in where it can go and what it can do with that as a as you know the backdrop um uh yeah um

uh supposedly according to gene i have two levels before it starts to vary it up okay um

but like that first eight level pack being what is essentially the same tile set

is fucking awful.

Like, I'm so bored of that style of architecture and that style of thing.

Um,

I also

like some of the new weapons are good, a bunch of them are like, okay.

I don't think the weapon roster is nearly as strong as Doom 2016 or

Eternal.

Is there any part of it that's like going for

the previous dooms before 2016 that's like like affecting kind of like what they're, what they're doing?

I mean, 2016 was a lot like Doom, and Eternal was, I guess, closer to Doom 2.

I don't know how to describe it.

It feels like an extreme career.

Like, remember how much faster Eternal was compared to Doom 2016?

This is slower in the other direction.

Like, this is the slow Eternal in the other direction.

And it's, I'm just,

it's just not

hitting for me the way that those two did.

Okay.

Um, the fact that it tried to kill my computer doesn't help.

That's not, that's not a, you know, especially since the game is very annoying about telling you to make sure to upgrade to the latest drivers.

So that's like kind of hilarious that it would then try and kill itself.

Um,

like the shield,

The shield mechanic is excellent.

Excellent.

Nice.

But it's your secondary weapon for everything.

Like, you know, in Eternal in 2016, every single gun had a secondary weapon, secondary fire that was really interesting.

Is there no synergy between the gun that, like, with the shield to kind of make up for that?

Yes, there is.

There's a huge amount of synergy.

So there's like some, like, you get the impaler, which is basically like a railgun, and it's it's like kills with the shield, drop railgun ammo.

Or if a railgun is impaled and you throw the shield at somebody, it does extra damage.

Stuff like that.

But it just,

yeah, I don't know.

I wish I had something

more concrete than, ah, I don't know.

I don't know.

Okay.

But

because I know that like the big difference, so the difference between Doom 2016 and Eternal is huge, but I still enjoyed both for what they were doing.

And,

you know, even though

Icon of Sin or whatever,

God awful, you know, but like the idea of the like, once I understood that you're like, you locked me in a room and you want me to combo the shit out of this room and like flaw and flow state, right?

Once I understood that that's what the game was asking, I was like, cool, I'm down.

I understand what you want me to do, which is different, but it was fun when it was going.

And

in this case,

I'm open to the idea of being asked to do something else, you know?

Like, let's throw Ultrakill into the mix, right?

Ultrakill, shorter levels of just fucking intensity and bosses and crazy shit that goes down.

But yeah, tons of alternate fire, tons of ways to like, you know, remix the way you're using the same weapons and create original synergies and things like that.

Like, um,

and then mechanics that are reward, like the coin flipping mechanic, you know, is like a simple thing that is rewarding to experiment with the entire time you're running through.

So like,

like whatever they're asking me to do, if it's different from the others, that's not inherently a problem to me.

It's just, is it going to be fun when you're executing it at its peak?

Oh, it definitely is.

I just, it's one of those things.

It kind of reminds me of our talk about DMC4 last week.

It's like the levels, the wrapper around that stuff just isn't there compared to the other two.

Maybe it'll get there.

I'm going to continue playing it.

Okay.

One of the things that really does stand out dramatically is that the game has almost no story, but it has just enough story to make you go, wow, this story is stupid and bad.

Like, there's like maybe

a single cutscene at the beginning and ending of every mission, and I like nothing is happening in them, but it's just enough for you to go, this is stupid as fuck.

Like, this doesn't even need to be here at all.

Okay.

Like,

actively dumb.

So, I mean, like, are we going

like, because I mean, because the story in the original, too, is like,

I love how straightforward and evil and just like corporate hellscape.

Here comes the maker.

She's terrible.

Absolutely.

And him on his ship, just hearing everybody freaking out and picking up the scientist, the clips of the scientist fucking goop in her panties talking about the slayer.

I'm like, yeah, that's great.

Sure.

Yeah, so people in the chat are talking about Eternal and how, like, Eternal was that times a million because Eternal had tons of story and tons of logs and tons of details about the Doom Slayer is actually this and they're actually Jesus and they're from heaven and oh my god, right, all that nonsense.

In the beginning.

Yeah, and Hayden and you know.

So it's that, but because it's a prequel,

like nothing is actually happening, but it's still doing that thing.

So like there's an entire level, an entire level that the only thing that is happening is we have to defend the level from the bad guys.

That's it.

That's all of it.

And they'll have like a couple cutscenes of like demons scheming, but it's like, what are they scheming?

They're scheming to blow it up.

And it's like, it could just not be there at all.

Okay.

So

because the way, whenever I like looking at the premise and sort of set up for these types of things, it's like you hear, you heard about, you know, the war through lore and tapes and as a reference in the past.

And like, is it, is it like going back to the Clone Wars?

And I mean, never feels like that.

Never mind the shit, never mind the show and the good stuff that happens, you know, many seasons in or whatever.

But like, it's like, what was the Clone Wars?

And it's like, it's this arena

in a dusty Coliseum where you can't see and those lightsabers are turning on in this one circle moment.

Yeah, no, now you're in it, and you're doing the war that everybody's scared to piss about the Slayer for.

And it's like, yeah, no,

it's an absolutely excellent game if it's not trying to kill your computer.

But I'm kind of unimpressed compared to 2016 and Eternal.

And I'm extra unimpressed considering the game is more expensive than normal.

Like, it's $89.99 Canadian normal circumstances.

Right.

Like, you know?

I'm going to keep banging away at it for a little bit,

but I would like to.

I mean, maybe part of the problem is that I love Eternal.

Like, I think Eternal is the fucking peak.

Like, people, some people didn't like.

Like, I remember when I played

the Eternal and I got to that hell level that was like fucking Mario Brothers spinning fucking flame balls and double jumping.

And it was a goddamn Mario thing.

And some folks were like, oh, I don't care for this.

This is stupid as fuck.

To which I say, yeah, Doom is the stupidest fuck video game.

Give me my double jump so I can get my extra life.

So

based on what you're saying, I mean, as somebody who thoroughly enjoyed Big Daddy drilling my way through

Bioshock 2.

I was like,

yes.

If the shield is good and fun and it's like rewarding enough, I'm super down to just enjoy that shield all the way through.

And that'll do it for me, you know?

Well,

by the third level, you can completely upgrade this shield to maximum, which is what I did.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

And I know it's going to be what you did, Doo.

Yeah.

And you should do that.

I'm a fan of meleeing obviously in general but like in a first-person game where um

you know it works in sync with your your your gun variety and stuff to like play off the two together where you can do things from far and then get in close and then do things from far and get in close and kind of combo and stuff like yeah that sounds that sounds rad as hell so uh interesting i wish the music was better and more of it

Yeah, and

I also think that

I wish Mick could be on all things at all times forever, but that's just not the reality right now.

I also think that maybe they've gone too far with the map.

So, you know how Doom games would like Eternal and 2016 would show you like, where a secret was on the map, but it was up to you how to get there?

It's been a minute, but.

Right, it would.

It would show like a question mark.

Okay, well, how the fuck do I get there, right?

They have gone too far.

So, like,

one of the pickups in this game is gold, and you'll sometimes get gold on the ground, like health potions are.

You know how they're all in a line?

You know, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And when you look at the map and you're within a certain distance, you will just see like literal lines of question marks leading to secret areas.

Okay.

And like one of them was like, turn down this corridor and walk down the line of gold.

And there's a big gold at the end.

And I punched it and it said, you got a secret.

And I'm like,

I didn't even jump to get in here, man.

So

it's not like finding finding the little Nendos, little doom guys around.

You still do, but like a lot of them are like, come on, man.

This isn't a fucking secret.

Give me a fucking break.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Okay.

There is one other thing, and it is really, really, really funny because it exists in direct

exists in this moment in time.

So you're playing a lot of Expedition 33.

Yes.

And Expedition 33, it has a fairly tight, but not unreasonable parry timing.

The parry timing on ultra violence and ultra nightmare and all the all the harder difficulties in Doom, uh, the Dark Ages is like

90 frames

and

exists

in a

sphere

maybe

10 feet in diameter around your character.

Okay, okay, okay.

It's counter, it's not parry.

It is, yeah.

They say it's parry.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

It is wild.

And through these types of discussions, we find words to iron down feelings that don't have words until this moment.

What you just described is so interesting because when a parry window is so generous that it extends too far ahead of the rhythm of the moment, it stops feeling good.

If you hit way too early on something and then it happens like a half second after, it's like, oh,

you didn't

feel like it was impacting on the moment.

I'm able to parry slow-moving attacks after I have dodged them and they are behind me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's not good.

That's not good.

That's not good.

Right.

And the funny thing about that is like, to,

if you just change your perspective on it, a character doing a counter, like a catch,

I'm anticipating something, and then it comes in, is like, oh, that's fine, right?

But for it to be a like, I am deflecting what you're doing off, it needs to be within

a heartbeat feeling, you know, like it's got to be, you can't, you can't get that too loose or the feeling's gone, especially if there's like a slowdown associated or something like that.

One of the things that's interesting is that this game's option menu allows for an extremely wide variety of changes to the gameplay.

So you can turn up the game speed, you can turn up the movement speed, you can turn up enemy speed, enemy damage, turn it down.

You can fuck with the parry timing.

You can make the parry timing more strict

if you wanted.

I'm playing on Ultra Violence, which is the Doom's classic hard mode, which is the way I've played through every Doom game since I was literally a child.

And

all the difficulties is hardest parry timing is around,

I don't know, 60% of the way up on

the thing.

So, when I'm talking about, I think the game is kind of slow, and I think the parry timing is incredibly generous.

I will see people either in my chat or comments or

Blue Sky or here right now

saying, Well, just change, just dial in the knobs to make the game feel how you want it to feel.

And

I

don't know how to explain that.

Like, I don't want to have to fine-tune past what the dev intended for me.

I'm already picking a difficulty to try and figure it out.

And I'm already QAing what settings crash my computer.

And now I am being asked to season it for myself

because the default spices aren't

as to my liking as the prior games they put out.

Well, I can certainly see like increasing

something's forgiveness to be like, you know, an accessibility option or like the hi-fi rush, I have no rhythm, you know, version of things.

But I get, yeah, making it stricter on yourself while

I see what you mean.

I'm not the kind of guy who brings my own hot sauce to the restaurant.

I get it.

And

I don't know.

It just doesn't.

It feels unconfident.

And it feels like the kind of thing that I would be messing with after I beat the game.

Right?

So.

I'm also reminded of how I super praise the way of the passive fist for four or five difficulty sliders that change up you know the challenge according to what you want it to be um and you know in a lot of cases like there or even in like um kid icarus you like slide up that difficulty and then the rewards go up or whatever the case is you know like if there's like an incentive to pushing something up or down that that becomes part of the game then i think that's fine too right so

um

the I'm reminded of like going into the options and tweaking that stuff is perhaps less fun than in Hades where you're doing like um

uh heat you know and you're putting on heat challenges where you're like oh it's part of the game to tweak these little things actually well it's with a with a game like Doom I feel like tweaking on these kinds of settings is like kind of self-defeating because like okay so I want to dial in how fast I want the game to be right and I want to dial in the parry timing and I want to dial into my taste so what is my option here play through an entire mission with my new settings decide, oh, you know what?

I really overdid it.

Should I continue on with different settings that have different enemy layouts and different challenges and realize actually I underdid it this time?

Or should I replay the mission I just played with the new setting?

Like, how long should I be spending to dial it in?

I mean, if they drop you into sounds like a reason to drop you into the void with one demon to just see what the feeling is when you tweak a setting, you know?

Also, and I'm sure someone in the chat can clarify this because I'm at like 60% on the parry thing, whatever ultraviolence does.

I don't think

that the, I think that the minimum parry timing is probably still extremely generous by like my standards.

Yeah, well, so I guess that would make very little difference.

Now, are you completely breezing through Expedition, right?

Or are you finding some challenge in that?

Expedition, I am ping-ponging between breezing and challenging.

Okay.

Because if you were to, if you strange curve.

Because if you sat here and said, like, oh, I find no challenge in those parries, and I'm like, well, then you're just a parry god compared to all the us mere mortals.

Like, I know I turned Expedition up to Expert because I wanted to fight more.

To fight more, yeah.

I would say, too, that the.

Fuck.

God damn it.

I just had the point.

Brain soup.

Anyway.

Sliders,

in the case with Doom or so, like.

yeah, I, I, I, um, fuck.

Oh, that's what it is.

So, the, the idea of like having to play through the level and everything like that.

Like, this is where now a

Armored Core just going, like, hey, you're slightly tweaking the percentages on a slight little gun on your slight little loadout change.

Jump into a little lab thing, see what that looks like.

Okay, you like that feel?

Okay, now go into the mission, right?

Like, a game like front mission, not front mission, armored core is like

saying tweak as gameplay test here now, sortie, you know?

Um, But what, yeah, if what you're describing is kind of just like an extensive list of things that are not necessarily a part of the game design, but are more just kind of like, I want to make this a bit

yeah, so there's a really good example of what I'm talking about.

There's someone in the chat right now who goes, who points out that there are options to fix the issues that I'm having, to which I'm saying, no, I don't want to mess with those options.

I don't want to fix it.

I just want to complain.

I don't enjoy tweaking it with sliders.

That's actively miserable.

And at what point do I feel that I'm like, like, how much of, how much time do I want to spend dialing it in

before I can make it feel as good as the two games they put out before?

Right?

Like, I, I never for a second thought, oh, I wish this was faster, or I wish the jump timing, or I wish this was different

on

Eternal or 2016 or Doom 1 or 2.

The only game I could ever think of in the entire Doom franchise that I ever sat around going, man, I would really like to change this was Doom 3 because I think the flashlight shit they had there was fucking stupid.

So look, I love custom

difficulty settings, and I think that's great.

And I think more games need to have that and lean into that.

But I understand the feeling of, I don't want to make it myself.

That,

you know,

that's a reasonable

takes time to actually dial

somebody in in here actually mentioned how do I feel about Wrath of the Righteous because Wrath of the Righteous the Pathfinder RPGs They have super super in-depth sliding scales for difficulties and the way that it works is you pick like I want normal easy casual or whatever and then it shows you what sliders it's changing

But if you're like I don't want critical hits anymore you can turn that off

And if I if you had to ask me how I feel about like the sliding scale difficulty options and Wrath of the righteous, my actual actual response would be: it would be really nice if Pathfinder Kingmaker and Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous had a single well-balanced difficulty setting in their entire fucking series of settings.

Every single fucking difficulty option in those games is too much or too little.

And you have to tweak things.

You kind of have to go into the sliders to turn it up or turn it down because easy is a cakewalk and normal is brutal.

And it's like, can you not just make a

good difficulty?

Please?

So there's definitely a confidence you want the developer to go into like the way they're making a game with this stuff and like release it, you know, feeling good.

The difference that I think is important here is when we talked about Hi-Fi Rush when it came out and about Expedition 33 right now,

it feels good, but even like the thing of like, I want more fights where you're like, okay, let me crank that up a bit, or the rhythm and the musical element of hi-fi rush kind of coming into play.

Those are things where, unlike Doom, they were released as their own original first entries into their franchise.

And Doom, you're comparing to the last two Doom games you played, right?

So

if this were a brand new thing on its own without any other comparison points directly, it would probably be a little different for like, yeah, go in, change the setting, tweak that way, or tweak this particular thing for the feeling.

But because you're straight up going, like, I hope this is more fun to do Meternal, you know, then you're attached to that part as well.

I think that makes a difference.

I mean, at the end of the day, I think, like,

I think, in terms of like

levels, enemies, weapons, et cetera, I think it's just like slightly worse than Eternal.

But I think most of my lack of excitement is like I prefer dashing and double jumping and glory killing more than i appreciate parrying or throwing that shield

okay and i i think i think at the end of the day i might

yeah i might not we'll see we'll see sounds interesting also the game's too expensive yeah if the if the game shut my pc off when i turned it on 89.99 is too expensive no 120

software game it should be the most immaculate presentation possible $120 Canadian dollars to play it a day early does not sound like my...

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, not $120, $128.99 plus tags.

Excuse me.

Excuse me.

My mistake.

To play it a day early is.

Yeah.

Right now in the early access part, I assume there's going to be a day one patch tomorrow.

I was beta testing it last night, like overtly.

And I got in touch with somebody who informed me that this game is coming in super hot and they threw as many bodies as they possibly could to get it out by the date it was.

And maybe, maybe they didn't

round off enough of the technical edges that they should have.

Doom as a franchise 2016 and Eternal have teased the big mech as a cool thing.

Have you piloted the mech?

Yeah, it's cool.

Okay.

It's a fairly simple section.

The mech doesn't have a lot going on, but I mean, it's Vogue and cool.

Okay.

There's also a dragon sequence in which you ride a dragon, and it's kind of like Panzer Dragoon.

Sure, yeah.

And there's not a lot going on,

but it's cool.

Yeah, jump like Edo Impact, you know?

Let's go.

Just punch, chain, giant step, do cool thing.

All right.

But that's more or less for me.

You can catch more of my bullshit

continuing on with Doom and Expedition 33 over at twitch.tv slash patstaresat.

Also, this weekend, Paige and I are going to be going back to Deltarune, chapters one and two,

because that Deltarune is on the horizon.

And we played that shit a long time ago.

A long time ago.

Sorry, I just had a thought on Doom that like

throughout that conversation for everything, like one of the biggest clouds above it is just the fact that like the music thing, man, because like not only is it just it sucks with Nick Gordon, but it's also like, man, that was like some of my favorite shit that he put out.

Like it was so instrumentally a part of like how cool the first games felt.

And, you know,

it is really strange that I had to go into the option.

Extreme bummer.

It is, it is weird.

Yeah.

It is strange.

Like, like, you don't like little pieces here that feel like maybe they could have gone for another pass.

Hmm.

Anytime, anytime, like, like, some games,

the music is tied to the identity much stronger than others.

And, like, this is fucking one of them.

And, you know.

Anyway, anyway.

All right.

Yeah, go down to twitch.tv/slash patstairs.

Do more content.

Enjoy more content.

Yeah, going to post a schedule up on Woolly Woolves on my socials and Woolly vs.

on YouTube and Twitch.

Quick break?

Yeah, let's do a quick break.

Very.

All right.

Quick word from our sponsors.

Hey, I love you, sponsor.

My eyeball.

My eyelids twitching.

I need to.

Oh, no.

That keeps.

Yeah, apparently

it's caffeine, stress, or sleep.

Well, I mean, it's probably all three.

Yes.

So here's the thing, though.

If you want to just crank it up, you'll look really cool before you look really bad.

If you look like totally done with everyone's shit, and then you're going to look like everyone's shit is done with you.

If I could just like concentrate it so that both eyes twitched at the same time, then I'd be fine.

I don't think that's true.

It's currently

my right lid is twitching, and I just need, I need it to be both.

Yeah, I get like a weepy eye on my left sometimes.

Got to be some kind of allergy thing.

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I have shown before, but I got a little,

I got to change the focus every time, but little monk, little monk woolly over here.

Oh my goodness.

Came out pretty cool.

That does look pretty cool, man.

Yeah.

So

shout outs to Hero Forge.

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Let's see here.

Where was I

pull it up?

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Okay.

So.

Yeah, when you said stealth mode and piss into the side, I legit, I got confused and thought you meant like into like the trash can next to the toilet.

Because that's not stealth.

The loudest of all.

No, that's the loudest thing ever.

No, no, because it's got like, it's got like cushions in there.

It's like a little stealth in there to absorb it.

Oh, yeah.

But then it's not, no, that's not.

You've got your fellows in there.

That stealth, that smell is not going to be very stealth.

No, that's not stealth at all.

No, no, no.

You need to, you need to

like compensate, check your angle, and then compensate for the stream line by having it hit the curve and to be as silent as possible.

Yeah, it's a whole thing.

It requires visual calculus.

All right.

What's going on?

As far as I'm concerned, our top story today is: have you seen this fucking Soul Calibur 2 shit?

I have.

I'm so glad.

This is our top story.

I'm so glad that this has come back from

high school lunchtime

to now.

Is this, do you recognize, is this a video from the past?

No.

No, no, okay.

It's brand new.

Okay.

I've seen tons of many new videos also.

Okay.

This thing, there is a Soul Calibur 2 parody intro video.

I've retweeted it on my, you know,

it's out there.

It reminds me of the old internet.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

It reminds me, it's so funny.

It's just two minutes of someone doing a Soul Calibur 2 narrator intro doing funny jokes over the narrator talking and timed and just executed in a way where it feels like I'm watching something from 2003.

Like, this is what the internet used to actually be.

It was absolutely.

You know, I don't know what to like, it's noteworthy because I didn't know how much I missed just clicking on things like this back in the day.

Hey, you kids, you kids now, you actually don't know this.

The internet used to actually be funnier.

It's it's what, like, and it's just all concentrated, timed.

It's that same era of gags that worked with like the way I edited Fighterpedia together.

You know, 100%.

Fate places his hands on the rim of the bowl and releases his fate into the toilet of time.

Boah, you know,

horror spreads like a raging tempest, like a thousand fursuits storming the halls of a Marriott Hotel.

I'm just like, yes, take me back.

Two souls stand like towers as fate crashes into the

just moving on.

You know?

It's great.

It's great.

Your homework today, everybody, is to go watch this video and just enjoy.

You know?

Yeah.

Trapped in a small cage with six children and nothing to eat, he emerged three days later, victorious as the lone survivor.

Battle one.

I think the one that gets me and really like sent me over the edge was just, I'm not reading that one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the intro just cuts.

It's the press start noise also abruptly cutting them all off.

It's perfection.

It's so well done.

Soul Calibur 2, still the best Soul Calibur game.

Oh, God.

It'll never be like that again.

I mean,

the one that went viral was not properly credited, but the

stuff

4 and 5 is the creator of the video.

So

kudos.

Kudos to just going, reaching right back into the internet we remember and giving us a reminder of a better time, you know?

All right.

What else is going on?

Well, back to the modern day.

Hey, you like.

What are other fighting games doing in the world?

Oh, we can go there too.

Sure.

That's all right.

Japan happened, but also, like, there's SNK news.

There's a couple things.

So for one,

well, how about that fucking Wolf Hawkfield?

Woolly.

Back.

I saw a comment.

I think it was on, I don't know where it was,

but it gave me

like a dear

spark of joy in my heart when I saw someone go, are they making this game exclusively just for pat

i mean akira had to be the first akira was always going to be the first yes but then wolf

my boy wolf is the first thing

top billing and he gets this sick ass wwe style intro where he's basically like undertaker biker mode now yeah like he's part of the pack and you know he's like his the the pack broke up yeah yeah yeah

in the time that has passed, you see him coming out with the beard, and he's been through a whole wrestling arc.

Rufflemonger has a fantastic...

There's two videos he put out going over the trailer.

But

Rufel correctly points out that this singular teaser trailer for Wolf is more story than this character has gotten

in the entire history.

In the entire history.

Oh my God.

There's a voiceover with with an announcer telling you his story and everything you've missed and a hundred

six lines of dialogue that's more than wolf has ever had in since 1993 like jeffrey was out to catch that fish i cannot tell you if he ever caught it

um he

did

But I believe he discovered the one he caught was actually a smaller devil shark and not the one he was after.

And then the correct devil shark killed his boat again.

I think that's how that works.

Amazing.

Amazing.

And yes,

it's not just more than he's ever had, but it's rad.

It's awesome because I'm like, that's a real wrestler, right?

He's got a knee brace on.

Oh, I didn't notice.

Okay.

Yeah, he's got a Stone Cold style knee brace on because he's because he's old.

He's old, yeah.

I'm looking at him.

I'm seeing like Taker.

You know what I mean?

I'm seeing that thing of like, imagine being from like the young wolf with the ponytail.

And then you go through like a couple of fail.

You go to a a failed faction, you go through all of that, and now your gimmick is just like, man, this is who I am off camera.

I'm just the same guy, you know?

There's so much detail in his character.

Like, we didn't get the best look at Akira because he's fairly muted.

But, like, you can even tell that Wolf

isn't doing the best job dying his hair

because the tips are still black.

Just all Ganendorf that with that, with that

Yeah.

I really hope that when he does his moves, you see him struggle a bit.

Just a little.

Right?

Just like

favoring one of his legs, kind of like favoring his right leg.

Yeah, absolutely.

Botching a little bit.

The damage is the damage, but just put it in the animation.

Oh, that'd be so good.

Very little news about Virtual Fighter other than that.

They're re-releasing.

Just

Wolf

makes me feel, boy, is this going to be far away.

Oh, man, that is not coming out this year.

They did confirm the multi, the cross-platform release

of Revo.

Of Revo, yeah.

Which thank God it needs it.

Holy fucking hell.

Holy hell does it need it.

You need every player base on every console playing together to buff those numbers up.

One regular video game's worth of player

population.

hey do what you got to do do what you got to do so that's awesome um

and then uh we got to take a look as well um

so what happened okay so one before uh all of this weekend uh harata came out to talk about um online he tweeted out that the balance team basically has been completely replaced so everyone that was doing the balance for season two uh or

has been just, you know, I think, I think, rotate.

And like, some people say, oh, they all got fired.

I'm like, no, no, I don't think that's what he said, but I think

rotated out, rotated out, right?

So they didn't just fucking cast them to the winds or so, but it's like, we're going to bring in a, you know, the old team back to, for this.

And yeah.

People who knew what the fuck they were doing.

There you go.

Not out the airlock.

And it has been, yeah, kind of, you know, saying that like, so, you know, hopefully things are looking up in the future and they announced everything.

They showed off some stuff and then they announced.

Now, listen, I'm well aware that you're unhappy with the second season, but I know what's going to turn it around for you guys.

This crushed hub bag of walnuts in a giant condom coming right at you.

It's fuck your mom.

Fakum Ram returns.

And I want to say that someone like really early saw like the country code somewhere in and you know looking at the the the data so they were able to see they saw poland and they saw thailand so they were able to be like oh yeah that pretty much confirms you know but uh

falcon ram's back and yeah just the like the fact he drops from space you know or whatever in the giant like like a uh

containment machine and then he's is in there it's

it's presented like a jump scare and it's so funny because the way

like I think watching everyone's response to that has just been like, Oh, dear god, no, please, no, why?

Because it's like, okay, there's there's there's different camps on it.

Some people are kind of like, I just don't like the character, um, because you know, he's over-designed and there's too much going on, and it's really, really

oh man,

the the the the overcompensating response to to Lucky Chloe, right

in in just the biggest brawliest you like insane over buff dude um and then some folks are just saying like gameplay wise he represents when like stuff started going off the rails in t7 you know oh oh good oh excellent so there's there's that part of it

and then there's those who are just like man i just want bruce

you know and i just don't think we're ever gonna get bruce again because you're not bruce was kind of just a martial arts guy guy.

He was just a normal guy.

He was Kazia's bodyguard, and that was it.

That's his story.

Bruce Irvin, he's a Muay Thai champion, and he's just a dude.

And everyone was like, not everyone, but like a lot of people for years have been like, damn, where's Bruce?

That was cool.

And,

you know, they're pretty much it's like, nah, like, this is kind of the replacement, I guess.

So, yeah.

Not, not a, not a, not, not the best reception to him returning of all the returning characters you'd expect to see here.

Something that I did see that I don't, I think I might have missed this early on, but

with the way he's designed, I saw some concept art of like an alt version of him that was much more like human proportioned, and it looked awesome.

And it was like, oh, that would have worked.

So I'm going to see if I can find it here.

Yeah, If you Google Fakum Ram concept art and you look at the orange prison jumpsuit variants of him, you'll see like a Muay Thai fighter in like a prisoner outfit and like kind of

just looks like a pretty cool tattooed up jail Muay Thai fighter.

You know, it's cool.

Looks like a human being.

Yeah.

And I definitely would have dug, you know, that alt version if that's what we got.

Oh, well, these concepts are are terrible.

Oh, my God.

I like the human-proportioned

prisoner garb one.

I think that one's cool.

With the chains and stuff.

Well, most of these are god-awful.

Holy shit.

But

I'm mainly to say that I think we have better than the final pick on that, in my opinion.

I think there's stronger contenders than the final, you know.

I don't know.

This is not something I think I've ever said about any character in my life, but Fuck'em Run's skin looks like visual noise.

Yeah, it's so that's like the tattoos, the texture, and the scars, and the vascularity just make it look like a bag of crushed-up walnuts.

It's so fucking weird.

It's really hard to make out details because of, yeah, it's all scarred up.

It's all of those things combined.

Exactly, yeah.

And it creates a visual

noise, difficult to parse detail, especially when the lighting is low.

But in any case,

that's

what's going on there.

We got a trailer for young ladies don't play fighting games.

Fucking cool.

Sick.

Been waiting on that.

Heard good things.

And this one is now tied in with Street Fighter VI,

which you see the footage directly in and stuff.

So, like, yeah, like, there's like the most detailed hands-on stick animations of them pressing buttons and, like, tapping

drastically.

Um, imagine light uh uh uh eating the potato chip on the arcade stick style animation, you know.

And now that you can use gameplay footage for like a lot of the action, you can just spend all your animation footage on, like, she looks over at me.

You can.

She tap a de button.

But, and that being said, the the animation that they did

for the show does look good, you know.

But, yeah.

Very excited to see that.

I want to see the dubs and edits, too, to like, let's fucking go.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Memes waiting to happen.

Yeah, we got those.

What else was going on?

So the SNK CEO is going to step down.

Oh, that's like this morning.

I missed that story.

What's going on?

Okay, so May 12th, 2025, SNK Corporation announces leadership transition and advisory role for Mr.

Kenji Matsubara.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Apparently, City of the Wolves has done

really,

really badly economically, especially in the face of its incredibly huge marketing budget.

Two hours ago.

Okay, I see it.

And as a result, the CEO is going to fall on his sword instead of the guy who was directly above him who actually made all the decisions that led to that.

Yeah,

so you know.

It's weird because CEOs are usually where the buck stops, but in this highly specific case, there are people directly above the the SNK CEO who are way more likely at fault for everything negative to do with this game.

But that's not SNK anymore.

Now you're going to EGDC, right?

So

yeah, that's the highest that it gets as far as the name SNK is concerned.

And everything above that, you switch over to those who own the shares.

Yeah, okay.

So I didn't see this, but I'm looking at it now.

What I did see was

the the numbers for sales in Japan.

Like it came in 10th last week because

it was like 6,000 in Japan or so, which is

pretty low.

Its steam peak is like lower than Uniest.

It's like 4,000.

Like we don't have exact numbers, but it's doing extraordinarily poorly.

And it had a crazy amount of money marketing.

So we were advertising it all over like WWE.

Yeah, yeah.

The marketing shit is nuts.

And, you know, like favors were certainly called in, as we can see across the board there.

I'm curious to see what the non-Japanese sales numbers look like.

You know,

to,

I don't know if the reports are in on that yet.

This was like a this is basically like a Liam gig back in the day, like going, looking at all the sales numbers here.

Yeah, he was just digging through that shit.

It was super useful.

The best you're going to get in English is is the Steam charts.

Right?

And they're bad.

Like, that's not the total sales because there's consoles and all that.

Like, it gives you a general barometer for sales in the West.

And it's like, hmm.

Yeah.

Well, okay.

I have to read all of this and see what's going on and get the full story.

Right now, by chat, that there are like multiple tournaments totaling up millions of dollars in prize money.

oh yeah no

they no there's um they they did announce a a huge 1.5 million dollar um

uh uh grand prize for an upcoming this game isn't gonna make 1.5 million dollars

in in in sales no

i

after marketing i think i but but i think um whatchamacallit so i think it said 1.5 for the first place and then another one.

So two total for the pool for the prize pool because there's more.

Not going to make $1

after marketing.

Yeah, although, so here's the weird part is like it gets,

it's like, okay, marketing cost, but like, what is a marketing cost when it's like, hey, you work for me, you go do this, right?

I don't know, man.

Like, it's like usually you still, usually you still have to have the interim companies buy from each other.

Oh, no, no.

I, I,

Obviously, like some billable hours for going and promoting something is 100% there.

But like the amount of stuff that's like, you know,

favors and friends and names called in.

Like I see like a Steve Aoki track on the

music and stuff.

And you're like, right, was that at cost?

Was that, you know,

calling in a favor?

I assume it's calling in a favor, you know?

I assume that if you go to perform, like

you reach out and you go like, hey, you want to,

you know, like, help me here, and then we'll, whatever, you know?

Um, but anyway, the, the, the, the, the,

I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to need to kind of go look and see what the details of the story are with like who's involved and what's stepping up here because I do remember when new SNK anyway, there's a history of

names and people in charge of different teams and stuff that I'm curious to see what's going to happen now afterwards.

Um, I also know that there were plans for

a samurai showdown RPG

and talks of doing something with Art of Fighting that they announced.

I don't think they announced a fighting game per se, but they did announce it.

I don't think Art of Fighting is going to...

I don't think that's going to happen.

I'm curious to see what...

What

they make of all this.

But it's also something weird because, like, okay, when we're normally describing any time a game comes out and like it's just

like

when it's when its performance is poor and/or it doesn't sell or doesn't get the momentum behind it, you go, damn, you're gonna see things start shifting immediately.

And obviously, an SNK CEO stepping down,

but an SNK CEO stepping down this quickly after release is definitely indicative, right?

Um, but I also have the feeling of like it doesn't feel the same because when it's kind of like someone's personal bank account, there's a bit of that like, yeah, this can be lost, this can lose money for longer than other things can.

If I personally am down to just let that sit and happen.

You know what I mean?

Like it feels, it feels like when it's personally tied in,

it's just not the same thing as

any other indie company or any other, not indie, but mid-sized studio

making a bigger release for their efforts and things not working out.

What do you mean exactly?

I mean when a mid-sized studio releases a game, there's oftentimes an all all-or-nothing.

If this doesn't work out, it's going to shut down

type of

gambit.

You think somebody who loses it entirely out of their personal bank account would be less upset than the shareholders?

No, I just mean that the idea of the company evaporating

is different when someone personally can just be like, no,

we're not doing that.

I'm over here just like actually being like, well, I'm glad that the solution to this problem was the CEO stepping down instead of stepping into a grave.

There is certainly, okay.

Yeah.

Because that's what we're talking about sometimes over on this.

Yeah.

Fair enough.

I'm.

I think that the

ability for

anything relating to whatever the Saudi Arabian investments are

to just sit there and like kind of exist regardless of you know

numbers in a way.

Like there's there's a whole lot of like spite money that can tank

results is all I'm trying to say.

Yeah.

So,

yeah,

it be nice to get some good SNK news for the first time in, like.

When did KOF 13 come out?

I mean,

the closest, well, the closest thing to that is that, like, the game is good.

You know,

they made a good fighting game.

It's marred with all that.

Yeah.

I would say that,

you know, it takes more, like, unfortunately, it takes more than that to be

the perfect sequel to like a classic.

And one of those things needs to be, you know, obviously not fucking marred with horrible, forced decisions and

rapists in the game, et cetera.

So

this is incidental.

This is anecdotal.

But I spoke to somebody who has friends that watch wrestling, but don't play fighting games.

And they asked them, why are they shilling this gacha game on WWE?

They thought it was a gacha game.

Yeah, because there wasn't enough actual

like detail there for them to not know it wasn't like a Hoyoverse thing or whatever.

That's ineffective.

That is money in the toilet.

You should have used that advertising money for literally any other purpose.

It's interesting to

yeah, it's interesting interesting to compare this to

something that was much more modest, like Samurai Shodown, where I really enjoyed that game as well.

And

it came out and it certainly did not set the world on fire sales-wise, but it also was not targeting such a high number, and it wasn't marketed through the roof.

It kind of was like, hey, this is an

odd other choice, and it'll be available on

Epic Game Store if you want.

It's on fucking Netflix.

It's on, it'll just be everywhere.

It's on Switch, and it's this kind of like off to the side, off the beaten pathfighting game that's pretty cool.

Um, but you know,

it's not the same as like making a really good game, but then like setting the

offset

through the to the stratosphere because of how hard you're pushing, right?

Yeah, I think like I feel like every two months we discuss how everybody in the video games industry is like, so if we put like

ten dollars into the game, we'll all get twenty dollars back, right?

And so, if we put in a million dollars, we'll get two million dollars back.

So, why don't you put a billion dollars into it?

Look, like, I will say that, like, Sam's show certainly did well enough for them that they continued into its like third season and then added guest characters from Feroner and Bikin and all these other people that showed up, you know, like that.

For Honor Man was there, yeah, that game had a long tail and it and it continued getting ported elsewhere.

And it was around for a while, you know, while the circuit happened and stuff, like there was an initial push, but then even afterwards, I was surprised to see seasons and seasons of content come out, you know.

So, like, that's kind of just like letting SNK do their thing, as opposed to getting your fingers in the mix and forcefully,

you know,

doing all that bullshit.

So, yeah, um,

it's a similar approach to the prod to the product they put out, but the amount of meddling that you see is night and day.

Whereas, and and like the core thing that they the core game itself from the people making the fighting game, they did the same good job, but you know, here you get to see the impact and the results

flub immediately.

Um,

in any case,

yeah, I kind of wonder,

like when it comes to obviously announcing seasons for these things or whatever, you commit to at least however much time of that game's

content and

tour and all that stuff.

I kind of wonder if that comes to an immediate abrupt end as soon as the currently announced stuff.

Yeah, that would be how you would know.

We'll see.

Okay.

So.

What's that?

That Strive shit.

Leaks.

Yeah.

So.

Did we talk about that last week?

I don't think so, no.

No, I talked about it on my show.

Okay.

Yeah.

Somehow the Strive source code got leaked, which is pretty bad.

It's the overwhelming feeling of someone stole a loud.

That's what it sounds like because what came out of it is the early, early, early 2019 build of the game and then the a version of the game that is not yet out yet including dlc that has not yet come out um and you know on the one hand it's like there's the people that are able to go play what the original version was and show off stuff there then there's people that are looking at the current uh character from the show

and there's like spoilers in in the in-game version of the character and stuff so there's like weird like story plot fuck-up shit happening.

And then above all of that, there's as soon as source code exists for a game, that's really bad because that gives people who want to do malicious things the ability to do so if they are, you know, so inclined.

Yep.

Oh, I forgot to mention last week.

Damn it, this is a weird place for this.

i watched the movie sinners breaking news woolly did watch a movie it's it's good it's a lot of fun ryan kugler did some cool shit um

check that out i didn't know i just all i remember is uh the trailer for it showing off like two michael b jordans and i was like what's going on over here okay i don't know sounds interesting i i'm like

Just I saw I saw two Michael B.

Jordans and then like I'm standing in front of a fire and I was like, okay, yeah, sure.

And then upon closer inspection,

it is a

black

musical

from dusk till dawn.

And it's awesome.

It's a whole lot of fun.

There's definitely a lot to dig into if you're looking at the references and the music and the history and what's going on and stuff.

But just go watch it.

It's cool.

There's not much else to say.

It's a it's a great flick fun characters and the the main character Who played Sammy I believe is like a debut actor as well who's got like a very distinct awesome voice So I love that as well that like you know taking a yeah, but you got to make a movie with a big star for it to get for an original movie to get made, but also like pushing you know new talent as well is awesome Especially because like yeah with with you know when you have also the director he did a creed and he did um black panther so he was also able to do a really um

cool crazy deal where in 25 years the rights to the film uh returned to him good

so there's your retirement that's very smart That's a good thing that directors should be able to do director writers people that are you know if you can work that out Especially now that films are the film industry is not what it used to be right people are streaming people are at home They don't have to get up and go to a theater.

So, if you can make them do that and this managed to do that in a way that's comparable to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, like it means more now to get ticket sales than it used to.

So, um, fucking awesome, awesome job on that.

Uh, yeah, that's it.

Go see Sinders, it's fun.

Uh, beyond that,

um,

do you like Berserk?

Uh, I don't like

Berserk as much as you're about to tell me.

Do you like Berserk $150

for

DLC costumes, Berserk?

No.

Okay.

Straight up, no.

So Diablo 4 is getting a Berserk crossover, and it's.

It costs more than the game.

How much is the game?

Diablo now?

Let me check.

So this is 150 USD, right?

150 USD.

So the Diablo 4 is $67

Canadian.

So let's say it's 50 bucks.

Okay, well, there you go.

Yeah, so there's a little bit of point math on this, though, to get to 150, admittedly.

So basically, they showed off a trailer with like, there's like a guts costume.

You can get a mounted horse for like a Griffith.

And

you can get the little like little demons and the Schnaz pet is there.

All these little cosmetics to put on your characters or you can get a Skull Knight armor for your Necromancer and stuff.

Great.

Cool.

Sure.

Haven't seen a crossover since

Dragon's Dogma 1, I think.

Then they're like, okay, so in order to get it, the class-specific outfits, you have to spend the premium currency, platinum.

You have to buy

2800, which equals 25 bucks worth of platinum.

And then to get the,

you know, you got Guts Armor, you've got the Struggler, you've got, you know, Griffith, and you've got Skull Knight.

So you put that together, you get 100 bucks.

Then you've got the War Horse.

That's going to take a little bit more.

But

because of the way that you buy

platinum,

the cheapest way to buy it all instead of in these lump sums, which will end up having you stuck with extra points, the way to have the least amount of stack points afterwards is to buy a full $150

pack of platinum for $18,500, leaving you with $2,000 platinum left over once you're done.

So

that's

hopefully that's how much berserk costs

and Diablo 3.

Yeah, I think part of the thing here is that, like, I don't like um fucking Diablo 4.

Uh,

I Diablo 4 is like a really genuinely

unfortunate game because it's one of those games where you're like, why would I play this one when I should instead actually just play the last one, which is just better objectively on every metric?

Well, there's that side of it.

There's the Diablo side of it.

And then on the Berserk side,

one

Hirataka Miyazaki has been so kind as to let you grab Guts sword, put on his outfit, get a crossbow, do his big jumping Berserker swing overhead slash.

Fight 185 enemies inspired by the enemies that Guts fights.

Look at a brand that's basically just the brand,

you know as you go through this fantasy nightmare horror setting that is a love letter basically to the to berserk just play just play dark souls just play demon souls just play elden ring and if you want to be really fancy pretend that sekaro is taking place a couple countries over from the morning

Right, right.

The Kushan Empire is right over there.

Literally, you have your pick of the litter.

You can pick which Souls game you want to just dark to just berserk through.

Yeah.

So

rough times.

But that's not the only crossover that was announced.

Oh.

So

Reggie came in and I was like, yo, did you see Overwatch 2 cross Street Fighter?

And he's like, wait, what?

And he pulls it up and he starts looking and he's looking through the Street Fighter news.

And I was like, no, no, no, no.

Street Fighter costumes in Overwatch.

And he's like, man, shut the fuck.

And it just closed that shit and went back to the

window.

I had the same exact feeling.

I had the exact

interaction.

Like, oh.

New costumes for a Street Fighter.

What are you stupid?

New Overwatch costumes in Street Fighter.

Yo, let's go.

Wait, no, it's the other way around.

God damn it.

Yeah.

Collaboration.

Trailer announced.

And you get to see the outfits and stuff.

And it's like, yeah, you know what?

Okay, sure.

Hanzo is Ryu running around.

Juno is Chun Lee.

Widowmaker is Cammy.

I saw some folks going like, wait, that doesn't make sense.

She's French.

And there's another British character that she, and it's like, no, but she's an assassin.

Like, I get it.

You know, they have the, yeah, Kiriko as Juri.

Soldier 76 is Guile, Sigma Bison, Winston Blanca, that's a no-brainer.

That one's easy.

Zenyata as Dalsim, also a no-brainer.

Yeah.

I saw, like, from day one, I was like, look at this Dalsim energy right here, pass into the Iris, yoga.

But I am disappointed at the lack of a very obvious slam dunk that is a Zarya Marissa is not a thing.

Yeah.

No.

Don't do it.

It'd be interesting.

What I would say, though.

I'd be doing anything to keep more costumes out of Street Fighter VI.

Including pulling them away

to put them in other games.

But no, the most important collaboration, I would say, is that the Overwatch dev team just collaborated with union each other.

Oh, good for them.

Yes.

That's good.

Damn, these bitches unionized.

Good for them.

Good for them.

Hopefully this results in

positive positive results for them and development for Overwatch.

Yeah, um, after we told the story about the, the big, uh,

super cross-North American mega union, I kind of was like, you know, I hope that that thing continues to grow as a, as a backdrop

threat,

you know, in the industry.

But, um,

the, I, because like, there's a thing here where it's like, anytime it's within the walls, then, you know, it is just as targetable.

But overall, still, yeah, over 200 developers,

excuse me, nearly 200 developers across the Overwatch 2 team at Blizzard are all part of the Overwatch Game Makers Guild CWA.

So,

cool.

Oh, wait.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

Hold on a second.

Joining the Communication Workers of America.

Oh, yeah, no, no, okay.

This is the CWA is also

the same part of that mega, the mega guild of

the larger North American union we discussed in the past.

So,

awesome.

Good stuff.

More of y'all should do that shit.

It's good.

It's good to do.

I mean, they try, and then they open up the trapdoor underneath them.

Yeah, well.

For example, speaking of opening up the trapdoor,

over at Microsoft, 6,840 people, aka 3% of their workforce,

are being laid off.

So, what are you raising the prices of games to do?

The times, you see,

the economic hardships and the

markets.

Yeah.

so

another round of cuts.

We also told this story in 2023, so literally, it's just you know, it's it's the same shit, yeah.

Um,

but hey, yeah, you know, 80 bucks, though, that's great, good stuff.

Um, I, the, the, the, this is you have your shot, you have your chaser, and you need your triforce of um

uh the CEO's uh bonus payout, yeah, and together then you can

get to the realm of the gods

and

open up the Twilight Realm.

When we get that third news story,

when we get that third news story about how much they got paid, we'll be able to

see the future.

What a pile of shit.

Well, you know, beyond that,

the news last week was about Giant Bomb

disintegrating.

And it seems like the bomb has come back together because Dan Rikert bought Giant Bomb.

Yeah, they just basically bought it back from fandom and went, nah, give it.

Now Giant Bomb is running Giant Bomb just back when Giant Bomb came out and Giant Bomb was run by Giant Bomb.

Great.com.

Great.

Cancel the explosion, put it back together.

We own it now.

That's actually a really good answer to the story.

Hey, we don't like how you're running things.

Fuck you.

No, fuck you.

Fine, have it.

Okay.

Yeah, if you can find the number now.

Yeah, yeah.

No, that's great.

That's it.

Anytime a studio was able to buy back the rights to a thing it owns, anytime someone, an artist, buys back the masters, you know, anytime these types of things happen.

And we just talked about like Googler with the film, but that's sick.

That's sick.

They're all going to go just make a new giant bomb anyway.

But it's nice that they got to keep the wiki in the middle.

So you have to imagine fandom kind of saw the writing on the wall there, right?

And just went like, God damn it, they've already put up the sign that says now with blackjack and hookers.

Like,

let's just

keep

just the name with literally everyone leaving would have had no value.

Might as well sell it and get some value out of it.

That's exactly it, right?

Not to mention that, like, you know, a double exodus and everything.

It's like, yeah, you don't.

Anyway, yeah, there's just no point to the name after that.

Or it getting folded back into GameSpot, I believe, was also the part of the discussion.

But

yeah,

quick break for a second.

Oh, okay.

I'm a piss.

BRB.

Alright.

Did I see here correctly?

There's a, I guess there's a

Spider-Nir teaser that I guess

hit the internet.

Yeah, Nick Cage is in the cage.

Like, I'm going to be Spider-Noir.

You know what?

Sure.

Yeah, that's how I feel about it.

Like,

feels like if you keep the lighting appropriately dark, you can do this pretty low-budget.

You know, have him jumping off the walls and the webbing and web-gutting stuff doesn't have to be crazy, obviously.

Do you think they should force Nick Cage to do all the action stuff?

And not train him.

And no wires.

No, this needs to be low-budget,

black-and-white, just small sets.

Like when he's going through the city on a rooftop or something, it should be clearly like a projector.

Absolutely.

I completely agree.

Adam West crawling up the side of a building style shit.

Absolutely.

There you go.

And when he falls down trying to do his thing, don't cut.

Just keep rolling.

Have the other stunt guy just awkwardly stand there and wait for him to get back up.

Perfection.

I want Nick Cage to do a really bad job, except when he's acting.

Like, I want both Nick Cages in the movie.

Does that make sense?

You want him to do a really good job in the role?

I want, like...

Wicker man, Nick Cage, when it's time for Spider-Noir to fight, but I want Matchstick Man, Nick Cage, when it's time for him to act.

Okay.

Okay.

The rock Nick Cage.

No, no, Matchstick Man.

Matchstick Man.

Oh, that's a great fucking movie.

I love that fucking movie.

Castor Troy?

No.

No, where he's acting good.

He's doing a good acting.

I don't have a whole lot of those in my brain.

I'm sorry.

The file is coming up empty.

You know, Daddy from Kickass.

He's not listening to me.

it's like talking to a it's like talking to a nick cage wall i i haven't seen those movies then i haven't seen the ones where he's he's acting in the good way i've only seen the movies where he's acting nick cage so i don't know what the fuck you're talking about no you you're you've seen nick cage

you know i heard he's good as the arms dealer the lords of war or so yeah lord like i like okay like can we get like

no not gone in 60 seconds nick cage no shut up people you all shut up

oh yeah yeah.

Ruthless Kaleida says, I want uncut gems, Adam Sandler, and Jack and Jill, Adam Sandler.

Depending on the scene.

Okay.

Let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send a letter, make it good.

There was a fucking thread on subreddit recently that said, is it time for Pat to yell at people writing emails in again?

Because after I went on a little tantrum, there was a genuine uptick in quality emails for like a couple of weeks.

Please write a good email.

Please, I beg of you.

Please send it to CastleSuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Most of what tends to get filtered out is basically like extensions of

how do I.

If a guy killed another guy on the moon with a rock would that be fucked up or what no that's great that's what I'm saying like it's not that it's just hey what would you want platinum to do or hey what would your stand be or hey

how quietly how cool is devil may cry

like questions free like somebody who like last heard or saw us do or say something 10 years ago then just thinking of something and putting it out there being like I like this thing and it's like yeah

yes, no, I know.

Yeah, Street Fighter, man.

Cool.

Like, you know, yes.

100%.

If a guy killed a guy on the moon, that would be nuts.

Damn.

That'd be nuts.

What do you use to do it?

A rock.

The flag.

That'd be fucked up.

All right.

Here we go.

Let's take one in from

Fable White says: Dear the last true esteemed video game journalists,

doing our best, everybody.

Expedition 33 has proven that you don't need an explosive budget to make a full experience that consumers will enjoy, which has come at the perfect time given the conversation of us already experiencing a very slow video game crash, which I agree is the case.

It poses the question if Mega Studios should pivot to AA as a way of recouping costs and what could possibly be

and how they could execute this with some major IPs.

For example, if you could make a A fantasy, Final Fantasy game that was completely set stylized in Amano's concept art as originally intended,

therefore you're not sacrificing the visual novelty of the beautiful work, and it doesn't require heavy graphics and processing of other expensive bits.

So the question is,

what quadruple or triple-A game series would you love to see reworked as AA?

How could you see it work?

I mean, the answer is truly all of them.

If I had to, the first thing that comes to mind for some, like, I can't, it's weird because I haven't touched any of the recent ones, but I feel like Assassin's Creed could massively benefit from not being what it is and from just chilling, going back to the concept level and executing something a little more directed, a little more small, and a little more pointed in

the promise of what the franchise is, which is like you can go different places in history and experience cool things.

You know,

I would kill forgetting an old style,

like classic style Resident Evil that cost like

$12

and some buttons to make

every 18 months.

See, it's funny, though, because like,

I guess I'm thinking of triple and quadruple A kind of like slop served as opposed to like the RE games come out fairly infrequently, right?

Like, they're, yeah, no, Resident Evil games used to come out every year.

Every year, and now it's

two per gen, you know?

And now we get one every five years, maybe, fucking whatever.

And they're doing it, yeah.

It's a, well, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's got, it's become a different style of franchise.

So I'm thinking of stuff that, like,

you know, hits that, that, the, the.

Again, like, As Creed is like a

great thing that comes to mind of like, there's anything where you're like, this is expensive, and there's probably too many of these things, you know?

I think,

I think the like the number one easy would be Final Fantasy.

I mean, this, like, we're talking about Expedition 33.

Like,

I would kill for Final Fantasy games to just be simpler and cheaper.

I mean, I think they're willing to do that.

And focus more about the things I actually care about.

I think they're willing to do that.

And I bet you at some point in the future, you will see exactly what you described, which is like a Mega Man 9 style Final Fantasy game.

It just won't be numbered as the big, huge release.

It'll just be like a side thing, you know?

Like, I feel like there's a willingness to do that, but not to treat it as like a proper big number, you know.

Can I reverse the question a little bit?

I

have a series and franchise that

is single or double A that I would think would be cool if they actually tried to make a triple A one once ever in the history of decades.

It would be cool to see like a Pokemon game that looked like a video game in current year.

I saw a lot of people saying Pokemon on the side there, and I was like, I don't think Pokemon fits into the triple or quadruple A feeling category because

like Nintendo, Nintendo AAA

is

different.

It's a different bar.

You're lowering.

Yeah.

Like Breath of the Wild, you're going, wow, Nintendo really tried.

You know, they pulled out all the stops on that one.

But you're not, that's not compared to the rest of the industry, obviously.

Okay.

You know, you know what?

Actually, man, you know what?

You know what I think we're going to see?

I think we're seeing it right now.

I think we saw a company have ridiculous, massive success with a triple-A in a game I would describe as quadruple A.

Now going back and going, hey, we're going to make double A games for a while, and it's from software.

Elden Ring was in development for so fucking long and was so, so big that we're now recovering.

Software is now going, hey, maybe we're going to fucking dial it back a little bit for a while.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're in the cocooning phase, and they're allowed.

They're allowed.

Elden Ring is an obnoxiously insane, unsustainable way to go.

You did too much, we loved it, but holy shit, take a break, you're fine.

Absolutely scale it back.

I mean, shit,

when did Elden Ring

start?

Yeah, when did they start on that, man?

They started right after Sekiro, which is 2019.

Well, they probably started earlier, actually.

Right?

2017.

They started in 2017.

And Shadows of the Erd Tree

came out in fucking

2024.

So they spent seven years

on Elden Ring

in some fashion.

I would want to work on something different.

That's a lot of Elden Ring.

That's longer than the suggested career time

at a studio if you're trying to, you know, move up and work on different projects.

Um,

the uh, uh, what was it?

Oh, yeah, no, just when you mentioned Pokemon earlier, I was gonna say that, like, I remember feeling that way a bunch, and you know, around X and Y time, like we talked about it, because that was like the last one I actually picked up and went in on.

Um, but the Legends series exists now, and I don't know how much those are like doing

the game that we kind of hoped to get a long time ago, but they seem to be a full,

you know, like step up from what the original Pokemon top-down sort of limitations were.

So

I think we're kind of in a weird situation for this because, like,

you and I, for literally the entire time we've been talking about shit on the internet, have been caught in the trap of, wow, that new thing looks really incredible.

Wow, that looks so cool.

While simultaneously going, but I'd actually be cool for PS2 games forever.

Just, you know, fix the, you know, put it at a higher resolution and make it run in a decent frame rate.

But yeah, I'm good with PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 games forever.

Indies are a really interesting case study because they started out emulating retro games as a nostalgia thing, and now it's just a practical budget.

It's practical.

It just has to look unique enough and visually appealing enough that you can see you know what's happening.

Shit coming out in 8 or 16 or 32-bit style sprites is like, yeah, no, that's an affordable way to make a game, and you can still tell great stories and do great things.

It's totally on

a first-person dungeon crawler that came out today that looks like a PS2 game.

It just happens to run at a high frame rate and a good resolution called Labyrinth of the Demon King, where it's like a from software first-person dungeon crawler in like feudal Japan.

I never would have predicted this feature.

It looks like the grimiest fucking thing.

I thought that

we would always be homaging, you know, earlier generations and stuff, but I never thought it would just be like, actually,

nah, this is an affordable way to develop games.

Let's just stick here, you know?

Or you can go hard if you want to with it and, you know, build on

what the sprites are doing.

No one's ever needed it.

And when I see an 8-bit sprite that gets magically lit in an octopath kind of way, I go, whoa,

the sprite got lit.

Ray tracing is totally pointless.

You know why I like ray tracing?

Like genuinely, as the new push behind graphics?

Because it's an easy thing to turn off and get an extra 30 frames.

I turned it on for a second in DMC5 and then I was like, okay, cool.

We're good.

Yeah.

Bump mapping can be used effectively in some cases.

There's no reason to have anything but pre-baked lighting

and blob shadows.

As somebody who actively was working on game environment maps and, you know, like back when I was using and making textures in 3D Studio Macs and stuff, like we would use it to make some shit look a little bit better, you know.

But

I know what you mean.

And then in the modern context, yes, yes, yes.

100%.

It's not that much.

The Devil May Cry 3 Crimson mod is coming out today in like an hour or two.

And that is a lot of stuff.

I'm going to cover it on the channel.

But one of the things it does, it goes, hey, what if Devil May Cry 3 just ran at a slightly higher frame rate and

had the interface redone to look

like good at high resolutions?

I'm like, oh, yeah, okay.

That's all.

Yeah, fine.

DMC3 at a higher resolution and better frame rate and better UI?

Okay, great, good.

One of the funniest things in Expedition 33 is how you go through the map in some areas, and it's so made for you to walk from outdoors into this cave, and you see the lighting change.

But then if you run Dark Souls 1, man, and you see, and like, and when you run backwards, it's like, no, no, no, don't do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like the bloom, and like, you can't, you're blind.

You're completely blind.

It's like, you're not supposed to be here.

Don't run backwards.

It's like when you walk through the door from the depths into Blight Town and the game's entire lighting model just goes crazy.

And one time I was able to peek at the sky and I saw, you saw the skylights shift out of position.

That's great.

And the shadows slide around.

It was so funny.

I'm like, God, who gives a shit?

Let's fucking

realistic.

Who gives a shit?

God.

From Kingdom of the Kingdom Come Deliverance.

I was playing that a bunch in the second game.

One of the reasons the second game works, like, runs really, really well, considering it's showing like hundreds of fucking characters and all these super depth and forests, is it's all pre-baked lighting.

They just made a lot of pre-baked lighting for like every significant time of day so the game doesn't have to calculate lighting.

Done.

You save so much performance to just not do that

100

um remember iko not iko shadow of the colossus

which had fake lighting and just had a different light box if you were inside or outside that's it cook those fucking

cook those textures man cook

cook that shit right onto the model

hell yeah i approve

um

i mean look guilty gear strive is doing amazing things when every every single individual character has their own rig for all situations.

Absolutely.

It's crazy.

But

we can't set that as a bar that people are going to strive

towards.

Anyway,

here's one coming in.

Matt from Ottawa says, hey, guys, was the

rose-tinted browser window, was the internet actually better 10 years ago, or am I just 34?

Yeah, it was better.

It was better.

It was subjectively better in every way.

Literally, go watch what I just described earlier today.

Go watch the Soul Calibur 2 video

that

I retweeted.

And that's old internet.

That's what it was.

In and out.

Funny.

That's it.

No AI generated.

Google search was uncomfortable.

No SEO generated fake content.

No click here to the next page for the slideshow.

focus of all social media, which means fighting with people didn't get you the most amount of information or sorry or attention.

No guessing whether or not a bot or a human is the person behind what you're reading.

No, it was like objectively better.

The algorithm was based on certainly like what you clicked on and what was going on, but the idea.

Did you click on it?

Did you watch the whole video?

As opposed to what makes you mad so that you'll click on it more.

Actually aiming to upset you.

Auto-scrolling

based media where you sit back and watch and it feeds you whatever, and then your attention span gets destroyed as a result.

Fuck that shit.

It actually was.

It actually was.

People who made memes really had to work at it.

Took work to make your memes.

Sure.

And if you made a shit post video, you just uploaded it.

And then that was that.

You know, it was like,

you make your, you have your Dumb Soul Calibur 2 gag, you upload that shit to game trailers, and fucking bang

gangbusters, start a career on that shit,

you know.

Indeed.

All right, and let's take one more over here from Kai, who says, What's up, TK Yozansen?

And 2H into Heavenly.

That's pretty good.

I like that.

What is the worst thing we lost in games due to them just not hitting?

For me, for example, customizable combos and the roulette wheel of Godhand.

I think if that game sold better, it would be the next judgment cut as a thing that action combat games must have.

Hmm.

If Godhand were a bigger hit,

the roulette wheel.

I think, yes.

I've talked about it many a times, and so have you, so have you.

The attache case, the rotating, fitting your inventory into a fun little space and using the grid effectively is so much fun.

Love that shit.

Wish more games did that.

It's super, super enjoyable as a secondary thing to like fit shit neatly into place.

And I'm not the only, I had an entire game design thought around that idea, and I'm not the only one.

There's at least two or three other games that are just like rotating your objects in your briefcase on a grid.

um

it's got to be cheat codes

yeah

it's got to be cheat codes you miss you miss cheat codes absolutely 100

what about when they were there was an in-between era when it wasn't a cheat code it was just a qa menu

yeah that was good too yeah okay okay

because it was literally just this was not meant to be for for the player this was just like if you hold these these uh buttons on power and then you get a fucking dev menu you know

shit you're not supposed to see

so one of the things that people talk like people complain about like game boxes and physical media and all that shit and it's like by the time I switched over to digital media um all the charm of buying physical media had already evaporated like I remember being able to buy a game had a nice box that was made out of like decent quality plastic or paper cardboard and I would have time to read the manual the whole way home

and it felt like a fucking premium product instead of like a fucking the absolute cheapest piece of shit like fake plastic piece of paper in the front end and the shittiest box ever reading the book okay yeah what am I missing out on

the digital the shittiest box ever

reading the color manual on the way home while you cracked open that plastic was a whole lot of fun

I mean but now we're just talking about the way people that used to buy like vinyls would like buy the vinyl and look at the art and whatever.

You know, it's basically just that, you know.

100%.

You know what?

Actually,

I have a controversial one, like, very controversial.

I think,

oh, man, that's controversial.

I think overall,

a lot of game music has gotten way more forgettable.

since

the Super Nintendo PlayStation 1 era.

Because now it's just a cinematic score.

Though the increased fidelity and ability to do a cinematic score has lent a lot of games away from having pure melody pieces.

And melody is what catches in your head.

Like a lot of bombastic ornamental scores kind of blends together.

And so you see how people are crazy about the Halo theme.

The Halo has a really strong, clear melody.

I know what you mean.

I think what has happened is that the really talented composers have risen above and have created absolute fucking legendary tracks that we'll remember forever.

I think like when a soundtrack hits and like in the same way that like, you know,

we'll be you'll be humming Mega Man 2 and Chrono Trigger for the rest of your life.

I will, yes, that's true.

You know, Stink Man thing.

Yeah, that's three, but still.

And there was a particular era where you're like, I can't believe Sephiroth's theme has lyrics.

That's crazy.

That's crazy right there was that little in-between era of like oh my god it sounds real but now that we're well over that stuff it's like no there's there's incredible songs and we were just talking today about mick gordon you know well here's the thing right when we hear a casey edwards or a two mellow you know i think i think of like a doom eternal i think of all they fear is you And that riff lives in my fucking head, the start of that.

And I also think about how we're playing through E33 right now.

And like, oh my God, I can't stop.

that fucking doot doot do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, like, this super intense melody-focused soundtrack.

Yes, yes, 100%.

It's

you, you, you, do, you remember a lot of that.

I think, but I, and I think good game composers will focus on what you're describing.

And games that don't will create a score that kind of just blends in, you know, like you'll hear something that's like

a violin is a powerful instrument that can be so memorable and strong in a scene.

And in a lot of cases, yeah, when you hear it just kind of being played as a tone and not really necessarily.

Yeah, the violin in my video game soundtrack has to be en pour or better than the violins in the background of faint.

And if they're not as good as that, then they failed.

Sure, sure.

We can't get toxic everywhere, you know?

But no, but that's it.

Like a lot of times you'll hear, and but this is what I think you're also describing, too.

It's an interesting discussion because there's a lot of video game music back then that was terrible and forgettable and bad and i think those people got access to

the same tools and the same ability to compose and put together much more um you know sophisticated soundtracks but the end result is still i i don't fucking know what was that right i'm remembering um

like pick you pick a random fucking like like the nintendo the the gamecube naruto fighting games had some music on them that was like pretty completely forgettable, that's had that narrow toe kind of sound effect to it.

And there were, there were one or two that I remember, and then it was like they grabbed samples from some existing famous sample tracks that you then hear in a bunch of other games, you know, used a lot.

So

you can tell when the, it's like the composer had a gig and they were just like hitting deadlines on it and you throw that on there.

You know, and then you have like the Okami soundtrack, which is fucking five discs and it has a very distinct, awesome sound and style to it.

Admittedly, there's almost, there's too much music in that game, to be perfectly honest, but

it stands out, you know?

Yeah, I just think that like there's always going to be people that know how to use the medium.

And if you're a good composer with chiptunes and 8-bit, you can be a good composer, whatever they give you.

And if you

don't know what you're doing, then it's going to be forgettable no matter what.

I think we can tie both of these emails together by the internet was better and music was better because 18 years ago, Shoes by Kelly, aka Liam Kyle Sullivan came out.

That fucking song rules.

You've seen it.

You've seen shoes.

Okay, just based on photo, I don't know what the fuck is going on here.

So no, I don't know what this is.

Shame.

I was hoping this was like going to be a deep cut off of like Anarchy Reigns or something.

It's a deep cut off of 2003.

Okay.

Alrighty.

Let's see.

Tune in next week when we will once again continue to boomer out

and talk about how the old times used to be better.

Yeah.

They were.

They were better.

They were so much better.

You You guys don't even know.

No, they do know and they mostly agree.

In fact, there's a whole bunch of that's the fun part.

There's a whole, there's a whole bit about

like with hip-hop in particular, how there was like a whole bunch of listeners that, besides those who came in just for Drake, were actively like mainly listening to older generations of rap and were not really

new shit.

Just the whole fucking section.

That's great.

There were like walls of quality that like people were like, oh, no, no, no, I don't fuck with the shit that came out while I was growing up.

No, no, no, that wasn't, there wasn't much going on.

There's always standouts and there's always people, like for, there's always, you always have a friend who's out there listening on SoundCloud that's out there grabbing stuff and can recommend out there.

So, but there's a whole bunch of people that were just like, nah, fuck this entire thing.

Like, not in good life.

That's really funny.

All righty.

Have a good week, everybody.