CSB319: Double Styrofoam

Yo, yo, how we doing?

I'm doing well.

How about you, bud?

Not too bad.

Okey-doke.

Yeah.

I guess,

I mean,

I'll,

as of a couple of minutes ago, got the clear to post it, so I just did.

But

hey,

get your fucking

get the hourglass out

right off the bat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Get it out immediately.

What do we got?

I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be hosting, I'm gonna be run doing the Evo Japan watch party officially.

Oh, fucking sick.

Hey, good job.

This weekend.

So,

so what the fuck are they gonna show about Virtue Fighter?

You can tell me now, bro.

There's no one listening.

So I'm gonna be.

You should secretly whisper it into my ear.

I am gonna be told what's I'm gonna be sent the

stuff as it's going down, and I don't know anything in advance.

So I will.

Did you know that this hourglass can't see Virtual Fighter?

That's fucking crazy.

That's crazy.

It's like.

It's completely invisible.

Okay.

So if I start with the words Virtual Fighter, we've created an exploit, you know, for Hourglass tech.

Where is this?

Get this out of here.

We don't need that.

Yeah, no.

So

I'm going to jump over onto the Evo channel with Reggie, and we're going to

follow, well, Evo Japan basically is happening, you know,

this weekend,

May 9th, 10th, and 11th.

And the hours are Japanese hours, which means while everybody is, you know, catching Zs.

And so we're going to basically wake up the next day and check out everything that was interesting that happened throughout the, you know, sleepy time hours and watch announcements, top eights, everything going on.

So it's going to be live or is it going to be like regular human times for the West Coast?

Exactly, exactly.

So I'm going to be live

and watching shit that happened a few hours ago during sleep time when it was not human time.

So the

total freakazoid freak people

who they need it We're going to be doing it live at dead ass Japan hours.

Yes.

I am not live during insane dead Japan hours.

I am live from regular Eastern noon to 5 p.m.

And if you want to catch up on what happened with Evo Japan, you tune in to watch us going over that stuff.

That's probably

the good move.

Yeah, and it's also like, you know, the highlights of the best stuff because it's also a long, full day of a lot going on, pools and this and that and everything.

So, uh, we're gonna be doing it

for

normal Western awake hours.

Normal

this

part,

this, you know, there's the this, the two parts, this part, there you go.

Um, yeah, which makes a ton of sense, obviously, because like asking people to fucking,

you know, yeah, just no problem, 3 a.m.

to fucking 9 a.m.

No, it's gotta be live, man.

What for who?

For who, yeah.

So, you know, that should be a lot of fun.

And

yeah, tune in, tune in, and

that'll be going down.

And yes, I'll keep I'll keep my hourglass by the ready.

But the

probably gonna be a while before

that again.

I don't know what's I don't know.

I mean, I'm hoping cool shit gets announced, certainly.

There's always proof of monger thinks there'll be virtual fighter stuff.

So, if you're in the country, it seems like the right time and place to be like, hey, people making this thing.

You look like you have something to say.

Do you?

You know?

Also, VF has like a much greater presence in Japan than it ever did out here.

I think they would be fine simply revealing costumes for Akira one by one with each trailer.

I think here comes

Akira without the hat.

I think they could just put out like one match between Akira and Stella

and with no commentary and no explanation of a single thing that's going on and just be like, there.

There you go.

That's what you get for the next six months.

Tell us about that map environment.

Let's take a look at the chickens and the stall.

Oh, dude, that's the Japanese style presentation where they just zoom in further and further and further on the last thing you ever care about.

It's so soul-crushing because

we have just figured out how to do it ourselves over here, you know?

Okay, but I will say that actually I'll use that as a jumping off point because

when you're seeing those details, you know, rendered in engine, when it's like, yo, we just figured out in the RE engine how to do this thing, so we're super proud of it, even though other tech figured out how to do that automatically really quickly a while ago.

35 years ago.

But there is something to the charm of, you know, handcrafted, we did it ourselves feeling world.

Oh, absolutely.

Right.

And this brings me to my big topic, I suppose, of this week, which is

Expedition Trentois.

Whoa, buddy.

I don't know.

Oh,

is anybody even playing that game?

Man.

Oh, man.

Two million.

Already.

Okay.

So I've played a lot more.

I am now at Act Two of Claribsky.

Oh, you are now leagues beyond my ass.

I have been taking it slow.

Okay.

I got stuck in that gastro village for like two hours, bro.

Well, so now we are seeing the timing of like stream time versus personal time, you know?

Yeah.

And guess what?

Usually it's stream time versus other guys' stream time, but now it's like.

Yeah.

You're crushing this shit.

Well, because this is what everybody else watching gets to do, which is sit at home home and just lock in, play, enjoy,

go get dinner, play a bit more, and then be like, all right, cool, you know, and like get really far and do stuff because you're just pushing through it.

So, yeah, obviously, I'm not going to spoil anything,

but

just talking around it,

the

you know,

the excellence continues and

things escalate.

And yeah, and Act 2

is a fun turning point.

I think that the story of

everything

that has this the way the story is presented continues to be as strong as the intro,

right?

So, like, I feel like that intro walking through the town is great for setting up characters, motivations, and establishing things.

And that whole idea of being in the dark about what's happening,

while not knowing what's going on, I love the conversations that the characters have with each other in in regards to that.

You know,

the disagreements they have about what to do, how to proceed when you don't know what the fuck is happening are extremely realistic.

It's very believable, you know.

Which is crazy because it's an overtly fantastical setting.

Yes.

Like, it is as it is, it is story picture book shit.

Yes.

I also think that this is some of my favorite depictions of people being very human in a way where,

how would I describe this?

So, I think that, like, there's a lot of instances of dialogue and things that, you know, you so, okay, so you can feel the flavor of the writer and dialogue and in different settings, and you can kind of tell, like, okay, if you're if you're hearing Hades characters talking to each other, they're going to be a little bit sardonic, they're going to be a little bit sultry, you're going to hear that vocal fry, and they're going to kind of be quippy, you know, but then they'll have meaningful things they say, you know, and those moments will slow down.

But for the most part, you're kind of like, there's an eyebrow raised as you're, you know, with the tone of the conversations type of thing.

And I feel like there's moments that happen where for, in order for drama to be facilitated in a story, people have to kind of like get really

like...

They have to blow things out of proportion in some cases or, you know,

react very extremely given circumstances and kind of like uh do things where you're like oh god damn it that's just going to lead to confusions and problems and you know freaking out i won't listen to you right and you're kind of hope you're waiting on a just talk moment type of thing and i feel like what you have here are characters that go through those moments and then like go okay wait hold on right they they second guess themselves and or like there's a moment where things kind of calm down and they just kind of are like yeah okay no right what you're saying makes sense sorry which is like yeah yeah people do that right?

People make decisions and then they stand on them sometimes, but other times they go, like, wait, no, what you just said, I completely, that, right, I agree with you there.

Or they're convinced, you know, and conversations are not just characters with a list of things that they feel

bouncing in reaction to the world around them.

And then

the conversations don't really, you know, move people too much one way or the other.

You know, I feel like

you don't see enough moments

of like people being convinced by things and/or having back and forth uncertainty, you know, reflected in

a conversation in ways.

I feel like there's a lot of times where you're like, Well, I know what my game is, and I know I'm going to perhaps reveal this much truth, or and then you know what your game is, and you're going to be like, I, I want my agenda no matter what.

No, even, even from the very beginning, there's a real like we're all in this shit together for realsies, yeah, for sure, regardless of our personal, like, ideological differences, we're going to bounce off of that in an attempt to be constructive at the very least.

And it's really interesting to be playing that in contrast to cyberpunk, which I also love.

But cyberpunk

is not constructive for shit.

Everybody's up to their own shit.

No one can truly be trusted.

And in moments where trust is happening, it's hard, hard earned through either strenuous negotiation,

you know, force, or, okay, goddammit, we're both going to die if we don't work together right now.

So, fine.

I don't care what you believe or what I believe, we have to get out of this alive, right?

Which is what cinema tends to be in action movie kind of logic, you know, in a way where it's just like, I don't agree with you, you don't like me either, but fuck it, that's a bigger problem, so let's deal with that.

But, um, and that's all fine given the setting and the world they're in.

But I just think for this one, where we're especially dealing with people that are familiar with each other and you know, also have a sense of like time is urgent and of the essence, and decisions matter, you know.

Um, I keep thinking about the idea of how, um,

you know, something with the setting here, of course, is that you know, uh, people don't have a lot of time, and you know, when you get introduced to, I forgot the name of the race and mass effect, but uh, the ones that that are solarians, yeah, the solarians that don't have a lot of time, like 30 years, exactly, right?

So, I'm like, what happens to humans with a solarian thought process, you know what I mean?

Where you're like, oh, we don't, our metabolism hasn't changed at all, but socially, we're like, there's old men.

There's an early detail when you're talking to Mael in like in the very first part of the prologue where they're talking about the gamage and how she doesn't have to come because she's like 16, right?

And

they're going on Expedition 33.

And he's like, well, yours isn't going to be for another nine years.

And I'm like, what the fuck?

Why would it be?

Oh, because as

it's going up one,

it's going down one.

So this is becoming super, super fucking dire.

Like right away, they only have like five more years to solve this before it is.

You're sending over 14-year-olds.

Yes.

No, you have to do the math and meet in the middle on where your young age is and where time will catch up to you.

You know?

It goes up, you go down.

Sorry, you go up, it goes down, and you eventually hit that, you know,

your finale point.

So

anyway, so all that to say that,

you know, there's some, I just really like the conversations the characters have with each other, and

they feel,

yeah, very believable and well, well thought out.

And, you know, even in brief, you know, in moments of just like

mild disagreement going along with each other and then discovering more together, the party overall is

great and a whole lot of fun.

Now, that being said, of course, the gameplay is fucking immaculate.

And, you know, we have described the defensive systems, which involve, you know, learning how to dodge attacks.

And then when you're feeling confident in the timing, go for a parry.

And then, you know, you individually parry all the hits and you get like a nice big counter, which is a huge payoff and makes hard fights easier.

But you get these.

There's a detail to that that I didn't pick up right away, which is if an enemy attacks like multiple separate characters, the last person to parry can do it by themselves and still get it.

Oh, oh, you can get an attack that hits each person like, yeah, twice or like two people twice.

And if you get, let's say you, you have an attack that goes to rank one and then rank three and then rank one and then rank three again.

If you fuck up rank one, but perfectly nail the rank three

parries twice, the rank three character will do their counter regardless.

So, yeah, so like it doesn't matter what's happening as a whole as much as when you're individually parrying with the characters.

Hey, you got it perfect for the third party member.

She's going to do her counter, even if you fucked up the first.

That's awesome.

And

in terms of just like

fucking hype, right?

When you, I don't know if you have you seen it, when you parry with the whole team.

I sure have.

When the whole team parries together.

Whole fucking gang.

Right.

You just get, you get the big sequence, and then instead of like

Gustave counters or whatever, you get Expedition 33

performs a counter and you're like oh the whole team yeah man it's nice like the game has been like so

so cool

about all of its like gameplay mechanics in those fights like the two that come to mind is like the chromatic nevron that i that is very very very early like right before you even go to the water place where it's like it will kill you in one hit

It's going to kill you in one hit every time.

So there's only one thing to do, and that's parry it 178 times in a row.

Go for it.

It's the only way to do it.

And eventually you learn that timing.

And if you're stubborn enough, like I am, you sit there and do it.

You know?

Yeah.

And then it tells you, hey, man, here's how many times you parried.

Yeah.

Here was your total damage.

Here was the amount of total damage.

Now, mimes and chromatic nevrons are fucking tiddlywinks compared to a real one that shows up later.

There's multiple levels of super boss, right?

So I love that.

You've got the ones we've seen, then you've got your fucking colossal titans, you know what I mean?

And then you've got just like the don't even bother unless you're prepared to like

like this is just not realistic.

You have the this seems insane like challenge that has introduced itself so far.

And I, and I, and I sat there, I spent a bit of time with it, and then I did a couple of things where I'm like, okay, hold on, let me test the waters a bit.

You see, it looks impossible.

Go back, change your buildup, right?

And that's that's like, are you committing to you know, resetting all of your abilities, all of your skills, you know, bringing in the right party members?

I'm gonna commit to it, give it your best shot.

Does it still seem impossible?

Absolutely.

Okay, fucking hold on.

This might be end game or never, you know?

But yeah, there's like unless

the level.

Unless you just bang it out.

But the level of deception on those parries and dodge timings gets so sinister.

So

that was my other one.

Like, we have delay stuff.

We have some, but then there's also, like, there was a, there was an attack on a fairly early boss.

It was the boss of the water area.

And I got, like, it tricked me because they give you the jump jump tutorial.

Yeah, okay.

Where you have to jump over moves,

and they're like, if there's a move that you can jump over, it says there's a flash.

And then you fight that boss, and the first move it does is jump.

It jumps.

And I went, okay, so I hit the X button to jump, and then it hit me five fucking times in a row.

You didn't?

Because it was just an attack called jump.

Simon didn't say jump, bitch.

Oh my god.

Simone, you got you tricked me.

Simon à pasi, jump.

I was tricked and confused.

Bamboozled.

No, the enemy jumped and landed and hit the ground, you know, but yes, there is that jumping prompt where you've got to fucking time it and then you get your air counter, which is super sick.

And now you're, now you're paying attention to multiple little rhythm game, you know, things, which, you know what?

Considering I was talking about like, you know, I love the gameplay and like Everhood and stuff like that.

And yeah, let's have it be one genre on offense and one genre on defense.

What a simple but brilliant, elegant thing, you know?

Yeah.

And then yeah, QTEing as well, which it's interesting because like some really good moves get really tricky timing with their QTEs, right?

Like you'll notice that the timing for landing overcharge, which is Gustav's big blast palm, is

much tighter.

than some of the others, you know, the window for landing it in the perfect zone.

So like, yeah, they kind of do that as well in a couple different places, stacking them to overlap with each other.

Um, they do want it to be challenging to, like, you know, handle everything on offense and defense aside from the RPG-ing that you're doing in a you know, pick enemy and attack kind of way.

Um,

the times where you're aiming your gun to shoot the weak point, and the weak point is kind of obscured and covered up, and you're like, ooh, or like, you know, there was a boss that we had to beat on it for a while before the weak point was like no longer covered by a piece of armor, yeah, yeah, there's that, right?

Um,

and uh, uh, uh, shit, what was I gonna say?

Um,

oh, yeah, there's like there's an enemy that jumps forward at one point and is just rocking you with like combos, right?

Lefts and rights, and you see they actually they do like a hook and then like an uppercut, and then they jump forward and they fake the hook and then come with a cross, you know?

Yeah, and you're like, you just did a fake on me, and I went

and then got

flattened.

You straight up boxer style

you know you twitched bitch it's it's great it's a lot of fun um

but um when I was starting this I brought up the the we did it ourselves conversation with like you know um hey we we figured out in fromsoft or in the RE engine how to make our own little little hut and and and how that looks

The one thing I'm going to say many hours into Expedition 33 right now that I think is

so okay I pray it's a flaw that is like uh kind of bugs me and it's

it's not fully their fault for this but it's this okay when you I praise how this game is understandably and reasonably triple a sorry double A in that you can see like I said the the the map limitations are all very you know uh targeted and you don't you could even when it expands and you can get you get lost in a way like it's still not anywhere like a giant, crazy, sprawling, open thing.

You know, even your overworld is it's all very contained, which it needs to be for this to be a reasonable, affordable thing that you know is not

going to suffer in quality because everything is bloated out with filler, right?

So, that is

great.

There is a feeling that you get that is just a it's an unfortunate byproduct of unreal engine generated

like static environments

where unfortunately you kind of know and you're looking at a world that is

there's nothing that really it moves or interacts with anything in any way.

So it feels like you're dropped into a just

setting,

you're dropped into a box that doesn't feel alive, you know?

Yeah, no, it feels like a 360 game.

And it feels like overtly like a 360 game.

Actually, it kind of looks like with the way the aliasing works on DLSS on my PC, it kind of looks like a PS3 game.

It looks like it should live alongside Lost Odyssey and folklore, if you remember that game.

Folklore barely, not really.

It's a little more obscure, but it's got those vibes on it.

Because I think what you kind of end up with, and there's these little bits that suddenly make a difference, right?

But like when your environment is littered with a whole lot of things that you walk by and kind of walk into and touch, but nothing moves or nothing really feels like you interact with it.

It's the problem I had with Mortal Shell, right?

Where you're like, outside of a couple of things, everything is just baked into the world.

No interactable objects fall over with physics.

Nothing really happens there.

And it's not necessary.

It's not necessary, but it adds to a feeling of like this whole world is not alive, right?

That pile of jars is just never going, doesn't move at all.

You know, that hut is a part of the ground.

It's not really a hut, you know?

And

the little things that happen in, you know,

I don't know, like a random,

not even this gen, but like last gen games or so, like in a random, say, fromsoft thing or whatever to just compare, or even like a,

any game where you like you see like a building that like i don't know it might blow up right or you might see like a door that's that that like

explode some way or you might see like jars that you run into that fall over rolling through jars in a souls game even adds a little bit of like the world is here and there's objects in that world um and because here you just kind of walk up to things and press square it doesn't feel like the world is alive well uh

I think you're completely right on that.

And I think that is absolutely a factor of their budgetary concerns.

Reasonable.

Improving that would have cost

a lot.

Yep.

But

it's a really good thing that as you were describing that, I'm like, oh, you mean it feels like static and lifeless?

Like, I don't know.

A painting?

Yeah, I mean,

you could go with that part of it.

But I think for sure, if anyone, and the thing is, like, I've got in a bit here, but if you have played,

I guess, like, asset flip Unreal games, you end up with this sort of feeling, you know?

I feel that's like fairly unkind.

It's, it's,

but no, no, no, it's not to compare, it's not to compare the fact that they've grabbed, like, like this is a, a, a, a, uh, artistic, like, masterwork with, like, how awesome the original

things they're creating are.

I'm not comparing it to say that like you grabbed someone else's work and just stuck it in there.

What I am saying is that, like, again, with Mortal Shell, that's a great comparison point.

A big, beautiful, empty area in that game where

it was, there was nothing that moved or inter that you interacted with, or so.

And so you kind of felt like I'm dropped as a piece into this world, and let's go find all the lights and press square on them, you know?

And it's not at all an important thing

in the grand scheme where you're like,

you know, we're talking about reasonable budgetary restrictions on excellent games.

But I don't want you to focus on the bad part of the implication of me saying asset flip creation.

It's more the part where you're like, if you grab the level, you know, much like if you were to have like, whatever,

hire this man, Sonic, Kirby, Mario running through a beautiful, you know, field or whatever.

That field is also kind of empty with nothing going on.

There's a tree there.

You hit it.

It just kind of sits there.

And

there is

an effect in earlier games and current games where by having little things that move and break and exist in the world, you just kind of like feel more like you're in that setting as opposed to, you know,

yeah, I'm almost lacking the full words to describe it, but that's exactly.

The word is ambiance.

Not ambiance, no.

no.

No, that's not what I said.

But that's kind of it.

That's kind of it, you know?

No, no, you're talking about that like minor detail place in realism, right?

Yeah.

Just like, you know, you'll see, you'll see, like, let's take a tree in some fucking whatever game, and like just the fact that the tree just kind of wiggles just a little bit in wind that's not really there gives it a more sense of place rather than me like being like completely static.

Yeah, I would definitely say something like that.

Or, you know, yeah,

or like things that react to you moving around, you know, like

there's another example of this, and I've seen it, I've seen this as a trick in other games as well, where there's a point where you have to run across some logs that are floating on water, right?

And you have to balance to not fall off.

And when you're running across the logs,

you very quickly notice that actually the logs are static completely.

Yeah.

And everything is locked in the world in its exact location.

The water animation is the only thing that's moving up and down to kind of make it give the impression that the logs are bouncing, but they're not, you know.

And so you see it up close, and you're like, oh, okay, right, this is a more affordable trick for this where you just, the water dynamics will sell the idea that you're watching a log bouncing on the water, but it's an illusion up close, you know?

I feel like, um,

so

this is like at its core, like, fairly nitpick.

Like, I do believe that

the correct, the correct decision to cut all that, that, that fluffing it up for like more or just tightening it up.

But there's kind of like this energy of like guy who loads up shooter and like fires 400 bullets into the ground and goes, look, the decals are disappearing.

It's fucking, oh, it's Sony loses.

Or, you know,

those fucking guys.

I know who you're talking about, but I'll say that like, I assure you, like, you know, you run from one environment to the other.

And as you're taking in these beautiful moments, especially, right?

Because that's the kind of thing is where, like, when you enter a new environment and you're sold on, like, you know, how gorgeous

the vista you're looking at is and like whatever is happening that's unique to this place, right?

So like the underwater place, you know, you see, like, it's not, you're not underwater, but weirdly underwater fluid dynamics are occurring, which are beautiful.

I'm going to stop you right there.

And I want to give a shout out to Monster Hunter World and now this game to be like, you know what?

Fucking rules?

Fake underwater environments.

Right.

Right.

Like, I'm a big fan of fake underwater environments.

Yeah, I don't have to deal with water.

I don't have to deal with swimming.

I don't have to deal with breathing.

But like, oh, it's the aesthetic of that.

And shit.

I love it.

And then, you know, entering another area where, like, yeah,

the beautiful things you're seeing off this cliffside or at these rocks or this formation of, you know,

elaborate construction and

manners and such.

There's all of these that are, you're walking into them and

they're gorgeous to look at.

You can, whoa, goddammit.

Stop it.

Leave me alone.

What'd I do?

I'm sorry.

I got assaulted by Windows.

It's okay.

Oh, fuck off, Windows.

Windows keeps telling me, hey, you know, you turned your location off.

Do you want to turn it back on?

I'm like, no.

Yeah.

Why would I want to fucking do that, you fucking bitch?

But all this to say that uh the the more beautiful these new settings you enter the more you start to feel what i'm talking about right uh because you come across like uh more elaborate um objects in the world and like lore

uh related

locations and you're kind of like it's a little stiff it's a little stiff you're like like look at this cool object that

It does, you know, nothing moves.

Nothing's nothing's.

Yeah.

So that's kind of it, though.

I like, do you want to hear what my nitpick is?

If I wanted to, to fucking nitpick some part of this game's presentation, sure, and it's a nitpick that I was fucking around with on my stream, and I was like, I kind of love this, I kind of love it.

Um, the absolute worst jumping animation I can remember is

just like jumping straight up,

just fucking weird, weird shit and the wrong momentum.

It's super floating, but it's also fast.

But it's there for certain platforming challenges that you're going to need to platform to get to.

I've already done a couple of them, but I can see that they're planning to escalate that shit on me dramatically.

You learn to run and jump, you know?

It's not, it's, it's not meant to be a platformer, but there will be platforming.

This reminds me so much.

I've talked about it on my show.

I don't know if I've, I think I mentioned it on the stream, but Iron Pineapple,

the fantastic YouTuber who covers tons tons of soul stuff, he said you can make a good game into a great game by making it suck a little bit.

Huh.

And like, when I read that, I was like, oh, wait a second.

I think he's gone to something here.

Interesting thoughts.

All the greatest things have just that part about it.

This is like, ah, fuck this fucking part.

Oh, why has it got to be like this?

Hmm.

I get the spirit.

I get the spirit.

I'm trying to think there because I'm like, how many games are actually like flawless, right?

I mean, I don't know that.

None.

Yeah.

Maybe original RE4.

Maybe.

Chrono Trigger?

Chrono Trigger's flawless.

Do I have any problems with Disco Elysium?

I don't think I do.

I had a minor issue with original release of Disco Elysium.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, no.

The director's cut, voice acted.

I don't think it's.

I don't think I have a problem with that game.

occasionally you can run into some fringe bugs that screw up your story progress but I haven't

well um

all this to say that uh yeah it is it is there's there's that little bits of jank that you hit on you know uh from time to time um

and you know and then there's things where you're like oh I didn't expect this detail here but this is nice such as going to camp and hanging out with your your friends and having nice conversations and basically having a Baldur's Gate 3 little sit-around.

Oh, very much so.

Yeah, absolutely.

And

there's NPCs to talk to.

And there's, you know, little people that can help you do stuff.

And you can see it's big for a reason.

There's the upgrade guy, which is the coolest thing

that you're doing.

There's your withers.

There's your withers standing right over there.

Yeah.

Floating skeleton.

Very, very crimson peak fucking skeleton with no face.

You know, and then there's the little details where it's like hey you can remind yourself what you're up to you can write in your journal all that fun stuff you know and then or just or just upgrade and and chill um little little moments dedicated of like hanging out with the party which love that there love it even in a smaller gameplay context like in darkest dungeon you know um

where yeah everybody just takes a moment to like breathe for a second um

those are those are fun things that i hope rpgs kind of continue to do because you know, they weren't really a staple of the old or older, like JRPGs, for example.

Yeah.

There's a little moment that I had on stream.

The last thing I did on my show was I got the fourth party member.

Okay, cool.

And upon getting the fourth party member, I was overwhelmed with the feeling of like, oh, I know what games you like to play, whoever designed this character.

I wasn't sure.

I

have played this system up to level 100 twice.

I see.

Write it down, because I don't know.

I didn't recognize the system, but I was like, this seems low.

Oh, it's complex.

It's a cross between Reaper and Astrologian in FF14.

Okay, okay.

It is a cross between those two classes almost like

verbatim is a weird word here, but like,

like, even down to the graphical interface, looks like the same like job gauge.

It's ridiculous.

Um, I will say this: that uh, the trend of characters wearing their references on their sleeve

continues, certainly, and it is awesome and obvious, like uh, uh, uh, in, I get in other ways where they pull their their inspiration from.

And it's all cool shit we like, you know?

Does it have that feeling of, hey, you guys like video games?

Because we do.

I'm going to just leave it right there.

I'm going to just leave it right there.

They

know

they 1,000% get it.

There's a moment I read

a thing that happens, and I'm like, I read about a system, and I'm looking at the system, and it's like halfway through the description.

I'm like, okay, all right, we're done.

We cooked.

This is lock it up.

We're done here.

The game's unbelievable.

So,

yeah, anyway,

push on with that.

That's a lot of fun.

It's

truly...

I'll continue.

And of course, yeah.

We continue.

But there's also the thing where, like you said, you throw the difficulty up and then you get fights that'll last a little bit longer, but they're still.

Normal, the random battles would be like one.

One hit.

Yeah.

And so this is also something I've kind of found where I was like, uh-oh, I kind of turned one of my party members into a beast god that is deleting the game.

Is it my I have turned Mael into a fight deleter

and it's a problem.

I can I'm not there yet, but I can see the path.

I mean, the character is built to kill.

She's frog, dude.

The stance system

is just like,

well, I mean, one, it's cool that she's doing all that Arya shit, you know, that's all fun.

Yeah.

But, like, you have, like, there's a sword I pick, you pick up, and it's like, start the battle in virtuous stance.

I literally

were like, oh, you're, you're giving me this this early?

I thought that would be the last thing if that existed.

And you gave it to me now?

Are you out of your mind?

I started to do.

I started to do, I got the ability she has where she just stays in place and then keeps the stance.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And what I would

is I would just...

I would just buff her with powerful and have her constantly skip her turns so she'd stay in virtuous.

And I built up all her pictos to do more counter damage so that whenever she would counter she would do a larger hit on her counter than anybody could do on their actual attacks oh it's it's cute that you're spending turns making her powerful that's cute

i'm not doing oh no no no i'm just saying like the possible what the possibilities that come from putting pictos on and learning skills that are like no no no no no when the battle starts right and then you have her start first, and you see all of the available Picto skills that you've put on them just pop up in one shot, and like a fucking list just goes,

you know, where it's like, oh, 50% more damage on the, okay, just

sorry, again, um,

this, this.

What did you do?

Uh, I did nothing, but Windows is

trying to be as annoying as shit.

Did you start the podcast with a PC that was like, hey, man, you should update?

No.

Firefox is deciding to do for the first time ever in its life a big loud notification.

And this is weird.

This has never happened before.

I don't hear it.

I don't know if Chad hears it.

They do.

They do.

The people at home.

Really do?

Yes.

So that's what's annoying.

It has never done this before.

I swear it's never happened.

And this is really annoying because this used to be like Windows Edge style harassment and bullshit.

This is the first time I've ever seen Firefox be like, hey, hey, hey, look at me.

Hey.

I can be like Windows Edge too.

God damn it, man.

Okay.

Well, I think I've cleared the notification, so let's assume that that's going to be fine.

Who loves computers?

Regardless,

you have a billion of these abilities on, and like a bunch of them are just stacking off each other.

So you're like the first thing you do is going to be brutal and you start in virtuous and you do and you and then you also have the AP extra to start off with your your your final attack that you're supposed to build up to you just start the round with

I'm start with it actually

and then like whatever's left standing which is like nothing is like okay well just pick off the rest you know um

let me ask you a question this is very important so uh one of the things that I noticed when I was building up my characters is that when the item that just gives you another slot to equip things in, you could just dump them all into like one person if you fucking felt like it.

You could just say, fuck it, 99 to my L.

Correct.

Right?

Yes.

Which allows you to stack every single buff you've ever heard of on the same character.

Yes.

And bust the game opening like that.

I'm going to assume that if and when you start to bust the game over your knee, the game provides you with something to test that strength.

There are a couple of tests of that strength.

However, none of them so far have

met up to the challenge except for the one that I'm describing, which is go fuck yourself, right?

There is an insane go fuck yourself enemy that like it's a that you start and it's like, all right, I got like

seven turns in a row coming at you first.

And each one of these at any point of this sequence is your game over.

So

have fun,

solo character, right?

Okay.

And here's the bit.

What if I told you that the game also starts going like, ah,

you've put a bunch of your points all on one character, have you?

Well, what if you got extra benefits from having your character stand there by themselves, right?

right?

What if you had pictos that were geared around solo play?

Oh, the lone wolf building.

The lone wolf build becomes a thing that is like encouraged if you want to go for it.

And, you know, you've got the cool, you've got this the refilled Estes.

You've got the refilled heels between saves.

So you can spend a turn managing yourself if you need to.

But like the ability to go in solo is very real and just have the party sit it out.

Um, and it doesn't take long, you know, so that that's great, yeah, but then they're gonna get all the XP and then they're gonna get really big.

I thought it was really interesting when I was fucking around.

I'm like, uh, because you know, if a character dies, they earn like half XP from the fight and stuff like that.

So, my characters are getting a little, little uneven, okay?

It's like, oh, you know what?

If I wanted to even them out, I could just fucking Gustav, get out there by yourself.

Fucking just fucking do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I, I, I, you know, in fact, I went with like the characters that were uneven.

I'd just have them go up first and, you know, push them for leveling out their balance and stuff.

And if you start messing around with the move skill tree, you can start seeing like, okay, if you buy a line to the right, that's going to be more of turning them into a healer versus just going to the left, and that's going to be more of a matter of the money.

Lune is a good example.

Like, each direction is like an element.

Right.

And then do you want them to be more support or more to more or more fire, you know, stacking damage over time and all these little things.

And then so you, as you're doing what you're describing, you can switch them up to be like, okay, actually, let's have you become the heavy damage dealer right now.

You know, so something great with Lune, for example, is a weapon where every time you take a gunshot, it fills an element stain at random.

So you can just...

Which means you can get her cash out like super fast.

Right.

So you're like, fuck it.

I'll waste four shots.

Pop, pop, pop, pop.

Fill it up, cash out.

You know?

So what are you going to do?

You're going to put the pictos on her that give her all these bonuses and stacking debuffs if she shoots people.

Or extra AP from

the jump, which allow her to then afford four bullets and

the cash out.

You know?

Yeah, no, the system is incredible.

Like just the amount, I'm not even that far, but like the amount of shit that you can push and tweak and fuck with.

And like every time I pick up a picto, I range the gamut from, oh, that's okay.

That's pretty good to, ooh,

that's interesting.

So something about that too is when you, when you grabbed your pictos, the learning process is one where you're like, it's only four fights, therefore always equip it and learn it, right?

Especially because your whole party members can fight, you can do that in 10 minutes, less, less, like five minutes.

Right.

And everybody gets the access to that skill.

Always do it.

So you do learn everything.

And because you're constantly incentivized to switch things over to learn them, you're always going to look back at like, okay, I pulled off this expensive skill to put on this one that I'm probably not going to use as much, but I want to learn it.

And now I have some refunded points to go rearrange their, the, their skills.

And it feels really great to know, like, my build

works with half of the points I've spent.

dedicated to, you know, Gustav's offense,

you know, locked in place.

So I have another eight points to just put wherever I want, you know, and like that's nice because you're kind of, it's, it's reinforcing this thing where you're like, okay, cool.

I'm, you're, you're encouraged to play around and stuff.

And so eventually you go like, all right, what's the most expensive Picto that I

don't want to lose points on while rotating the other two out?

I'll give that to him, right?

So this, it costs 10 AP in order to have him start out with his base attack be 50% stronger.

Lock that in place.

You will always rock that.

And then you'll rotate the other two.

We'll take the refund on AP points and just be like, what if we made our build about the gun?

You know, what if we made shooting super cool?

That is the total opposite way of how I've been building my characters.

I've been building them in a completely different way.

So,

what I've been doing is I go to them and I go, listen,

what weapon do I have equipped right now?

Like, Gustav, your weapon is B and C on, I think, like, vit vit and like speed whatever right and so i go okay what will give me the best bang for my buck and i sort the pictos

by defense value

and i i equip the top three defense value pictos because that juices his stats up enormously then i look at what that has given him and then i build the rest of it around whatever those happen to be ah okay okay okay So you're also, do you also level up your stats according to the weapon you're maining

for scaling?

Yeah, well,

I've been, so what I've been doing is that I've switched to every new weapon as I've gotten it

and then I've chased the stats that the new weapon has

while keeping a baseline.

You don't reset.

Yeah, I haven't reset.

I reset once.

Okay.

But like, I don't want anyone to have one speed.

Okay, I see.

So like everybody, like, it's like...

Gotcha.

One level is like purely into the stats this weapon has, and then the next level is the ones that I didn't do.

Okay.

And so on and so forth.

So say like I had a level on Mayel that was speed for a really long time.

So she got a really high speed.

But then I switched to a different weapon and then I started leveling those up stats because I haven't gotten enough yet to really lock in on like what I want.

So I'm kind of generalizing it slightly.

So what you're doing, yeah.

So that makes more sense then to have your defense value go up based on your pictos and then work around your weapon for me this is a completely different discussion because my defense stat is zero for every party member so so you're not going to equip any weapons that use the defense i give no shits about that right and and a lot i saw that and i was and i called i'm like oh willie's gonna fucking go through this game with zero defense zero defense right and i gave myself a bit of luck because i want to get my crit uh to 20 or so you know let's get that 20

um but for the most part, we're going.

And Myel has like fucking 45% crit, right?

And so the interesting thing, right?

The interesting thing about doing it with zero defense is, of course, your skill is depending, is what determines your defense.

Yeah, parry or die.

Parry or die, right?

And then what we also get is weapons where I look at it and I go, okay, what's the element on this weapon?

Is it like something, is it like an earth and it scales with defense or so?

All right.

Do I want the abilities underneath here more than I care about the damage, right?

So, like I described with Mael, starting in virtuous stance is the most important thing.

So, if this scales with defense, everything is secondary to that, then fuck it, we rebuild for this weapon, right?

The weapon has its unlockables.

Those unlockables become the priority.

You build your stats around that, and then you build the pictos around the existing stats, right?

But in the absence of that, if I can get something that scales with health and agility, we're gonna going to just run that into the fucking ground and

damage, damage, damage, damage all day, you know?

And so what that has created is characters with like, like,

I have the top three stats like pretty

front loaded, but like, I did mix in heavy luck for one of the characters who has a scaling weapon with luck that also has the abilities on it that I want her to have, you know?

Tons of freedom in this system by just...

Yeah, so like my Gustave is based on defense right now and what Gustave has mainly been doing is using items to resurrect the damage dealing characters when I fuck up the parry.

Ah, okay, okay.

Um,

I haven't and do breaks, yeah, you know, with overcharge and shit like that.

Well, I mean, one big suggestion I certainly have is

Yeah, always make sure you give your character the ability to break something, right?

It's so fucking vital.

That fucking boss that eats you.

Yeah, I was like, I was struggling on that, and I was like, oh no, everyone has to be able to everyone needs a break it's right it's unbeatable this is a this is a hard tutorial this is a hard lock tutorial you must learn how to do this um

not if you're doing enough damage

yeah yeah you can play with two party members and be fine uh but but uh

still

For utility purposes, give every character the ability to break something, and you'll notice on their skill tree that there's multiple things that can break.

And then, you know,

if the break conditions are something that, you know, is like, have the right stains, then of course give her the ability to get those stains.

If the break conditions are, it has to be a marked opponent, give yourself the ability to create, fulfill those conditions, right?

So

yeah, pick a break and pick the ability to

fulfill those conditions.

And then second,

I would say, you know, give yourself a passive that is not, that is when you're not allowed to attack or if you're hit with a status effect or something else going on, give yourself the ability to either, you know, uh, buff the party or buff yourself, or something that's not an act, just not an act, an attack, you know, yeah.

Um, and because there's going to be turns where you're like, shit, there's nothing I can do right now except manage, you know?

Um, yeah,

so those are, those are, those are the two things that I found have come in extreme handy.

Um,

yeah, this game's incredible, it is, it is, and uh,

I'm I'm really like I'm scratching the surface on like you know, these picto combinations and stuff, but the feeling is definitely there that it's like, oh, if you want to play around, you can spend more time.

There's more experimenting you can do than fights provided to experiment with.

Well, it's like, well, basically, where do you want to spend your time?

Do you want to fight and

get like really, really, really quite excellent at the timed gameplay, like the button presses?

Do you want to fight your ass off and just give your characters more physical power and levels?

Or do you want to go into these menus and just fucking play Logic Magician and create bullshit?

So

something I described gameplay-wise in FF7 Remake was one of my favorite moments was

I was syncing up and getting really good like combination juggles with the party while uh going through the Shinra building and specifically Operation Rescue Aerith was playing which is uh the sickest remix of let the battles begin in that game in my opinion and right as the music hit a crescendo I had two characters in the air in slow motion you know and I'm picking the next skill and I'm like what do I want okay

Tifa's getting a juggle and like cloud is jumping up behind and like I was like oh and like it's just a perfect slowdown moment with the music and the and the the violins going and I was like this game is fucking incredible right um I it was a moment just for me in that fight in the gameplay that was that was um bespoke and

I feel like every single fight end in this game in Expedition 33 is trying to hit that is hitting is hitting that moment where you get the you want to save up the big pop you get the overcharge or you get the big finale and you land that last hit you get the slowdown, and then the music switches over to the like either hyper or like denouement version of what it was.

In some cases, vocals kick in on that level-up screen, you know, and the music-the the I mean, the fact that they just found somebody online that went this hard and is killing it because every single theme you hear has an amazing end version as well is perfect.

I believe the um, the lead writer is also someone they just found on Reddit.

Yep, They are somebody who applied to be a voice actor, and then she

ended up just meshing with the team

and became the head writer.

Like the whole thing, so there's this interview, right, that was done and we have it as one of the notes.

But Guillaume Brosch, the director,

basically just made this game online while being bored at Ubisoft during COVID.

And like the whole thing is like

they found a lot of people that passed the vibe check and were on the same page with creatively what they were going for.

And those people ended up just taking bigger roles because it's like, okay, yeah, you ought to be a voice actor, but you clearly have the same vision and idea and get it and have these good ideas.

Fuck it.

Write it.

Let's go.

There's a real, I think that the quote from that guy is that like it would have taken 25 years to make this game at Ubisoft because of the bureaucracy of Triple-A.

100%.

And it's like,

so like this, this person to get started on the game, mind you.

Like an extreme eye for talent,

I'm getting from this.

And they can't quite sell it other than you look cool, get in.

But their eye for it is

dead on.

And so by just having total control and be like, yeah, whatever, you, you, you, you, and you.

And I can also

do it.

And you can feel with the composer that, you know, especially this is like the official gig coming off of being just like a random, you know, composer on SoundCloud.

This is.

Yo, check out my SoundCloud, actually work.

Yeah, and but this is like the Mick Gordon, Casey Edwards school of like, I get to work on the cool thing.

I'm going to make more music than anyone asked for.

I'm going to be, you know, like you asked me for like 12 tracks, you're getting 150 and variants, and you're getting three or four or five albums worth.

And like, probably.

Here's four remixes of the battle theme for the one area.

Why did you make four?

You know, like, I, and I super, I get that feeling of like, oh, they shot way above where anyone asked them to.

So now they're in the clear running for like soundtrack of the year, like already, and it's, it's fucking May.

What happens?

What happens when you assemble a team of people that snuck in to make the swinging good in Spider-Man 2?

Yeah, what if everyone on the team is doing that, right?

That's the thing here.

Well, there's a, there's a very, um, there's an uh, there's a story about that, uh, that I think about quite often, which is the original development of BioWare.

So, and Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, because

BioWare used to be a medical technology company, which is why it's called BioWare.

Right?

And the two doctors

had private practices as well as a medical technology company.

So they were fucking crushing it and making dollars.

And they're like, yeah, I want to make cool ass nerd games where money was the secondary concern.

Making their cool ass Dungeons and Dragons games was the primary concern.

And if we make some money along the way, so much the better.

And like that, that focus of like, I just want to make something fucking cool.

Yeah.

And like, I feel that coming out of Expedition 33.

A bunch of people who just want to make a cool thing.

Passion.

I mean, look,

just the way that items are

like rewarded in this game, where

you walk through the basic level and you come across Pictos left and right.

And if you go a little bit off the beaten path, you might find like a really cool, rare Picto.

um

and then when you fight some of these harder enemies that are around you get a cool weapon for beating them um but if you really go out of your way and you scrape and you find the the shops and challenges and shit on the fringes Almost always what you're getting is an awesome costume or hairstyle,

you know?

So you scrape and work to get the cosmetics.

And I'm like, let's fucking play dress up.

Hell yeah.

You know?

Let's play silly ass dress up.

Oh, I love the way my characters look.

So, I the first part I spent so much of the game initially with everybody like suited up in uniform, rolling as a criminal.

Come in, Ben, get to the mirror.

But once I got fun stuff for everybody, I'm like, yo, let's just start playing fashion here, you know?

And yeah,

the mix and match, you know, is great.

Like, um, fourth party member, I'm like, I like the default expedition uniform, but I want that uh beret on, you know, I like the look of that.

You know, you can mix the serious and goofy styles together to create some fun combinations as well.

So that's been, I love that, that, like, the reward for some of the biggest challenges is exclusively cosmetic.

It's thrown me for a loop that the cosmetics are like all out of order.

Like, there's absolutely no

reason.

So you get like Gustave's mime shit like right away.

And I was under the assumption that then you would get Lunay's mime shit.

And then you would get Mael's mime shit.

It's like, no, I have like four haircuts for one and half a mime for another and

a burlap sack for one of the...

Just like

there's no way to plan for it or figure it out in advance.

Also, whoever's on your party, just tap R3 to switch to them as the running around active character.

Yeah, why not?

You can stare at Chrono, but you can stare at anyone else in that slot if you want to.

And, you know, when you talk to people, the right person will do the talking talking as contextually

required.

Sometimes it matters.

But for the most part, do you want to just pick Lune and like fly around instead of sprint?

Okay, cool.

Do it.

You know?

It's, yeah, it's just, it just allows you to just enjoy the style and fun of that stuff like immediately.

Fucking funny.

I don't want to run from playing as Bane of the Gods, Mael.

She's so broken, dude.

She's so broken.

Dude, I think it's on purpose.

I pointed it out when I got her in the party, and she starts as the strongest member in the party, which is really fun when that happens.

And I'm like, she has the Frenchest weapon.

Therefore, she is the strongest.

Doing the fucking poses and everything.

And yeah, and every time you do one of these challenges, like I said, you know, where you're like, Time to learn.

Time to learn the defense.

I'm like, as a person who loves these mechanics, how much are you going to punish me?

Okay, I drop to the ground, clear,

obscure,

and I'm standing back in front of the enemy,

like 15, 10 seconds tops, right back in.

Love that, love that, you know?

Incredible stuff.

Incredible stuff.

More updates as we get further in.

That game's incredible.

Yeah, I'm excited to see

as you as you see more of it.

there's some good shit.

There's some wipeouts.

Oh, there's some wipeouts, and there's some wipeouts.

There's some wipeouts, and there's some awesome,

you know.

I mean, look, you start out with,

holy fuck, look at these badasses.

They're so scary.

They're so strong.

You know, a classic Shonen moment in any good, like Shonen We Love is: open the door, surprise, it's Atachi.

It's me.

What the fuck are you doing here?

What are you, where are the exams?

You know?

Kaisen, same thing.

It's the exams.

What the fuck you doing here?

Ow!

Chaos Arc begins.

That we establish a, I don't know what to call it, a Sephiroth character, a omnipresent mega threat to the party.

And when they talk about them,

it's not like, oh, I'm going to get them for what they did to us.

It's like, if you see that dude, fucking run.

Don't like everybody just run.

That's what I'm talking about when I, okay, so that's what I mean when I'm talking about like dialogue, right?

There's a like, okay,

people will have feelings that say,

get your revenge.

No, I'm going to.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Listen to me very carefully.

Don't fuck around.

Get out of there.

I don't care how you feel.

Run.

Like, there's an understanding.

Well, you're going to run too, right?

Oh, yeah.

No, I'm going to be running.

There's an understanding of the threat level, you know, in that exchange.

That's what I mean: is these moments of like movie Trump, movie Trump?

Nah.

Nah.

You know, okay, all right, cool.

As long as we're on the same page here.

I love that.

I love that.

Yeah, it's great.

Okay, Claire Obscure continues.

Hey, let me ask you a really important question about Claire Obscure Expedition Trentois.

CEO or E33?

E33.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

That's what I, I, somebody in my chat the other day was like, oh, I've been playing CO.

And I was like, what the fuck?

No, no, no.

What the hell?

Because I think, I think, one, Expedition 33 is there for English speakers to be able to say it, you know?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, I didn't even think about that.

Claire obscure

is extremely awkward for English speakers.

It's super weird.

So Expedition 33 is there.

And I did see, like, you know, I saw like someone say, oh, that name sounds really generic and whatever.

And it's like, yeah, no, the whole thing isn't, but this part of it that is the brand is what you can do.

And like,

I don't imagine, I thought about this, but it's like, okay, the nature of the story is you go through this as you're learning about the world and as you're learning about the other expeditions, you know?

So I don't know that like expedition number can necessarily be a franchise marker.

I don't know that this is a setting that calls for

franchising.

I'm like, no.

You know,

this feels like incredibly hostile to franchise vacation.

It doesn't seem likely, you know, but that being said, you never know.

And brand recognition is a thing.

And if people know that word, then there is a monetary value to either using the word expedition or the word clairobscure, you know, again.

And unfortunately, because of the plot being like, well, this is the number of the team, and we already kind of are learning about the other teams in retrospect, it feels like the claire obscure word might be easier to translate, to bring over to the next entry if needed.

But I don't know, you know.

What I can say, though, is that, like, yeah, E33, 100%.

Yeah, absolutely.

Sandfall Interactive.

Oh, what a great fucking game.

What a great fucking game.

Please, please, please let this be

the example of how development can go, you know, for other studios and people with like ambitions that are like at this level, you know?

I saw people comparing it to Baldur's Gate and like, I'm starting to understand it because it's like, it's just a team that just got to do whatever the fuck they wanted.

That's it.

Driven by passion.

That's it.

Like absolutely no oversight at all.

Like people who know what what makes for a good game getting together and doing it without any of the red tape and bullshit to get through.

I'm going to take a weird point of defense here.

Sometimes some teams need red tape.

Like I remember talking to people who worked at BioWare Montreal who described that they never saw anyone from EA walk into their office once.

Yeah,

maybe they should have sent someone over there

and figure out why they weren't making the game.

Also, we are going to talk about the there is a little bit of Silk Song news, for example, and there is another time where, hey, you might need some tape, right?

Maybe, maybe somebody cracking a whip a little bit.

You might need, hey, what the fuck?

You might need some tape.

However,

Sandfall Interactive, this company of clearly passionate devs that got together and made a double-A experience that we're all loving while understanding what makes for good games and keeping out the chaff and having what's there be

on point.

They also

have a, I'm sure, a department that handles marketing.

I'm sure, you know what I mean?

They have a department that they have deadlines, they have all these things.

Like somebody ran and made all these decisions, so we can't just act like, you know,

it's not Studio H DMR, you know, that made Cuphead.

It's not like Two Brothers and the.

Have you ever read about like Valve's fucking office structure and how awful it is to make games?

I remember the Valve handbook with the moving around and the

cell phone.

Your desks all have wheels on them and so people are just constantly reorganizing according to their whims on various projects.

So

I don't think that's inherently a bad idea, especially because the main thing, like I read the handbook and like we can see how the flaws of that come to fruition over time with

how many products come out and what the focus is on.

Gains are so much higher prioritized than long-term gains.

But on paper, I don't think think that that philosophy is inherently flawed because the other condition they had was that hiring is of the utmost importance.

And you need to hire people that could essentially be not only your replacement, but better than you.

So in theory, you're having people that are more skilled that could be your own like boss or manager join the company or people that are like, if you're an artist and you're looking to work with other people, you're going to hire up above you, essentially, instead of a top-down kind of dynamic.

And in theory, the person that joins would be able to

have a massive, massive

benefit that they add being a part of the team, you know?

And that comes from, I guess, like being like, well, I think this game needs this really cool thing.

And then

you hope that's the end goal.

So on paper, right?

But I think here, with at least with this team, like, no, we know that this is a team of, you know, as they said, it was like, what, like 70 people or something like that?

Or

so they,

there's two numbers.

One is 30 people and a dog, and the other is 84 people and a dog.

Okay.

And

the question is:

are you counting outsourced QA?

Yeah.

You didn't even have to do that.

They don't work inside the team.

I guarantee you that number means QA testers versus the dog is definitely a full-time studio member and in fact has a special

thing inside the game for it.

Sweet.

I don't know if you found it.

Not yet.

Start,

you know,

I'm just going to type it out to you.

But yeah,

that number makes a lot of sense when you include outsourcing.

Ah, okay.

Okay.

Interesting.

Ooh, that's something I did not know.

Isn't it?

Ha, wow.

Fuck.

Shit.

Time to go find out some shit.

Isn't that cool?

But yeah, no,

but this is a team that clearly, you know, like, you can't pretend pretend this is, yeah, it's not four people putting their own indie thing out, like completely absent of any production marketing or, you know,

decision making.

I don't get it.

Like Ubisoft, like, like straight up, Ubisoft could have made this game like 15 years ago.

Like this exact game.

But their structure prevents them from being able to do it.

So if I'm not mistaken, didn't the attempt go into things like Child of Light?

Yeah.

Right?

But you didn't get enough time

to do something like Expedition 33.

Because I believe Child of Light and a couple other things they released back then were attempts at having indie style development teams work and essentially just be published as a Ubisoft thing, but hands-off development.

The way that I heard it is that Child of Light and things that came out under that period in Ubisoft was

basically

a please don't quit game for developers on Assassin's Creed Duty.

That it was like,

listen, you're allowed to put your passion over here.

Six and a half years of Assassin's Creed games, and you're about to walk out the door because you feel totally unfulfilled.

You know what?

Fine.

In a year, you can make anything you fucking want and we'll put it out.

Let's create a receptacle for your passions.

Yeah.

And then you're going to go right back on a fucking assassin.

I see.

But, but obviously, this is the things where when you see these standout examples of like, you know, incredible success coming from modest beginnings, the, the, yeah, the producer, the AAA, the quadruple A studio wants to figure out how to reproduce this under

their oversight.

And the answer is, you, you fucking don't.

You know, know, you, you can't, you will not relax.

Um,

and I think that the studios that have the best shot at that, perhaps, are maybe your um, your new bloods type of thing, you know, your your annapurnas, where you're kind of like you're showing up to basically like um publish a thing that was moving without you

and

not, um, can we put our name on this?

We helped, yeah, and not and not the like you you are room 15 in a in the mega complex you know

um anyways I don't want to work in the mega complex

my my creative is

well do you have ideas well do you have uh mouths to feed and rent to pay yeah well the mega complex offers you some security oh the mega oh stability oh get me in that mega complex until it fucking doesn't

oh no

um

anyway mega complex was supposed to protect me

uh how could the unfeeling mega complex do this to me well it it it it's because it took all the the predatory gropers and it protected them and and then it moved oh man it moved them over there oh

yeah

um

So that is that is that is going on.

Besides that,

yeah, I guess the other thing I did was played some more of that Phantom Liberty, Cyberpunk,

finished off the DLC there and got the mid-game credits for the DLC,

which are deserved because it really does like, you know, it's like, yeah, this is a tonal insertion that is like, oh, you've done like this last and therefore it's some of the best content in the game for sure.

But also, like, a lot of people played played that after they beat the game so when you beat it understandable it should like you know understandable you know uh but it really does feel interesting and odd to look at video games as the only medium where this happens where you can be going through an experience and then part of it like imagine watching a movie and then in the between act two and three

like the short film that was made after the release of the film is inserted you know what i mean like that doesn't happen you get a director's cut sometimes, but that would be a director's cut.

Yeah, that would be.

But, like a full-on short film that was made separately and afterwards dropped into the in-between of act two and three is just,

you don't get that, you know?

Um, but here it really is, uh, it's interesting.

So, I go into it and because you know, I'm aware of the fact that, look, the quality is going to be through the roof on this by comparison to the base game.

Um, you know, I'm not going to be too perturbed by that.

I'm, I'm ready for for dissonance.

It's okay.

I've played enough video games.

Oh, I don't think there's anything that would have a more profound dissonance than the Witcher 3 expansions.

Like,

the end of Witcher 3 is like probably its weakest part.

And then both of the Witcher 3 expansions are like far and away the best parts of that game.

Like, it is not even close.

I mean, and so

there is a fucking line in the sand on quality on that.

From like missions that are like, this is pretty good, but it's like,

you know, it's kind of winding down to like fucking blasting off to space in terms of quality.

Yeah.

And so now that I've played through like Citadel and Mass Effect 3, I'm like, okay, I, I,

yeah, there's, there's times where the DLC is like a nice little addition.

There's times where it's some fucking cool extra shit.

Like, I'd say all the Souls DLC often has like, you know, some of the best fucking bosses in a lot of those cases.

Maybe not the area per se, but one part of that is going to be a favorite, you know?

But

yeah, with Citadel and with Phantom Liberty and these things, it's just like, oh no, this as a whole is just better.

And

I would say that like anytime the game is one where the nuts and bolts of regular gameplay start to be,

you see, when you see the limitations and you kind of see, like, okay,

I've seen the variety of mission types, I've seen the variety of NPC behaviors.

We're just going through the motions now, waiting for the new assets and lines of dialogue to take us to the credits.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's where brand new systems and fresh feeling, you know,

mechanics

are

very refreshing and fun.

Yeah.

So they flex hard with the thing they're most proud of in Phantom Liberty, which is the stage set acting,

you know, where other games will have characters facing each other, left and right, exchanging lines, and then occasionally someone reaches out and hands someone an invisible object.

Shot, reverse shot.

And then

you need to stick your arm out and take this invisible object I'm handing you and put it in your back pocket, you know.

And here they're like,

we got really cool setups where people can go from sitting to standing, and two people can act out on a stage, you know,

this scene with Mocap detailed.

So they flex off some of that.

And like, yeah, a big part of like, I'd say, um, the finale of at least the path that I chose

is like showing off some of the most impressive versions of that.

The other thing they do really early in the game that is very impressive, and I'm glad to see that they're still kind of using it, is the opening montage has you like montaging in engine in real time from location to location to moment to shot to shot.

I love a good montage.

It's so hard for games to do it.

It's so technically hard.

In game, in engine, it's fucking without loading, it's impossible almost, you know?

Like, they did such a good job having it be seamless.

And

yeah, that ends up, some of that stuff ends up being really, really cool with Phantom Liberty as well.

There's all the, there's these little things too where,

you know, I remember when we're going through the

Shadows of the Earth Tree and you're like, hey, you know what's fun?

What if we survival horror for a minute?

Hey, if you want to talk about like quality gap, Shadows of the Earth Tree is a great place to come in because like, man,

that thing is nuts.

That thing is crazy.

I mean, the hour count on it is just, again, it's obnoxious, you know?

But the

parts where they're like,

but the parts where you're like, yeah, run over there and then play a little survival horror game.

You know,

there's a segment in Phantom Liberty where it's just like,

hey, yo, you know what's sick?

Metroid Dread, even though this is not the right timeline for it, but that shit's awesome.

And

play a sequence that is very different from the rest and tight and very, very fun.

But for everything it did,

yeah, Alien Isolation certainly as well.

True.

I think that is, because I only got a few hours into that, so like that's not as at the forefront of my mind with it.

But yeah, there's a lot of that going on for sure.

You're waiting to, there's moments where you're like, I'm waiting to see a face hurger run by that computer terminal.

When it's all said and done, I was so, so happy that.

The thing I liked most, because all the characters in that are really like compelling NPCs that are like,

everyone's got their hands dirty, right?

Everyone is, it's Night City, so you can't spend too long, you know, admiring anybody.

Um, and if you do, there's gonna be a moment that makes you go, oh,

oh, they're all dirty,

you know, don't feel too good about anyone.

But

the part that I loved the most when it was all said and done was

not the actual like final finale or sequence or any of that stuff.

It was the conversation epilogue after you come back to the main game and you just sit there and have a conversation with Johnny.

And it's awesome.

I really liked that.

And it was a

moment that was very thematically fulfilling for what I've been wanting the game to talk about the whole time I've been playing it.

You know, it scratched an itch I've been waiting on.

And

that is an unexpected thing because I was like this is great this is great DLC very cool and then you hit an amazing thematic note that I go fuck yeah you just crushed it right um

and it's it's it's similar to when I was describing like what I loved about the super boss and metaphor you know where I'm like oh this is great this is really real you nailed it you figured it out right here

and um let's see yeah I oftentimes I'm waiting for for like after the setting gets introduced and we get and the players get introduced and the pieces are moving on the board.

I want to know like

what the author, so to speak, has to say about the world they've created, you know?

And Night City is so hopeless, right?

It is stupid.

It is foolish to be optimistic.

So, like, why

care about anything?

That's what I want to know and see more of.

And you get a really nice littled conversation about that as a whole, especially coming off of Edge Runners and knowing all that, where you're just like, this is a cool world to look at, but like, what's like the characters caring and having feelings about things, there's a point where you would hit that's just like, why even bother, right?

And

that's what you get for beating the DLC.

So fucking kudos on that.

I really, really

enjoy it.

You know?

The

bile pit

David Martinez mom

in a in a fucking neat little container

moment should not be forgotten.

You know, that that type of thing, that little just, oh, it was so official and meaningless, you know,

should

continue to be part of this as you yourself, the player, is like ludonarratively like just flattening people left and right on the average mission because the city always wins and nobody's,

nobody with compassion is...

uh gonna last long here, you know?

So yeah, fun stuff.

I hope the remaining mainline narrative has a little bit more to say about that stuff, too.

We'll see where it goes.

Um,

and uh, I know there's a big alternate route for Phantom Liberty, and uh, I don't intend to play through it, but I do intend to watch

some highlights of that because uh, I know there's some cool stuff, I understand that, but I also know that like it's

in the interest of time and you know, nothing I do will ever get me out of like woolly snail, whatever, yada yada, but I'm going to I'm going to attempt to watch.

I mean, shit, look how fast you're going on Expedition 33 now that you don't have the eyeball of the world on you.

You know, so yeah, in the interest of not having things

last too, too long here, I'm going to just watch

the moments that are significantly different from the branching path.

Because it feels like essentially halfway through Phantom Liberty, there's a switch, and

your decision changes the entire last half, you know?

So.

Sorry, my ears fell off.

No, no worries.

Yes.

I just moved slightly and my whole fucking pussy fell out.

I'm sorry.

Better tuck that back in there.

Can you give me a second?

All right, we're good.

So, yeah,

that's pretty much it.

Got some matches in, played some

Galra,

and I continue to just

really want to praise the color edit.

And I think just having fun with costumes and,

you know, making little like, yo, here's Kevin, here's Android 16, here's Hokutomaru, here's fucking Strider, you know, is just a fun little bit.

Give people the freedom to dress up and color their characters as they want.

And then also, like, you know, I want the freedom to go online and fight against everyone else's like giant color, like horrible creations, just like nightmare fuel eye colour searing, or a little option underneath that says turn custom colors off.

And then you can just

and then you can just be like, yeah, actually, I just want to see the defaults.

You know, in case somebody figures out how to do the Hakan color 12, you can't tell when he's oiled trick.

You know, using it.

Using, using.

I'm sure they are.

God.

Whatever bugs might occur.

What kind of of fucking freak-ass guy would pick a purposely obscuring, eyeball-garish costume or color to throw their opponent off?

That would be wrong to do.

I mean, as much as I want to complain about that, and I will,

we can't forget Samurai Shodown, not Samurai Shodown, Soul Calibur, and the...

Add a sphere accessory to your character that floats and scale it up to the maximum size, which is bigger than the screen.

And now, when you fight the person online, you cannot see them.

You cannot see your opponent because they're inside of a big sphere.

I love it.

I love it.

Hey, it's part of the rules.

It's part of the rules.

It's part of the game.

It's fair.

So, yeah.

If they don't want that to happen, they should patch it.

You need that little option for anybody that wants it.

Anyway.

I fully believe that the Hakan thing was intentional and that that was part of the character's balance.

He needs it.

He needed it.

He needed it.

Yeah.

All right.

So, yeah, so this week, Cyberpunk continues.

One more session tomorrow.

And then, as I mentioned earlier, this weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the Evo Japan watch party with me and Reggie checking it out over on twitch.tv slash Evo.

So tune in from 12 to 5 as we watch all the.

What days are those again?

I'm sorry?

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

So, May 9th, 10th.

The weekend.

The weekend is

Evo Japan.

That's pretty much me.

All right.

Well, what's going on over at

the pat house?

You know, hold on one second.

Just hold on.

Literally, one second.

All right.

A boost

has been acquired.

And those paws are so broken.

I want to hold this gross dog.

He's nasty.

I love him.

Alright.

So,

not a whole lot went on over at Pat House this week.

My mother-in-law was visiting from out of town.

Alright.

Yep.

So, also,

me and Paige played Split Fiction yesterday.

Okay.

And if you want to talk about games that had absolutely no oversight and are good because of it,

Haze Light has no one from EA come and talk to them.

Hazelite has no one from EA check the game at all.

Joseph Ferris and his brother and the team are left completely to their own devices.

And boy, holy shit, can you tell?

Because that game is fucking unbelievable.

Like, it is just so fucking peak at every respect.

Is Fatass Fatass

accredited

on the staff?

Yes.

What's the role?

I heard his voice at least once.

Okay, okay.

Cool.

But

I.

Every single.

Okay.

So you're going through the split fiction, you know, the themed areas, and each character gets a bespoke gimmick or mechanic for the area, and every 15 minutes they twist on that mechanic, and then they run it into

the ground

and then leave it, and it will never come back again.

And it is like that for the whole fucking game, and it is unbelievable.

And that's what It Takes 2 felt like.

It felt like every stage was going to just be that one moment, and you could tell because are you a bug in a bug-themed world?

Well, you're not going to be as soon as you're not around bugs anymore.

You know, you're ice skating, you're doing ice things.

All right, do it in the ice world.

Have a lot of fun with it.

It's gone now.

And despite

the story is extremely cliche,

boy, is it cliche?

The integration with its mechanical systems is so fucking peak and dead on and perfect

that

it tricks you

into

yelling out the theme of the area's writing to the person you're playing with before you have realized that is the theme of the area.

Okay.

Like, I have an example

that I will modify for spoiler purposes,

but it is the equivalent of having a very long like push and pull sequence in which you have to move like, you know, an object between two places while lasers attack you, and you end up yelling at someone that they have to push it or they have to pull it, and then that ends up being the stated thematic emotional core of the story in that area spinal final cutscene.

Yes, yes, right.

So, like, the thing you kept saying about the gameplay is what you were actually saying

to the characters

during the thing.

And it is so fucking crazy.

It is so

perfect because you can, like, you see the characters building up during their cliche, and you're like, you know what they're going to say because you have been saying it.

And I mean, physically, literally saying it because the game has to be played with a partner and you have to communicate, right?

Right,

okay.

So, if like

uh one person

had to

uh shrink down to a small insect size and then physically crawl on the skin of the other character, for example, yeah,

and perhaps you know,

create a wound that might not heal, you know, yes, yes, right, okay.

It's it's so

it's so awesome like i am i'm in fucking shock uh and we are we are like

right at the end like we we were time limited due to the human that we take care of um and we are at the end of all the themed areas and about to go into the final confrontation which should take about i don't know like an hour so the next time me and page stream it'll be uh it'll be i almost said it takes two it'll be split fiction, and then we're gonna go back to Devil May Cry 3 with the Page May Cry series.

Uh, and shout out to Viking for

completely redoing the Page May Cry animation by himself with no input from me.

I didn't ask him about it, he just saw it and went, oh, I want to redo it, and he redid it.

So, thanks, man.

Aside from that, unintended side effect of the game Split Fiction being mentioned is every time it does, my brain also thinks about spy fiction.

Yes.

These PlayStation 2

series

foray into video games, which is

absurd Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell mocking ad campaign.

With the cool hair.

Spy fiction.

He did.

That was not cool.

Look at the hair.

Look at the hair.

Was not cool.

Look at the hair.

Spy fiction.

Spy fiction.

What else is going on?

Um,

I played Split Fiction.

Oh, you know what?

In preparation of

Paige going back to the Page May Cry series, I have recently replayed through DMC 3 for the umpteenth time.

Hell yeah.

And I've recently gone through most of Devil May Cry 4 SE

for the umpteenth time.

And I have not played Devil May Cry 4 since DMC 5 came out.

Oh, okay.

And

man, Devil May Cry 3 is an all-time classic.

So we've

an all-time classic and stands up as good as it did the day it came in.

We've had versions of this discussion before where I know that I love what's going on in 4 more than you did.

I know that there's stuff about 4 you didn't enjoy as much for sure.

And like,

I remember this from back then, and I make up a big part of it came down to the fact that

Dante is the least of what I want when I play.

Yeah.

I'm looking for the...

I actually, I actually have more compliance than I'm going to do.

Interesting.

Okay.

They have one really big one.

And that is that the secret missions in four are fucking terrible.

Okay.

The secret missions

are...

are just god-awful.

I remember all the ones for five.

I remember writing a guide for the five secret missions back before the game came out so I could give them to you when you were going through them if you had any trouble finding them.

But, like, the secret missions in three are all great, and I know that because I just did them two weeks ago.

And the ones in four are god-awful.

They are, they're legitimately infuriating.

The one where all the blades attack you and they're infected by the parasites, and the only thing is don't get hit, or the one where you have to line up Pandora to fucking shoot the two targets simultaneously, or the one where Nero has to hold up the frost to get style points even though you don't unlock that for like 12 more missions

yeah i think um i think uh they're a mess uh uh if if i'm remembering correctly i feel like the the bayonetta challenges like you know uh um

alfheims and stuff were like ultimately where they got the right mixture of like combat focused in a unique area, you know, kind of limited here and not necessarily traversing back through the level map for parts of these challenges things.

Or, like, instead of platforming off of like weirdly placed blocks

in awkward ways, it was kind of just like enemy-based, like, in this environment stuff.

And I like those a lot more.

I think they kind of figured those out.

But yeah,

I think Four's level stuff is worse than anyone remembers.

I think going going through that jungle stage like four times in a row

is just like, fuck.

Damn it.

I don't mind the Dyson 4 because bustering lets you

grab it and shove it down on the right number.

I'm so torn on it because like the Dyson 4 is like fucking stupid and awful, but I go, well, I don't care because I can just like do it like that because there's a trick to it.

Right.

But like, if my only reason I don't mind an area is because I've figured out how to bypass it instantly.

You know what is interesting though?

Going through DMC3 and then DMC4 back to back.

Oh my God.

Even the neutered DMC3 SE is 10 times harder than DMC4.

Oh, interesting.

It is crazy how much easier Devil May Cry 4 is compared to stock standard Devil May Cry 3.

I think

another thing too as well though, like, like

well, it's time is all messed up now, but I will say that a big alleviation is the instant style switching and getting re-added back to three is a huge, huge value.

Oh, I didn't play it with it on.

No, I know, I know.

But like, I don't believe in it.

I think it's, that's, that's cool shit that I like, that, that, like, you know, four has that, uh, you know, three originally didn't or so.

Um,

but yeah, look, I, you know, it, that's, that's,

we're here for, we're here looking for different things, so it is what it is.

You know, I'm going to be very interested because I'm going to roll right through to DMC, DMC, DMC, Devil May Cry.

And I bet I'm going to come away for the way that plays in the definitive edition more favorably now than I did even back then.

Because I remember we had our feelings about the regular version, and then I had more positive feelings about the definitive version.

And I'm interested in seeing what my feelings about it right now are because of well, because like Devil May DMC Devil May Cry doesn't fucking annoy me nearly as much with Devil May Cry 4 5 right over there.

How mad can I be?

All right, right.

Yeah, hey, don't be shitheads, y'all.

Fucking

anyway, it's fine.

What?

Just you talking to me?

No, but

it's just whatever.

I think with four,

like going back and certainly adding fucking Virgil to that was also amazing and adding extra playable characters to that was also amazing.

And

there is something to it where I think

by

playing the games later on,

it was always more about running Bloody Palace, you know, than it was about returning to the main levels.

Devil May Cry games have different scores depending on how much you care about Bloody Palace.

I think if DMC4

is, I think if you don't care about Bloody Palace playing Devil May Cry 4, that game is significantly worse than it otherwise would be.

Because Bloody Palace is where I feel that game lives and dies.

Like, I feel like DMC3's campaign and DMC5's campaign are both extremely strong.

I don't like...

I'm not a big fan of DMC3's Bloody Palace.

I think the 10,000 floors at once shit is fucking crazy.

Yeah, I've only, honestly, like, that's the thing is, like, that is,

I much prefer the four version of it, even though I wish you could fight Credo more because Credo is the best part of that game.

It's dumb and it sucks that

the one time.

But I do think that

in general,

you know, when I think back on going through it and everything, I'm just like, yeah, I fucking love me the way playing as that character feels.

I love every moment of what it's asking me to do.

And I just, you know, a lot of the flaws and I guess other things you're describing became just extremely minor, like in the rear view mirror for me versus how much I enjoy playing as the character.

That is definitely not a rear view mirror for you, which is, man, Blitz is the worst enemy they've ever made.

Yeah, you got to stand and fucking deal with that shit.

Blitz is fucking terrible.

I don't know what the fuck they were thinking.

And, you know, I mean, there's definitely like, we spent more years talking and discussing about this franchise than, you know, than the time I remember back when playing it.

So the revisits, you know, give you a chance to update with things.

And I think,

I think

we, for example, like.

I've heard the discussion from folks that are like able to do all that crazy guard flying shit.

And they're like, oh, they're crazy.

And they're like, no, you don't understand.

Inertia was what the whole game was.

Can I quote Friend of the Show Hitchhiker about this topic?

Friend of the show Hitchhiker, Devil May Cry modder, friend of the show, said in one of my streams, quote, that Devil May Cry 4 is the Smash Bros.

melee of the Devil May Cry series.

And like, I completely agree with that.

Some people that are looking.

What about like guard flying literally sounds like the way people talk about like melee fucking like technical nonsense.

It's like, but it doesn't have this.

Yeah, it has fucking more characters than Sin Devil trick and shut up.

It's better.

But it's quiet.

But when people are doing it, it's rad as shit, and I respect it as something that I'm not capable of doing.

Like, yeah, right up until they put up the fucking statement on their social media that they're going to have to quit playing video games because they gave themselves RSI.

Okay, well, don't do that.

But,

but no, the,

the, the, the high-level styling that comes from this unintended thing that people start fucking doing is like, oh my God, I can't do that, but I respect the shit out of it.

That looks really cool.

Blitzes, that the funny thing about blitzes, though, is that they don't actually give up on the design because they come back in the form of furies, right?

Yeah, which is like the

way better version of that exact same because you have the timing-based like counter to it as opposed to the stop playing, you know,

moments.

But yeah, no.

Anyway, all the, all the, like,

if I remember correctly, there was somewhere in that

LP back in the day where I just went, okay, I'm not here to fucking attorney for Devil May Cry fucking for, you know?

Like,

it is what it is.

If you care about different things in the game you're playing,

the flaws are going to be more or less pronounced to you, so to speak.

And for me,

enjoying the character I'm playing as and the things I can do in a given character action game are like the entire brain cell and then everything else you're doing and what's happening around that just get falls so far into the background that it's like, oh yeah, I guess the challenges and the,

I guess they were bad rooms.

Okay, I

can I fucking buster that spear?

Let me uh, let me

tell you something.

I just, I don't, I don't remember how annoyed I was at the dice room because I'm like, can I fucking parry that shit back at the, at the, the Angelo formation, you know?

can I activate that run?

I'm getting so excited about that shit that I'm not really, you know, but that's that's we're individual people on that, so I don't know, you know what's really fun about restream re-streaming a game like DMC4 at the ass end of night.

Like, I'm, I'm doing this at like 1, 1 a.m.

Pacific, sorry, uh,

uh, Eastern Like I've been going through the Dev Me Cry games when I'm like, ah, fuck it, I'm bored and everyone's asleep, and I don't want to go to sleep.

So fuck it.

It's 10, 11

p.m.

Pacific, it's 2 in the morning.

I don't give a shit.

Let's go.

Is that you get like the freaks in there?

You get like the people who are like, oh, yeah, I don't sleep.

I got Steve May Cry.

And you get to learn all sorts of weird shit.

Like, it's like, why is the enemy list in Devil May Cry 4 have so many Devil May Cry 1 enemies?

It's like, well, because Fortuna is actually located really close to Malay Island.

Right.

I didn't know that.

I didn't know that shit at all.

Right?

Interesting.

Freaks.

Or if you pull off.

And Europeans, I guess.

If you pull off the hood on the lady in red, you can see that it's got Kyrie's face model with the different hairstyle.

Yeah, and

the naked frog woman.

That's Kyrie's body model.

Oh, shit.

Yeah, there you go.

Okay, perfect.

Yeah.

It's just funny because someone wrote, like, that's a you problem when I'm describing.

And I'm like, actually, I'm the one enjoying the video game, having a good time.

It doesn't sound like a problem to you.

You are the one having the issue, not liking the thing.

Me enjoying the thing is good, actually.

It is quite fun to do the thing.

And

yeah, I like that no matter how many years later,

the sound of Dante going royal.

Just...

I'm so glad.

I'm so glad they did what they needed to do for five in that respect.

I would have been so disappointed by the return of Vante.

Yeah,

yeah, no, you need that opportunity.

You need that opportunity to fucking fight the character that you shouldn't be fighting and realize how fucking impossible it is.

Yeah, I'm so happy.

That's pretty much it for me, except for one

minor detail.

Ah,

mini

hourglass has been placed.

Mini hourglass.

So I

re-subbed

to FF14

this past week.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Oh,

this one will run out a lot faster than the one you have right there.

I was wondering whether or not I should tell you to flip yours, but like, nah, nah, nah.

So

you've been away for a minute.

I have been away since October of last year.

When

the story restarted, or rather, the new arc began.

Yeah, and

I could talk about how

they have the relic coming, and I could talk about how they've got the cosmic exploration moon shit happening, and all that,

all the gameplay stuff that has to do with FF14 and why you would resub.

And like none of that is actually the reason I subscribed at all.

Like 95%

of it is so that I could

have an excuse to chat about a bunch of nerd shit with my pals who play FF14 still.

For social reasons.

Like nearly entirely for social concerns.

And that is so that I can exist in a fictional space or go, oh, hey, there's Creepy Porpoise.

Oh, hey, there's Vel, and be like, what the fuck are you doing?

Are you doing that stupid moon shit?

Where'd you get that thing?

And now you join the majority of my friends that play it, where I have a large, I have a handful of folks, and there's a split between those who are just social and those who are clearing world first type shit.

And I think the social players has outnumbered

the gamers, the beaters.

The beaters.

Well, I mean, like, I'm fucking, I'm macro crafting a Moragian steel ingot, like, right now, because I have

15 to go.

But, like, so I'm still, I'm getting back into it.

But

there's...

Like, I don't have like the the drive to bleeding edge the shit as it as it launches is gone.

I mean, it's just like I just want to be existing in this space.

And hey, look, I get it.

You know, I have a friend that sends me so much Viera art and has all the mods going and is just, you know, hanging out, taking photos.

Never name that friend because those are against the rules and it would be wrong to use those at risk of your account.

But also, an artist that's just, you know, drawing their own things and having fun um

so that you know i know how much time can be spent uh in the in the social side but i have i do have one one um very important question you unsubscribed thus you stopped playing you stopped paying for uh the game every month did you ever uninstall it

oh yeah absolutely oh you deleted it completely yeah okay okay

I didn't uninstall it off of this PC because I knew that I would come back to stream it at some point,

but I installed it off the home PC.

Yeah.

Okay.

It wasn't like, I'm not subscribed, but it's currently up to date.

No, no, no, no, no.

Gotcha.

All right.

Hmm.

Didn't even reach the end.

Now you don't have to send me a picture of your balls.

Damn.

I was getting the lighting right and everything.

That's pretty much it for me.

If you want to see the stupid shit that I'm up to this week,

you can go down.

Nice.

Yeah.

Does somebody break into your house to shave your balls?

Yeah.

Or me?

Is that just a woolly?

Yeah, it was you.

I broke in.

Okay.

If you want to see the stupid crap that I'm up to this week, you can go down to twitch.tv/slash patstares at.

The remainder of this week is primarily Expedition 33 as well as uh something on Thursday that I can't remember what the fuck I put on the fucking schedule.

I can't remember.

Let's just look over here.

What the fuck?

That's I should have looked this up, huh?

I should have loved to fucking.

Oh, I didn't sticky it.

Are you serious, Pat?

Oh, you're so stupid.

Oh, I'm gonna take a look at some indie games called Skin Deep and White Knuckle

on Thursday.

What is that?

Uh, Skin Deep is a.

It is.

Who the fuck made it?

We played a game that was top-down that you were on a fucking spaceship.

This is not helpful.

Oh my god.

Okay.

Oh, that's two different games.

It's not a game called Skin Deep and a White New Game.

I see.

I see.

Developer Blendo.

Okay.

So the people who made Skin Deep made Quadrilateral Cowboy and they made 30 Flights of Loving.

And that is a spaceship immersive sim.

That genre you think is fake?

It's real.

And it came out.

And Knuckle...

What's it called?

White Knuckle?

White Knuckle is a roguelike climbing game.

First person.

I see.

Okay.

Oh, this thing.

Yes.

I'm all over the place today.

I remember the, yeah, this looks cool.

With the hands grabbing and then the.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

yeah, right, right, right.

But that's what's going on with me.

Um,

so go on down to switch.tv slash patstairs at.

I'm also like throwing in random streams like late at night, like 10, 11 p.m.

Pacific.

Uh, if the baby goes down and I got nothing else going on and I just feel like it, I just wander over to the office and turn it on with no fanfare.

Okay.

So who the fuck knows?

All right.

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

Let's do it.

All right.

Quick word from our sponsors.

I love you, sponsors.

This week, the podcast is sponsored by Raycon.

And

what is going on?

What's going on is that if I was using Raycon earlier, I wouldn't wouldn't have just moved and unplugged myself and not heard what you have to say and look stupid.

Well, that's embarrassing.

You had wires in your life that you shouldn't have had.

And I had warnings.

I was told.

I was warned.

Hmm.

Okay.

So is Father's Day coming up?

Is that what this is?

No.

No,

that seems like.

Mommy Day is coming up.

Mommy Day is coming up.

It seems like Father's Day is still perhaps some ways away.

You know?

I mean, it's coming up eventually.

Yeah.

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And this week, the podcast is sponsored by Rocket Money.

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Alrighty,

so

we have already discussed the simple but powerful quote: It would have taken 25 years to navigate all the bureaucracy to get a AAA studio started on the game Claire Obscure.

It's crazy how fast you can make a game if you don't have to bring them into the touchy room for your boss.

Oh, yeah, I got you with that one.

That's not

a bad one.

That's a bad one.

Or if you just find really sick talented people online and subscribe to uh crazy taxi development

you know which is you're okay get in

um yeah it's it's it's nice to be able to do that i think uh i hope there was a point during talking to the musician like the composer where they're like do you need my name no

i don't even want to know your name i don't even want to know i don't want to know what you look like.

Give it to the person.

I clicked play.

You're hired.

Give your name to the person making the credits.

You know?

Yeah.

I'm just going to call you Music Man.

But yes, no, of course,

this is all from an interview that Guillaume Brosch had

about Sandfall.

And it's interesting because, like, yeah, through Reddit conversations and the whole, the trail of this game can, is, is all online, too.

So, um, very cool to see this, this game currently just experiencing all the success from going about it in a way that, you know, we need more breath of fresh air games like this that are awesome, that are practical, that are being made by people that fucking just have the passion for it.

And, um,

and skipped all the steps and just started doing it and are doing so while working bored at Ubi, you know.

And it's interesting, too, because, you know, there's always certain studios have like

the practices in place where it's like any ideas you have while working for us are our ideas, actually.

Yeah, Bethesda's super, super strict about that.

And that is a tricky water to navigate, you know.

I'm glad that he was able to do so successfully.

In this instance, I have friends who have had uncomfortable conversations about their own indie projects.

And this is something that so many people working right now are all trying to figure out: how do I, you know, do this, especially when you're surrounded by other people that you're friends with that are also talented, that also are interested in indie work as well.

But, you know, they're very strict about like, hey, you can't basically make a cool group of talented people and fuck out of here to go make a cool thing.

But I also know that

I've spoken to people who have had managers and bosses that are like overall like, okay, look, it's real simple.

I don't want to see or hear it and I won't ask about it.

And that'll be that.

Yeah.

You know?

Don't tell me you're working on it.

Don't show it off.

Just when you eventually leave,

work

on it really hard and get an 18-month build out in two weeks.

Maybe don't use the emails accounts associated with your work account to discuss.

Don't work on it on this computer.

You know, but there's just, there's a very clear, just like, we, we get it, just don't be stupid, you know?

And it's like, okay, got it.

Respectable energy from

people who, who, who know the deal.

Because, yeah, hey, guess what?

People who are creative and talented that get jobs in the industry oftentimes have dreams of doing bigger, cooler things so or you know when you work on your big indie game do so as a completely anonymous fake person like toby fox or whatever

is toby fox toby fox i don't know only sakurai knows

toby fox could be like 10 different people i don't know Does Sakurai know that he even knows?

I can confirm that Sakurai played him in person, but I don't know that Temmi even knows.

You know, I don't know that anyone working on Deltarune has met Toby Fox in person.

So who the exact, that's the mystery.

But yes, yeah.

Just, you know, queue up the fucking woolly gif if you need to.

Don't be an idiot.

Just shut the fuck up.

So that's, that's cool.

I look forward to more.

um from from this team and for what they're doing.

And in general as well, the fact that this first interview addressed exactly the whole thing about the bloat of AAA Studios.

And, you know, I'm reminded of the conversation not too long ago when we I was talking about the big Twitter thread about

how every game challenging the free-to-play

Fortnite or whatever other free-to-play monolith is going to struggle to convince people to stop playing their game temporarily.

Stop playing the free-to-play game to temporarily spend what's now going to be $80 on this full service thing for a couple of weeks.

If your friends are down, then maybe you'll do it together.

But otherwise, it's a mild distraction, which then leads back to the free full-time full service game.

It's not healthy for the industry, right?

So you need the ability to do this.

And like, I think,

I don't know what their margins are for success, but obviously 2 million is something worth celebrating and it's awesome.

It's good.

I think they've succeeded.

Yes.

And I would, but like, I would love to know that, like, what, like, I would like to know that, like, a fraction of that would have been.

Yeah, what was their magic number?

What's the magic number, right?

Was it, was it 400K?

Was it, was it 200K?

I hope low six figures,

you know, I hope low six figures was what they were, what they needed.

Um, because that's great.

I think it's fairly clear that they've crushed their own magic number, and it's been like 10 days.

So, like,

we're going to see some sandfall shit shit for a while.

That's pretty exciting, you know?

Speaking of numbers,

I saw,

I just

saw like a thing that I saw a

message.

I was like,

Ye's new album sold like 2.4

thousand copies or some shit like that.

And it's like,

all of that just to go double styrofoam.

You know,

it's kind of, it's quite incredible.

So numbers, putting up numbers, big, big numbers.

Good stuff.

Anyways, what else is going on?

Hold that thought.

I am required elsewhere.

I will be back in five minutes.

Perfect.

Alrighty.

So.

Other things happening.

Let's see.

Well,

some video game news.

Oh, fuck no.

Oh, I hate video games.

Shit's for nerds.

The video game news is that video game news appears to be

going through it.

And.

This was the wrong joke to use on this story.

Fuck.

By simply standing still, by

twiddling my thumbs and

flicking these

smooth as eggs balls around, pouring ketchup on my stomach and going.

We have now become even more...

Bro, what?

We have become even more solidified as games journalism

simply because the other things around us

now begin to cease existing.

Yeah.

I hate it.

I hate it.

I really, really.

You're like one of the leading figures in big man news.

So what's going on?

Well,

Polygon has been sold to Game Rant over

owner ValNet.

Some staffers have been laid off and will no longer be with the publication.

What does that smell?

Is that

union employees?

Oh.

Get those motherfuckers out of here.

Oh,

I see.

I see.

And then, simultaneous to this,

Fandom appears to be detonating the giant bomb.

And,

you know, that's a really weird one because, like, you know, the giant bomb is obviously it's like the

it's gerstmanless.

But now

this version is also like, strangely, there's, there's whatever disagreements are happening, whatever's going on internally, people are leaving.

And

I can't.

I have a little bit more detail on that if you want.

Yeah, so I mean, there's

whatever is

public or known or whatever's coming out, the end result appears to be that,

yeah, people are leaving and things are changing.

And I know that speculation towards the idea that, hey, people click on AI-generated wiki sites a whole lot more than they click on things that human beings wrote.

So swerving in that direction for profit feels like a very believable outcome.

Yeah.

So

the gist of what I've been hearing about Giant Bomb

is that

fandom went to

the giant bomb people and said, hey, we really need you to like family-friendly this shit up for like brand safety guidelines for you know safety of the brand to which giant bomb was like this is giant bomb are you fucking are you dumb

uh and then they put out a podcast that was like

literally multiple hours of them just shitting on brand safety guidelines

and then fandom took the podcast down and then they put the podcast back up and then fandom took the podcast back down and then they all just started going all right fuck y'all, I'm out, bye, quit, quit time,

yeah, okay.

Uh,

that's that's yeah, that makes that makes sense.

Wooly, you can no longer make veiled abortion jokes in the podcast title,

can't do it, man.

It just having to having to fucking answer to some stupid shit must really suck.

Yeah.

It's, I, I, I, there would, if I could not title these podcasts the way I have been for the last 13 years.

Oh, man.

So much of the fun.

What would even be this career?

What would be, what would it be?

You know?

Um,

this is my legacy.

This is, this is, this is my mark on the world.

These titles.

I want one day when we're dead, somebody to go, what was this podcast about?

And for someone to go, video games?

Question mark.

Immensely, immensely fireable podcast titles.

Just

for all time, you know?

And you know what?

Maybe, maybe it's like a...

Just maybe it's a reminder.

If we ever get a little too big for our britches, you know what I mean?

If I'm being all like, hey, guys, you can catch me on the Evo channel.

It's going to be really fun.

We'll be talking about those fighting games.

And then someone just posts my fucking titles.

And it's like, hey, remember where you came from, asshole.

You think you're leaving the hood?

You think you're leaving us behind?

You ain't making it out, son.

No one makes it out.

That's going to be on the Evo channel, right?

Right?

Like not yours is going to be on the Evo main channel.

I plead the fifth.

but that's where that show is going to be, right?

When you're going to be doing the co-stream of Evo, it's going to be on the Evo channel.

That is correct.

That is correct.

Does that mean, like, do you think the Evo auto mod is set up to automatically flag your own podcast titles?

I mean, look, there are human beings that I have spoken to that will be moderating.

So it is not an auto mod.

There will be people themselves there.

So, you know,

we're going to have a good time.

I think it'll be fine.

But just, you know, it's just,

yeah.

Just in case you ever need a reminder of where you came from, you know, before I, before that, that, that,

anyway, you know, you know, that, like, scrub

that that's done before you run for office?

Yeah.

That scrub is probably getting, like, super fun nowadays.

Right?

Oh, man.

I just,

it's like, yeah.

senator they've uh they've gotten your uh

they've gotten your Xbox Live account.

They've they've they have they have the TMs.

They have

oh no.

Yeah.

Um oh good God.

You know, it's it's it's like hey, uh, these these titles are are out of control and need to stop.

Or

or instead, did you just explode it into

subsequent like titles and named clips that just quintuple down

on

the

un

unhire the the the what I don't even know what you describe it as but the unawardable unawardable titles you know you know yeah um anyways listen um the Academy refuses consideration of these titles

uh whatever is happening over with Polygon and Giant Bomb and everything else um

you know one thing stands true: you can tune in over here for the latest and most accurate games, journalism, and news at your most trusted source.

Also, considering the history of Giant Bomb and the people that work there, I'm giving it like

10 days

before

not

Giant Bomb gives birth to itself and is the exact same goddamn thing with all the same people.

Yep, yep, yep.

Nope, keep it, keep it dialed over here.

Now watch as I forget to talk about GTA 6's second trailer.

And we end the podcast without it.

I think GTA 6's second trailer doesn't actually have a whole lot to talk about.

I think GTA 6 being delayed has stuff to talk about because everyone's shat their ass to get out of the way of the game that is now coming out next fucking year.

It looks pretty.

We saw the couple hanging out.

We saw the Shadow the Hedgehog was there.

I saw him.

The VI6 is like vice.

And then,

yeah, what's that number?

What's that date we saw?

May 26th of 26.

2026.

There you go.

So guess what?

You now have fucking.

So game prices are up.

That's a difference.

I feel like game prices are up is part of the Grand Theft Auto story.

Right.

Because like everyone was expecting, well, Grand Theft Auto is going to come out and it's going to be $10, $20 more.

So fuck it.

We'll just get there.

Oh, no way.

Grand Theft Auto is next year.

That shit.

Oh, no.

Now, you know how we've just,

that is an adjacent story here.

But

the Sonic the Hedgehog account has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever.

And they're too cowards to do it.

They're too coward to do it.

Oh, they're not.

They're not.

You don't know.

But if they're crazy.

If they just congratulated GTA 6 on its announcement.

And perhaps the tone of the person writing the tweet was a little more edgy.

Yeah.

I see a brilliant marketing opportunity.

So I have not seen the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 film.

We keep waiting to watch them, but while the baby's asleep, and then we fall asleep because we're old and we're parents now.

But I have been told that Shadow just straight up watches his telenovelas in that fucking movie.

Like Shadow the Hedgehog loves Latinas, is enshrined in canon.

To which I ask and return, who doesn't?

Who

amongst us

does not appreciate a big booty Latina, you know?

Yeah,

so I don't see any of those people in this room right now.

Well,

in any case, I

did also see announce alongside this announcement, Microsoft has announced the price of their games is going up, as predicted.

We saw the Nintendo and then Sony versions of this story in previous weeks.

In fact, one to another week.

It's been three weeks in a row of each company stepping up to be like, yeah,

you know,

you're going to pay more.

So, like,

how much did we talk about that?

I don't remember.

I can't keep track of what conversations are on the podcast.

The first version.

And what conversations are on the podcast?

So first we talked about Nintendo and their price announcement for the Switch 2, which then was like, is this tariffs?

Is it not?

And then it got muddled.

And then it was like,

okay, sort of, but we're waiting to see what that's going to be afterwards so it sort of is but um

yes and no they're all kind of just chasing nintendo and then and then sony came out and said yep it's it's getting cranked up and now xbox is saying um 60 to 70 games will now be 80 these are usd of course i mean for canadian prices we're already over the moon we're getting fucked on it um and the consoles going up by

uh depends on which but like yeah the the various different versions ps5 costs more than it did when it came out um not only has it not received a price drop it is now more expensive than it was when it came out yeah the consoles the xbox series consoles are all about uh 80 to 100 more across the board controllers going up as well and uh yeah games by uh 15 to 20.

so so here's the thing right I spoke to

when this was happening with the Switch stuff and then I happened with the Sony stuff, I spoke to a bunch of people about this that were in positions to know things.

And what I got back was that

everybody's spending too much money

building games and they're freaking out because the numbers don't work.

So they need to kick it up a notch to make it work.

And I said, what about spending less money?

And I was told, that's stupid.

They're never going to do it.

Shut up, go home.

And I was like, this was a great two separate conversations that went exactly the same way.

Out the window, you go business meeting, man.

Yeah.

And

at the end of the day, like, I, I, on my stream, I went through like minimum wages in different countries as in terms of purchasing power for a new game or a new console.

Or I went, you know, you could argue about like turning it into a luxury product, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this shit.

And it's like, Sony put out a statement to their investors like two years ago that when they charged extra for God of War, and I think there was something else, that sales went down by a bunch because people aren't willing to pay the extra $10.

And that's like the only thing that matters.

Sales are going to go down more than the money you will make off of the extra money.

And it doesn't matter if it's fair, and it doesn't matter if the game is full of value, and it doesn't matter this, or it doesn't matter that.

All that matters is people go, Fuck you, I'm not paying that.

Yeah, so um,

I feel like there's a slight update to the takes we've been having for the last 10 years in regards to all of this because it's been pretty much the same every time.

The only little thing to add to it is just

these things you should be doing, it would be pretty good and healthy for the industry if you started doing them.

If you don't, they're gonna happen anyway, it's just gonna hurt more.

The unsustainable will

guess what?

Explode.

Things will not sell.

Productions will fail, fall apart.

People will get fired.

These will end in fires everywhere, and the industry will continue to burn, and people's jobs will continue to go away.

You can correct course somewhat in advance if you steer away from

the quadruple A production, or you can just hit the wall on it and suffer the hard way, you know, but it doesn't matter because, in the end, whether you do or don't, it's going to change because it has to.

So, like, um, the wall in this respect is Grand Theft Auto VI.

Because Grand Theft Auto VI will sell 800 million Shazillian copies, and it will cost more than other games.

And once people own Grand Theft Auto VI and they paid $110 for the collectors or whatever the fuck,

You're going to come along with Assassin's Creed, whatever, or Gears of War, who cares, and go, this is worth the same amount you paid for Grand Theft Auto.

And people are going to go, no, it's not.

And that's it.

That's like the whole thing.

So

it is.

It's interesting to imagine the,

you know, how like there's

the crash of

the first video game crash, right?

And

the Atari shit.

And then you have the Nintendo from the Ashes

resurrection.

And then we talk about

what another crash might look like.

It's interesting to imagine one where

everything unsustainable, insanely expensive, and just that we've been screaming about for such a long time implodes.

You have companies like Ubi and companies like EA and massive publishers and everyone that is in that echelon.

You have those

a world where those things explode and the IPs end up in every possible direction.

And then people that are just at their computers making indie games just kind of look around and go, huh, damn, that sucks anyway.

Man, dude, I remember posts for 20 years

of the phrase, who even owns System Shock?

Do you remember that?

Just like, like, oh, whatever happened to that game series?

I don't know.

No one can find find who owns it.

I just find it so fascinating that, you know, we could easily head for a crash that detonates the entire top floor.

And then people in small teams working on passion projects, publishing themselves straight to Steam will continue to be able to do so in the ashes.

I have a brave thing to say.

Be brave.

Be brave.

Can I say something brave?

Say something brave.

I think we've been in a video game crash for multiple years.

Like, the difference is that it's been slow.

It hasn't been a catastrophic everybody goes bankrupt all at once.

But for like five years, we have seen bankrupt, bankrupt, bankrupt, absorbed,

but like absorbed into a bad situation.

We have talked about layoffs almost every week for like 18 months.

Yo, bars.

Like

100,000%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's

interesting because like it's almost like there's a lot of things in life that you go through that you expect are going to be these massive, insane, explosive historic events.

And it turns out, no.

you can live through them quietly in a weird way where nothing really explodes.

It just kind of

persists.

There's no, you know, and you're like, oh, we're in it.

We're in it.

Are we in it?

We're still waking up and it's all, yeah, yeah, no, 100%.

You're waiting for

it.

You're waiting for the cataclysm because that's what the history books kind of taught you about, you know, and there is none.

You're just in it day to day.

It's crazy.

You're 100% right.

And I think a lot of things in life are going to be like that now.

It's a weird feeling.

People are, there's going to be a crash.

I think it's fairly inevitable, like a proper crash.

And

the date on it, like, oh, this was the start of the crash, like Rome or some shit is going to be like when Ubisoft gets bought in by Tencent or it goes bankrupt or when EA has to fucking cut and run or, you know, that, like, some mega company, right, has to be like, oh, can't make any fucking money.

And then the stock people all go fucking nuts because all video games don't make any money.

And they sell, and then a bunch of capital gets lost.

It's a whole fucking thing.

But like, that's just like part 25

of the thing we're watching happening in slow motion right now.

But future historian goes, but that makes no sense, teacher.

You're saying there was a crash while Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft continued to make hardware and release them.

Well, I'm going to shelves.

I have a new brave thing to say

I think that if Nintendo I think that if Sony and Microsoft are raising the prices of their fucking boxes by a hundred dollars I'm gonna look up something right now I'm gonna go to amazon.ca

and I'm gonna click in Sony PlayStation 5

and the Sony PlayStation 5

fucking disc edition costs 744

with tax.

That is $7.44

times $.14.

That is $850 for a PlayStation 5 that is six years old.

Okay.

I do not think

there is going to be a PlayStation 6 or an Xbox Next

for a fucking while.

Unless something insanely drastic changes, perhaps.

I do not.

There's not, oh, you want a thousand dollar PlayStation?

I don't think anybody wants a fucking thousand dollar PlayStation

ever in the history of anything.

Christ, I didn't buy a PS5 Pro because it was too expensive.

You and me earned the fucking freak 1% of video game obsessives.

And we were like, oh, that's way too much.

That's ridiculous.

And

how much should consoles cost uh uh

back in the well okay

and the cost of consoles and the cost of games and all this stuff relative to the wages that people were being paid at the time yeah

you know uh yeah one of those

one of those numbers increases and the other one stays in the exact same place so um the the pain you dial that pain up

I I if I was the Xbox and the Sony, I would be like, well, we should just keep making games for this fucking thing for a while.

And so I just got asked that question the other day on stream where someone was like, hey, what do you want to see in the new generation of consoles?

Or do you, or do you, would you like to see things go back to the four-year turnaround or whatever that it used to be?

And I'm like, are you out?

Like, fuck no.

Let it sit.

Let it cook.

We're here.

People can develop what they want to currently on these existing things.

There's no reason to put another box out to crank the price up on something that's going to marginally get slightly better.

I don't need a niche 8K feature, you know, to be possible with some games.

I don't need the best

game of this year so far might as well be a 360 game.

You know,

yeah, it just, I could not be.

And it costs 50 bucks.

It didn't cost the same as other games either.

I could not be any further against the idea of starting a new generation for no fucking fucking reason, you know?

And it's and each one and on top of that too, like the jump from

SNES to N64 to GameCube, et cetera, from, you know,

16 to 32-bit to fucking every, like, that jump doesn't happen anymore, right?

It's,

you don't even,

you don't even get to argue on behalf of the insane tech jump because it's become such a subtle background thing, you know?

games and certainly and PC, you have these in-between steps where like shit looks prettier, shit does look better, you know, but like, is it worth it?

Is it worth the fucking pain and cost and restarting of the development cycle where also everyone has to learn the ropes again from scratch and fucking expensive it gets expensive again because no one knows how to develop for this new thing, you know, dude.

Someone in someone in chat just pointed out.

So I was talking about Expedition 33,

but I accidentally also described Oblivion.

The best-selling game of this year

is a fucking cleaned-up 360 game.

Like, yeah.

Yeah.

Um, no, I, there is, there is something to be said about the weird soft crash, the passive crash, the, the thing that is like, we're still here.

The market is, is making them, they're going out on shelves, games are being made, things are being sold, but like, it's becoming more and more impossible for people to continue participating in the industry as creators and as consumers on both sides.

And

production habits don't seem to be preserving

the future in any way, shape, or form.

So you can just watch it slowly atrophy, I guess, in a weird, quiet, long-tailed way.

We're getting into a strange place where people are going to go, there's no money in video games anymore.

And that that won't be true.

What's true?

Because everybody still has their consoles and PCs.

And it'll just be like, if the economy is tough and blah, blah, blah, then there's actually plenty of money for video games below a very specific list of

threshold.

Right.

Or otherwise, you go and you just, you, you know, the simple mechanics of that other discussion of like, okay, is your company worth investing in versus the SP 500, period?

right?

Like, just basics.

No, then what are we doing here?

Right?

So,

when the Xbox price increase happened,

I think what I posted on Blue Sky was like, Microsoft, you are fucking crazy.

You are not Nintendo.

Nintendo isn't even the Nintendo that Nintendo thinks they are.

But they're still Nintendo.

Right?

Like,

I'm like, Mario Kart Kart and fucking Donkey Kong and shit.

It might as well be a Disney property in terms of obsessive belovedness.

Right?

Like, I'm going to play Mario Kart with my small child.

That's the end of that discussion as far as purchasing goes, right?

Microsoft and Sony don't make Nintendo games.

So those discussions are like different by default.

It'll be interesting to see an industry where, you know, the type of person that, let's say,

Call of Duty and GTA and every other mainline thing, let's say those things go away, right?

Yeah, they're going to go away.

The type of person who is like, oh, I guess video games are over.

Yeah.

Right?

That's a lot of people.

There's a lot of people who are like, oh, you know what?

This entire genre is over then.

I have discovered in my mind the day that the video game crash will be recorded.

It will be the day that EA says

that we are not going to put out Madden or FIFA.

No more sports.

No more sports.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That, I mean, and people will go and like literally 800 million people will go, well, I guess I'm never playing a video game ever again.

You know, and it's like, meanwhile, we're going to be over here talking about like, yo, you see what fucking Blue Prince has got going on?

That's just crazy.

And

yo, Deltarune is what?

Wow.

Thing looks like fucking trash and it sounds amazing and it plays amazing.

It's a big game on Steam where you have a baby to cast spells and shoot combat.

Wow.

Look at this MS Paint garbage that cost four cents.

I can't wait to go back and play it.

You know, and it's just like, yeah, that's just.

Oh, did you finally get around a 100-line last survival defense academy?

Yeah, dude.

God, bro, there's a character in that game that asks you.

you might have to play 100 line defense academy.

Sure.

I've been informed that there is a character who asks that you make them

a carriable bag that they can vomit in.

Ah, yes, yes.

I have heard about the lore of the emergency vacuum-sealed vomit bag.

Yes, I've heard about this.

And I'm like,

this is very, very on brand for us.

That is weirdly pointed.

Yep.

No, I mean, you will look around and you will see thumbnails about how like literally the it is all over it's done there is no fifa there is no madden there is no warzone where uh it's cooked and then i'll go like yo I didn't even know this game on UFO 50 cooked so hard.

This shit's just crazy.

I never booted it up.

Look at that.

A lot of those people will just stop playing games entirely.

Yeah, but that's the weirdness.

That's the weirdness of the industry we're looking at right now.

Once upon a time, those people would have been right.

And now it's just like, I don't know what any of this means, you know.

But

if Triple-A dies,

that is a gigantic, humongous, massive face of the industry.

But oh, absolutely.

But games are here

existing.

The crash is going to happen.

The crash is going to happen.

And

there's no money in video games, and mass audiences will desert because of the no football or whatever.

But like, the people listening to this podcast are not those people.

The people that spend like 99% of the money on Steam are not those people.

Right?

Games will continue to be made and sell and some will sell very well.

And if games like

Expedition 33 Claire Obscure can be made in those conditions, then why should I give a fuck?

Yeah, and also Fate will live on forever.

And Grand Blue Fantasy.

I mean, the 11 more Hoyo versus 4.

Well, if you can fucking cash it on your phone, then so be it.

And

woo-woo-wing way.

Yeah,

if I have to keep hearing about Virgil's daughters in all these mobile games, then I get- It's really funny.

It's really funny that they're all girls.

It's really funny.

Then I guess that's what my future has in store.

You know, that I suppose so be it.

Judgment cuts from all these anime girls

and all the fan art that comes from it, where it's like, oh, there's Virgil hanging out with, I don't know their names, whatever, this one or that one or the other.

And, you know, if you're, if, yeah.

It's, all right, cool.

Punishing Grey Raven.

Show me what you got.

Um,

anyways,

Gears of War reloaded.

Why are they, this is one of those fucking things where they just keep redoing the first one instead of moving on to the later one?

We're doing it again

So I had to check but it was like it was 2003 and then 2015 and now you know

10 years later so just released Gears of War 3 multiplayer by itself

So there's a whole list of features including multiplayer suites and yada yada and stuff that's coming with it, whatever.

None of that is even whatever.

Like the only thing I could just, I want to say about this is just,

do you feel the weirdness that comes alongside an announcement where Gears of War is being announced for PS5?

Is that not the weirdest shit?

It says to me that when Microsoft says that we're definitely making another console, I sit there and I go, but why?

Literally, why?

They've been publicly talking about the desire to play along with everybody else.

They've made it the most open that they're like, hey guys,

why even go to war?

Why not console love?

Why not console peace?

I agree.

Also, like, why are you saying you're also going back to war?

Like, I don't get it.

It's fucking weird.

I mean, the, again, the closest thing to agreement we have is the stalemate that is PC is neutral ground that we can use to promote our existing exclusives.

And if somebody plays nicely, cross-play is a possibility for certain games if we sign particular contracts for, you know, game-by-game basis things.

But

that's the middle ground we can reach for now.

I just...

I'm down, but I just can't help but be like, man, that's so weird that we're here now.

It's so weird.

It was that, it's like, you know, fucking Banjo-Kazooie Xbox stuff from back in the, like, it's just like, whoa.

Absolutely.

Whoa, that's weird.

Anyway.

Gears of War isn't just like an iconic Microsoft property.

It's also an iconic 360 Dude Bro Mountain Dew Doritos property alongside Halo.

It's fucking green and orange.

It's not even.

It's like dark gray for most of the game, but like the game bleeds green.

Limited edition

special package Doritos in the briefcase.

Yeah, so

if you happen to be in Australia on September 18th,

there's a museum, and at that museum, they are claiming that they will have a fully playable exhibit.

with Silk Song

in its entirety.

So a lot of people have actually confirmed that that yes it will be there

so instead of a release date of any kind we have a story about a museum in australia that is claiming that they're going to have the full game at least out by that date

and that's the closest we have to it so hypothetically the game will be out before september 18th's exhibit in australia's national museum of screen culture and this is what will take i suppose, for a date announcement.

Do you think there's some kind of legal thing?

Because I know Microsoft owns the marketing rights for Silk Song.

If there is, then why not just

then why

frame things as if it's like, no, it's just, it's coming, don't worry, right?

Like, why not just be like, oh, the stuff speak?

Like,

I feel like you phrase and talk about it, and the team, and everything that's been happening in the background with that, at least what was public-facing, would have been handled very differently if it was like, oh, no, it's done.

There's legal problems we're sort of figuring out.

You know what?

You know,

I'm gonna, I'm gonna fucking

take back every negative thing I've ever said about Team Cherry

and Silk Song

and everything about this on one condition.

If I beat Silk Song

and then I watch the credits and it kicks me back to the fucking title screen and I was like, that was pretty amazing.

And then there's a new option on the title screen that says Hollow Knight 2

and I click on it

and I play Hollow Knight 2.

Yeah.

Then I will shut my mouth.

Yeah, that's funny.

That's funny, but no, I don't care, actually.

Like, we get it more game than anyone has ever asked for, but that, that, I feel like that has long worn off.

The idea is we, we know that there's more game than anybody wants with what Team Cherry is doing.

That's not a thing.

That doesn't matter after a certain point.

Too much is not, it doesn't matter when you're holding nothing.

Like,

it, I get it, but I don't care.

I just don't care.

Yeah, okay.

Four, five, six, seven, Okami, you know, whatever.

Yeah, Okami's is always going to be the peak.

You know, 20 years from now, it'll also say three and Silk Song 2.

And that, like, it's like, what?

No, it doesn't, like, just because there's more, it doesn't mean that, like, this is reasonable.

I like more.

You know.

I like more.

I like less, actually.

Anyway, all right.

Let's take some letters.

There was something else I wanted to talk about.

What's going on?

So they did the Borderlands 4 state of play thing where they showed off a 20-minute presentation of Borderlands.

And

I know I have been quite hard on Marathon, so I don't really want to dogpile on Marathon because it's only broadly comparable.

But I remember complaining very adamantly that I did not like the style of the marathon presentation because it was like a bunch of dudes sitting around on a stage talking about it for most of it.

And it was very,

very light on stuff

They showed off Borderlands 4 and it was 19 and a half minutes of gameplay

Just straight up like a trailer followed by an extremely long presentation

and in a context in which like I see people complaining that marathon should be like a single player thing or it should be more like destiny

Gearbox has decided to make their next Borderlands game into a Destiny clone.

You have a floating robot that solves things for you.

You have vehicles that control, looks like identically to Destiny vehicles.

But it has the very classic style, like Borderlands Schluter stuff.

That part no one ever complains about.

But is this a predominantly online experience?

No.

It is a single-player game that you can play in four-player co-op at all times.

Oh, okay.

It's closer to Diablo than anything.

But it's Destiny-styled in that single-player experience.

Okay.

The movement abilities,

the movement abilities, the vehicles, the

little robot that helps you,

it really looks like they took inspiration from Destiny.

Okay.

And the gameplay stuff for Borderlands games have always been fantastic.

The problem is the absolute nightmare, god-awful, cringe fuck writing and voice acting and delivery has been horrible.

Borderlands 1 is played like mostly straight, but it's in a goofy setting.

So

a lot of the humor comes from the clash between absurdity and seriousness.

And then after that, everything just became like

memory and fucking nonsense clown shit from two onwards.

They did a 20-minute presentation that contained no jokes.

Not a one.

The only thing I could label as a joke is that a gigantic, horrific monstrosity came out as a boss fight, to which the characters exclaim, oh my god, what the fuck is that thing?

And the name card says Tim.

Okay.

And I went, ah, that's pretty funny.

So, are you about to say that

by abandoning its identity as a game and through its writing and through its script,

this is the most excited you've been for a Borderlands game?

No, what I'm about to say is that the thing that I have been asking for since, you know, let me, when did Borderlands 2 come out?

Borderlands 2.

Borderlands 2 came out in 2012.

So for 13 years, I've been like, man, I really wish Borderlands was written more like one.

Like the first one.

I see.

That I really, really liked.

Okay.

And they say, we are going back to, like, verbatim, we are going back to the style of Borderlands 1.

And I'm like,

yes,

this, please.

And then the narrative lead posted a fucking thing on Blue Sky saying that they made sure to emulate the,

what was it, the famous cinematography from Shadow the Hedgehog 3, which was the Akira slide.

Okay.

But crediting it to Shadow.

And I was like, that's actually pretty funny.

Okay.

So, like,

so the franchise has been around long enough and had enough spin-offs and things going with it that, like, why not try everything?

Borderlands one, two,

three, tales, sequel, tales, and then the tiny

fantasy game.

There's been

and,

like, every single one, but the first one has just been like

god awful dialogue and narrative.

See, I don't, I didn't.

Just fucking terrible.

If we've talked about you, about the first one not having that issue, I feel like this hasn't come up enough for me to remember that.

So I didn't know that.

Well, yeah, the first one was like 2009.

And like,

dude, I fucking love Borderlands.

Interesting.

It has a great tone, has great music.

I thought the whole bit was that the entire franchise was that, you know?

No, that's why people get mad at it because there's one that isn't like that, and it has the best tone.

And it's like, it's not like fucking Oscar or even Sony, like, prestige game writing, but like, one is like played straight that is kind of funny, and it worked really, really well.

And two

is memed out to shit, but the villain is very charismatic.

Hmm.

I liked the telltale

one.

That's pretty much what I've played, but I'm seeing some people that

is Handsome Jack a feature in the

Handsome Jackson

deal with all of that shit because he's awesome.

A lot of people here like to,

you know, so

I would say I'm going to put this out there, and I'll see if

the live audience agrees.

Two is just as cringe as three, but handsome Jack is there, so fuck it, it gets a pass.

Interesting.

Like, that's how I feel about that.

Hmm.

It's one element

that is being remembered fondly.

Answer Jack's great.

Okay.

Yeah.

That was, yeah, it was funny.

Anyway, yeah, Borderlands 4 looks great, and now it comes out before Marathon.

So that'll be interesting.

Interesting.

Hey, well, single player.

There you go.

That's

the thing that you like, yeah.

it's nice to have games that you can play by yourself.

You can just play them by yourself, no one can force you.

Isn't that cool?

Isn't that a cool feature you can do sometimes?

Yeah.

Um, I saw someone mention, uh, hey, you got y'all gonna talk about Echo the Dolphin?

And I'm like, um, what about so?

Look, to be perfectly honest, like Sega announcing a bunch of old franchises returning, like, I'm gonna put these all in the same boat where until one of these comes out and we see what's going on, you know, Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi, Golden Axe, Shinobi, this is another one.

And

if something comes out and it's good, then I will pay more attention to the rest of these.

But until then, I am cautiously pessimistic,

especially given what I've been hearing about behind the scenes a little bit.

Doesn't sound like too excited about it.

So I hear echoes coming back along these other things.

I got nothing to say about it.

Let me see one of these new Sega things come out and be good.

Then I'll care about the rest.

I think that's fair.

Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Yeah.

I don't think Streets of Rage 4 was a part of that group.

I think Streets of Rage 4 was a...

No, it wasn't.

No, that was way before.

That was a.mu thing on its own that it was completely separate from this development push, right?

This is a particular one that we're seeing that's looking like micro for some games is coming out.

And anyway, it's not the same thing.

Let's take one over here.

All right.

Hello, Flashbang through the door and climb up the ladder if you want another go.

Games have been my hobby ever since I was five because dad was a park ranger and I lived miles from civilization.

Weren't any other kids around, lots of dangerous animals outside, so I stuck to my Genesis and played consoles up to the PS4 era.

Renting games,

having rental games mailed to you was at its peak in the late 2000s.

Bro, the idea of like, oh, I gotta play my video games inside or else I'll be attacked by bears is fucking cool.

I was beating one game every week during the 360 PS3 era that was the golden age for me as a result I played a lot of garbage to completion just from being a bored teenager

worst game I've ever rolled credits on was 2009 third-person western shooter damn nation

if you if you don't remember it uh you can look it up and see it's completely unremarkable it was so bad solid three out of ten or worse even for the time it's not played that at your house didn't we uh i don't remember this game no uh we

Still, not my least favorite game of all time that I've beaten, but

that award goes to Mass Effect Andromeda, which was the nail in the coffin for my excitement on that franchise.

But what is the worst game that you have

beaten in terms of quality and follow-up

that you most resent?

Oh, we did not play this.

Holy from SKBN.

So, yeah, there's a lot of games that are terrible that you don't roll credits on.

I think the worst game I've rolled credits on

is probably Omicron the Nomad Soul.

Oh, shit, now I gotta think of a different one.

Yeah, because it just, there's shit that's less competent.

There's shit that, or no, there's shit that is,

that's not true.

Like, there's things that are simpler in how bad they are, but this thing being 3D and having like David Bowie and like

you know what?

We should make this more interesting.

Yeah, I get no cage.

We should say the worst, worst game that you finished prior to playing games

for the internet.

Ah,

because that is closer to the heart of the question.

True.

When nobody is forcing you with a gun to your hair, nobody was forcing you to do it and you went through it.

For me, it's probably DMC2.

I beat that game seven times back to back.

Whoa.

Hoping it was going to get good.

I mean, we did bond over hatred of

it.

No, wait.

There was Indigo Prophecy's demo that we saw.

That we loved.

That we loved, but then playing it was the completion was on the channel as well.

No, nope.

Indigo Prophecy, we played to completion on the channel, but we all played it to completion first before the channel.

Beforehand, yeah, okay.

So

I was trying to remember if that was the case.

Yes.

So then that is technically a

David Cage game that happened.

The Omicron, let's just pick this next game from the same developer.

Um,

yep, yep, there was that.

There was that one.

Like, I'm like, I'm like hitting credits.

There's a lot of games I fucking just

before

LPing

where you stick it with it all the way through.

Like, that's fucking crazy, you know?

See, I never had like a vicious, I had a very short time in my life where I had like a desperate need to finish games that I picked up because from the

from the

from for the Nest, the PlayStation 1, and the PlayStation 2,

for most of those systems' life cycles, I had methods of playing many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many games on the cheap.

So if something was like stray dog water, I'd be like, ah, fuck it.

I just need to go buy more CDs.

Yeah, yeah, it's going to have to.

To listen to music on.

It's going to have to be David Cage, then.

Because, I mean, look, what am I going to say?

Like, Evil Zone fucking Urge, you know?

I think it's so funny that our hatred for Evil Zone was so strong.

It actually got all the way out to Paul Iding.

Do you know that?

What happened with Paul Iding?

Paul Iding at some point was sent an Evil Zone video.

Yeah.

And

remarked on a different interview years later saying,

yeah, I really liked working on Evil Zone.

And I saw these guys talking about, oh, poor Colonel Campbell working on this dog shit.

And I was like, I really like working on that dog shit.

It was great.

All right.

Because I think he plays Danzyver.

Yeah, Danzyver is cool.

It's a fucking toku hero.

And it's cool as long as you don't actually have to touch the game.

As long as you admire it as a thing to look at, which working on it, I'm sure you can do.

You know?

And the same for anybody who showed up and got really upset.

It's like, yes, it's really cool to admire this thing without actually touching it.

In fact, this has happened a couple of times throughout our career where you've,

you know, a thing that's really cool to look at but feels like shit when you actually play it upsets a lot of people that are

unable to necessarily

like feel the shit because it's just cool to look at.

So

I absolutely would love to, you know, die on the hill of every character is a Saturday morning cartoon show with voice acting.

Oh, the concept for Evil Zone super cool.

With unique voice acting and from episode to episode, you get these unique chapter things that feels like a fun story is being told as you watch a show that's a great idea for a fighting game

what isn't is two buttons and an inability to do more than three things you know anyway um yeah there you go

uh

let's see here uh dull says uh hello graveborn woolly and beast tamer pat you've been you've been granted the ability to resurrect two canceled video game projects and bring them to completion no strings attached.

What do you revive?

Oh my god, I need like a second.

That's because

this is interesting.

Because think about stuff that has been like, I wanted this, but then it came back in another form spiritually, anyways, right?

I got my two.

That was faster than I thought it was going to be.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Nova

and

Silent Hills.

If you're not familiar with Nova, it was the Eidos

Final Fantasy game.

That would have been cool.

Idos was supposedly working on

according to my butt.

That would have been cool.

I think.

That might have been cool, Woolly.

And Silent Hills, I don't think I have to explain something.

Yeah, yeah,

PT is a pretty good one to bring back.

That's an industry changer right there.

But then what takes top slot on that, you know?

It's funny because I remember a time where, like, once upon a time, I would have said StarCraft Ghost.

There was definitely a time I would have said StarCraft Ghost.

Absolutely.

100%.

I guess I got to say Titanfall 3.

I guess so.

What about Titanfall 5 and 4?

5 and 4.

What about those?

Titanfall 6 was where it was really going to come together.

Dude,

I remember when I first moved to Vancouver,

I was running, you know, we're doing the neighbor thing,

and I ran into somebody

who I was like, what do you do?

Like, I work in games.

He's like, oh, really?

I'm like, oh, I just cover them.

He's like, oh, well, I work at

such and such company.

And I was like, wow, really?

Do you think you could tell me about Titanfall?

And he's like, he just gave me a little smile.

He was like, maybe.

And I was like, oh, yeah, that was like three years ago.

That, that, that, that, that shit he was winking at me over is dead.

Um, can I say something, Brave?

Yeah, you know what?

Yes.

I don't know that Scalebound would have been as good as we were hoping it would be.

Can I say something brave?

Yeah.

Yeah, I totally agree with you.

100%.

I don't know, man.

I feel so strongly in agreement with you.

In a post-Bayo 3 world, bruh,

i don't know

i can't i don't know i can't stand i can't stand on business on that one you know

um

what was what was microsoft cooking

did someone just walk into the room and go man this ain't it

no

Yeah, I just I'm so tired because there's there's Bayo 3, but there's Astral Chain, and it's like time, Time.

Man, what a swerve on basically the same game.

Time has fucked this entire thing up.

Once upon a time, scale bad, man,

now it's like...

And, and, and also, we have, we have Nero.

We have five Nero.

He's right there.

He exists.

He is right there.

Five Nero is fine.

You know?

I love Five Nero.

I love him.

I love him.

He's great.

I would love him.

I would kiss him.

You know,

would I love him more than other Nero?

Other 4-Nero ribs?

Dragon Nero?

Dragon.

Yeah, I think I would love 5-Nero more.

I don't know.

Dinosaur Control,

Gamora.

That was fine.

I don't know.

That was okay.

I don't know.

All right.

Can I throw an honorable mention to pray to?

Yeah, you'd resurrect.

Yeah, that game seemed like it would be really cool.

Bethesda killed it so they could try and eat the studio, and it didn't work.

Okay.

Hmm.

You know what?

And while we're on just

let's get some fucking McDonald's Frieslaw questions going on here.

Yeah, yeah.

Just the basics here, the bottom of the fucking barrel.

We got one coming in here that says, with DMC on everyone's everyone's mind because of the anime and so on, and Oblivion Remastered's success, how would you feel about Capcom remaking DMC 3 instead of making DMC 6?

They could remake 3 instead of a probable remake of RE5 or Quote Veronica or something.

And to that, I say, I'm in the camp that is like, yo, I think if the effort were being made

to redo Devil May Cry stuff, then I would want it to be one one or two.

I, I, okay, so like, we're gonna go on different paths on this.

Me, I'm like, man, I just beat DMC3 like last week.

It doesn't need it, like, it just doesn't need it.

There you go.

That shit.

They could clean it up a little bit more.

I mean, right?

Because the HD collection is not a super great port.

Well, that's that switch.

How about picking that switch port and putting it everywhere and just making everything fucking sick?

Sure, you know?

But like,

fucking

fucking, yeah, redo two.

Yeah, save two.

Fucking do that.

Save two.

Or if you feel like it, start with one to learn the ropes and then

and then save two even more.

You know, that's fine.

I want to see the level of complexity on display from five, though.

And as somebody who is, well, of course, that's what we mean by save it, right?

Take it even further.

But as someone who's always championing the new, the wrinkle in the works here is this.

I always am in favor of, yo you know yes we know about the thing the old thing but like the new thing is is priority it suno has left the company someone else is taking the reins we need them to have training time on one of those older games before committing them to six you want to make sure they can cut their teeth on something safer before making the future of the franchise without him now granted i'm sure there's a lot of people who worked on five that still work at capcom of course of course but still there is confidence in taking a crack at it and going, Oh, they nailed it with that remake, which was needed anyway.

Now we can go forward into the future with confidence.

All right, I'll leave it there.

Can you not

use that photo of Prince Charles at the end?

It scares my baby

because Because Paige watches us do the podcast.

I was.

Because he doesn't get to it in time.

It scares the shit out of him.

Oh, I was about to say no and go right back to Uno

until you gave me the reason why.

Okay.

All right.

Like,

I got over there the other day in time, and he saw Prince Charles's blood thing come up, and he started going, ah,

okay.

Well, I mean, good instincts, kid.

Good instincts, number one.

Yes, he needs to know.

Yes, all right.

No,

I was about to shut that shit down.

I know, but I know, but that is, yes, all right, so with that, everyone, the bit is dead.

Take care.

I'm sorry.