CSB318: Summer Boy Takes All Your Pulls

Bonjour, bonjour.

Bièvenue che chateau de la superbête.

Yeah, superbette, huh?

C'est podcast.

No, no, no.

C'est pin podcast.

C'est what's our

c'est pour le mot.

Okay, en France c'est en podcast.

Mai en Quebec ste in balladeau

or balladeau balladeau c'est le mot

c'est le moteau c'est le c'est le mot le ple pier de monde.

I swear.

Yo.

Balladot c'est le mot.

C'est dego.

In Quebec c'est balladeau.

Mais pauvre.

Le pod

castelle superbist.

You know, Chateau de la Superbet.

Maisui, ballador, C'est dego la semola.

Bon.

Please tell me you have been playing Expedition 33.

Expedition Trentroire Claire Obscure.

It's so French.

It's the Frenchest thing I've ever fucking seen in my life.

It's so fucking French.

It's so French that I have learned, that I realized that I've heard

the word before in art history class, and I didn't quite remember it.

Oh my god.

We've learned in art history about Claire Obscure, which is Carry Scuro,

right?

We had a whole, there's a whole part of artists.

Oh, that's what Strongbad used back in the day.

Carry Scuro.

Yeah, exactly.

It's, it's high contrast.

It's, it's, it's the Sin City

style applied to classical painting, you know, if you go Renaissance.

And so just, that's, that's the bit.

I'm like, oh shit, that's actually a word I learned.

Indeed, so I have started it.

I am not super duper far in.

I am also not super duper far.

But

I will just say that like I've done the intro.

I got a party member and I got to a talking pot and stopped.

Right.

Okay.

So

I am a little further than you, like just a bit, like maybe

90 minutes past you.

I got to the end of the preview portion that they sent out a while ago.

So, like, when I finished my stream last night, I was finally at like new stuff, though they didn't have the prologue

in the preview content.

And,

like, I don't know where to go for this or here.

So, it's incredible.

It's highly excellent, fantastic.

It is RPG.

It is insanely quality.

It is

shockingly good.

And

the art design, tone, performance,

theme,

music.

Okay, so I've been waiting

a long time to say this, and I saw it with the trailers, and I kind of

the eyebrow was raised, and then friends sent me messages about it, going, This is,

you should take a look.

And I take a look, and I am seeing the most immaculately lost Odyssey shit I've seen.

It is, it is lost Odyssey In decades, and that makes me so happy.

Because I was talking to Gene about this, and

he pointed out that it has like 360 game vibes on it.

Right, right, right, right.

So, in particular, like Lost Odyssey, what's

like the fact that it's like, okay, you're getting a very

you're getting a realistic but stylized art style, you know?

Um, the characters are fairly realistic in their portrayal, and the world is fantastical and the designs of everything around you.

You can't possibly turn your head in a direction that doesn't look like an artist came up with this

vista anywhere.

There's nothing, you know, nothing normal.

And then as you're just walking, generally, you're walking, talking through a pretty limited sort of line, you know, even in the beginning section and then later when the game actually, when the

RPG starts, you're walking in a line but you know it's very just it's it's that is the if you're trading off whatever open-ended generic feeling for a very painterly and designed line I'm down I'm down because once the fight starts you're just you're playing a really simple and fun RPG and so one of the best things about Lost Odyssey is that

The line is not so right where you're at, the line is going to start to branch a little bit and what it is it's there's a there's a critical path there's like an incredibly well-defined critical path that is like usually highlighted by like actual lanterns okay like just old-fashioned light sources but you'll do like critical path with like a side circle

aligned to a challenge boss so far this has been the mood and then aligned to like a open area that's like a circle that has this or that or whatever.

And it's like a relatively small circle.

And the kicker is that at the end of every single little diversion or little open area there is a path to either a picto which is really cool and like some kind it's an upgrade material it's it's like your your equipment

or a challenge boss there are so many way tougher than you challenge bosses hidden off the beating beaten path hell yeah everywhere hell yeah like half the time you go oh wonder what's over here it's like a big motherfucking enemy that will kill everybody in a single spin.

So you better learn how to parry.

But if you are good at defense, you can take on the things that are stronger than you, even if you're not ready for it.

And that feels amazing, right?

And just memories of using time, running up to something and having the circle close in,

right?

Yeah.

That feeling when you're doing your abilities in this game is fantastic.

The music is swelling when different levels and it feels like different phases at the very least of like the fights i was going through like are layered though i was going through like the water area and i like there were like four different battle themes yeah yeah right and and like i in in one of the fights against like a stronger enemy in particular it felt like when my life got low the music changed a little bit or when its life was getting lower and that final version which is the slot the soft slow down explosion where you get your your level up screen your everything your your rewards, and then you hit the button.

We continue.

I'll continue.

It's great, man.

And so, to anybody who doesn't know, it's a traditional RPG, like an old-fashioned Final Fantasy game, turn-based combat, what with Mario Brothers-style action commands.

And the action commands are all like stellar and fun and well-synced up to their animations.

The parrying and dodging mechanic feels great.

And you get a massive, massive counter hit if you parry everything.

Yeah, so you get like the incentive structure to dodge is to not take damage, obviously.

And then that relies on you learning the pattern and the anticipation of what's coming at you, some of which is very stagger, Elden Ring-asquee.

Ugh,

right?

There's an enemy later on that I fought that.

It shoots out two slow tracking projectiles, then goes to swing at you and it's like swing and then wait and then projectile and projectile even though the projectiles come out way earlier interesting okay it's super super tricky it feels like like blocking a mix up yeah yeah that that's that's great I love that feeling and the fact that it's like okay you have a generous way to learn the timing with your dodge however when you do it you feel the rhythm for when the parry would be.

So and this is like there's a little ping and there's a little vibration on the controller so that you dodge the swing with a big, wide open dodge range, but you hear that exact moment and go next time you see this attack and it tells you a slow attack is coming, you have the timing to actually parry it.

And yeah, all three leads to a big crit, big buff on your stuff.

It's super good with that.

So, you're not far enough into it, but there are more action commands than

dodge and parry.

Awesome.

There is at least a third one.

Okay.

Okay.

And like, I did something I never, ever, ever, ever do when I'm playing a game on stream.

And I almost have never done it playing a game in my own time.

I beat a couple and I got maybe 20 minutes after the part you're at, where you get the third party member, I think you're describing.

I don't know yet.

I'm only two so far, but we just.

Oh, you're only two?

Okay, I got to the point where I got the third party member and

went into the options and turned the difficulty from normal to expert.

Okay.

And it's like,

I want to be in the fights for longer i was looking at the description on it and it sounds a bit like that's the move yeah i was waiting to see a little bit um

but that was in there i also did something that i've never done or that i haven't done in a very long time i switched the dialogue to french

so

and so man i don't know if i want to do that have you tried it yet No, because it's Charlie Cox and Jen English and Ben Starr and Andy Serkis.

So here's what's up.

I did both.

I did both, right?

And like, I'm setting this up, but ultimately,

I did the intro in French to hear the original, how it was, you know, how it was done.

And

then I switched over to English and I did it again.

And they're both great.

The English voice acting is stellar.

It's really strong.

And I feel like

if you the one thing that's weird about the french unfortunately is that the lip syncing is not made for the french it's yeah it was made for the anglers it's made for english which is the main audience so that makes a ton of sense you know for the hangless but in the same way that i'm like if i'll watch an anime in japanese and read the subtitles i'll watch a friend in front you know what i mean like i'll play it in the language you know but um

yeah like that's actually a little confusing to me as to what the the real language is when the lip syncing is for english it is for english yeah here's the thing, though, there's something like, okay, if you're, like this, listening to it in French, though, adds a little air of like, hmm, a little like

sarcasm to the exchanges.

Don't you mean sarcasm?

I suppose so, you know,

sarcasm.

Sequect shows it's a little bit,

there's that, there's that, that, um, you know,

foreign film feeling to it, you know, when they when they say things, they have little lines or whatever, and the way that uh Gustave says the like like Maes, Maes says something, and she goes, he kind of says, like, Ma, you know, like there's a little bit of a vibe that's a little different in French.

Charlie Cox is daredeviling all over Gustave.

He is daredeviling it all over the place.

Now, what's funny is that when I look at his face, I see Robert Petinson.

It's weird.

So I see like Monsieur Pettinson Robert.

It's pretty close, right?

It's so strong.

It's crazy.

So like,

before I get too far away from the gameplay stuff, also, I've gotten far enough to get upgrades.

And the way the game handles upgrades is incredible.

You upgrade weapons with what is the game's equivalent of Titanite.

So there's...

There's bespoke like upgrade materials for levels one to three and you get like a million and then levels three to five is a different one and then you'll eventually get a million of those.

So I've noticed I've been picking up these, yeah, weapon upgrade tools and Lumina points, and I haven't been able to use them yet because you, I just last night got to the park.

You get to a place where you can use them.

Okay, so that, yeah, there we go.

We're sitting on that for now.

And it's like the part I played up to is like the training wheels.

And then the training wheels come off, and they're like, okay, you can feed.

So there's a system where you equip something called a picto.

It's essentially equipment.

And they all have little skills on it.

So like, you know, if you shoot an enemy, it can mark them, or maybe you do 50% more with your regular attacks and stat buffs, yeah.

Yeah, and stat buffs.

But when you've done four battles with a Picto equipped, the passive ability just becomes available to slot in, but you have a limited number of slots.

One of the upgrades you get is

how many of these upgrade slots do you want?

Like right now,

when I got to the upgrade, I went from 11 to 20 on every one.

So, how about this?

And you just get the upgrades to just dump as many as you want.

And how about this?

Once you internalize the skill, your whole party can use it.

Yeah.

If they have the spare points to spend on them, you can equip everything.

So like I'm thinking of the like FF6 like, you know, learning system, you know, or FF9?

Well, I'm thinking of six

when you learn magic after a while, you know, by equipping material.

Six magic system and like the nine ability system.

Okay, but like in this case, everyone is sharing it.

It's not just the one person.

Yeah.

Right.

And so like I learned augmented attack, which costs seven Lumina, which is very expensive, but it's basic attack is 50% stronger.

Yeah.

Yep.

Gotcha.

So

it's going to go on everyone.

And then I got one called Vigilance, which is the counterattack that you do when you do a perfect parry is 25% stronger.

And that costs three.

Okay, there it goes on every single person.

It's just a funny team.

Sorry, it's just like the mixing and matching makes it so easy to build a character out out into what you want.

So, like, Gustave for me, I had a thing where it's like 20% to mark on free aim, 50% chance to burn on free aim,

gets an AP back on free aim, and does more damage on free aim.

So Gustave would start the fight, and I go bang, bang, bang, bang on one on every enemy, and they would be burned and marked and shit, and then the other two could just clean it up.

And it's like, it's so easy and so fast.

I learned something.

Well, I already knew this about myself, but I'm glad that I can express it in this game.

It's like, did you give me a defensive option that is skill-based?

Well, I will never spend a single stat point on defense.

Well, because that is my fault for getting hit.

So that's the trick.

You get weapons and weapons have elements, but weapons all scale with random, like different stats.

There are weapons that scale with defense.

True, right?

Okay.

Scale with luck.

Right.

And that uses the

souls thing.

Now, luckily,

Recoat, which is the full respect, you can respect.

Are plentiful.

Nice.

I got one so far.

So if you want, yeah, I've gotten two and I used one, but they start to show up more and more and more.

So if you want to just completely redo the whole character, because you got the new ice sword and the ice sword scales with defense and luck,

you have now essentially, and you rebuild the character towards that.

You have essentially created a brand new character.

Like, yeah, that's great.

That's great.

Like, I knew it was special because it's like, I'm, I'm like, I don't care what my life is.

Let me learn how to do this properly.

And that tutorial fight against Mael

where they're like, do it again if you want.

I did it like five times just to get that feeling right, you know?

Let me give you a tip.

If you're the type of person, Wooly, who's going to just roll up on everything as soon as it's available.

And also you're going to be like, I'm going to parry the world.

Speed is the best stat because if enemies are going to kill you in a single hit,

then all that matters is getting go first.

Yeah, 100%.

I'm going, I went heavy on speed and might, you know, with the characters so far.

Something else that is fun to take note of is just, you know, when I see that like it's a picto that you're equipping,

it's a picto me sen picto,

you know, and it's like people are preparing for lagomage

and, you know, and like the

created words, right?

The fictional words that would be our tetsuzankos

and, you know, and so on are just like these very, not just French, but French, French-sounding words.

I love it when you can feel.

the intense cultural effect of the region something was made in on the thing in question.

I like Japanese games that are like, this is a fucking game from Japan.

I like Korean games that are like that.

I like Polish and German and Brazilian games that are like that.

But there aren't many games that are French.

French.

And this one feels like it is trying to make up for that as being the Frenchest thing I've ever seen in my life.

Not just

the setting.

in displaced Paris, not just the constant use of French, not just the fucking baguette costumes you can unlock immediately

outfits, not just the super bosses hiding in the wings that are all fucking mimes, but like the tone and music.

Yes, it is the tone

starts off with the wistful embers of what could have been, but now will never be ennui.

It is like French impression.

There is you're feeling you're hearing Amélie Poulet, right?

As lines are being dropped, like, you two, you look like you're in love.

Oh, well, we broke up.

And it's like, that has nothing to do.

We are in love.

No, no, no, no.

We broke up.

And the line is later.

It's like, that has nothing to do with matters of love.

And I'm like, that is the French shit.

I'm so sad and French about it.

It's like, who cares?

That's not what I asked you.

I didn't ask you if you broke up.

That has nothing to do with love.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

No, and straight up, especially like, you know, I just told you, like, I watched La Hain the other other day with Vincent Cassan and like that is like you're watching like rowdy French youth standing on rooftops looking down at like

town squares, you know and the Arc de Triomphe and all that stuff and like stand the game starting on rooftops looking down at the street level is also super Paris feeling, you know

Yeah, man I'm also like it it's the the writing is so like succinct.

There's a lot of so like I'm further than you.

There's a lot of like world details that are just not available okay yeah like why is it like this yeah

off but like deal with it but the rule of curiosity with the death game anime setups where you're like you don't know why things are the way they are you're gonna find out i suppose but the the the the hooks are in place to be like go discover what these other expeditions were about right go find also the the little tiny pieces you get that are a part of it Like,

the part that stood out to me is when you meet the pre-orphans.

You meet a batch of kids in the prologue that are going to be orphans tomorrow.

Not yet.

And they're being like organized into being orphans.

It's no, like, within the first 10 minutes of the game, like,

because like Punch Mom came up to ask, like, oh, what's this?

And I kind of explained it.

And I was like, yeah.

In 10 minutes, it's established like what's happening and like how interesting this setting is.

But it's also that deep, deep,

again,

Euro ennui

right away.

It's like, all I can do is smoke my cigarette and be depressed.

Exactly.

Just a little more wine.

Of course, we all need wine to deal with the end.

The fact that,

yeah, you pan the camera around every corner and you're looking at fucking matte paintings, like beautiful, you know, set-piece artwork things and such.

I love, yeah, that bit about being unapologetic about like the cultural aspect of it or so.

Um, I know that, like, you know,

these days, you don't bring it up with

no one brings it up with much good to say, but there's parts of indivisible that I still think are rattish it.

Um,

and I liked a lot of like

the wearing the cultures on its sleeve parts of that, you know?

Right.

Um, the ability to like, and like, yeah, because you just, you, I, I, I want, if you're, if this game is being, yeah, made in a particular location, dial it up to 12.

I want to taste that.

Dial it up to 12 for me.

I love, I love playing a game and be like, is this made by chicks?

It is made by chicks.

Like, it's, it, it's, yeah.

Was this made in Estonia?

It was.

It sounds like it is.

Yeah.

Um, So, so no, I'm immensely impressed with that.

And also, of course, you can see what's going on with like their,

what they're inspired by, you know?

Inspired by fucking Final Fantasy.

Inspired by Final Fantasy.

Inspired by RPGs, you know, and,

you know, even like the little menus where you're like zipping around your character from different angles as you're putting the equipment on and stuff.

It's, it's, it's, it's awesome.

It's really, really cool.

I think there's a single detail about the game that shows its inspiration, like not on its sleeve, like on its heart and its whole body.

And I read an interview about it after the fact, but when I played the preview,

you exit out of an area onto a fucking small, chibby character,

like outsized world map.

Like it's fucking Star Ocean or FF7.

Okay, okay.

And like,

it's like...

Insanely old school.

It's like a PlayStation 1 game world map.

And I read an interview with some of the devs and they were like, why'd you put world maps in?

Because world maps are cool.

Sick.

I also appreciate just for my own exploration purposes that like you walk down a hallway, it branches and you're like, one of these is hard progress, the other one isn't.

And if you pick the one that's hard progress

first, there'll be a thing that's like, oh, hey, progress is beyond this path.

Are you sure?

And I go, oh, thank you.

No.

And then I go the other way.

Hey, that, so that's gonna stop happening.

Instead, it'll switch up to, are the characters talking?

Yeah, this is progress.

There's that, there's that bit too, yeah.

Or, like, or, like, did, did, did the next beautiful tree sprout, you know, or so?

You're like, okay, cool.

Um, is there, is there, is there a way larger than usual enemy on the horizon?

This is the optional one.

Cool, great.

I am, I'm astonished at how many optional, like, mid-bosses, and in one case, super boss that I found.

I found a legitimate, like, super boss within the game's first three hours.

The game labels the area with a giant danger symbol.

Okay.

Um, and I beat it during the preview.

Okay.

And I'm like, all right, I'll go beat it again.

And then when I tried it, I discovered that they made the thing resistant to burn damage, which is how I beat it during the preview.

I'm like, oh, okay, you guys actually don't want me to be able to do this.

Right.

I saw Jacob Geller playing it and being like, yeah, this can happen.

And he posted a fucking screenshot of of the post-battle report where it was like a 56 and a half minute fight

with like

900 parries.

Wow.

It's like, as long as you just

allow yourself to get hit, you can defeat anything eventually.

Incredible.

Incredible.

Yeah,

the skill tree is a proper, like, you can see good shit in all directions, and it's a genuine, hmm, which way do I want to go right now?

Because if everything exploding into fire and immediately overcharging sounds phenomenal, um,

but you know, a quick little lightning zaps over here and going down, the things that look that go this way seem like they're also worth it.

And then healing over here is important.

Resurrection, you know, resing your party.

Like, there's some stuff where you have to actually sit there and be like, I don't know how I want want to spend these stats, you know?

So I had a situation where I was just buying the cheapest skills available to get the most skills, but you can only equip six.

So that's not actually.

Ah.

So

I do have a pro tip.

I'm saving that.

Everybody has a skill that does what's called a break.

Yes.

Which is,

it knocks, it stuns a monster and it, you know, renders.

You want to have one of those on every character.

Because if you don't, you can get fucked on.

Okay.

Yeah.

I can see that.

I feel, I look looking at it too, I can see there's an early way to have characters be self-sustaining.

And I'm like, yeah, I want that too.

I want people healing themselves.

Yeah.

One of the more interesting things that I had to,

I didn't understand it until someone in chat explained it to me.

Have you been using your Estes flasks?

Yes.

There's Estes Flasks.

Yes.

Have you been, so Estes Flasks on the open world, you will get more of them.

Like you'll get upgrades to have like two or three.

And it's just a full party heal, just straight up.

Like, all right, let's go.

Have you been using your in-battle Estes flasks?

Oh, they're separate.

So the consumables that you have

is

you have three consumables, a heal, a give AP, and resurrection.

That's per battle?

Those are per battle.

Wow.

Oh, the three are per battle.

I didn't realize that.

Those are also upgraded.

Wow.

So like if you upgrade the health potion, it does more and then it can uh you can get a picto that causes it to heal statuses so i noticed upon uh dying to the super boss that or to the hard enemy rather that um you start out right outside of it looking at it right outside so you want to just don't you want to just do it do it that is a high and and and you know between that and the bonfire system a flag camps between each other where you refresh your esthesis there's a very high incentive to challenge yourself just fight it just fucking fight it what's the worst that will happen you'll You'll lose like a minute.

And then if you can't, you're like, all right, fuck this.

Then walk away, you know?

Also, sitting down at the bonfire respawns enemies, you know, so it really is, um, yeah, like grace, you know, essentially.

I was fighting an enemy and I was trying to learn the parry timing and I was having a really hard time.

And I was like, you know, doing the resurrect item and you only get three.

So I'd use all that up and then my party would get down to like from from three to one like all right i'm cooked and then what you do is you hit start and you hit load game and you load the auto save that's right in front of it yeah yeah

so okay it doesn't seem like manual saving is a part of this game nope interesting interesting design saves a rotating list of saves every like 10 feet or like every time you interact with something it auto saves every time you walk into a new area you know like it's it auto saves like a souls game does yeah okay

so you just like don't even think about saving just there will be something a couple steps back from where you were don't worry about what i literally just don't worry about it.

I mean, it's it's weird because that's not what we're used to, but no, we have hit a point in games where I don't see the problem with that.

No, right?

Um, the the okay, perhaps if you want to make a major branch from your progress and you want to go back to that point sometime way back, uh,

oh, see, you don't need to do that.

That's, that's the other thing is that every once you get to the continent, like the main continent where everything is, you know, it's your RPG world, you'll be able to return to literally everywhere.

Oh, yeah.

No, there's fast teleport travel on the on the

camps as well.

But I guess I'm thinking of a, you know, I guess the game doesn't have branches that are extreme then, you know?

Like if you want to

get an item or go a route, or if there's anything in the game that's like, you know, major left or right change.

But you can respec and you can travel backwards.

So if the game's not going to ask you to really miss out on anything like that, then why even bother?

You can miss out on things.

Okay.

So I missed out on things.

So in the prologue, you can unlock a red version of the maiden costume.

I got it.

I missed it.

Because completely missed it.

Okay, so here's what happened.

I hit the end of the prologue and I went, hold on a minute.

What if, because like some people are doing stuff, like there's one person you meet that's like, hey, can you go give this to my kid?

Right.

Right.

And I was like, oh, maybe that, what if that happened behind me somewhere?

You know?

And so just did a quick run back through the environment because the intro world, the intro section is pretty big.

It's a fairly large walk.

I missed apparently a ton of stuff.

Yeah, I went back and I went, oh, fuck, I missed a bunch of kids over here.

I found the mime.

I found a like two or three other interactions with people just standing around, you know?

So there's a solid like bunch of people that you can just not walk by and miss the prompt on, you know?

Now, it's not the end of the world because the game has the game is drowning you in costumes and weapons.

I already have more than I want or need, yes, it's true.

Like, did you get you get the baguette?

I sure did.

Uh, I

have the red outfit, I have the white suit, I have the cool dark one for the gomage, um, and then I have three hairstyles, you know.

So, you can also, yeah, switching up your hairstyle is also a bit um

so which version it's which

traumatic, but I'm like,

which

JF that I used to work with do I want to turn this into?

Which dude that I used to work with back here or that I went to college with do I want to see?

Do I want the man bun?

Do I want the dude with the side, the side coff, you know, or maybe the one who has it like all just loose and shaggy?

There's a whole lot of French guy haircuts, then you can choose any one of them.

Or, you know, in particular, do you want to look like Princess Carolyn's secretary from Bojack?

Oh, man.

You know, that guy?

The Silicon Valley type?

You know, you can go for that type of guy, you know, or the metal, or the metalhead guy with the Amonamarth shirt.

There's so many variants of French guy, and this has them all.

And of course they would know, because that's who made it, you know?

Of course.

It is.

I'm astonished in how good it is and how fucking cool it is

when like you're hanging with like like the main character is hanging with like his girlfriend in the in in the beginning and I'm looking at like the two of them standing there and I'm just like

I actually know that couple yeah I literally know

those two and I like with that thing going on you know Sophie a gustab

I'm I'm very very

what I can say too as well and this is not

a flaw, but I can appreciate that like all of this really good vibe I'm getting from the beginning of this game so far is

also

something where walking around the environment, you can feel the hard limits.

You can feel the walls.

Oh, yeah, it's real clear

where you can go and people are blocking your path.

Walls and trees and path, like it is a tiny little thing that says, this is pretty to look at.

You know there's nothing up there don't worry about it you know and you're like this is a small studio making a giant game so fair enough right we don't need to have this big empty thing with nothing going on in it if i could walk around enjoy what i'm seeing and then the game and then i can't wait for the next fight i'm like more fights i'm almost like fucking give me more grunts to to to to to swing at yeah that's why i turned it up to expert yeah yeah because on normal the grunt fights are like like they don't get to have a turn in a lot of cases.

And on Expert, it's like it's just enough extra health on the enemies that they don't just get alpha striked by your full turn.

You know, like they get to do something.

You know what it is?

It's the scale and pacing of Hellblade.

I have a different example.

Okay.

So this is a French-feeling Final Fantasy game.

There is a different Final Fantasy game that's actually labeled Final Fantasy that is also obsessed with being French and is also highly linear and has a good battle system.

And that game is Final Fantasy 13.

Ah, the hallways.

I've heard about it.

The difference here is that I was fighting and having a blast with the combat

in this game within like 10 minutes.

And it allows me to fight up against challenges and like just play my ass off

right away.

And also, I actually like these characters.

Yeah,

I does.

So

the reason why I think why Hellblade comes to mind is because the fights are spaced out and you enter an environment and then you're like, there's the fight.

And then I go up that ladder and there's another one, you know?

And

I certainly hope that like, you know, that thing that happens when, because like, like Lost Odyssey, for example, you hit that point where you're like, okay, now I'm going through a dungeon and we're RPGing it.

And I'm fighting

my way to that boss.

And it's going to, you're going to get through a whole bunch.

And you're going to have a good long amount of time to get intimately familiar with the system and the way the characters interact and your magic and stuff.

So

here, like,

yeah, if like if the difficulty going up is one way to have the fights last longer, you know, that'll solve it.

But they don't last that much longer.

It's not that much harder.

It's just

harder enough

that you're like playing more of the game okay but one thing like if you're gonna parry the world i would recommend actually kicking it up to expert well it's just like

it feels so fun to be in combat in this game absolutely it feels so fun yeah

um

fucking like just again this is worth the beginning we don't know where this is going but absolutely incredible job sandfall interactive so far um

love love everything i'm seeing there and um

yeah like the the uh

the characters individual like the two characters that i've gotten introduced to so far they're caught like this the whole like um stain system

on yeah loon is like complex enough to her that is like oh shit if everybody has that level of system subsystem going on

Fuck.

Everybody has their own subsystem.

Awesome.

Awesome.

So it's like Gustav has his overcharge.

She has her stain system.

The one after that has a stance system.

I don't know what the other party members have.

Yeah.

But like they all have like a very in-depth gimmick that you can build around.

So like there's versions of Luna that are you're like, well, do I want to like build myself up to be a massive debuffer that like I'm all blue?

Or do I want to build up so that I have white, blue, green, red, right?

And I have like a huge nuke.

Yeah, there's because

and then you see the interactions where stains on certain things will also like you can like well, this is where like darkest dungeon synergy comes into play, but

one character can mark while another character takes advantage of that mark, you know, or like one character can stack on flame and the other can take advantage, etc.

You know, so you start working together in that way.

I also think that there's this game might have come out at a perfect time for people like you and me because there's a massive undercurrent that keeps coming up in the dialogue in which people are calling Gustav an old man.

And he's like, you know, 30 years old didn't used to be old.

And people are like, whatever, dude, you're so old.

And I'm like, I just turned 39 last week.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

You can, you start thinking about age a whole lot differently playing this game for sure.

Um,

uh, uh, uh, I'm almost 40.

Ah, shit.

I had another point, but

it's slipping away.

Yeah, so good.

Good, good stuff so far.

I would say this is like one of the games I played this year that is like a definite game of the year contender.

Like right away, it's just exploding with quality.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, like...

We're not even really getting into it, but like the story is very compelling so far.

Oh, absolutely.

Everything's so weird.

Everything that's happening is so interesting and strange and like

an awful and like, wow, you know, and like, there's this kind of,

you know, you know that

like that,

I guess to go French with it, it's like, you know,

Nazi occupied France, we soldier on, right?

That like in the, you know, in the midst of the hopeless, we keep on marching.

Well, yeah, because these people never had a World War I or a World War II.

It's Paris that got sucked into some dimension in like 1905 or some shit.

Some other shit's going down.

And then,

right, you have, again, your Death Game anime rules that are like, okay, let's figure out why the fucking walls and the Titans and the

Gantts ball is there.

But also, literally, here's a mysterious key.

I got that mysterious key, and I'm like, what the fuck?

What do you need to do with the key?

I don't know, but you know what?

Between that and fucking souls, giving me a mysterious key is,

I like it.

I feel like of the items I got in the prologue, that's the one that matters.

I like having a mysterious key at the beginning of a video game.

That is a good feeling.

That is a big old.

Oh, where's this going to go?

Yeah.

I just want to make a quick point that the soundtrack is absolutely, unbelievably incredible.

It is constantly changing.

There's so many tracks.

And trying to listen out for those lyrics and trying to hear, you know, as it's switching between English, I'm hearing lyrics going in heavily accented English.

Yeah, I'm hearing don't give up and then dropping over to clair obscure.

You know, like they're switching languages on you.

Would you be surprised to hear that this soundtrack is by a game composing amateur?

Yes.

That is first game.

And that they were found off of SoundCloud.

Hey, you, you look cool.

Get in.

Okay.

Literally, they just went, they reached out to somebody posting on SoundCloud that did some good work and they were like, yo, you're awesome.

Official,

want to work on a game.

You want to do 150 tracks for this big budget RPG?

Amazing.

Okay.

Amazing.

Yeah.

I would love to know.

I'm very curious because we were talking about, you know, when we saw the trailer and kind of saw the announcement for this, and then we saw the big old baguette, you know, trailer and stuff.

Um, we, I was like, yeah, who is this studio?

Like, how many people are they?

What, what scale is this?

But uh,

I 84 people and one dog.

Fantastic.

Fantastic.

You know, I really do hope

that, like,

I like the idea that this

double A, triple A, this would be double A

today's

This is a double A feeling game, and

I need more of this.

This exact scale where I can feel this.

This exact thing.

I can feel the limits, right?

And I don't know how long the game is, but you can tell that it's like,

it's going to be, you know, shyer than

an Atlas game.

So it's 30 to 60, and that is dependent on how much you want to give it.

Excellent.

So Gene was in my stream the other night, and he's beaten it.

And of note is that he's like, yeah, yeah, no, I'm building up my characters right now to

fight other stuff in, you know, the excellent game or what have you.

I like those numbers.

I like that.

That's great.

So 60 for us.

100, yeah.

That's great.

That's totally fine.

Fucking recommend, go, go, go, take it.

Go get it.

Go get it.

Go get it.

And like, yeah, and I specifically want this scale of game to succeed.

I want AA

to be a thing.

So I'm heavy pushing claire obscure expedition trentois.

It is.

And I'm going to say it like that way every time.

What else do you get up to

aside from Frenchyland RPG time?

Well,

so what happened?

There was the SOMAD tournament.

I couldn't remember what the SO stood for.

Spring Overture.

Spring Overture.

Okay,

they just wanted to get so mad.

Yeah, but now we've had we've had we have you mad, we have we mad, we have be mad.

Oh, I didn't know about B-Mad.

There was a special event to get to have someone go to a Brazilian qualifier.

So the Brazilian Montreal Air Dashers tournament was B-Mad.

And then there there was really good.

And then there was New Mad as well.

So yeah, So Mad is,

it's great.

It's great.

How many of these can they do?

That's the question is every time they come up with a new one, everyone's like, wow!

You know, and I've basically explained to everybody, I'm like, I'm like, yeah, no, the funnest part is waiting to hear what the new name is going to be.

So Mad

was,

and they got, yeah, they got it, printed a cool shirt here.

I'm so mad.

I went 0-2, and all I I got was this lousy shirt.

Oh, did you?

You were doing commentary.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And

no, I got fifth in Iron Saga versus.

I'll take it.

That's all right.

So, this is going to be a really stupid question.

Yeah.

But to those who are not paying attention last week, So Mad is a fighting game tournament.

Yes, it is.

It takes place in Montreal.

It's a local

event over here.

Me and Reggie went over, jumped on

commentary for that, had some fun.

I see the timer.

There you go.

Don't worry.

Not much to it.

Don't worry about that.

Oh, good bit.

Good bit.

Good bit.

Is that the Mortal Kombat timer by any chance?

No, it is not.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

The, the, uh, I got, I, I, I played a little bit of that Iron Saga Versus.

That's a, that's a fun, goofy little robot game that's going to be off to the side to enjoy.

I would like to see that get updated with more super robots over time.

I think that would be fun as a little background thing.

You know, did some Street Fighter and then, yeah, there was the first City of the Wolves tournament as well.

You know, not much to say beyond Hotaru and Hokutomaru.

The little kids in that game are very, very strong.

They're very good.

They're good.

Those two.

Those, like, they're great.

Speed kills, man.

And the way...

So you're playing an old school fighting game that feels very old school, but the way that they run feels like a Marvel game.

They move so quickly at you.

So

it gets scary, you know?

But yeah, shit was fun.

Got to enjoy that with everybody.

I think the weirdest thing I've seen is like Salvatore is like turning people around on him.

Yeah, so basically it

through Max getting the

Maxuit.

The Soul Transfer tracksuit, and then overall through the bits where Salvatore has,

he's like a fan of the series and is someone that is like, and like the character is not a real person.

That's not his real name, but it is like a fiction.

Salvatore Genachi.

That's not his real name.

Salvatore Gennachi is a fictional person.

Oh.

That like has all these anime moments and music video things and stuff.

So like people are like, okay, this is a goofy thing that fits in a little bit better than we initially thought.

And that has been, that has been changing

minds a little bit.

Also, seeing his idle animations and his stuff where I saw it during that first

exhibition, and I screenshotted it, but I didn't like post it out or anything.

But I saw like his win code against Terry Bogart is literally the, hey, Terry, you asked me if I'm okay, but then you hit me.

What's the point of that?

You know, kind of like lucky he's doing the bit as well.

So yeah,

people are warming up to it.

I think what turned me around on him is that I saw

somebody post a video of him sitting in a balloon-less

carriage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the balloon people show up and say, Hey, man, we forgot the balloon.

He goes, Do you see any cops around?

No, and he just floats away.

Skittles commercial vibes.

The name of the video is F the Cops.

Skittles commercial vibes is what

Max called it for sure.

Now,

I still think that this is a character that only gets in based on who he's friends with.

And there is that element to it.

But

it is, in the end, like if they announced him first and then Ronaldo second, the energy probably would have been a little bit different about that.

And I think, too, like, the difference between somebody who gives a fuck about the game they're in and is a fan of the thing is going to go over better with fans of the thing than somebody who's like, I'm clearly just.

You know what I mean?

I'm showing up.

Also, all that other shit.

I'm making an appearance.

Yes, of course.

Of course.

Right.

But I think that's part of what

the perception changing has been as well as that, you know.

But,

you know, you're not going to pretend.

I'll say it every time.

There's a rapist in the game.

It's there.

Don't pretend it's not.

But anyway, that's basically what's been happening.

Beyond that,

I wanted to give a shout-out as well to Black Mirror, has started season seven.

Hello, what's up?

Nah, nothing.

I know that.

You can thank Paige for this incredible idea.

That's bait.

And I know what that is.

I'm not taking that bait.

I'm going to be Mad Max up here.

I'm going to stay in the truck.

Black Mirror has started.

I really like Black Mirror.

I enjoy that series.

And I know what if your mom run on batteries, but actually...

What if?

What if?

But actually,

what's particular and what I kind of realized about the series that

I love

is that it is going to age

immensely poorly.

and has already begun doing so.

And

it is a moment in time show.

Like this,

Black Mirror could not exist before it came out.

And it will immediately be rotten and

aged like milk

in a matter of months, right?

Because of the months?

Because of the way tech works in this world, right?

Yeah.

So I love it because it's a very of the moment.

Right now is the only time this matters.

Like you have to appreciate it right where we're when we're on the cusp of discomfort with this particular subject.

Um,

and what if your mind ran on batteries, and and and yeah, and and so you know, the whole bit where like, um, you know, they went with like the kind of horror theme stuff to just be like, okay, we understand some folks were like massively uncomfortable when it just straight up overlaps with reality.

And let's just do some fun direction bits with the last season.

Um, but this one, they're they're back and they're hitting on some shit that is, of course, of the moment.

And, you know, probably

like, yeah, like, like, okay, maybe not a matter of months, but like, definitely in a matter of years watching these things backwards.

There's going to be like, I can see the next generation of kids watching Black Mirror and being like, what?

Yeah, that's the way it's always been.

I don't get it.

Why is that?

These kids don't have time for Black Mirror.

They got that skibbity shit.

Sure.

To brain rot their asses with.

But a

pretty strong start.

So just watch the first episode of Common People with Rashida Jones in it so far.

And it was a good one.

But now now that it's been, I guess, the new season has come, I kind of wanted to just touch on something that happened in the last season, in season six.

I mentioned it when I watched it back then, and I didn't want to get into the details about what it was about per se.

And I'm it's if you don't want to hear, I'm not going to spoil the specifics, but the topic that it goes into, I'd like to mention because I loved it and I think it's really great.

And I also think it's like on the pro in the process of being expired as I describe it right now.

Um, the first episode of season six was called Lock Henry, and it wasn't clear what it was about at first.

It was kind of following

this crime that happened in the past, and you're kind of piecing together the details of it through, you know, these characters going back to visit,

you know, a childhood home.

And

it basically ends up being that the Black Mirrors take on something that I have been immensely uncomfortable with for a long time now and i haven't heard anyone or anything really

pointing at it this is the first thing i've seen like directly calling it out okay what is it true crime weirdness when the fandom

around like actual murder victims becomes entertainment As that has become more and more of a thing, I mean, it's become super weird.

And

yeah.

I mean,

to the bored white woman housewife, you can either get really into true crime or daydrinking.

Okay, well, so like, I mean, it's one or the other.

Yes.

Like, what's saying that they should become alcoholics?

Is that what you're saying?

But I mean, from the moment

I heard, like, my favorite murder is the name of a thing, and I was like, oh, that's what it's called, is it?

And it's like, that doesn't.

Does that hit on

like,

is it about like what's fucked up about it?

And that's it?

Or are we kind of getting into the fandom part of it?

Or are we going Jeffrey Dahmer drama fandom with it?

Are we getting into that weird thing where it's like you're not really focusing on what the fuck happened and who it happened to, but it's like, let's get out the streamers and the cool t-shirts and the funny glasses, you know?

I mean, it's, it's obviously like, there's a, there's a,

that's, that's a, that's a, uh, a, a, hyper-exaggerated straw man of it.

But I do, there's a thing that you can see with certain types of Netflix depictions of it and stuff where you kind of, and certain podcasts as well, where it goes into like

fandom entertainment around a real thing that people got super murdered by.

And it, and it, it, it is attached to the same weird thing that led to

that cannibal that ate the, the, from Japan, that ate the woman in France, France, then going back and being on TV for a while.

And people are like, let's have you be a guest on a bunch of random panels until people got uncomfortable with it and eventually went, oh, maybe we shouldn't have the murderer that got away with it be a guest star on various shows.

What the fuck, right?

But it took a while for that to kick in, you know?

So I feel like I remember hearing about that a while ago.

And then I, and then like, the way true crime shit has kind of progressed, there's been that like did you hear about this insane thing that happened a while ago no oh my god that's fucked up right and um

in some case in the best cases um

uh you will learn about something that that happened and like the story being told through the documentary is not just informative but like is relevantly part of it and I'll give I'll quote Dare Zachary as probably one of the best examples of the story being told about this thing that happened the the the the documentary is important to that story and is relevant to it, and it matters.

And then the feeling from that is so far, far from the mysterious Dahmer.

Look how hot he is.

He was so elusive and the genius mastermind, you know?

And I'm like, oh.

So Black Mirror touched on that.

And I went, fucking thank you for saying it because it's weird.

So, like, it's always been my opinion that

um some of these

uh some of these things are just like

like gendered versions of the same compulsive human issue so like

guy that just sits around and fantasy role plays with his bros about i would have stopped that

that i would i would have fucking stopped those oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah right that's what it was saying should have been me on wahlberg saying he would have stopped.

If it was me on that plane,

I'm just saying, just saying, things would have gone a whole lot differently, bro.

As like, I'm going to catch this killer.

Right.

And it's like similarly to how, like, women have had astrology forever and now boys have crypto.

Like, it's the same, like, I want to use

magic numbers to influence the world.

You can also make sure just through a gendered lens.

You can also make sure to seat your back towards every entrance and

analyze how you would take down the terrorist that walks into the restaurant.

Listen, listen, that is actually a better example than the two that I've come up with.

Because if you want to brain rot yourself on TikTok while thinking about the Roman Empire,

what you can do is

you can have like Sigma male video, and it's like, I always keep my back in the restaurant to scan for threats.

And when I walk into the room, I assume an alpha stance in order, like all that fucking nonsense.

And then you scroll up and it's like 48 year old like probably drunk wine mom walking up to her car and saying hey you ever see if your car has has like a zip tie tied around yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

you need right to and it's like it's the same exact emotional content it's just being filtered through a different societal lens because they're crazy but then i always have that moment at the end of this like Jesus Christ, I roll my eyes and then I go,

okay, but also I don't live in America, right?

And so there's a moment where I'm like, I don't know, depending on where or what's up, right, how crazy shit might get in a given scenario.

But at the very least, if we're talking about the, like, the astrology and the, and the, the mental LARPing,

you know,

yes, there's a feed that that goes down as well.

And,

I think that like, unfortunately, like, I remember hearing, like, the quote I remember was like,

oh, like,

girls don't get into, like, like, girls don't get into true crime

because it's entertaining.

We study that shit.

to learn from it, right?

They lie.

And I'm like, that is not true when you're telling me how hot you think Jeffrey Dahmer is.

No, no.

I don't care.

I'm not practicing to serial killers because it's the closest they're going to get to dating a vampire or a werewolf.

Oh, God.

That's why.

You're so threatening.

Jesus.

Oh, boy.

I mean, I just,

I just, I know that, like, we've, we've been online a long time.

I have been online for a bit.

Yes.

And I have certainly come across all kinds of dark corners out there on that internet.

And there's a couple times where, you know, you peek in on something and you go, oh,

there's a community over here.

And you're like, huh, word?

That's a thing.

Yeah.

And, oh, God, oh, fuck.

I just had the perfect example, but I forgot what it was called.

The

Digimon are real?

No, not Digimon Are Real, but the one where you can have

Alpha Beta and Sigma,

Furry, Putin, Obama, and

Biden and Trump.

Oh, like Furry Hitler, Omegaverse, Omegaverse, Omegaverse, exactly, right?

The Omegaverse stuff where you kind of peek in and you go, oh, oh, okay.

Obama is a Sigma Omega type, and he has to rut every now and then.

So he's got to go find

a beta like Biden or so

to rut with.

I want to say something here.

I often say this to Paige

when I don't understand what she's talking about.

And it's fairly rare that it applies to you.

You're just saying words.

Yeah.

I know.

Like you're, I know.

What the fuck are you?

You're just saying words in an order.

But the few who know what I'm talking about are freaking out right now, and I'm doing it for them.

I'm not doing it for you.

I'm not doing it for anybody who's typing question marks and anyone who's holding the question mark key and mashing enter.

I'm not doing this for you.

I'm doing it for the people who just spit their coffee out when they heard me say Omegaverse.

All right.

This is like me talking about the fist of the dog medicine where he sprays the dog medicine on his hands to make his hands tougher.

I understand.

Right.

So, so, um, to that end, you know, you kind of peer in and you go, oh shit, that's a thing, huh?

Okay.

And then you kind of close the door.

And

there's weird like

stuff where, like, yeah, we talk about like the

Dahmer fandom bits and things.

And like, some, and I saw where a couple groups of that started branching off into like other

tragedies and then becoming fans of certain tragedies based on how attractive they think the perpetrator was, right?

So there's like fan cams, like, you know, like K-pop stand fan cams for like

murderers and like less than their fan cams for everything.

Yeah, yeah.

And you would see a couple of these just being like, okay, but look how hot he is, though, over here when he's in this court deposition, you know?

Or other heinous, like mass fucking death event footage where people are like, and I'm like, oh, there's a level of, I don't know what causes that, but something's going on there that might be,

I don't know, it might be.

It's your genitals.

Yes, but, but it's connected.

That's what causes it.

But it's connected to the thing that makes your hand write a pen pal letter to the murderer in jail.

You know what I mean?

Like, I don't know.

I don't know what that thing is, but I'm like, that's dark.

And it's over there.

And that's a part of the interview.

And uh, what I've discovered is that there's a lot of people out there that are like, you know, like when you were younger, you're like, oh man, everybody's stupid or whatever.

Uh, now I'm old enough to be like, wow, tons of people are just crazy.

Like, tons of people are just nuts.

Yeah, I mean, just completely fucking nuts.

Like, that's the end, like, that's the end conclusion, and that's foregone.

But it doesn't mean that the journey to discovering the specifics of how that manifests isn't fascinating and wildly like, oh oh my, like, really?

That's where we got to.

Okay.

Anyway, so

I think looking over at someone in the chat saying you are being so judgmental, La Mau, is like the funniest possible takeaway from this.

Yeah.

No, I'm being too harsh on those murderers and those people that, you know, like, I should be

no, no, the fan cams for the Columbine shooters.

We should be more open-minded towards those

accounts, actually.

What if I can fix him?

The guy that plowed into a family, but was rich and hot and got off, like, yeah,

when he was drunk driving, like, we should be chill, actually.

Yeah, he's not the only one who got off, am I right?

Wow.

Aphasia.

So, anyway, um,

it's crazy.

That's insane.

That's completely, that is not reasonable to say.

That is not a reasonable thing.

You're being completely unreasonable.

Fuck that.

What have we kissed in the conjugal visit trailer?

I think that,

oh, excuse me, not aphasia.

Affluenza was the affluenza.

That's the other one.

That's like...

Like you can't hear noises in your brain.

Right, excuse me.

No, no, affluenza.

That's the other one where you're like, you're too rich, so you didn't know that like

other people's lives.

You know what the worst thing is about the affluenza thing?

Like the explanation that this dipshit was so rich and coddled that he couldn't appreciate

the degree his actions harm people.

I actually find that to be compelling.

I genuinely think that is extremely real.

I just don't care.

Ah, okay.

If we check the tapes, you see a childhood where there was never a moment that taught the value of human life to the kid based on that.

I'm sure you've met like a child that was like eight or nine that you're like, oh, the parents fucked this kid up already.

I see.

This kid has no, like, like never a consequence.

So you can be diagnosed with it.

It just doesn't affect the sentence whatsoever.

Yeah, it's like, okay, yeah, sure.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Yeah.

No, that makes sense.

I'm addicted to candy.

Does that mean that if I ran over a fucking family of five because the devil promised me candy?

Okay, well, not if the devil promised me candy.

That might actually, you know, be, you know, a good excuse.

But long-winded way to say that, like, over the years, I've seen these moments of like people online, like, like, being really into like heinous shit, and it's always been weird, but it's like, okay, whatever.

That's just a small group of crazy shit going on over there.

Oh, no, it's not.

It's not a small group at all.

But, but, but, but, but I'm saying it's ramped up, right?

And then the version of it that we get in the form of the

true crime variant now, where it's like, it's just skirting on that edge.

I'm like, okay, there's an episode of Black Mirror that touched on that.

And I don't know that this is going to, like, I don't know how relevant this true crime weird vibe is going to be for the next, for the next couple of years, but at the moment right now, that shit hits, you know?

I think that, uh, I think that, um, I don't think this behavior has ramped up at all.

Uh, I think this behavior is more visible and is more easily networked.

I think the amount of people who have secret, like,

internalized fan cams for murderers and scumbags has actually always been the same.

But they thought that they were freaks.

Because they never met other freaks.

Well, yes, okay, yes, because there's the thing where, like, they get to network together and become more of a community for sure.

But there's also the part of, like, as that builds momentum and, like, lands on a streaming platform or becomes a more and more, bigger, bigger thing, other people do kind of get into it, starting with

dangerous teams.

Well, but also through, like, here's the real case, here's the real murders that happened, and then here's the wrap-up show where we discuss like the latest, you know,

fan fams and memes about what's been going on in this thing, you know?

Wooly, there's somebody in the chat just like nailed it perfectly.

It's like the armpit and feet people.

See, back in the day, if you were like an armpit guy or like a foot guy, you'd be too embarrassed to talk about it because it was weird and you would never meet anyone in your whole life that was like that.

And you'd be like,

But now, now we have like armpitliquers.us or whatever the fuck, and they're having their meetups, and they're like,

everybody's like, and this is like a totally

wiki feat.

It's just, it's just gross as shit.

But, like, now, like, oh, yeah, you know what?

Yeah, there are a lot of us.

You know what?

I should talk about armpit shit.

Yeah.

Probably.

No, stop.

Stop it.

Sure.

Stop it.

Either way,

I enjoyed that episode and that being a part of the discussion.

So shout outs to Black Mirror.

Watch it now because it's like milk.

It's going off.

I don't know.

It's going off.

Its expiry date is like...

Every season has an expiration date.

This episode aged really well.

Oh, the first episode of the first season?

Yeah, I think that aged really well.

I think that's just as appropriate now as it was then.

Certainly, but I think not, but the same can't be said for all of them.

And the what if your mom ran on batteries bit, it's like, yes, but

and then you're you one day you see your mom replacing her double A's.

I think the goofiest thing about the fact that we always laugh about that is like my father does run on batteries.

Oh, oh, okay.

Unironically, my father has a pacemaker,

and he has to occasionally like three to five years, he has to get the batteries changed.

There you go.

Um,

good stuff.

Uh, we We live in a fucking nightmare.

Woo!

Always have, always has been.

Yay.

Astronaut execution.

Gonna be playing some more Phantom Liberty this week

and getting through that cyberpunk.

Going concentrated on it.

So yeah, tune in Wednesday and Thursday.

We'll be doing that.

And then getting to Fighting Games on Saturday as well over on Wooly vs on Twitch and YouTube.

All right.

So I played Expedition 33.

So, I mean, let's just skip past that.

That game's incredible.

That's that's fucking amazing.

I love it.

It's incredible.

It's great.

Yeah.

LPing Expedition 33.

And then, you know, again, we talk about how Death Stranding is on its way and all these things.

Like, I think it would.

It is.

It would be a mistake to

get into some stuff right now.

Like, I'm trying to keep the

up to the camera.

Yeah, so for me, it's Expedition 33

and then Night Rain.

But Night Rain's not like a superhero.

Sorry to disappoint, you know.

But yeah,

it'll be off camera for you.

Yeah, I play it for you.

Just enjoy it and be like, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, wa, wah.

So I played Expedition 33.

It's great.

I'm going to keep playing that.

If you want to see an LP of it, you can come to my channel.

It's twitch.tv/slash patstairs at.

I also took a look at,

I screw this name up every time, so I have to read it out loud.

The 100-line last defense academy.

So I reached out and they sent me a code, and I appreciate it because games are too expensive nowadays.

So

the 100-line last defense academy is made by the people who made Danganrampa and the people who made

the Dangenrampa tactics.

Yes.

Yes, I heard that.

But also,

the writer behind Zero Escape.

I heard about this.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So

I'm going to start it out right away.

I haven't played that much.

I did one stream of it, and I haven't been back to it since, but I plan to go back to it.

Also of note, I

really

had a very strong negative reaction to trying to play Danganrampa.

Yeah, you did not like that game.

Incredibly negative reaction.

And we talked about it a bit when I brought up, like, I think 2KO

when they released, what was it, Akodama Drive, like the anime that came out.

There's a whole style to the Dangenrampa,

basically like Uchikoshi stuff, where

you see that character art style, you see that same vibe and design and stuff.

And even if it's not in the Dangenrampa world, the aesthetic is there, right?

So

it's still very much in a similar style.

Like

you can taste taste the writing being the dang and rompa guy, but it's immediately much more appealing.

I don't know why

I like I don't I don't know why a part of it is that the the the the narrative setup is so much more confusing and interesting

It takes place in a Tokyo that is entirely Underground or in a bubble or something of course it does with random attacks that no one understands I like And then you are swooped away by a magic bear to defend the world

in a high school.

Yep.

And then you visual novel talk to people who stand around in little 2D.

Yes.

I mean five.

Yeah.

And it's

the characters very much look like Dangenrampa characters, and they talk like Dangenrampa characters.

There are, you meet a cast of, I think it's like eight or nine.

Protagonist with a little hair strand sticking up.

Yep.

He's normal.

He's a normal guy.

And then there's like the angry guy.

There's the prissy girl.

There's the prissy girls' sister-obsessed freak brother.

There's the pathetic guy.

There's the gym rat girl.

Like, there are a bunch of fucking ridiculous stereotypes.

But for some reason, it's charming to me.

Whereas

Dangan Rampa was like, made me want to barf right away.

I really can't.

Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah.

Because here's the thing is I've always found it it to be charming and i always i did enjoy it um i feel like the way the art style and the subject matter kind of clash with each other and the way it kind of goes about everything it feels almost like um a bunch of like candy mascots had a media story to you know like about them like it's like it's like almost like yeah like what if these were all like characters from various fruit snacks you know that are now getting a game or something like that.

I'm not sure.

Or like pachinkos.

I'm not sure if what's going on here is something that was present in Danganrampa, but there is definitely a parody element here.

One of the major characters is a girl that looks just like Jinx from League of Legends

and is literally just being like, boy, I sure would love to be in a death game.

It would be so exciting to be in a death game.

I hurt, yeah.

In which we all try and figure out who killed me and all that shit.

And it's just like outwardly saying, I wish I was in 999.

I wish I was in Danganrampa.

I wish I was in VLR.

I heard that the word death game actually gets dropped.

You know, like, yeah.

And

it's played for goofs.

There is, I don't know what to call him other than the Jimmy of the group, just an outwardly cowardly piece of fucking garbage.

Always.

That an early dialogue is.

You kind of like not you're not super cool with him and he yells at you like wait Are you are you ignoring me because I'm fucking poor?

I hope you get canceled.

And there's something about that that's just really endearing to me because he's such a fucking shitbag.

It wasn't the genre that bothered you back in the day, it wasn't the no, it was not the genre.

I love like Ace Attorney, so I figured Danganrampa would be the thing, but for whatever reason, I think it was like the core premise of the ultimate whatever just made me want to fucking barf.

I think the pink blood also bothered you.

A pink blood, there's pink blood.

I don't even know what that is.

No, no, okay, no, I can't remember when we talked about it, but all right.

But then there's the loser.

There's a tiny little, like,

too small character that's like a pathetic little fat weirdo.

And every single line of dialogue that comes out of his mouth is: I am a waste of life.

I am the worst.

I can't do anything right.

I'm so stupid.

Like a Mineta style character?

No, like self-deprecating and shamed and just

like hates himself.

He's going to kill himself any second.

And

I'm like, this is really,

really intense.

Like, this is probably the most self-hatred that I've ever seen in a character ever.

And I was then informed and provided with sources that Kodaka, the writer of the main writer of this game and the Danganrapa guy,

gave a shout out to Hideki Kamiya saying, hey, dude, I love the shit you you say to people in your tweets.

I am totally writing a character based off of these.

Oh my God.

Okay, okay.

So everything he says about himself is something Hideki Kamiya has said to someone on Twitter.

Oh fuck.

Okay.

And now I'm turned all the way around.

Yeah, all right.

That's where it comes from.

That's a deep cut.

That's a pretty deep cut.

And

in addition to that of being a weird visual novel with a fascinating plot premise, it's also like a tactics RPG

that plays pretty well against what is essentially like the Earth Defense Force cast of monsters.

Like running the, like, you know, you'll fight like little goofy mascot dudes and like little blobbos that look like they're from Disneyland or Universal Studios.

And then like a gigantic 100-tall fucking death myth dragon from Dark Souls.

Yeah.

And like there's moments like that in the Danganarumpa games too, where there's these strangely like elaborate designs for beasts and monsters that would just pop out for a gag.

You know, it was always, it was never to be taken seriously.

Like, they'd always show up and then kind of just be like, hey, look at that cool thing.

Anyway, it just stands there or it barely fucking works or it's a piece of shit.

And it seems here, like, yeah, this, this same kind of

stylistic thing combined with this, the, the, the, simplified art style.

Overall, I'm assuming the tone is mostly punchlines and goofy.

Uh,

Yes and no.

Okay.

When violence happened,

it was

really violent.

Yeah, that's Danganrampa as well.

Like, for sure.

Like, outrageously so.

And there's also,

like, it's mostly Danganrampa, but it does have an element of, like, the zero escape mystery to it.

Like, I'm not super familiar with Danganrampa's mystery elements, but it feels like kind of like VLR to me.

Okay.

So like, I'm like, the big thing is like, what the fuck is going on in this story at all?

Yeah.

Like, like, like, like, what is even happening in its own premise right off the bat?

Um, and it gives a way better first impression than Danganrampa does.

And I would say probably gives a better first impression than something like 999 does because 999 just drops you into like a fucking room escape like instantaneously.

Yeah.

Uh, so like there's more to hook you here right away.

Like

we were just talking about this with you know Expedition 33, but like the like the rules of the world or something about this setting is

confusing and strange and or you're trapped in a setting where you don't have the answers why I don't know who did this.

This game takes place on Earth.

Right, right, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

And like the complete discombobulation of your main characters as they figure out why the world is the way it is or whatever is an established thing.

The choice to go tactics with this is interesting because I mean I like tactics games.

Yeah, so this

is a big improvement for me.

All I'm saying, like, cause like the previous foray with Ultra Despair Girls went into a, you know, they swerved off into a genre that I don't think worked well for them that time.

This is tactics games are pretty fun.

They also, I'm like, between this and then fucking God, Unicorn Overlord came out, and I don't know if anyone finished that, so I don't know what the final hour count is.

No one finished it.

But it seems like a gigantic gigantic humongous game.

Yeah.

I remember hearing that it was quite big.

Yeah.

The thing with a tactic style game is, I guess, I'm like, it feels like those settings tend to be like world-encompassing, right?

Because of the nature of going from map to map and area to area.

Yeah, no, all the fights in this are taking place in front of the school.

Yeah, that's strange.

That's so weird for it to be like a trapped small location, you know, for that type of genre.

Hmm.

Interesting.

Also, I happen to know that there are

100 endings in this game.

Wow.

Okay.

So they and supposedly the Danganrampa guy, Kodaka, wrote the main scenario,

and Uchikoshi, the zero escape guy, wrote most of the alternate scenarios.

Interesting.

So I'm seeing

people describe an hour count of somewhere between 30 to 140

hours okay depending on how much you want to actually pull out of it so when i hear a hundred endings it has a reverse effect on me where i'm thinking like they can't be that significant then right like i i don't know like chrono trigger has a lot of endings and that was a holy shit moment back in the day especially some of which are much more elaborate than others but if it's a hundred but they're all a couple screens and not much to them that would not be great.

So I'm hoping

I'm going to pull out the call to our live chat because I know there's somebody in here who's just beaten at least the first ending.

Not joke endings.

Okay.

Yeah, because if automata is the other thing where like some automata endings are complete, like you know, just gags, and some of them are real, obviously.

Um,

they're apparently

they're real.

Okay,

wow,

wow,

cool.

Yeah.

I would like to put more time into that.

The two Kyo games bit, the aesthetic and the style and Kodaka and Uchikoshi, like that, that's cool.

Yeah.

I'm glad that that's still a thing.

This is going to sound really strange.

And I don't know how to say it.

Because I don't really care for the Danganraba art style.

I'm not a fan.

I don't really like it.

Similarly to how I really like One Piece, and I think One Piece looks like shit.

I think One Piece looks like shit.

But I really like One Piece.

Yeah,

I feel like the Dangenrampa characters look at their best on a sweater or a cool hoodie

with graphics and sharp colors and line art.

But I like it.

I like the style.

This version of the Danganrampa art style is definitely a lot more palatable to me.

I wish we could get to the bottom of what it is because it is.

I'm looking at it.

I'm like, this is what it's always been.

Why does it work now?

But not before.

It reminds me of

when I'll go out somewhere and I'll try food and be like, I don't really like it.

And my wife, Paige, will be like, what don't you like about it?

And my answer is nearly exclusively, I don't like that it tastes like shit when I put it into my mouth.

I put it in my mouth and I go, and I go,

similarly, when I see like a huge proportion of One Piece characters and I go, uh, that looks bad.

That's it.

It looks bad.

Because I think, like, something that they kind of share from at least what I can see with, like, well, I mean, for every Denger Rompa character design, there's that.

There's, there's, there's, there's the similarities and designs.

But then, with One Piece characters as well, there's a choice to lean into stylized, like, exaggeration.

And the, the, turning up whatever the theme of the character is to 11 surpasses making them cool, right?

There will be a cool factor for some characters in moments where you see them like do

like their special thing or, you know, like there's characters like Sakura Ogami is like the basically a grappler baky

student who is like this beefy giant like muscle girl in a in a in a Sakura uniform a school uniform, a sailor fuku.

And her whole design is meant to be like a gag on the world that they're in.

But then she does really cool shit, you know, while being this like scarred, I look like I'm from a different world entirely character, you know?

They sacrifice, yeah, like some of the cool factor to be like more slapstick about it kind of thing.

And it reminds me of like mascot character design.

You know, when I mentioned earlier, like Pachinko or like Candy or whatever, I'm like, it's like like they treat their characters like mascots where not every franchise does that, you know.

But it's different.

I think it's interesting.

I think it's uniquely recognizable from other anime art style designs.

And I think it works for them, you know?

I think for One Piece,

the strangest thing is that I'll look at most of the cast and I'll be like, I really like these characters and I think they're cool.

And then I'll like, so like, I really love Chopper.

Chopper's my favorite guy on the cast.

And I think Brooks, a character I had not read up to, who's a skeleton, is really cool.

And then I see that, that, uh, the blue guy with the fucking arms.

Uh,

Frankie,

Frankie, I think I can't help you, but and I'm like, oh, he looks stupid.

Well, I'm sure he's cool, but I think his, like, his proportions look stupid.

Um, allow me to sainwash you for a moment

uh

over time from dang and rompo one through two and then the side things and then the other uh side spin-off projects and even the anime as well the character designs and the art style has gotten better it has improved so if you are feeling good about the latest incarnations

over the line for me on this one you're watching i'm looking at it you're watching some of the best stuff they've done for sure They've certainly improved with that thing they've been doing, but it still is that same thing, you know.

I need to take a second here.

Hey, guys, when I say I think something, you can't say someone's wrong.

You know, loud.

It's not no,

that's why you say I think this, or this is just my opinion.

In my opinion, because you can't tell me that I'm not having that opinion.

I am, I am having it.

How else would your career have fucking been built if not for this is my opinion?

Yeah.

Okay.

So, yeah, 100 line defense academy, really cool.

Haven't put as much time into it.

I'll probably talk more about it next week.

Excited to, because the strategy RPG parts seem like pretty good.

So I'm excited to see if that maintains.

And aside from that, Sharon Gan, Infinite Tsukiyomi, except you get locked in a reality where only other pats are in chat talking and typing into your chat, so you could only argue.

Dude, that would be great.

We'd agree on everything.

Oh, would you?

Absolutely.

Would you?

So, wait, so you say,

are they other pats

or are they other similarly attituded, different people?

They are other pats.

Oh, well, then we'd agree on everything.

Why would we have any difference of opinion if they're all the same person?

Well, that was easy.

We would return to reality with a bloodbath.

All right.

I'd be like, man, I don't really like pickles.

And then all the other pats would be like, I also don't like pickles.

Friends forever.

Blood.

You don't have to live in a world in which people like pickles.

Blood and organs everywhere.

All right.

The other thing, and by far the most interesting thing that I played this week, and I've been talking to Gene and Dad Dad Asana about it non-stop, is the marathon alpha.

Ah, Bungie.

Right.

So that was closed?

That is very closed.

You had to get a code for being an influencer or send a code out as an influencer.

So

I talked about how the Bungie presentation was super weird last week.

And how it seemed like for Bungie, by Bungie.

Internal.

Okay.

So

straight straight off the bat before you even got your code uh you could you would get invited to the bungie discord in which you got to see the guy whose job it was to hand out the codes just having a straight up mental breakdown for like six days um because

um the codes wouldn't work

or the codes wouldn't go out or people were having trouble assigning their bungie accounts to the code or like just like you I you know you you know when you get an announcement in Discord and like a muted channel all of a sudden pings up with like the little one and you for like there's like a three four five day period where every single time like listen don't DM me about the codes until you have done the following thing and just like just really going through it oh no okay everything on my discord has a little one next to it all of it it's

don't like that's not it that's all right all right fair enough fair enough but anyway I get the idea the spirit of what you're saying.

And so I spoke with Gene at length, and I have Gene's permission

to put some of the opinions that we talked about forward.

So the most interesting thing about Gene's time with Marathon is that he has been having the absolute hardest time getting to play Marathon.

For whatever reason, they sent it to his work email instead of the one that

his Bungie account is tabled to.

And he spent literally the entire pre-beta and beta time up until yesterday talking with various people at Bungie, trying to get a code and going, Why is it so hard for you guys to send me a code when everyone I talk to is, I will definitely send you a code right away?

Okay, so from a live service perspective, community manager sweaty rollout things are not encouraging.

Not great.

How is game?

How is game, though?

It's fucking terrible.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

It looked terrible.

Oh, damn.

It looked cool.

It looked really cool.

This was supposed to be an embargoed alpha.

This was going to be, hey, man, we don't want any video.

We don't want any pictures.

We want...

impressions only and then like two days before that

they were like guys you can stream it, you can do anything.

So, uh, the game is coming out this year.

Oh, man, that cool art style gets wasted.

Wait, wait, wait, wait,

wait, okay, okay, okay, all right, all right, all right, all right.

The game is coming out this year,

and this is an alpha.

And you know how we make fun of 2x KO for having an alpha, but it's not really an alpha, you know how we make fun of this game for having a beta, and it's not really a beta.

Marathon's Alpha is the roughest version of a game I have ever seen sent out for this type of promotion.

It is alpha.

It really is.

A huge proportion of the game's visual presentation is missing.

The external areas are one step above gray box.

Like,

it's rough and it is ugly and it is, it is, it is alpha.

And it is like, this is supposed to come out in four or five months bro this that is that is dire that is worrying man

so after sorry to to to interrupt you just yeah go for it but feel free to cut in whenever well after we talked about it last time and i saw the little like gameplay breakdown thing i noticed because you were asking me what did i watch specifically and yeah what i did see was the um it was it was all just narrated narration over gameplay mechanics right and i was like wow this looks really cool

And the idea of, and like, yeah, what was happening with the art style, I thought was, looked pretty bold and impressive.

And I thought that was a, you know, a cool direction visually for what was going on.

And, you know, everything they described seemed fine, I guess, you know, team, team thing.

I later, when the conversation was done after the podcast, went and watched the short film

concept thing, which was fucking rad.

Absolutely.

That thing was incredible.

I completely missed that.

And I was like, oh, fuck.

That was the promise of what people's expectations were.

Okay, so I'm going to stop.

No, right there.

I'm going to stop you right there.

Okay.

The gameplay stuff that they showed off, as of right now, the game doesn't look like that either.

Okay, I'm going to just send you.

You can turn your sound off, but I'm just going to send you like a random

YouTube video from some guy where just in the middle of gameplay where he's moving the camera around.

The game does not look

good

at all it looks it looks like profoundly unfinished

it is rough and you know what the game looking visually a certain way is not important okay that's not the main thing the main thing is that this does not look and feel like it is going to come out in six months okay and it looks way

way worse than the stuff they have been showing so i can see from look at look here that like the assets and the bold color choices and everything are as advertised, but I guess the lighting, especially outside, is not as dynamic as it could be.

It is not, it's not there.

It's not finished and it's not there.

Okay, okay.

I see.

I see.

I see.

My first thing is like.

You should not have, I actually disagree with the, because it was a higher up decision when that price discussion happened to put the game out so people could see it.

I agree they should actually have not let people watch this version of the game.

I think it gives a really terrible first impression.

I wonder if they were forced to after a certain amount of time for

investment.

Is this an extraction game, right?

Yep.

And

for some reason, I talked about this when they showed it off.

They're like, you know what we're going to do?

We are going to do a three-man extraction game.

The game is going to put you into teams of three.

If you solo queue, you're going to be be up against teams of three.

The way to play this game is with teams of three.

So what did I do?

I went and got Dad Asana and I got Quiet Viking and I said, come on the show.

And we hung out and we played it in a match-made,

pre-built

on-voice chat during the stream team of people who all know each other and all had the same goal and started to run into like immediately.

Were you on Discord comms?

Yes, we were.

Okay.

And my stream, if you want to go watch it, it's me and Dead Asna and Quiet Viking.

Thank you for coming on the show.

You guys are great.

Right on.

And we did, you know, we did five or six games.

So, right off the bat, is

I couldn't believe how British Dead Asna is.

It's outrageous.

I believe it.

It's offensive.

I believe it.

But more than that is that I cannot imagine how miserable playing this game in anything but that scenario is.

So it's an extraction game.

So if you die, you lose every single item on your person.

Yes.

Right?

Okay.

So queuing by yourself is a nightmare because it has like halo level time to kill, you know, in Halo multiplayer where like an engagement is like 10 seconds long.

Okay.

So if an engagement is like five to 10 seconds long,

There's no chance to beat a team one-on-three.

In like Warzone and Call of Duty, where you can kill someone with like a single shot or like a burst from your gun, one very excellent player can beat a team of three if they get the drop on them, right?

Shoot them in the back, shoot them in the back, shoot them, you know, that kind of thing.

The encounter time in Marathon is really long.

In the footage on my stream, Asana dumped an entire magazine into another player.

And they didn't die.

And then that other player's friend came around the corner and both of them focused her down.

Okay, so like shields are a big thing, yeah.

So, like,

one versus two is impossible, two versus three is impossible.

So, if you're playing with you by yourself or with not the maximum amount of people, combat against other players is just not available as a genuine option, which is ridiculous because this is a PvP game.

If you are going to play with randoms, right, you run into a different problem, which is if you have the apex situation where they just ditch you or

are actively harmful,

you can either perform badly enough that you cause them to lose all their fancy gear, or if you came in with good stuff,

you

cause you to lose your fancy gear.

And you would think that's not that big of a deal, except the game's primary form of permanent progression is little contracts.

But the contracts can't build up.

You only have one contract to come into the match, and everybody's contracts are going to be different and point them to different parts of the map.

So if you match make in,

then everyone's going to have objectives to go to different parts of the map.

And how are you supposed to get randoms to actually team up with you and go where you want?

You can't.

On top of that, it's an extraction game.

And you remember, you remember when everybody wanted to be Destiny 2?

Like shooter MMOs?

Oh, was that a phase?

Yeah, that was a big phase.

There were a bunch of games that came out like that, and none of them were Destiny.

This is the new trend is extraction, Tarkov.

Which is a, is a genre for sicko freaks because it's so vicious and mean and punishing.

Well, so I was about to ask, actually, because I remember, so Asana, I believe, was talking about

when you go on a losing streak in these games, right?

It's just, it's just, you know, start your, you know, in a fighting game terminology, everybody else gets to start with full meter and you don't

lose again.

You start with nothing constantly.

And if you have stuff saved up that you're, you don't, you're afraid to lose, and you, if, or if you do end up losing everything, there's just, yeah, there's nothing to do.

You're, you're, you know.

So it's about, it's about, like, you know, being very careful and costing.

XP can be lost, essentially.

So what happens?

Okay, so here's what happens.

We did a couple matches and we had some good gear.

And the first, you know, you do a match and the first

most of the match is slowly crawling through an environment,

scrounging through items and looking through boxes and being like, do I want this gun?

Do I want that gun?

Do I want that item?

Apex.

Do I want this health item?

No, but slow.

Like crawling.

Okay.

Because what happens when you die in Apex?

You hit rematch, right?

And you just go to the next match.

What happens when you die in Marathon?

You lose every single item on your body and start back up with the default gear.

Well, teams, which is shit.

Team's got to come grab you, though, right?

No, if you die,

if your team wipes, everyone's just...

If you wipe, no, no, no.

I mean, if you individually go down, you...

Yeah, they can pick up.

Yeah, yeah.

And so it's just slowly crawling through an environment and hopefully not encountering an enemy.

And you know what happened?

We found a team of three, and we were a team of three, and we got the drop on them, and we beat them, and we stole all their gear.

And then we walked about a hundred feet, and a different team of three got the drop on us and killed us.

And we lost every single thing that we got in the entire thing, and we didn't actually have any fun either.

Okay, well, I mean, that dog eat dog moment, the fish, bigger, fish thing, is that's the design.

It's the point, right?

But my point is that the game's also not fun to play, which is the weirdest part.

This is a bungee game.

People put up with all sorts of shit in Destiny because Destiny plays like a bungee game, and bungee games are fun to shoot guns in.

This game is the slowest game they've ever made, like movement and all this stuff.

It has the worst-feeling guns,

it has the worst movement.

It just feels bad.

Is any of that slow?

Is any of that connected to the fact that it's from Marathon?

Or is that just.

I don't think so.

Okay.

Is there, you know, because I'm like, is there a part of it that's legacy or are we just looking at like, we're not doing another destiny thing.

We're doing something that was established.

There's people in here who have played it as well and they can like the game legitimately like feels poor to control.

And like that was supposed to be the saving grace.

The saving grace was people like, well, I don't like extraction games and I don't like this and I don't like that, but it's going to be a bungee game, so you know it's going to play hot.

It plays bad.

And so I have a very, very, very quick impression from Gene that I think saw sums the whole thing up, where he got the code last night when I was streaming and left to go play Marathon.

He left my stream.

Sorry, he put my stream on his phone or a second monitor and he started to play marathon.

Then the following things happened.

Let me go find it.

I asked him, hey, man, how was it?

And he said, it made me fall asleep.

I woke up and your stream was over, and then I went back to bed.

And I asked him, do you mean fell asleep with your controller in your hand?

And he said, yes.

I woke up full on with my controller in my hand on the

exfiltration screen.

I tried to do another game, but then I died and I lost all my stuff.

So now I only have a knife.

Wow.

Okay.

And the thing is, is like

playing your, I mean, we were talking about this a little bit earlier before when you were talking about like City of the Wolves, for example, but playing with other people is also how you maximize your chances at fun.

Absolutely.

And so I played with people that I know and have known for years and I really like.

And we were both sitting around going.

Damn.

Sorry, we were all sitting around going, oh, I don't know about this.

Oh, do you guys want to?

And so, like, I feel like the ultimate

opinion-having moment for me was that it was an alpha of a highly exclusive game by a well, generally well-liked company.

And I was doing great numbers, and I had two guests on the show, and I played it for 90 minutes, and I went, you know what?

We're good.

My usual streams four or five hours, and I did 90 minutes of it.

I'm like, you know what?

I'm just going to stop

and

turn the game off.

And the tipping point for me was that

there's progression.

There is a progression system.

Like you do your quests,

kill this many people or get this many items, and they build up to permanent buffs, right?

And that's cool.

It's like faster sprint or, you know, stuff like that.

And it has like a skill tree.

I'm like, that's cool.

And then you mouse over it and they last for the season,

so it lasts for 30 to 90 days.

So, your actual progression that you're doing all this for is so that you can be a little stronger

for like two weeks at the end of the season, and then if you ever peace out and come back later, yeah, it's cool.

Don't worry, it'll reset.

So, it's fine.

Um,

it is, it is a, it is a really,

really bad alpha.

It is very troubling that this game is four or five months away.

Almost every single thread on the marathon subreddit is

people going into it and going, why is this game built for three players?

What the fuck are they thinking?

It is acting as

just the most vicious

way to make it impossible to play.

I wonder if they're like, it is

this.

It's just sorry, sorry.

Oh, no, I was going to say, like, if I were, like, I guess just thinking about the past, I remember

you and other people playing Destiny used to talk about

the shit that was terrible about those games, and then like how over time, I guess, they kind of buttered them up until Taken King

King was great was really good.

So, yeah, I kind of wonder if they...

Because Destiny 2 came out and didn't have any of the good stuff from Taken King, and it took until Forsaken for Destiny 2 to become good.

And then Destiny 2 was great

for a while.

So I kind of wonder, like, if this is a case of, hey, maybe put it back in the oven for a bit.

You know, people got their hands on it for the first time.

You got a lot of feedback.

Don't spit it out in a couple of months just to watch it die to get, just to watch it get concorded.

Take the time you need to make sure that it you're your

your shit's actually

i think this game is being like rushed out super hard um

because the thing that really says it to me is like one it doesn't play well which is weird because bungie makes games that play well that's always been the hallmark of it for the fps and it's like it's a sci-fi shooter like it like it should be like just steal the destiny shit uh but the second one is um

the the maps that are in the game right now are very small and there is a big map coming after release that's a gigantic spaceship called the Marathon,

which

will likely be the game's primary map, but it's not there at launch.

And the only reason I can think of it not being there at launch is that the game is being rushed out the door.

Okay.

The title of the game as a map is going to be post-launch.

Yeah, I think my only experience playing an extraction thing has been Mash Mac mode in Mecha Break.

I have on

Asana said they had way more fun playing that with you.

It was cool.

Than they did playing this with me.

It was cool, you know.

And the thing is,

here's the other bit.

It was cool, and it was a way to go and get XP and custom paints and whatever, leveling up your equipment, etc.

But it was a side mode to a team shooter main mode.

You could choose to play the game in its team of six v6,

or you could go do this extraction mode.

It wasn't the main thing, you know?

Um, um, I am like genuinely very surprised at how bad this alpha is, and obviously, hey, alpha, not final, but then it's like

by the end of the year, and I'm like, no,

no,

that's

it's it's rough.

Uh, it feels, it feels like we are playing

internal alpha playtest builds.

Um,

so

yeah, Bungie really used to be synonymous with like,

yo, really fun,

shoot good FPS console game, you know.

Yeah, Halo feels awesome.

Destiny feels awesome.

So, like, if they don't have that, like, what, who is this for?

Just out of curiosity, when Halo switched hands over to the other studios that are in control of it now,

do the latest Halo.

They kept it exactly the same.

Right.

And so, and how do those things feel compared to like Destiny's

last,

you know?

They feel like Halo.

The big problem with Halo 4 was that the fucking, I think it was the new enemy types were just not as fun to fight

as the Covenant.

Okay.

So, like, Master Chief feels.

The foundation of everything else is still the same.

And I know that Halo Infinite feels good, but, you know.

Okay, okay, fair enough.

Yeah.

I mean,

there's an element of like

when I, you know, first playing Apex, and I'm kind of like, damn it, why can't I run off the walls?

You know,

you have that moment, but you're like, you're going from S plus to like, yeah, right, this is still fine.

So, yeah.

need to be really clear.

I'm not talking about general life.

I'm not talking about abilities.

I'm talking about like firing an assault rifle in marathon feels like shit.

I'm talking about like the single most basic interaction you could have with a first-person shooter.

You're like, uh.

I see.

Okay.

What's going on?

That's it for what I did this past week.

This current week, I have a a lot going on all of a sudden.

It's one of those weeks where I didn't have a lot going on and then a bunch of shit happened.

So now I have tons going on to the point where I have to look at my own picture of a schedule.

Okay.

Today's the podcast.

You're listening to that.

On Wednesday, I'm going to watch the Borderlands State of Play and go back to beat the backlog.

On Thursday, it's Claire Obscure again.

On Friday and Saturday, I'm going to be watching the Collegiate Esports Commissions Cup.

Okay.

That's a sponsored stream.

And then on Saturday,

Paige, and what's that?

Shout out St.

Cola.

I believe so, yeah.

And

later in the evening on Saturday,

me and Paige are going to be trying to beat Split Fiction.

So very excited for that.

Okay.

And that's over at twitch.tv/slash Patstairs at.

Okay.

All right.

Let's take a quick word from our sponsors.

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Do you love sponsors, Caboose?

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All right.

So as we were live,

it seems like breaking news.

EA has found...

Another Titanfall game that nobody had canceled and found a way to cancel it.

Yeah, it was the Titanfall extraction game.

Laying off several hundred employees in the process.

So here we thought that they had already killed all of it, but there was a secret extra Titanfall

unfired, uncanceled game that could have been canceled for more cancellation of Titanfall.

So, yep, there goes that whoopsie doodle.

What little hope you might have had is now gone.

And time to focus more on Apex Legends and Star Wars Jedi.

Listen, I would really like to apologize because I think what happened here is someone at EA with purse decision power saw me playing the marathon

and went, oh, God, we got to get out of this fucking shit, and canceled

the game when they came in Monday morning.

So, realistically, there's a larger

team adjustment, quote unquote, which was reported at EA, where 400 or so people got fired, and 100 of those were respawn employees in particular,

leading to the cancellation of an unannounced Titanfall game codenamed R7.

Apparently, an extraction shooter

project that was being worked on.

And extraction shooters are getting killed before they even come out.

That's crazy.

Does this make three Titanfall cancellations?

There's three Titan.

There are more canceled Titanfall games than existing ones.

That's crazy.

Why'd they even make Titanfall if they didn't want to make Titanfall, though?

It was so good, and that's the curse.

It was just, it was too pure for this world.

And, and, you know,

and

it was right on that time frame where, like,

well, you know, again, the, I think the decision with Apex was where the fracture began, right?

It was like we're leaning heavily into

the

genre of the moment, and you know, they successfully made a thing that, like, it certainly worked.

But if there's any part of you that has an attachment to the thing that came before or wants to just run on a wall and jump into a robot, go fuck yourself.

Oh, man.

The weird part, too, is in a lot of this stuff is like, of all these different projects, you know, you kind of look at like how

as much as we love,

as much as we love the multiplayer and everything in Teinfall 2, like that single player is a tight, short, awesome experience that I think

a lot of people would have enjoyed,

you know, like if they were to just make things like that, you know, if they, but I guess the respawn is

always perpetually on the chopping block.

And I feel like EA wants them to kind of be the apex Star Wars company.

And that pesky little cool thing that they made, you know, just can't, it keeps popping back up like Tom and Jerry.

You know, so you just gotta, is that a BT sticking its head out of a rat hole over there?

How many more employees can we fire?

Let's hire a bunch of people to put how many do we got?

How many got okay?

Whatever that number is,

shave a little bit off there.

You know, where's my bonus?

Yeah, well, or the announcement is actually you, you tell everyone that, like, hey, you're working on a Titanfall project, and then they immediately know that they've been laid off.

Um, that fucking sucks.

Time to start looking for work.

What a pile of shit.

What a pile of fucking garbage.

Uh, in the meantime,

what else is happening in France game development?

Well, on the one side is Expedition 33.

On the other side,

Ubisoft is facing a $100 million fine as

hidden data harvesting accusations are discovered by privacy experts.

It turns out that Far Cry Primal and Assassin's Creed Shadows,

which require internet connections despite despite being offline experiences, are also siphoning players' gaming habits and doing so without permission.

One

with Far Cry Primal in particular noticed that the game was constantly pinging external servers of Amazon and Google 150 times in just 10 minutes.

And

the wildest part about this is I'm like, don't most games always just make you agree to a EULA that basically gives away everything at this point, anyway.

And despite that being the way things are now, where you more or less click, yes, I accept all of that, they're still finding a way to do shit without your permission.

Without, you know,

it's baffling.

Anyway,

you know,

it's barely a bit, but either there's legal action coming against them for doing so.

And obviously, fuck anytime

an offline game forces you to be online for no reason.

I don't understand.

Like, it's just, it's just like, it's just fucking incompetence in the course of their evil.

They could have been competently evil, and it would have been fine.

The trend has been to be competently evil about things.

And then you just, yeah.

So.

Like, it's like Ursula ran up on you and just took your voice.

Like, what?

No contract?

Are you fucking serious?

Like, come on.

Hope my boyfriend hits you with a ship, you dumb octopus bitch.

Little mermaid.

No, I know, I know.

Yes,

that's not what I was thinking of.

I was trying to remember Divine, where it's like, you want to talk about stealing a voice?

How about Ursula stealing Divine?

Where it's like, basically, like, that is the character, you know, that's, that's, that's the real person.

But anyway, um,

yeah, no, the, the whole, the whole thing with that.

So, anyway, speaking of competence, I suppose, and me not understanding things, um, did you see this

punishing gray raven cross devil may cry promotion that has been done?

I did.

People uh sent it to me en masse, yes, uh, to which I responded with, I don't play gacha games, man.

I can't.

That may be an untruth.

There is video evidence.

No, no, no.

Like, I do the same thing every time.

I go, maybe I'll play this one.

And then I get sick.

And then I'm like, nope, can't play it.

Okay, there we go.

The illness has occurred.

I'm currently on the wagon.

Okay.

Well,

yeah, I got sent to the bunch too.

And I was like, okay, what's going on?

And then I saw, like, oh,

someone must have been wrong or lying because they were like now is the time because it's when it goes away it's gone forever and I was like oh okay

so I downloaded and installed punishing gray raven

and then I booted it up yeah and uh I was looking at it on my phone and then I went actually let me do this on my computer

and then I did And then I did the tutorial and I was like, fuck me.

This is one of them good, stylish, mobile feeling things that is like what Zenless was doing where I'm like, oh yeah, oh no, you got, you got it.

You did a cool dodge.

You did a combo.

That's, yeah, you're doing it.

Got it.

And then there was a title screen where I'm scrolling through a million things and I'm like, okay, where's, where's Dante?

Where is it?

And

which the events that I see no Dante in any of the, okay, which one of these buttons leads to the, and I'm, and I can't, and I couldn't.

And then I was like, something's wrong here.

And I went back online and it has been announced, but it's not out.

It will be coming out in China later this month and then, or in May, and then it'll be

coming out internationally at some time after that.

So it was just a preview of that content.

I was like, okay.

So, um,

I bring it up because

the integration of Dante and Virgil into that game is phenomenal.

Yeah.

The art style.

I noticed that it's specifically

built around Sun High Legend GIFs.

Yeah.

So the Virgil Sun High Legend GIF of the combo was recreated in the game in Punishing Grey Raven.

And I'm like, that's a flex.

That's a pretty impressive flex to show off everything down to the taunt juggle, you know, when S ranking as Virgil.

I'm like,

that's cool.

And then they show a really slow, detailed render of like the in-game characters

in, you know, like cell-shaded anime art style.

And it's insane how faithful they were about it.

Like they basically went, we're going to have the game, the characters look shaded the way everything else does, but the models are going to look as if they were lifted from DMC5, but they're not.

Very, very impressive.

I would say the best integration I've seen of Dante and Virgil as guests in anything.

And

other details of their, yeah, their combat styles are like, they just look fully accurate.

There seems to be a function of

Virgil boss fight that looks like, as it should, like a DMC5 level boss fight.

And there's even a like a style meter that kicks in for that.

So you can see basically an insane attention to detail put into this where you're like, oh, they're fans of the thing.

And I mean, it makes sense given that, like, you know, this is one of the action games that's coming posts, you know, like every a lot of action games that are coming post Devil May Cry that are inspired by it are going to have reference for that.

So

looking at the like loving amount of detail put into this or so reminds me of how Shovel Knight was integrated into

Rivals Rivals of Aether, where you're like, you really cared about that and wanted it to be just right.

I would say that, like, not that they have to, because I'm sure these gacha games are fucking making bank and can live in their own world, but Kuro games,

I look at this and go, there is no reason why Capcom should not have...

or ask them to work on a Devil May Cry mobile thing if they wanted to instead of Pinnacle of Combat, right?

There's a direct previous Devil May Cry live service mobile thing that just shut itself down

and everyone applauded.

And then you have this, which is an incredible integration of these two characters, extremely faithfully, exhaustively so.

And it's like, oh yeah, they could 100% do it if they wanted to.

Yeah, but...

When they're guest characters in Punishing Gray Raven, they only need to make fucking Dante and Virgil.

They don't have to do the nonsense that Peak of Combat did, which was like Dante with a shotgun.

Split every style and weapon into a different character.

Into its own character.

Yeah.

Or give Nevin a really weird human skin recolor.

Don't do that.

I think the weirdest thing is that when you play Punishing Grey Raven, I hop in, like, oh man, it's like you also still have to play like the beginning of Punishing Grey Raven, which is like 35 years old.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

so i that's what i was doing right i was like i realized i was like i'm gonna have to do the tutorial to get to the thing and i'm like all right let's just let's let's see it did the dialogue kind of had that nikke sort of intro where i'm like oh the robot girl is talking to the human commander and is you know gonna destroy herself to do the limiter release okay cool get to the fight and then

um

after that i i saw the conversation kind of kept going and i'm not gonna lie i just hit skip and i was like yeah take take yeah take me to dante

and and and he wasn't there yet and I went all right there you go we're done until it comes back but

um

boy I will always feel like especially booting one of these games up on a on a desktop PC which is not of course the the intended platform but no but that

front end like gacha

like button HUD thing is

I know I'm old it's been a thing for a while but I will never enjoy it I will hate it and I will hate it as it becomes normal in in other genres too.

He'll hate it so much.

It is awful.

I just, I don't mind the character up front as a like, you know, um,

a part of your like showing off, you know, part of your game design or your characters or your heroes, your champions, your heroes are, you know, that's all fine.

I have no issue with that.

I just, I hate the fucking everything around it that is not a menu that is meant for humans.

Well, these are the new humans.

Yeah.

I used to hear,

I remember when it was like there's

fucking GDC talks and like, it's and SIGGRAPH speeches about like UX and game user interface and

design and the whole thing that goes into like coming up with a very

like relatable and understandable way to present information to people.

And it just, you throw all that out to show the latest events and make sure that you can see the dick jiggle on the new hot, like the new hot boy for the summer season.

This is the summer boy.

Oh, boy, summer boy.

All right.

I don't like that term.

Yeah, you do.

You love it.

Summer boy.

Summer boy is here and he's and he's fucking, he's going to take all your pulls.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

Whatever you say, buddy.

Hey, Breath of Fire 4 is suddenly on GOG.

Fucking great.

That game's been.

That's a good game.

The boys, it's been hard to get a hold of.

GOG is great.

Sick.

They're doing good stuff.

Unexpected out of nowhere.

And, you know, there's a bunch of quality of life, like, obviously, like, since PS1,

you know, things they've done.

Yeah.

But

the surprise Capcom Classic release showing up out of nowhere is pretty cool.

And it's 10 bucks.

Alongside that,

Expedition 33 sold a million.

Congrats to them.

Very cool.

And so the Oblivion Remaster came out, and folks have been looking into it.

And I'm probably going to get some of this wrong, so bear with me as I try to relay.

I played Oblivion 20 years ago.

I'm going to try to relay this information as best as I understand it.

It takes place in a location.

However, yes, that is true.

However, Morrowind and Skythrim take place in other locations.

That Woolly?

Wow.

Okay.

So the regions.

the regions on the map for Oblivion show you the other continents that are parts of the other games that don't even

have to be there.

My windows to the north, Morowinds to the east.

And you can actually go to those locations, though unintended, and see that the geography is there.

It's pretty empty, but you can walk around the entire landmass of where Skyrim takes place, for example.

And

like they've essentially created, you know, what is a giant map that can be used for future reference for further things.

In Oblivion, there was a quest way back in the day where you would get up really high and you could see into Skyrim.

Okay.

Huh.

That was a.

I don't remember if you could do that for Morwind as well.

And it was just looking at the land mass from a distance.

Yeah, you can see the throne of the world, world, which is the big, the big mountain.

Okay, so it's not being rendered for no reason.

It's a part of this.

There is a quest that brings you up there.

Okay.

And

boundary breakers have also

found what they believe the location for

the Elder Scroll VI is going to be, Hammerfall.

Really?

And that is something that is also

a landmass that stretches beyond render distance, but

is a part of where you can get to.

I don't know.

I thought it wasn't going to be.

I was under the impression that it wasn't going to be Hammerfell.

It'd be

the Black Marsh.

Well, I.

Maybe that's just cope.

Maybe that's just where I want it to go.

This appears to be people speculating on shit, and I'm just

going off of what they're saying.

But Boundary Breaker showing off the different places that go further beyond where you're supposed to be able to see.

And some of the screenshots include Hammerfell, home of the Red Guards, and the

rumored setting of Elder Scrolls VI.

I don't know if that's...

I don't know.

I just hope we don't go to Elf Land.

I would hate that shit.

I fucking hate the elves in the fucking Elder Scrolls setting.

They're fucking awful.

Apparently the reason why people believe that is because there were some tweets that included an image, detailed map of Skyrim, telling people to transcribe the past and the map of the future, and the candles point towards a location,

and people have kind of, I guess, ARG'd it.

Bro, I'm going to tell you this.

No matter what new region they throw the new Elder Scrolls game at, people are going to to be mad as fuck.

And it really depends on what people you want to be mad.

Because Skyrim, so Morrowind was like the dark elf capital.

So

a lot of fucking Drow looking freaks.

And then Oblivion and Skyrim are basically like Roman whites and fucking Nordic whites.

And so the remaining options are the horrible goddamn elves,

the Hammerfell is like Arabian, like African, or the fucking Black Marsh, which is all lizard people.

Okay.

So like,

I just kind of wonder if this is a like, hey, look at us rendering out all of these demons from our demon catalog.

I sure don't expect you're going to see these new versions of everything popping up for the next 10 years.

You know?

Are you looking at a thing for this remaster that is like, oh, yeah, and we just built out our plans for the future as well?

No, I don't think that at all.

No?

Okay.

I don't think that at all.

And I think the reason that I don't think that is that I think that Elder Scroll VI is so fucking far away that they haven't even fucking picked where they're going to put the goddamn thing.

I see.

My child will be in high school before

Elder Scroll VI comes out.

Does the part where they're talking about the Skyrim landmass

have anything?

No?

no?

That doesn't shock me.

I remember there being a quest for the Thieves Guild where you go way up north.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So we have Kingdom Come Deliverance now.

We don't need Elder Scrolls anymore.

We have peasant simulators.

What else is going on?

Oh, okay.

So,

you know,

okay.

So you

let's let's start.

Let's start backwards here.

Okay, let's go backwards.

A news story has broken

where

Russia is seeking to seize assets from World of Tanks

bosses amidst claims of extremist activities due to Ukraine support.

And so this is a story, and looking at it, it's like,

the history of war gaming is surprisingly complicated

because it was located in,

it's located in Cyprus, but it was also in Belarus, right?

And

when

the climate changed, when war fucking broke out,

the company split.

into two companies, one which of which is war gaming and the other, which was Lesta, which remained in Minsk and in Belarus.

And they basically were like, Yeah, we have nothing to do with each other.

And

we're two separate things or whatever.

Then their businesses are no longer involved.

So they continued existing.

And then

War Gaming in Cyprus had some events that were fundraising for ambulances in the Ukraine,

in Ukraine.

And that has led to

basically Russia seeking to seize assets and basically and shut down Lesta, the side company, or the other company, which is now completely separate from when that split happened, right?

So some crazy shit's going on with that.

And they're saying we have nothing to do with the original war gaming because since that split happened, you know, we're our own thing and we have nothing to do with that.

And Russia's like, we don't believe you.

And so that's what's happening with them.

And as I'm looking at this, all I'm thinking is,

no wonder

weapons and machines and and plans and shit were being shared on those forums.

There absolutely must have been

like some sort of wild security exchange of sorts through being happening through people arguing on World of Tanks forums.

Because you fool me once.

You don't know that.

Shame on me.

You don't know that.

Fool me eight times

where we

don't know for sure, Z's.

When we.

Also, you're thinking of War Thunder right now.

Oh, my God.

I'm stupid.

World of Tanks doesn't have that problem.

I'm stupid.

I'm stupid.

I'm sorry.

I thought that...

Okay, it was War Thunder, not World of Tanks.

My mistake.

World of Tanks sponsor this podcast.

That means they're cool.

I mean, wasn't...

That was a long time ago.

Yeah, I'm thinking of like that.

That was the one with Arnold sticking his head out of the tank

with the cigar that one time.

I believe so okay well never mind

all right want to talk about elena

heal me man

uh can i just say that they shut off the elena trailer and she's coming june 5th and people are going to get their hands on her at cap at um evo japan

and

they

understood the assignment and did almost everything right

because who the fuck she looks great?

Who is she fighting in that trailer?

Akuma.

Her only

friends.

And that because they're best friends.

That one little joke moment is super canon.

The only friend, the only contact Akuma has is Elena.

And she's really good at talking to wild beasts.

So she's friends with everybody.

And Akuma's like down for it.

And they're going to have this great,

like,

a lucky and wild relationship and i can't wait to see what they do with that that's a whole lot of fun um especially now that akuma is a uh friendly um

fruit seller and uh

he's just chilling like that one piece of art way back in the day indeed um

so that's a lot of fun

and uh

i'm looking at that costume too and I think the classic costume is the best model Capcom has ever made.

It's

pretty great.

I prefer the new costume.

Wow.

You're the only one.

I do.

Yeah.

I don't like her new hair at all.

I really don't like that bang cut flat look.

But old hair on the new costume would be great.

But the old costume is

impeccable.

And like they did such a good job with my that you can see.

Like, I was like, oh, they want to make sure the guest character gets as much love and you know, like gravitas to make sure that they're done justice.

And it's like, no, no, no, our own characters, and we're just leveling it up.

Um,

there's a screenshot.

There's the moment of her putting her head up and looking at the camera, and I saw it side by side with the third strike artwork of Elena, and it looks

insanely accurate.

Um, the most impressive thing I've seen I've seen.

Um,

so she looks great.

Um,

Move-wise, yeah, we're seeing all this, the crazy shit you're expecting to see.

They took her

overhead mallet smash kick and put it into this new like rolling links song move.

You can go to the Steam blog to kind of read about like how they've changed the moves and stuff.

And

it is interesting to see how they've adapted her to this system.

Because no matter what, she has really long limbs.

She's got like tons.

She was insanely strong in

Street Fighter 4 in particular, but they teased healing because they knew like everyone's wondering, what's it going to be?

Save a line, Bart.

Healing.

You know, it's a jump scare at the end, right?

It's cut like a horror movie.

Now, luckily, healing is part of a move that needs to hit.

Yes.

And more importantly, like healing could be strong in Third Strike, but it was a massive, insanely powerful, broken thing in Street Fighter 4 because the way you built up your ability to heal your ultra was by getting hit.

So take damage to earn the ability to heal your life back and then do it again.

And do it again.

And do it again.

And do it again.

Whereas beforehand, you had to attack and hit and do damage to build up your meter or whiff buttons and you know it was based on like your fighting not based on how much you're getting punched in the face so that's a big that's a big difference right the resource that you built was way too free in that game um

now uh you have to land that super and then you forego a little bit of extra damage on her level two to do the healing so yeah i think that's cool seems fine seems fair um i imagine it's not going to heal too much either way right they're going to forego um

a little bit.

Yeah, focus meter.

You could also just focus and backdash to build up ultra as well in Street Fighter 4.

So, you know, but

the point strike characters should be able to punch to get meter.

Stand back and go

whiff buttons.

Yeah.

And

this new stage looks excellent.

Looks really cool.

Like the new music is and everything.

I think the new stage looks absolutely incredible.

I'm probably going to to play nearly exclusively on it.

The art team is like improving.

We're watching them get better over time with each thing.

And that happened in the last game too.

The characters towards season three and then ending off and Gil and stuff were all way more impressive than the first seasons were.

It looks great.

It's always so weird because when you see it happen, it can't happen too much.

Because if it happens too much, it gets super strange when the new new guy looks way better than the old guy.

Yeah, but they kind of committed, right?

Because it was around the time of Cody and Blanca joining Street Fighter V that we saw them adding those extra little animation flourishes to their moves, you know?

So

Blanca does the lightning and then stands up and kind of like,

puts his hands up and down.

Or like Cody lands like a zonk knuckle and then tightens up his tie, you know?

And it's a skippable animation, but it's like a baked in little flourish for each little thing.

That only started coming in charm, baked-in auto-taunts kind of thing.

And they only started coming later with those, you know.

So, um, yeah, I think they're just like, nah, make it look good.

And if the early characters look worse, then so be it.

But I don't think the early characters look bad, they look great.

It's just very, it's great, it's going from great to fucking amazing, you know, great to excellent.

Um,

so that was great too.

Um,

and yeah, instead of just taking the supers that she always had, which were spinning beat,

the brave dance, and then like healing, she's now got like a just a straight-up anti-air, like, you know, and combo afterwards,

super dupe, essentially.

Revival dance is the level two, and then song of the grasslands, where she just fucking juggles your ass up and down into the camera.

More than any of her new moves, I think the fact that they start that trailer with her heavy kick just blowing up DJ in his drive rush is the part that, like, yes.

Because that's an amazing, lovable heavy kick.

I love that heavy kick.

Seeing her roll under fireballs always gets me excited because I'm like, that's a new thing.

And anything that says, fuck your fucking zoning feels like, ooh, nice.

Well, I mean, she's a third strike character, right?

So she should have something to ignore fireballs.

I don't care.

I don't care.

I'm rolling under it.

And if you let me roll twice, the next thing that happens is going to be really strong but it's also now the only way to do her um her overhead mallet smash uh the kind of like rainbow arc kick is out of the roll so you can't just all right that's fine it used to be super fast and hard to deal with uh you know what it with how fast the ex version was but now it's like yeah you have to you have to earn it with that um

I saw her level three juggling you off the ground being compared to Fist of the North Star when you start reverse bouncing people.

Oh, man, I don't know about that.

That seems no, it really was though, because if so, for anyone who hasn't seen it, there's the Fist of the North Star

Arc Sis fighting game, and it was programmed in such a way where every time you're the longer your combo lasted, the heavier characters would get until they tried to slam themselves into the ground faster and faster so you couldn't keep comboing them.

But they fucked up the coding and they made it so that the variable that made you heavy could go into the negatives.

And what that means is you eventually hit the ground and bounce back up into the air to go combo, to get comboed for longer.

So you would start basketball dunking over and over and over.

It's so cool.

It's the craziest shit you've ever seen, all based on a bug.

And it makes watching that game at high level insane and fun.

So it looks like she's kind of doing that to you, you know?

I love that her win quote has the element of her doing acrobatics acrobatics and nearly falling over, just like her old taunt version.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But then she balances and she sees a flower.

So, no, that looks great.

I think the, you know, one of the problems is people were waiting a bit too long for her.

They were wondering what was going on.

Well, she had to be there for the Nintendo Switch, too.

Clearly.

It took a minute.

Some characters are, and, you know, they're not evenly spaced out each time a new character comes out with six, but

I really like what they're doing with her.

I just don't dig that haircut.

That's it.

I don't understand why they didn't show off costumes three and four that are going to come out alongside her.

Why did they not do that?

Pat, you seem to be confused because

what you're not seeing is the panic as they canceled all the World Tour costumes to quickly try and convert all the assets over into

costumes for fighting ground for the for the the real versus mode you know

that thing dude world tour must be making like insane money they're not telling us but it must be must be making some money it's the only reason why you know like it must be it must it has to explain why they're spending so much time on that but

um

and i do see too as well that uh

People do reflect on the fact that there's a lot of there's a lot of people that really casually enjoy like playing in Battle Hub instead of having to go uh to ranked or or even looking for casual matches online because just walking around the arcade sitting down getting some good games in with people showing off your your costume etc is like a fun thing to jump in and do every now and then and um

that you can feel when that is like a part that other games are not really able to hit on like i mean city of the wolves for example its story mode is fucking whatever it's not there's nothing going on with that you know eosd mode um and

yeah, like there's a level of like the battle hub does scratch that itch for someone that's like, I want to jump back in, but I don't just want to hit find a random casual.

You know, I kind of want to that little walk around the arcade experience is worth something.

So they were, they were smart to design it that way and to have World Tour be as in-depth as it was, you know.

It says a lot that the only major complaint I have about Street Fighter VI is that there aren't enough of costumes for me to buy.

There you go.

As complaints go, that's okay.

Yeah.

It is a moment that I had.

I was talking to Reggie about it this weekend, but I was like, oh,

take note of when you're in the good times with at least

with a game, right?

Don't forget what the Dark Ages are like.

And don't take for granted that, you know, no guest characters that make you feel horrible have shown up as well.

And that the the game is just pretty fun and solid right now.

You know, peace is easy to take for granted until you have

whatever the fuck else is going on with these fighting games.

Yeah, you know what?

Peace is easy to take for granted until Tekken 8 season two comes out.

Yeah,

until your top players are like, I'm going to go do parkour until this gets better.

You know,

there you go.

So, what happens when the timer runs out, Pat?

I don't don't know.

Okay.

Hasn't run out yet.

Okay.

That is malicious.

Is it?

It feels bad.

No.

Why?

It feels

threatening.

It's just a visual aid.

I know.

I know.

It's just a nice little visual aid.

Because

we might have overdone it last week.

So some infrastructure might be helpful.

I don't want to get into it for our eyes.

I don't want to get into it.

But,

all right.

What else is going on?

Oh, and by the way, if you do feel it's malicious, I would like to point out that once again, yes, this was Paige's idea, and I fully support it.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

Maybe that's where you're getting the evil from.

I wish I fucking thought of it okay well

um

and I got this one for emergencies oh what's that

that is one-third the time of the other one

did you go out and buy those yes

no these are Stan these are stan I see I see and when little Woolly shows up, I'm probably going to super glue his ass to the top of the...

Oh, no, that wouldn't work.

It's an hourglass.

I see.

I see.

Okay.

All right.

Well,

I will

either internally feel a pressure to quell my passions, or I will ignore.

I don't know.

We'll see.

You could get a gigantic sign behind you that says wrap it up when I'm talking about an MMO.

I could, but I I don't.

You could just click the button.

I don't want to.

I mean, I think,

you know,

people have

feelings.

Sometimes.

Yeah, sometimes it's a bit exaggerated.

But

anyway, it's fine.

I think

to the audio listeners, I'm holding up a 30-minute 30-minute-minute hourglass.

Yeah, that's why I was taking a moment to

elaborate a little bit more on that because

just in case people were just listening and not watching.

Yeah.

Casey had fun.

I think she enjoyed herself.

I think.

Oh, dude, I'm busting your ball.

No, I know.

I mean the people that freaked the fuck out were kind of the overdoing.

Oh, yeah, they freaked out.

They were overdoing it.

And I'm like,

we can relax.

We talked to Casey about it, and she was like, I don't give a shit.

I think we can relax.

It's not that big a deal.

But if, whatever,

I can't tell people how to feel.

The only other thing I was going to bring up was...

Yeah, you can.

What?

You totally can.

Can what?

You can tell people how to feel.

Just do it.

If you're like, I hate this, it feels, and I hate when they talk about this shit, and it felt uncomfortable, and I was cringing, and I had to turn it off or whatever.

All right, then I guess you turn it off.

There's nothing I can do about that.

Oh, no, don't turn it off.

Just stay and

search for your emotions and definitely stay for the sponsor.

Um, yeah, I think, I think people overreacted, and I'm just leaving it being.

Are you telling me that somebody on the internet overreacted?

I think that what you just said is stupid, and it makes me really upset.

Couldn't be me.

Um,

all righty,

I was

going to talk about

uh

the time when Baldur's Gate 3

considered making DLC,

but then went why

and then they didn't.

I don't understand this story because they did make DLC.

They made tons of it,

but it was all just in the main game.

It was just called updates, I guess.

Yeah, I guess

they put out 12 classes and then epilogue for free like they didn't have to do that yeah um

no it's it's officially just a weird unfair nothing can be compared to this type of story

because i it would be great if any other game was able to pull off what larian did here but um

it's just

who like what what does what can the like the closest thing i ever think of is when bayo went oh we we were thinking of adding extra weapons as dlc and then we said nah put them all into the base game.

That was sick, you know, but

it's got two years.

Like, so for context, my baby got born, and then Baldur's Gate 3 came out like a week later.

Like, my baby is Baldur's Gate 3 years old,

and Baldur's Gate 3 is just finished its DLC rollout now.

That's one Patrick's baby's worth of DLC for free.

I'm hoping that even though the conversation of like, just do it like Baldur's Gate 3 is one of those like, that is such a ridiculous ass,

right?

But

I think what will hopefully happen optimistically is that it's like, okay, maybe do the, like, you'll see people just start doing the part that they can do with the time scale, budget, and team size they have.

If they were like, yeah, maybe we could do this thing or that thing.

More to the point, I'm going to wait till I beat the game, but assuming that no balls are dropped and everything continues to be tight, I would tell people, I'd be like, yo, aim for that fucking Expedition 33 type shit.

Hit that A pocket

if you're considering

going.

I think you should obviously aim for whatever you can actually hit.

Yes, yes.

But the scale back.

The scale back is so acceptable when the pieces are fantastic.

You know?

So like Larian did something really where they had a certain scale in the first act of the game, which is the largest act, and then they just started to like scale up

infinitely because the early access did so well, and then the full game did so well, so they just kept scaling up, but I think that that's weird.

It is, and I mean, like, um, it's a bit of that Hades kind of philosophy in a way, but like, yeah, they were, they were prepared to just expand outward.

But I think the important thing that kind of might get lost sometimes in talking about how solid

BG3 is as a product is that you

don't want to mistake scaling for quality, right?

Just because you did more, built more, doesn't mean it was all good.

Every time we talk about the amount of things you can do in Baldur's Gate, they're good things, right?

They're all good things.

It's like, because we had to.

It's not empty calories.

We had like an Ubisoft generation of what if we put more things on the map, right?

And it's like, are they the same thing?

Yeah.

More nothing, you know?

Fucking filler.

The problem is, is that the scope, like

the pencil pusher nerd at wherever, he can understand there's 800 quests in the game.

He can't understand, but are they good though?

Because you can't put that on a spreadsheet.

Man.

But, you know, and you, but you certainly can be like, hey, junior game designer, take five quest types and expand it into 800 of them, right?

Like, change the assets a little bit here and there, but overall, you know, asasino.

Okay, go catch the thief.

You know, like, we, you just, you know, kill 12 wolves and get their asses.

Like, the idea that the,

you know, Baldur's Gate Gate 3 is this new giant insane standard for an RPG

in terms of the amount of freedom you have and what you can do.

But

it's not just big for the sake of being big.

It's fucking good in what it is.

That's what matters, man.

So just, yeah, like, that's what the conversation should be every time it gets compared to, you know?

I remember there was a, I remember there was like a, an article a while back when

Baldur's Gate 3 came out that was like, hey, don't look at this as the new standard.

Don't, well, please, please, this is like a once-in-a-lifetime fucking game made by the most talented people with infinite time and infinite budget and infinite talent.

You can't expect this.

And everyone was like, ah, that's so fucking cope.

That's such pussy shit.

No, you know what?

Maybe those people had

something there.

Because,

like,

try, I can imagine...

a team attempting to do we're gonna do baldersgate 3 but us and just hitting a wall and dying

well like and just okay well like like driving their race car directly into a brick wall well we completed the entire cycle of like

is this the dark souls of blank right becoming like the punchline

and then once we got past that point you're now still seeing

souls likes in gen and a ton of things that are just like forever carrying over like it changed its genre and then a bunch of other adjacent ones as well.

So I feel like that's a slightly different situation because one of the one of the reasons Dark Souls became like this incredible template was that Dark Souls doesn't have any fucking cutscenes and voice acting and quiet and like it's so fucked it's like bare ass.

In terms of like raw assets, it's pretty bare bones.

Yeah, the most exciting things that happen are the boss fights.

Right?

And like it took to Elden Ring until we got like big money souls game, right?

Whereas, like, Baldur's Gate 3 is just taking old, old, like, CRPG stuff from, like, the 90s and being like, well, what if we just brought every single part of this up to modern standard?

Oh, that would be expensive and hard to do as hell, wouldn't it?

And it was.

Yeah, no, like the, the, the Baldur's Gate version of this is also like a ridiculous amount of asset work, you know, by comparison as well.

But

speaking of

Souls likes and

where that expands to.

Yeah, so I saw a trailer for Wu Chang Fallen Feathers.

Which is Wu Chang.

Which is a new Wuxia, you know, kind of action game, which is kind of, you know, this is kind of becoming more and more of a thing.

And

I would say that, like,

especially after Wukong, we're seeing like a ton of these like

Wuxia action games.

I'm going to just assume this is a Chinese game.

Yes, yes.

And particularly.

Because this looks like.

Yes.

And Chinese martial arts.

Big China vibes.

Big China vibes, big China martial arts, big China swordplay and explosions and characters with drapery spinning and talking to each other.

There's like a really specific

series of hit sparks that come off Chinese games.

It's so, it's so like specific.

So that's actually, so I bring it up because I wanted to talk about exactly this, right?

Because there was a time I would say, because at this point, there's like, it's now becoming an identity, but there was a time where at first you're like, oh, okay, there's like a souls-like thing, but remixed with their, with, you know, their own take on it, their own flavor but then you're kind of like oh but now you're styling a bit more in a way that is like um like okay you know how like a souls game will have like like its slow you know whatever like boss fight spectacular kind of moment and then but then like stylish character action shit will be like more high octane more over the top and all of that yeah and then there's these moments where you kind of hit that in-between i would say like when sekiro was like at its like last boss and shit like that it's kind of that that it's at its hype yeah at its hypest moments it's kind of doing that in-between thing where you're like, this is almost style souls a little bit, you know?

And so it kind of feels like this is that, that as well, but they're constantly sort of hitting that in-between space.

You know, I was kind of thinking, I'm like, I don't know what criteria you're going with here, but do you have more moves than the boss?

You know, do you have stamina or do you just go do kind of whatever?

Yeah.

But like, they all are landing exactly in that space.

And so this one's there.

And then Neo lives in this space.

Neo, absolutely.

Neo for sure.

But like, but Neo, moment to moment, outside of like one of those boss fights, you still are running around an environment and kind of soul zing as opposed to hitting a verse, you know, or a style room.

And I guess that, you know, we'll have to see from one to the other.

But yeah, I guess Busha action is

kind of the way to go with it.

It's going to take a sec, but there are some four or so, I think, that are also supposed to, like, I feel like there's about five of these things or so that are kind of on the way.

And

shit looks, it looks cool.

It looks cool.

I kind of just,

I'm trying to remember because I think we saw Phantom Blade Zero,

right?

For it was like at, it was like a part of, it was like the PlayStation,

it was like a state of play trailer.

Is that the one made by one guy?

No, that is Lost Soul Aside.

Oh my god, right,

and China's coming at us with these action games, man.

And then there's uh, Where Winds Meet, which is the other crazy traditional, stylish one.

Um, and then there's the one with the with the kid on your back,

you know, I don't know that one.

There's one where you have a kid on your back,

and like you're doing you're doing the Wusha.

I don't even know.

Hold on.

Battle of Antara?

What the fuck?

Yeah, okay.

You know.

The perceiver.

Yeah, there it is.

Yep.

There's a bunch.

There's a bunch.

And,

you know, they're upcoming or about to drop or so.

This is fascinating that China has decided that Wuxia action game is the fucking way to go.

They've locked into it.

Well, it does make sense when you consider the movies and

the

spectacle of high octane fights.

Where's like

where's like Confucius's Gate 3?

Or here's the question.

Where's modern day?

Oh, yeah.

You know, where's modern day walking around town and like getting into some of the

true crime streets of Shanghai?

I don't know.

I wonder.

Would it be like, hey, we don't want to show off our city having crime and bad things?

I don't know.

I don't know.

You know, but I kind of wonder.

That would be, I'm curious if we get there eventually.

At the very least.

Yeah, well, hey, Sleeping Dogs is not.

That's a Western-ass

Western western game, y'all.

If my name is in the credits, that is not a game.

That game takes place in New York City

from China.

But no,

yeah,

the flowing, cool swordplay sparks.

And make sure that when you do a big energy explosion and you twist, that you create

a yin-yang.

With a yin-yang pattern with

the petals or the flowers, you know?

I'm like, yeah, yeah, there it is.

So, yeah, this one is Wu-Chang, fallen feathers.

All right.

Let's take some letters.

Okay.

Fucking get this one.

Word?

No, no, no.

Damn, it's like that.

Oh, I just wanted to do it.

I have if you want to send in a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castle superbeastmail at gmail.com.

What's happening?

You start fucking talking about FF14 and I'll bust this bad boy out on you.

Oh my god, you have the same one!

Get the fuck out!

I don't.

You have the same hourglass!

I don't.

It's not.

It's not.

But that's why I asked.

It's highly similar.

But you know what the difference is?

What is it?

What's that say?

Oh, that's more combat?

No, this is the same.

This is the same hourglass.

Okay, well, this is the Mortal Klass.

You just have the generic.

I have the Mortal Kombat branded hourglass.

How long is that one?

I don't know.

Maybe like 15 minutes or something?

This one's 15, but it fits in my hand.

Yours is fitting in your hand.

That might be 30.

No, this is definitely less than 20.

It's definitely less.

I remember.

Okay, we both have the same fucking.

Yeah, I remember when I got it from

back then.

100%.

Because this, so your hourglass, your hourglass is to limit fighting games, but mine is to promote them.

Because this is from, what's his name?

Garris.

Is that, hey, listen, let me ask you,

is that the hourglass that you use to tell you to stop playing Mortal Kombat after you started?

This is when you stop

and you flip it over and 15 minutes later.

I have combo broken your anti-fighting game Hourglass with a fighting game promoting Hourglass with a Mortal Kombat logo

because Girus, that's why fighting games.

You can't stop me.

Try

die before I stop.

Take all of y'all with me.

See, you can tell people how to feel.

It's so easy.

I actually had it right there.

So when you, wait, when you're looking at your monitor and you saw me pull this

path out, I went, you were looking past your monitor to the same hourglass?

Yes.

Going,

you have the MK hourglass?

Okay.

No, I would never.

I would never have an MK hourglass.

Damn.

I'm glad that it's MK2.

It's specifically.

It's like, yeah, that's the one.

That's the fucking fighting game hourglass.

That's technically a fighting game.

Make it hurt.

We got one coming in.

Let's see.

Dear Red Grave Woolly and Seed of Sparta Pat.

Howdy, my name is Jamie and

Longtime fan who owes to you something,

owes to of you for getting me into DMC.

writing for the first time

after listening to CSB talking about Netflix's Devil May Cry and the rug pull it ended up being.

So I wanted to ask, what are your worst experiences with Trojan horse adaptations and why do you think these damn things keep getting made?

I'm specifically talking about stuff that looked recognizable from the outside, but were only masquerading as the material it claimed to be.

For as awful as Ninja Theory's DMC is, I don't count it because it had the the decency to not wear the skin as the rest of the franchise for the most part.

All right, I'm going to just tell you right now,

I don't think

every version of every story that Wishbone told was the best version.

Oh my God, let's go.

Rip Van Winkle, Wishbone style?

Let's go.

Yes.

Hell yeah.

Odyssey, the Odyssey.

The Wishbone Odyssey.

He's got his little puppet hands shooting

through all the different fucking arrowheads.

Oh, man.

Yo, Boris, 100.

Yes, okay.

That's pretty good.

That's pretty good.

Fucking rip, rip, though, because that dog's super dead for sure.

What's the story?

Wishbone.

What's the fucking story?

It was a good one.

I think Wishbone was like a legitimately fantastic fucking way to get kids to like read about like, or not read, but hear about the fucking Odyssey.

Yeah.

And Cyreno de Berger.

I paid attention.

Also, it was on in the morning before the school bus, so it was right on time to eat the cereal and watch, you know, morning stuff before school.

So yeah, you caught that 100%.

Like what elementary school situation is going to encounter Cyrano de Bergerac?

What's a Wishbone?

Remember the dog from Frasier?

Oh my fucking God, you fucking Gen Z piece of shit.

Wishbone was the dog from Fraser going on adventures through history.

That was not the dog.

No, but it was like that kind of dog.

This is Jack Russell Terrier.

And

was it not the exact same one?

No, man.

Okay.

Well,

it

was

also going through history and teaching you.

And at some point, he had to make a really high jump.

Yeah.

And he could do it.

every time and you're like oh look at him go

i just thought one of the best things about wishbone is that whenever they had to have the dog handle like a human object, it would just cut away and you would see like these

triumph screen dog puppet hands.

Triumph pause.

So fucking funny, dude.

Triumph the comic dog paws, a million percent.

There we go.

As far as Trojan Horse media goes, I mean, so yeah, okay, you got that.

Cats.

Can I say cats?

You know, I saw someone say Netflix cowboy bebop, but it is like, you see live action outside.

We knew.

You know,

yeah.

I mean, okay, I will like the Death Note live-action movies, not the Netflix one, but the actual

Japanese ones were

like doing Death Note until they swerved hard towards the end and just did their own thing.

But like, I don't,

I'm trying to think of something where it's like, it appeared to be what you thought it was, and then it just turned out to not be that at all.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Where he starts to take his helmet off and have sex with women, and people are like, What the fuck?

The suit should be doing that,

yeah, man.

People, I haven't, I have not even bothered to watch the Yakuza live-action adaptation, which says a lot about it.

Oh, um, Scott Pilgrim takes off is a Trojan horse adaptation in a great way,

in a good way.

So, there's that.

Uh, All right.

Let's see here.

Here's one coming in.

Isaac from Texas.

Says,

Dear Mr.

D E I and Mr.

Also D E I

don't think about it.

I'm not that short.

There's other stuff in there.

Is there?

Probably.

I'm big into cooking and down to eat just about anything.

Plenty of vegan fiends and have plenty of vegan friends and recently started making vegan meals.

And to my surprise, it slaps pretty hard.

I feel like I've unlocked a new skill tree and I've ignored my whole life because of the tasty meta.

I'm on a cut to drop weight.

So far, my vegan dishes have been pretty effective.

So your vegan friend jumps you and ties you and your meat-loving ass up and

says, Pick your poison,

carnist trash.

What's your last meal going to be?

And it has to be vegan.

I don't know, something Indian.

Any yeah, yeah, dansac, korma, um, like literally, literally anything, vindaloo, that shit, all that shit is fantastic.

Peshwari nan,

uh, apple.

I don't know.

Fucking like, um, um, I have no issue with vegan cuisine at all until they put the word chicken or beef

into the name

of the fucking food.

And then I lose my mind.

The thing where instead of finding your own path, you have to imitate a fraction of our power, right?

This is the problem.

Stop imitating and making fake chicken and tofurki and, you know,

whatever,

impossible meat, and just go your own path.

Go your own way.

I could go for like a pizza, sure.

And like, it's funny because we were just, I was just talking to

Punchwoman and Reggie about this.

But so there's a kind of roti called like doubles, where it's essentially like

chickpeas and like a curry.

And

I'm usually in the in roti for the meat.

I will say I was

a hater initially, but then giving it a chance, I was like, nah, this is pretty good.

And I usually am not a fan of chickpeas at all, but the curry sauce was pretty solid.

So I could go with it.

I mean, curry sauce will carry a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

But I'm just like, but if it's that good already, how good would it be with that curry and meat, though?

And that's kind of where I'm like.

And you're describing like the Indian food, and I'm like, yeah, dan sack is great, but you know what's even better?

Chicken dan sack

or you know, lamb vindaloo or korma.

Like, it's like, just throw that fucking, you know, it's not going to make it worse.

So, yeah, yeah, there you go.

All right, last one.

Can I just have like the sauce from a Korma dish?

Okay.

Like, just a gigantic bowl of the sauce.

So

if you do the right thing when you have Indian and you save that and you use it on food later on, right?

I mean,

I save it inside my stomach.

Okay, okay, okay, okay.

That's what I wanted to do.

Fair enough.

Because you bet your ass that I like, you get a little bit of extra nan and you take that butter chicken and you just, you know, you keep that.

And next day, you got some continuing fucking great food.

Yeah, no, I'm going to save it inside of my body for 10 to 15 hours.

Or if you got some rice that needs,

you know, needs some life.

Is rice vegan?

Yeah.

It doesn't involve phenanimal,

I guess.

Or, I don't know.

Ask fucking Justin Timberlake on The Simpsons.

I'm not gonna.

I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna call up JT.

Okay.

Early on,

because the difference between vegetarian and vegan from learning that stuff at church was like, I was like, you know what?

In both cases, I'll be out.

I'll be over there.

So, you know, you do your thing, y'all.

Okay, here, one more.

It's corn vegan.

It's not animal, so yes.

Yeah, but animals get killed in the harvesting.

Yes, true.

But I think it has to be direct byproduct for it to count.

Oh, okay.

You can't enjoy the blood.

You have to.

No, no.

If

suffering baby chickens were used to feed the ground that the corn grew out of,

that would still be fine because

it and of itself is still corn.

Hey, how is honey not vegan?

The bees want you to take the honey.

We're working together.

We have a system with the bees.

Milk always.

Milk is coming out of the other animals.

Another animal is involved.

I don't know.

The rules are confusing, and I could learn them with a single Google search, but I don't want to.

Hey, I have a question for vegans.

I have a legit question.

This is a real question.

I'm not even joking.

I won't put this out of the.

Why do you exist?

Okay, no.

Okay, growing, you're growing like you're growing carrots, right?

And you're growing all organic, like fucking no pesticide carrots and shit, right?

And you're like, I'm

it's the most vegan, it's a carrot, like

not complicated as well at all, right?

But then a groundhog breaks in your fucking your field and starts eating your carrot, and then you beat it to death with a hammer.

Is the carrot still vegan?

I would say no.

Yeah,

so

remember in metaphor when you're arguing

against

that one politician who's like

the fact that we eat meat is horrendous, and this is the problem with the world today.

Totally, yeah.

And you actually have to sit there and go,

okay,

sure,

but what are we supposed to do overnight for people that survive on this?

You know,

I just saw it.

I'm sorry.

I just saw somebody in the chat just say, no, you have to let him eat the carrot.

And I don't know why, but that just completely fucked me.

Okay.

Are you familiar with the lone star tick?

I am familiar with the lone star tick.

Keep that shit away from me.

Okay, good.

For those who don't know, it's a tick tick that bites you, and once you're bitten, you develop an aversion and basically

phobia of meat.

Yeah, it makes you very sick if you eat red meat.

Like violently ill, like you barf.

It's a jerk-ass tick.

Can't believe that exists.

Nature is fucking crazy.

Nature's crazy.

And I would say that a nature so violent and apathetic as to create an animal such as the lone star tick has, you know,

you know, some animals that deserve to be eaten.

Not the ticks, though.

That'd be gross.

All right.

Last one over here.

Dear Vanguard and Duelist.

I've been a fan for 14 years.

Thank you.

When I was a kid, I used to draw different fantasy jobs and classes on my notebook, and my classmates took notice, so we started to play a paper and pen RPG during our breaks.

Each of them chose a different class so I drew them and made them go on different adventures.

I wasn't familiar with the concept of tabletop games so instead of fairly rolling dice I just randomly generated numbers in my head.

Sure.

This all went on for a couple weeks and then one classmate wanted to join in but since he started late his stats were all low compared to everyone else's.

He didn't want to feel so weak and so he and left out so he offered me his lunch money to give him a boost.

Naturally, as a dumb, greedy kid, I accepted and gave him a boost to catch up a bit.

However,

he still wasn't the most powerful, so he kept offering me money

to keep making his character stronger.

This kept going for a month where he became way too overpowered, and everyone else lost interest in the game.

So naturally, they just kind of stopped playing.

Come on.

I didn't give any of his money back.

Hustle or scam.

That's a hustle.

That's a hustle.

100%.

You gave him what he wanted.

Did you?

Here's my.

I have one clarifying question.

Did you promise a live service for 10 months or so for the cost of his lunch money?

If not,

you know he didn't.

If not, that is a clean, pristine

hustle.

Yeah, absolutely.

100%

unadulterated,

not an ounce of scam anywhere in that.

You provided the goods and services for which you were paid.

That is distilled.

That is a distilled hustle.

That is a genuine transaction.

And furthermore, it was not your fault or his when the player base dried up.

In fact.

I would go further as to say it was the other players' fault for not coming to you and asking for similar deals.

That's possible as well, but maybe they couldn't afford it.

They could have done that.

But if they couldn't afford them, then they just stopped playing.

And when you check Steam Spy and the player count goes to zero, well,

whose fault is that?

Right?

You gave the boosts that were paid for.

There was nothing about that

that was misrepresented whatsoever.

Everyone got exactly what they wanted.

I think the wildest thing about this story is that it would have been very different if the new player hadn't

offered as the very first option.

Like, they probably would have juiced their stats if they just said, hey, man, I'm really behind.

Can you just juice my stats?

Because I, no, they, they went to right to, I'll give you money to it.

And just again, like, like, not knowing what D ⁇ D was were just all in your head anyways, is kind of incredible.

But I'm kind of just imagining them then going up to like the friends that don't want to play the game anymore and be like, hey, don't you guys want to play?

And they're just like, lol, dead game.

Dead game.

Dead game.

Brilliant.

Perfect.

Fantastic.

You should feel no guilt.

Take care, everybody.

Have a good week, everybody.