CSB315: A 2nd Argosax Has Hit The Towers feat. Gene Park

Hey, there we are.

Hello.

Hey, Gene, how you doing, man?

Arise, rockers, and hip-hoppers, everyone.

Hello.

Welcome.

Glad you could join us.

Very glad to have you, Gene.

You know what?

Let me just adjust my volume a little bit down because I can see I'm redlining a bit.

Don't do that, man.

No, no, no.

I think it's needed.

Yes, and hopefully

I replaced my board now, so the sound issues should be taken care of for at least a couple years.

But you know how these things...

Yeah, fantastic.

These things die out after literally, I think, like four to five every single time on the gain button.

Can I say something?

Can I say something brave about that?

Yeah.

So

when we had the office a million years ago, those mixers would die constantly.

Yeah.

And then you say that those mixers, your mixer dies like,

like, fairly regularly?

No, okay.

Well, it's more that the gain button starts to act up after

a period of time.

And it does, you know?

I'm using the same one I bought like nine years ago.

Okay.

Well, I don't know.

But

I've noticed the gain button tends to need some

servicing.

pretty regularly and then eventually starts kind of acting up.

So I'm not too sure.

You don't even use the devil buttons.

You mean this double button right here?

Yes, I mean this double button right here.

The mark of my dignity shall scar thy DNA.

Oh, that's a good use for that.

That's a good one.

Let me be the blesser of all souls.

Yeah, that's pretty.

That's all right.

Something like that.

Gene, do you have a devil button?

No, I do not have a chat button.

I'm not subscribed to Nintendo Switch Online.

I'm kidding.

How you doing, Gene?

Pretty good.

Pretty good.

You know, just

kind of sitting in the afterglow of the Nintendo Switch 2 events.

Lots of stuff going on.

Is it a good thing?

You got the big Bowser scoop.

I did.

I did get to speak to Mr.

Bowser.

Talked about $80 Mario Kart.

Shout out to Wario64 for sharing that piece

war and fight far and wide,

basically.

And yeah, I got to.

It's a massive, great value, and it's incredible, and that's why it's more expensive.

So, Bill Trin said that to IGN, and Doug Bowser said, What we're bringing back is variable pricing.

And he's talking about, they both basically said the same version of the same thing, but it's like, you know, it's $80 because of the breadth and depth of the gameplay, quote-unquote.

Right, right.

And the amount of, you know, production and budget that goes into it, and the amount of repeatability of the gameplay experience, if you will, as you said.

There was a couple of takeaways that, like, yeah, headlines that got pulled out of that, that interview, and a couple of other things he said.

And that was a big one, certainly, which was

if you're adding the value of replay into the cost or factoring it in, then I guess that means that replay value as a concept goes down because the whole point of replay value is that, hey, look, you get more for whatever the game was, you know, than you expected.

Does that make sense?

You know what I mean?

Like, if UFO, like, Ballatro should cost $1,000, right?

Is that argument?

Ballatro should cost $1,000.

That's the Northern Lion argument, right?

And UFO 50 should also be up there, costing $10,000

for the amount of gameplay you're getting.

And the Order 1886 should cost $12.

So,

and Cyanara Wildhearts should be free.

But it's like, yeah, I don't like that factor being brought into the discussion.

I feel like they didn't do a good enough job of using their corporate fake magic PR speak to not sound like they're saying, well, we know we can get an extra $10 on fucking Mario Kart.

So

I mean, it's surge pricing like for cabs.

It certainly got applied to some topics, like when the question about the AI stuff popped up and it was like, oh, well, we always want to make sure there's a human touch on it.

It's like, okay, well, that doesn't mean to mean anything, but yes, sure.

You know,

there was some double speak coming out there.

But I guess just that's just taking the interpretations.

Do you think overall,

or was your was your impression that like

the the stuff about the pricing now that we're seeing where it's actually not related to tariffs is what like some of the the the news stories from today are saying does that make sense to you at all

gene uh i mean kind of like you would kind of

feel like what they're saying is that we just don't know about these tariffs, you know?

And versus, like, you know, they were already thinking about potential costs in advance.

Because

I saw a tweet from an analyst saying that, you know, the Switch 2 might have just cost $350 if there was no tariffs at all.

I feel like

the reason so, because everyone was making fun of Nintendo, because, like, why do games cost $80?

Oh, because of the tariffs.

That was like the easiest layup in the world, and they fumbled it.

And I feel like the reason why they fumbled it is because

in

two weeks, they're going to come out with the new Switch 2 price and the new Switch 2 games price and go, no, no, no, this one is because of the tariffs.

The kick up to 650 USD?

No, that one's because of the tariffs.

That one is, we didn't even decide that.

We were going to sell it at $450 because of the incredible value of the Nintendo Switch 2 console.

So I guess the idea was that there was going to be a increase no matter what, but this also coincidentally just plays in with the news, but the price was set.

The MSRP was set well before this announcement then.

And then the delayed reaction is going to, yeah, perhaps cause further changes to that.

I mean, we also are seeing today the same thing about the pre-orders getting delayed, or they're also getting delayed.

So, at first,

at first, it was just America, and it's like, no, now it's in Canada, too.

And it's like, well, yeah, that makes perfect sense.

In fact, it's like anywhere that's going to be affected by this.

And also, like, you know, if you're creating a market where people are going to drive up to Canada to do the Plattsburgh thing we used to do, you know, to potentially like start buying Canadian,

you know what I mean, international skew versions of the thing, like that's goofy as hell.

And like you have a scalper aftermarket immediately, I imagine they don't want that.

So I was doing some digging on this and the economic reality of what's going on with Canada and the U.S.

in regards to an import from Japan is not clear.

What should happen is that if you have a product that comes into a U.S.

port and then could be sold in the U.S., but is actually en route to Canada, you would charge the tariff at port of entry, but then on the way out of the country, you would get a refund for that thing because it's not intended to be sold within the continental United States.

But that hasn't been happening.

But on the other hand, most products that ship through, like say, say, shipping came in through like Seattle, right?

What's supposed to happen is that the pallet is supposed to be called a bonded item, and the bonded item is supposed to be exempt because it is literally en route.

It is never intended to be unpacked.

It is never intended to come out of its shipping container within the country that it's arrived at.

So

there's confusion as to whether or not the Canadian price would be affected at all.

I think it probably should not.

But if pre-orders had gone live later tonight,

Amazon Canada ships to the U.S.

Like,

that would have been scooped up.

I feel, yeah, there's that, right?

There's the bought buyers.

There's everything that happened with the NVIDIA cards, you know, that just made them impossible when you're going through direct retail.

But I am also just thinking of like, thank God we're not in the alternate reality where the solution Nintendo chose would have been one to reinstate region locking beyond just the Japanese-only SKU, you know?

I totally disagree.

Really?

You would want a world where they're like every...

If we are dealing with an economic reality in which we are absolutely worried about people from

a three-hour drive away buying up our entire supply of items because it's so much cheaper here, then yes, I would like Canadian SKUs to be region-locked.

To Canada.

With Canada-only game cartridges and Canada-only.

Build the firewall.

Oh, my God.

Build the Switch 2 firewall.

Because region rules, region 1 is Canada U.S.

Of course.

And that's the thing is like the idea of going and splitting up every territory or continent or so into all these different SKUs individually, creating a much more

confusing version of things.

Like, overall, it does simplify for them to basically be like, yeah, international box, here you go, ship it everywhere.

The language is included,

you know, no matter where you are or what your options need to be.

The version where they're like, okay, we're making one for ourselves locally because we shouldn't be affected by anything going on or so.

That's the odd part because I guess if the whole thing about what Bowser is saying, where it's like,

these prices were determined without these tariffs being a factor,

then why was the Japanese SKU that's cheaper chosen to be a thing well in advance?

That feels like a tariff product, you know?

I think the yen is weak right now.

I think that has a factor in it.

I think they might be willing to take a loss on hardware in Japan.

So just

for their own region specifically to not be affected by that.

And then they also are still offering the international version SKU in Japan that you can buy, but it's going to cost you more.

Yeah, and also

they are in total control of their own internal shipments.

Yeah.

There's no, I mean, unless Vietnam, you know, because the switches are being manufactured in Vietnam.

Unless Vietnam gave them a reason to doubt that, but there's no reason for any like economic turmoil on that shipping area.

No, I wouldn't imagine so, but like, but it does feel like that type of product existing is a response to, you know, what's going on and basically being like, we're not going to fuck overprices for our own here.

You know, we're going to keep it, we're going to do our own thing.

And then everywhere else internationally, we'll just be a separate thing and then we'll keep it at two SKUs.

You know,

I'm guessing.

I will say one thing about Real People Impact here.

And what I should have said at the top is, when you asked me how I'm doing, is, yeah, I'm pretty tired because I just came back from CBS News, but here I am on CSB news.

Wop, wop, wop,

news, totally.

Totally the same.

Same level of prestige and importance.

Yes,

same level of journalism.

We're talking about the economic realities of a major market.

Yeah, exactly.

Boop-a-boop, boop, boop.

But while I was at the CBS Broadcast Center in

New York City,

I got my hair and makeup done, and I was just waiting in the green room, and I'm waiting by the studio.

And then one of the producers just like, he's like,

hey,

hey, you're Gene Park, right?

I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's me.

And I'm like,

do you?

He was like, do you really think Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to be $100?

And I was like, bro, after today,

guarantee, bro.

And he was like, shit, I need to find a new job.

Absolutely.

100%, dude.

Because they're not paying him shit at CBS either.

Nintendo is going to charge you.

I mean, okay, let's throw a 40% tariff on the $80 price what is that fucking $110

right if Mario Kart's going to come out at 110 USD

why the fuck wouldn't Grand Theft Auto 6 come out at 100?

Why not 120?

Well,

the funny monkey's paw to that is, you know, the first story, which was like a bunch of devs are hoping that they release it at a higher price so that everyone can shoot, or rather, a bunch of

publishers are hoping that they shoot it out at a higher price because now we can set a higher bar.

But hey, you got your higher bar, but I don't think this is the way you wanted it to go down.

You know, like you are getting that $100 or more GTA, sure, but at what cost?

You know?

We know the cost.

That's literally what.

I don't think this is viable long term.

We saw Sony talk about how...

when they did their first party games at being like $10 more, that they saw decreased sales as a result because people were loss averse to higher prices and they didn't see the particular Sony first-party titles as deserving of it.

Now, Grand Theft Auto VI

is probably immune to that concern.

However, I feel that if Grand Theft Auto VI comes out, $100

and everyone goes, oh, sick, we can charge $100.

You're not Grand Theft Auto VI.

You're going to crush and burn and die.

I think it's pretty, like, there's an obvious thing that's like underneath all of this,

the pricing discussion, which is the amount of people that are just kind of like, ah, fuck that, goes up drastically.

And when you have a ton of, again, cheaper alternatives and shorter and other things you can get through Steam and even on your phone, there's a bunch of free-to-play shit.

You can just, you know, spend, there's no short, you can go play a bunch of other things that are not asking you to join, not to not just like invest in like picking up a a particular game, but invest in an expensive generation, right?

You're getting the console and then your attachment and everything else you continue to purchase there is going to continue to be higher and higher.

It's nice to know that.

Nintendo games don't go on sale.

No, it's nice to know that the, like, it's like, okay, so they announced that, what was it, the tour, Nintendo Switch 2 tour, is like 10 bucks or 5 bucks, was it?

Right?

$10.

$6.

Should be free.

Should still be free.

Right?

Should still be free.

It's nice that it's not a full price thing, obviously.

Great.

Should still be free.

So I don't know where this came from.

I don't know if that was you reporting it, Gene, but

I think it was you.

Where Reggie Fizzeme had to push really, really hard for Wii Sports to be included in the Wii.

And Miyamoto fucking hated it.

He hated it.

Hated it.

And now, like, it's a $6 game

fucking

tiny little fucking packing there you go there it is

cinder's book disrupting the game by reggie feezume really good business book it's basically like marketed it's like he's he wrote it for like business students to like read and like be inspired by the story of reggie feesume and he talks about like his time at like mtv and uh

fucking pepsi i don't know i'm forgetting the the other

companies he worked on but he but he tells a story there about miyamoto was like no we're not gonna give a Wii Wii Sports.

And he's like, it's a good idea, though.

I like to imagine that book was written mid-parachute drop diving out of the GameStop plane.

Because that's where he also was for a second.

Jumped in, got the bag, and just DB Coopered his way out, you know?

Yeah, that is a wild idea.

And then the quote was like, we.

What was it?

It was like,

everything we make,

we don't want...

Something about we don't want to give things away away for free.

We deserve yeah, we don't, yeah, we don't give things away for free.

Like, like if we worked hard, if we worked hard on it, we don't give it away for free.

And I'm just like, Mario and Duck Hunt was a game changer, was a humongous deal back in the day.

That was a launch day pack in.

I think that was later.

Was it?

It wasn't a launch because that's how the that's how the Nintendo arrived in my life was packed in with Mario and Duck and Duck Hunt.

I thought that, and then the second controller as well.

And

the prospect of the full family computer, you know, with two controllers and multiple games.

Here you go, all packed in, ready to go for it.

You know what?

Miyamoto is so fucking full of shit.

I was like, I feel like there's a bigger example of this.

Well, Tetris is a 1989 puzzle video game developed for the Game Boy that was bundled with North American and European releases of the Game Boy.

Of course it was.

Of course.

Yeah, because Hank Rogers had to convince Nintendo, don't pack in the Game Boy with Mario, pack it in with Tetris.

Watch the the Tetris movie on Apple TV, really good.

Yeah, and I just, you know, I feel like it was just such a good call because the Wii was probably the first,

I mean, it was the most recent, like, major, major

new,

I guess, consoles reaching out beyond gamer space and getting into casual space and like, you know, the whatever, hitting all corners because it's just a whole new way to do shit.

Um, and having that packed in to be like, here's how that works and giving you an example.

Grew to market.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We were talking last week about, like, yeah, just your Pat mentioned like the PlayStation, and it's just like, okay, so you got some demo discs from magazines, I hope, lying around, you know, like, what, what are you going to stare at?

What are you going to do?

You know, I saw Chad mention, yeah, that's right.

Reggie used to work at Pizza Hut, and he was responsible for the Pizza Hut demo disc that we used to get back in the day, too.

That's awesome.

So, like, dude, like, he's like, Reggie's been feeding us literally for like decades, you know?

It's awesome.

I am foreseeing like the absolute most pathetic gimme possible what's that nintendo switch 2 demo thing called playlab welcome tour welcome tour i i foresee like in two weeks they're gonna be like we regret to inform you that the price of the nintendo switch has jumped to 679 usd but

It will be coming with Nintendo Play Tour included as an additional value and just like the absolute most fucking loser shit.

Well, I mean, look, we'll see.

After they told us it's 10 bucks, it's like, oh, man.

Once the pre-order is open, you know, I'm sure the delay is going to be to account for something, right?

So we'll see what happens.

So I'll tell you what, there is a benefit to all of this shit, which is if you really want it.

The UK pre-orders opened this morning and

people went and pre-ordered them and

people,

I'm not seeing tons of people complain that they couldn't get one because I was watching the store tickers go up and down over the morning, and it was like, they're out of stock here.

No, no, they're back in stock.

No, they're out of stock.

Oh, no, they're back.

Like, and it was like an on and off, on and off all morning, where usually it's like, did you buy it within 90 seconds of 9 a.m.?

Oh, they're gone.

Hmm.

So you can still do it

in the UK.

Oh, yeah.

But what I mean is it's like, well, the increased cost of everything.

It's not selling out immediately.

Yes.

Yes, it's not selling out immediately.

Yeah, I mean, we'll see.

There's always also that thing of like, your first batch of shipments is like destined to sell out.

Like, it's, you know, it's, it's more like,

when does production slow down, right?

When does demand catch up?

And you go like, okay.

We've completed as many as are moving off the shelves first as soon as they go up.

up, and then things start to, and then they start switching over to a smaller one.

That must be a discussion they're having right now,

right?

Because they must, they have to be going back and forth about the price, and it's like they don't know how long any of these economic sanctions are going to last.

So, do we slow production down fucking now before the thing's even out?

So, I'm curious, like, June, I'm curious.

Like, things are in a weird place, too, with games because generations used to have kind of like starting points you know and then if you came in in between you were the weirdo like the dreamcast was and you're like hey what are you doing we're only two years into the gen stop it right but they would happen almost like elections you know like every four um and like is it and now that things kind of go for longer because these platforms can stay updated or release different tiered skews x box series x s and wherever they're at with the the the future ones like do you think it's do you do you prefer when generations all kind of start and begin at the same place, or do you prefer it where every company is kind of just jumping in whenever they're ready to?

That's an interesting question.

I kind of like it.

I mean, like, I love the Dreamcast.

So, like, who am I to talk?

You know, I totally jumped in on the Dreamcast mid-gen and I thought it was the best thing ever.

So, it was never a problem for me.

I love the Dreamcast, sure.

And I never really bought, like, I don't really buy systems at launch.

You know, the only time I ever did that was when Sony and Xbox sent me a PS5 and and Xbox Series X for free four years ago.

That's the only time I ever had a console at launch, besides buying the Wii.

Luckily, back in the day in 2006, I bought that.

That's the only console I've ever bought at launch, period.

Okay.

So I've never been into buying console at launch.

I bought the PS4 when Bloodborne came out.

That's it.

I was like, oh, yeah, I'll get it now.

Yeah.

I feel like I followed suit in a lot of cases.

One thing, though, when I'm thinking about this now as we're talking about it, is like, like I do like when

you're not at weird different levels of tech for like things getting ported you know for like certain games or if the yeah if like one console like Nintendo's obviously always coming in a little bit underneath or spending a little bit less than you know Sony and Microsoft were like trying to push it as far in PC as well but like

I'm kind of like if we had a thing if we had a world where every level of tech port would be completely different and it'd just just be like, oh, the PlayStation 1

is good for now, but then, oh, the thing released two years from now is not going to be bad.

It's like, that would be really annoying, you know?

So I kind of do like the idea of like, okay, you can get this port or that port or that port.

And, you know, hey, look, this one might run worse for whatever reason or you pick your pathway.

But

for a lot of cases during the 360, like, you know, PS3 era,

I feel like there was things that would happen.

Like Bayonetta would come out and you'd be like, oh, holy shit, the frame rate is dog shit.

shit don't fucking play that version you know but but for the most part there being tech parody allows you to kind of like not have too many disparate issues going from one version to another of a game across generations you know

I miss when tech parody had to force different ports of the game you know like

I want my isometric Tony Hawk Pro Skater on the

game you want you want your ghostbusters with the little me characters

of PlayStation 2

The Game Boy color Resident Evil that never happened or whatever.

Yeah, dude.

Yeah,

Shin Resident Evil, yeah.

I think we're long past that because we had the Wii, we had the Wii U, we had the Switch, and now we have the Switch 2.

Nintendo has been like a full half step behind on a technical level for like three?

Fifth,

20 years?

20 years?

Yeah, since the GameCube.

Wii U.

It was like 2006.

Yeah, Wii U.

2006, yeah.

19 years, yeah.

GameCube

was on the level.

GameCube was concurrent.

GameCube was concurrent.

What had parodyed it?

It was Wii Us, right?

Yeah, it was Wii, Wii U, Switch, and Switch 2 now.

Yeah.

So, like, hey, what's a Nintendo console for?

It's to play Nintendo games.

Like, that has been the case forever.

And if you only have a Nintendo, then you'll, or you love Portable.

That's where you'll get that thing.

So I don't think there's like a huge audience of people going, why doesn't Call of Duty run the best on the Nintendo Switch?

I don't feel that in my heart.

Well, I guess the emergence of PC as like an actual real, like part of it, the

scale.

Yeah.

Means that at all given moments, a PC can still push past whatever else is going on on your console.

And Gene says, you bought a PS4 for Bloodborne.

And there were a lot of people who bought a PS4 for Bloodborne.

And it's interesting to me because I feel like Nintendo took that very specific emotion to task because

okay well I got I'll buy a I'll buy a

I'll buy a Wii U for sorry I'll buy a Wii for Zelda I'll buy a switch for Zelda yep yep I'll buy a switch 2 for Mario Kart but also in case you don't give a shit about that will you also buy a switch 2 for not bloodborne it's not bloodborne but it's

console Consoles for me have always moved because of a game choice.

Third Strike was only ported to the Dreamcast.

Shadow the Colossus for the PS2.

Fucking...

Jade Edit 2 on the Wii U.

You know, Street Fighter V was what got me to get a PS4, right?

Like, it's like, I, and the thing is, of course, being in this position, of course, like, it's like, yeah, when it's your gig, you know, you, you definitely do need to jump in there.

But in terms of when I choose to jump in, I can hang out a lot for a while just of not necessarily getting a new skew of something or getting a new iteration of it.

Like Xbox, I'm kind of like, I have no reason to get an Xbox right now for anything.

The reason I got an Xbox is because Atlas told me to.

Sure.

They literally said, go get an Xbox and record this video on an Xbox.

I mean, okay.

Like

Killer Instinct, you know, back in the with the Xbox One.

And then a while.

What did I get the new one for?

Was it DMC5?

It might have been to like,

it might have been to get,

I think it was something with DMC, I forget, you know, but it was just like, yeah, it was retracing.

It was to do something specifically, you know?

I mean, let's even look at the, like, you know, you know, Willie, you and I are streaming games all the time, and Gene, you're covering them.

So there's a, there's a, there's an extremely high incentive for the three of us to grab or be gifted or acquire or whatever the fuck, a Switch 2 at launch.

But, like, at the end of the day, like, do you know what I'm going to be streaming on the Switch 2 release date?

Fucking Deltarune.

Right, right, right.

Like, like, like, Deltarune is a much higher priority than Mario Kart or any of the other games that.

And it's like, okay, well, what about the rest of June?

Death Stranding 2 comes out on the 26th.

Like, we're not hurting for shit.

It's not like, oh, there's a fucking dearth of shit to play.

Because of, oh man, June's going to be so empty because I don't have this.

Like, no, man.

Like, if if I can't acquire one, I'm going to acquire one.

But if I can't, it's not the end of the world.

It'll just be a little annoying.

Yeah, I think so.

I think,

and besides, as well, like, there's a lot of shit that

I missed getting around to on the Switch as well.

Like, I didn't play Tears of the Kingdom yet.

So I was like, oh, cool.

They updated it.

Great.

I'll jump on that.

Oh, you're going to play a much better version of that game.

Awesome.

Yeah.

It runs so smoothly.

I got some hands-on time with that.

I mean, I had had hands-on time with everything at the Switch 2 event, basically.

Except for Mario Party Jamboree, and we could talk about that a little bit.

I have a funny story for you, Willie, about that.

Did you ask me?

Age of Calamity.

No, no, no.

Well, they wouldn't talk about anything that they weren't ready to talk about.

Damn it, Age of Calamity.

That's the Nintendo game with the worst framework.

Yes, I was upset that that didn't show up.

That was my priority, too.

Maybe the Switch 2 can't.

Maybe the game's just made wrong.

But now that we're on to Age of Imprisonment,

isn't it just like, yeah, we don't talk about old shit, shut up?

Are we just moving on?

Yeah, maybe.

With the Tears of the Kingdom,

the bit with just going and grabbing existing constructs seemed pretty cool.

I'm wondering, is that only from friends, or can you browse like a list of creations and load in a metal gear?

Oh, that'd be nice.

Yeah.

You know?

I think you're using the phone app with your daily bonus and shit like that.

But I guess

is there a public list of creations or is it just from people you know?

You know?

I mean, maybe it's like they're relying on the social aspect of it.

So like I could tweet out my mechanical

and the QR code.

Chat's saying that it uses QR codes.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So like, yeah, I'll probably just tweet out my mech and you can just grab that real quick.

Fantastic.

Because I saw those videos and I was like, okay, well, I'm not going to go sit and make that, but that looks rat as hell.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

I don't know where this would be a good spot to talk about this, but Willie, can I mention something real quick about the camera?

Yeah.

We're doing all Switch to random shit right now.

Go for it.

Yeah.

So

I didn't get to see this, and I didn't get to try it out in person.

So I just want to qualify at that.

But

from what I understand from my black friend,

I knew this was going to be about the camera was having a hard time picking them up.

The way he started getting into the topic and directing the focus, it was like, aha, gee, I wonder where this is going.

Tell me more.

Tell me more.

That's awesome.

It's like, it's like,

and it's so like.

Have not moved on from the connect.

Okay.

I like the label showing everybody on a like everybody in that video was on a pure white background.

I'm like, that's super sunlit.

But there was a black guy in the promo video.

Dude, a pure white background there was.

Sunlight,

like roof to ceiling, like wall to like, like floor to ceiling, windows, you know, Tyler,

Tyler, why is your room all green?

What's going on back there?

You know, like, it's like, oh, I just redecorated a little bit.

Yeah, anyway, guys, we're having fun.

Can you?

But the Switch 2 event is all red and blue lights, you know?

So it's not like the best lighting, but it's not like the worst lighting.

It's in right now.

You can see

right here.

Yes.

You mean this gill shit that I'm pulling off right here?

Pyrokinesis.

He's just telling you it's not going to work in the very room you're in.

Let's find out.

Let's find out.

I mean, this is

the podcast camera setup is different from the couch back there, but let's find out how it deals, you know.

Meanwhile, Pat is going to be like perfectly aliased, you know, just like a perfect carving carving.

Well, because it's not just that, but I have a bonus in that I have like darker red that's a fucking circle around my head.

No, there's this the skin filter goes from like Caucasian to pale to red.

That's the that's your gamut, blood filling the face, chortling.

Um, wow, okay.

Well,

my idea when I saw that

tech with the chat stuff, I kind of went, okay, so basically they're doing Discord green screen and Discord like, you know, background noise filtering and everything that's become standardized at this point with these types of Zoom, you know, chats and stuff like that.

So it should at least be at parody with what Zoom and fucking,

what's the other one there?

Discord?

No.

God, it's Skype?

Yeah.

Teams.

Skype.

Isn't it embarrassing how much Skype fucked up?

Anyway, whatever.

To not have dominated that.

Skype used to be good, then Microsoft bought it, then Microsoft ruined it.

Yeah, and then just the fact that

you think Skype existing as a video call thing would have been the main reference for COVID conversations, and it just didn't.

But yes, 100%.

You know,

I think that,

hey, everybody is in their camera and you can see their feed while you're playing a game thing is

actually kind of genius like genuinely I'm not being sarcastic at all because when Breath of the Wild came out and I was no lifing breath of the wild I was no lifing breath of the wild on a discord call with all of the people I play FF14 with

and we were all no lifing breath of the wild simultaneously

and

not having to go through Discord and just having them and like our heads floating around that would be legit awesome.

And don't forget, too, I brought up the other day that there's that app where you just get a fake social media thing going where you can have a fake chat popping up.

And if you're a kid that's like, hey, like,

you're hearing about like kids who are gaming on voice chat or whatever that are just like, hey, what's up, stream?

Hey, what's up, chat?

Chat, I'm cooked.

And you're talking to like literally just the two friends that are chatting with you, but you're just having that thing.

It's like,

I feel like the video and picture in picture element of having it in the background and what as well gets it makes everyone kind of feel like they're streaming, you know.

But what the fuck are VTubers going to do?

What becomes

of that tech?

YouTubers are going to use their PC to do their VTube stuff.

So you just can't use the direct camera to do anything with it, then.

Either that or they're going to put like a cardboard cutout on their face, like that human giant skit with Aziz Ansari and Will Arnett and Hashley Olson.

Uh-huh.

Well, okay, but I guess

if you want to

call in through the Switch

UI and be on another VTuber's call or something, you know, within the

Switch interface or so, then I don't know if any other type of

device or input would work, right?

I feel like

that's probably a proprietary camera thing that they're going to get.

I don't think Nintendo is designing their technical

uses of fake people.

No, I don't imagine so.

Also, but but also, like, if you want to use a better quality camera than the one they have, like, yeah,

that's not what they're doing with it.

Eat rocks or wait till

Hori or Logitech brings out a higher camera that doesn't work because it's only putting out like the shittiest bandwidth imaginable.

Because if you could have

just any feed convert to a USB-C and then you know have that be your input, then it's like okay, VTubers can directly put themselves in and play together, you know.

But yeah, anyway,

the USB-C port will take any camera.

It's already a piranha plant camera for sale from I want to say it's Hori, I'm not sure, but it's like a it's really nice.

You close the piranha plant's mouth to turn the camera off, then that just solves the problem right there.

Okay, then yeah, they're good to go.

Um, you could just you could just figure out the output, the input on your computer from beforehand and then feed that in instead.

Okay.

And then, yes, it'll be in 480p.

I mean,

it doesn't matter.

Yeah, so Gene, did you get into or get up to anything?

Oh, hold on.

Before we leave this, before I leave this,

I want on-the-record guesses for what you think the United States Switch 2 price is going to be when that fucking shit comes back up.

The readjustment.

I'm saying

$6.50.

I'll say $5.50.

I don't know.

Price is right rules.

Price is right rules.

You can say $1?

$1.

Ah, you coward bitch.

But it's a good guess.

And you're talking American?

Yeah.

You're talking USD.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

All right.

Sorry, I just had to get that in there.

I desperately wanted to have that in the air.

An increase of 50%

over the premium.

Boy.

Yeah, I don't know what you want to talk about, Switch 2.

I can start with mouse controls.

Let's go.

I was excited to talk to Wooly and tell him about how right he was.

I guess it's his concept of having like a controller on the left hand and then using the mouse on the right hand.

Is that the lore?

Like that's the idea, right?

Accuracy of a mouse with the accuracy of a controller.

Of the left thumbstick.

That's exactly what this is, Woolly.

High accuracy on both hands.

They hated him because he was right.

Woolly.

That's exactly what.

You're going to be able to connect Joy-Cons to your PC and use that setup for PC.

You currently can.

You currently can.

Yeah.

Yeah, but without the interface, I'm completely fucking nuts.

Oh, no, no, no.

No, you literally can Bluetooth.

You can do it.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can.

Also, a lot of games

set up a don't have your interface flicker between two devices if you want.

That's become an option, too.

So I play Metroid Prime 4 using the left thumbstick to lock on with the left trigger and then moving around and I'm like dashing and air dashing at Samus.

And then I seamlessly go from like the like holding it regularly down to the mouse pad.

And then I'm doing precise precision aiming.

And the first boss has like four weak spots all over them, and then they have shields on their arms, and they're moving their arms around to block your shots as like they're adapting to your movements.

And then at the whole time, I'm just like doing like slight precision movements to like move the mouse around and like hit directly in the spot.

It felt like I was playing a PC game with a thumbstick at the left hand.

Were you using it on a mouse pad or what?

They had a that's the that's the tricky thing.

Like the switch 2 event had like these massive tables that are perfect for using for mouses, but you can use it on your clothes.

You can use it on your pants too.

That's they showed it in the in the promo video.

They show it on just a random table surface, right?

Yeah.

Now in the treehouse footage,

the person that was playing was having a hard time aiming and was missing a whole lot.

Oh, man.

Bleeding the shots and stuff was difficult.

But

you're saying you felt it work.

And also, it's Metroid Prime, so locking on is like, you know, it centers

pretty quickly.

But you were able to also just like

freestyle it as much as you needed to.

And it felt like it was responsive.

It felt like I guess the person who was playing Treehouse was not great because I was playing and the whole Nintendo staff was like, yo, you got it right in the bullseye.

Like, I'm hitting the missiles and everything like that.

It's perfect.

It's perfect aiming.

Precision aiming.

They are for children.

They are for little babies.

You did it.

It's like, yay.

Good job, buddy.

And look,

if anyone is butt mad, then just turn it sideways, click it back on, and play it the normal way.

You got the

normal way.

You have a free choice to do whatever you want.

The better way

or the old and busted.

I feel like, let's say you you don't get a Switch 2 at all.

I think that the Joy-Con situation with the built-in mouse control setup, as well as their new Pro Controller that is the only standard controller to date that has the back buttons built in.

I feel like Nintendo's controller solutions here are better than their console.

Just with all the different input options.

I think giving you your nightmare bullshit and having built-in back buttons for normal humans

is like a win-win for everybody.

Well, and it's also probably...

Yeah, that's right.

You don't like the back buttons because you squeeze too hard, which I can totally get.

You know, like, that happens to me sometimes too.

Thank you, especially on the Seam Deck.

Thank you for the vindication.

Thank you for telling me that I'm seen, Gene.

I appreciate it.

But it really does feel like there's so many different ways to play first-person shooters now on a Switch, too.

There's still gyro too, right?

Yeah, there's still gyro.

Yeah, you can still move that shit around too, you know?

Great.

Yeah, I mean, just more is better.

I think

also, anyone that, like, if you are forced to play with the mouse and, you know, side to things, this would be a massive negative story.

This would be a huge problem.

Well, get ready for Splatoon 4.

That's what my gut says.

Star Fox Zero comes to mind, right?

Oh, yeah.

Anytime people are, like, forced to use the thing and are like,

the way it worked was fine before.

It's like, yeah, yeah, I know.

Allow it to be an option.

Definitely allow it to be an option.

But I never played Xenoblade X because Xenoblade X was one of the only Wii U games to come out that was like, you must use the gamepad for the entire interface.

And I was like,

it wasn't just like I hate the gamepad.

A lot of that was.

But also, the interface switching down to the gamepad for every single menu in that game sucked.

It was very annoying.

For a big part for me, it was

how much waggling can I avoid

with any game that had waggling as a thing?

I also am thinking of like, I played Metroid Prime 1 and 2

on the GameCube with the controller there.

And then for 3, when you got the Wii mode out, I was like, I'd rather just play it with the controller, you know?

I should have waited because,

or whatever, because

I gave myself like a minor case of frozen shoulder playing.

Metroid Prime 3 because I beat that thing in like a weekend and like my shoulder fucking locked up and my wrist was sore.

And it was because it wanted me to hold the thing like the Wiimote's only like what?

It's like a TV remote.

Well, it was a little heavier because of the batteries, but it wanted you to hold it up and out

the whole time and non-stop.

And I'm trying to do it with it resting on my lap because I'm like, I'm not, you know, I'm trying to keep my shoulder relaxed to play for a while for sure.

I'm always going to talk about Kid Icarus as just

Sakurai's fucking crowning achievement of hubris, you know?

Like, it's if the, like, it's not that playing a game with the stick and stylus is a problem in theory, it's that you asked too much by making the hardest difficulty a wrist ruiner for him, for Liam, for everybody.

So, it's just like, yeah, man, like, if you just have that option to be like, I see that, that's cool.

I'm going to stick with what I want the option to just stick with the regular, then great, you know?

Um,

did you play anything else that used it by any chance?

Well, first of all, man, a Kid Icarus re-release with the mouse controls.

God.

Now's the time.

The time is now, actually.

The time is now.

And also, I'm thinking Mario Paint, because Mario Paint is the last time that Nintendo used a mouse, right?

But also, Mario Maker is going to be so fun to play around with, making levels with that thing.

Oh, Mario Maker.

Yeah, that's with a cursor for sure.

Yeah, for sure.

Or, you know, the Zelda Maker, because remember, Lynx Awakening was originally, oh, not Link's Awakening, Echoes of Wisdom was originally supposed to be the Zelda Maker game.

Fuck it.

And they're like, yeah, we can just make a Zelda game.

While we're at it, throw in Yoshi Safari and Battle Clash and all this Super Scope 6 games.

Battle Clash, yo!

Super Scope games?

That would be crazy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Bring them all back.

I did play

if Pat wants to ruin his back and his whole body even more,

you can try playing Dragon Drive

at wheelchair basketball.

I saw that, and I was like,

using the mouse like swoops for every single motion seems like a lot.

It sure is.

You can see my photo at the cover of a Canadian French newspaper, Les Duvois.

I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that.

You actually know that was correct.

Okay,

there you go.

Les Duvois.

I'm there like you can see me hunched over like looking up at the screen like this like pushing my dragon drive like switch to Joy-Cons

over

it is a very misused because when you said dragon drive I'm like I don't know what game that is and then because I was calling it legs the whole time the sequel to arms and the sequel to arms yes

during that presentation there was a guy in my chat that was like I am in a wheelchair I fucking never want to play this game.

This looks terrible.

Why would I want to play this?

You know, Gene, if you need me to just like block out your camera so that you're not seen laughing at this fucking fool over here, I can do that anytime.

You can just let me know.

Um, look, I mainly thought of the Burger King Kids Club guy wheels.

Sure, you know, sure, I thought of Kodal Khan, you know, you know, we all,

but it is cool, it is cool.

Um, um, in that I like the way it looks, and I like, I like the,

you know, I guess like, yeah, the whole aesthetic now that is

fucking car soccer.

I always forget the name now.

God damn it.

Rocket League.

Rocket League.

Rocket League.

Rocket League, yeah.

But it's also kind of wild because I never thought that, like, Bernie Mac used to do an old bit about like his

friend who was in a wheelchair that was trying to avoid getting spanked by their parents, who was like turning and trying to avoid the belt.

And he would do this whole big act out with the hands and it was ridiculous and it's like that looks very tiring and to be fit enough to do that IRL like those like wheelchair athletes are incredible but if you really have to do it to that degree to play that would be a hell of a workout man So you don't, that's what that's that's when I found out and the that the mouse controls work on your pants.

You don't have to keep doing this on a table.

You just put put it on your lap and just kind of so it's like how like when we played Wii bowling and we're like pretending to like bowl like for real or like using our actual like arms to like motion around we tennis like no you just flick your wrist or like no you just flick your wrist so it's kind of like that version where you can just go like this on your pants, you know, okay just kind of rub your thighs a bit, you know so like you don't have to don't be like all the dads who are throwing their fastball and whipping the Wii Mote straight through the fucking TV

Yeah, okay, okay.

Yeah, it still seems to be exhausting like any motion control game would be.

Like, it feels like a game that would be fun to play for like 30 minutes.

Like, a pickup game of Dragon Drive, I guess.

My issue with it is why the characters are so sauceless.

Like, why is there no character design?

They look like prototypes.

They look like Halo ODST soldiers in wheelchairs, you know?

Yeah, I guess the, I mean, there's two ways to go with it, right?

You can make characters and give them a whole art style and look or so, or you can just make like cyber tech future dudes and keep it i'm hoping that we find out more and then there's like you know like the arms character designers actually like did the thing here you know but it's it's weird that we didn't see any of that so

um

mighty they showed it early

maybe i don't know i forget whether that's launched or not i mean i don't care i'm not gonna play that game no i'm not gonna play that shit either but you know federation force yeah the the soldiers that that kind of look comes to mind as well yeah yeah oh the fun thing about metro prior 4 is that uh it does begin a lot like Metro in Prime 3.

Very hectic.

I don't know if you saw the treehouse footage, but there's like a lot of wartime going on.

You see like a big-ass Doom Slayer type robot, and the Galactic Federation forces all over the place, and they're all screaming in Samus' ear, you know?

Any really fun stuff.

I mean, so seeing the psychic powers bit, it's like, okay, so the new gimmick is floating stuff around.

We've played a bunch of games that let you, you know, any

modern Star Wars game with force powers lets you just use phys X to, you know, slap things into things.

So that on its own is not particularly novel nor is like sliding puzzle pieces around on a on a surface from a distance so like was there anything cool about it in like terms of combat or other applications of like that new angle

didn't see any of that I mean that'd be cool uh you know uh you know I know Pat always mentions psyops the mind gate conspiracy

I'm gonna mention that again too so reset the clock Yeah, yeah, exactly.

If Metro Prime 4 is somehow a secret sequel to PsyOps Mindgate Conspiracy, and the Dobby Sicks.

At bare minimum.

I mean, at fucking Starkiller, Force Unleashed, right?

Force Unleashed.

At bare minimum, we need to hit that level of shenanigans with grabbing shit in the environment or enemies.

Or if you can psychic grip up

a space pirate and then missile it in the air, that'd be kind of cool, I guess.

Some tech, yeah.

That'd be cool.

Okay.

So, okay, you got to try that out.

Um, so Mario Kart World.

Um,

I was saying last time I was kind of checked out on Mario Kart.

I was like, yeah, you know, I think I'm good.

Like, I, I, I, they're cool, they're a lot of fun, but I'm in terms of like going and buying them each time, kind of like Mario Party.

I'm like, you can get this for every once in a while when you have people over, but I don't need to get all 10 Mario Parties, man.

And then I saw the swerve off world, you know, like burn out paradise bit, as they're saying.

And it's like, yeah, okay, that actually gets my attention.

That's pretty cool to have an open world racing game applied to Mario Kart.

How was that?

So I was like you, because like, so the Switch 2 event is coordinated off by floors, and the bottom floor experience is here is regular Grand Pri for Mario Kart World, right?

So you're just going to do a little race over here.

And all these Switch 2s are just locked to that experience.

You can't, I couldn't go into the OS.

I couldn't see what the home screen looked like.

I couldn't see what the e-shop looked like.

I couldn't go back to the menu screen.

It's like, no, you are just locked in this race.

And then you go upstairs to play the free roam and knockout tour mode.

And what I'll say about the

free roam is I think you are right to be excited.

This is the first Mario Kart game where you can apply, you see that mountain over there, now you can Mario Kart drive to it.

Now you can blue shell up to it.

That's exactly what I did, where I saw the world and I saw the the highest peak in the world.

So I was like, Why don't I just drive up there?

And it's in the ice area, and you can see way off in the distance the ice palace that is glimmering.

And like, I'm getting closer and closer.

And I go into the ice palace, which is like multi-different layers with different paths, and everything like that.

I go up to the highest peak of the mountain, and there's sure enough, there's a ramp there, and I just jump off and I can just see the whole Mario Kart world.

And my immediate thought was, oh, this is the lands between of Mario Kart.

Okay, okay, okay.

Oh, man.

Because I was going to say, like,

is this a, because for me, I was thinking, is this a Tony Hawk 4 moment, jump off the board and just platform over to this completely non-skate park part of the map?

You know, is that where we are?

I, you know, I wonder if Mario Kart world is $80 because they're going to reveal in the direct.

I don't know anything about this, but they're going to reveal in the direct that you can just jump off the car and just run around.

Just run around with all these characters.

Elden.

Yeah, it's just a Mario game all of a sudden.

Elden Kart.

I think what they're probably going to reveal is that, like, it because I looked at this and I saw Mario Kart Paradise.

I saw Burnout Paradise returned in kart form.

And they showed off Grand Prix and they showed off Knockout Tour.

And, like, really, all they have to do is give you a fucking anything, any task, perpetual task to do in the free room.

And that's going to be fucking game of the year forever.

Drive into the first warp pipe you see and literally get spit out into Kalid.

Like, just

but that's the thing, though.

Like, you can see the whole map, and it's like, oh, I can see the ghost house land over here, and I can see the volcano mountain over here.

And people are like, oh, but Force of Horizon came out in 2012, and it's like, yeah, but you're not driving around the goddamn mushroom kingdom, you know?

Yeah, you're

not driving around

some kind of real place with kind of real cars.

Yeah, Hawaii or Africa or whatever.

But it's like, no, this is the Mushroom Kingdom we're driving around here now.

So they cha-h we're seeing as well, too, like, um,

you know, and I guess this segues into Bonanza, but like Donkey Kong looks a bit more like movie-like and he's got the movie coming as well.

I wonder if like there will be an area there that's like, oh, the apartment, the New York from the Mario movie, or if they're going to like work the movie into, you know, any part of what they're making from now on.

I wonder about that, yeah.

What was I going to say about?

Oh, Naka Tour, real quick, is super fun.

So Naka Tour is a cross-country race again across the whole map.

So, you just really get to see the entire map.

It is wild.

It is something else to actually play the game and see like 30 players on a racetrack.

Everyone is doing like a different path.

People are doing the wall jump up.

You can see the people wall jumping up there.

People over here on the left are grinding.

The cow is grinding over here.

People are just flying over here.

And it's just, it's kind of glorious, actually, when you see a race this big, like at all, like everyone doing something different, completely different, you know.

It's fun.

It's Mario Kart, man.

You know, the steel ball run of Mario Kart.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The, but, but, like, um, I was just thinking about when you were describing, like, you know, oh, the Mushroom Kingdom is here, and, like, looking at like the mountains, and that's over there.

I'm like, that was part of, just to go back to it for a second, the movie kind of gave that impression of like, oh, Luigi's Mansion takes place in this location, and like you got a feeling for a map to that world overall, you know.

So it feels like that would be like something you could easily one-to-one and just be like, okay, and this is where Donkey Kong hangs out, and you just kind of, you know, take it from there.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I said the lands in between and Mario Kart.

I mean, the real proper parallel is the breath of the wild of Mario Kart.

That's what this is.

Right, right, right.

You know, like, oh, there's Death Mountain, and there's Hyrule Castle, and there's, you know, the water, the Zora area, and everything like that.

And you just see it fully realized as a Mario Kart world.

What is there to do in the free world once you're not on a set racetrack?

That we have no idea.

So

that is what will probably determine whether $80 is a good price or not.

Because we don't know.

Because

I have a quote here,

quote, there is more.

End quote to the free road mode.

Okay.

Bill Trennan said that to IGN, so we will probably find out more in in the Mario Kart Direct whether, you know, we don't know anything about battle mode.

Like, I really think like a battle mode in this big-ass map will be super cool.

Will it be a battle royale?

That sounds fun to me.

It's a boring idea, but it sounds fun.

Like, is it just drive and collect the Koroks, you know, or is it like, oh, go help that ranch go find their lost cow up on the mountainside over there?

You know, like, what's how NPC driven, how much of us, like, you know, I assume it would be

drive up the Ubisoft Tower and stare down and create all the icons for your cart side quests.

I mean, a bunch of races for sure, but is there going to be

gameplay beyond that?

I guess I wonder.

When you say open world, you usually think of different quest types and different

things you run into and stuff.

I mean, shit, it could be a huge question.

There's a lot.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Find the different letters, exactly.

Craziness.

There's clearly a lot of different hidden areas and everything at that, so maybe we'll see.

I don't know.

Giving, giving, you know,

giving a character, giving Pauline a ride from one place to another if she needs it or something.

Crazy taxi.

Yeah.

Crazy taxi.

Speaking of Pauline, yeah.

DK Bonanza.

AKA Red Fraction Gorilla.

Gorilla.

Oh my God.

They should have called it that.

No, they can't, but still.

I mean, they literally can't, but

I'm sure.

Also,

that's a way less popular franchise than Donkey Kong.

Man, I really liked Red Faction 1.

But yeah, sure, sure.

How was that?

I did play that.

It is very stress-relieving.

It feels good to hit the wall over and over again.

It feels good to hit the ground over and over again.

It's intuitive because you press B to punch down and you press X, the top button, to punch up.

And then you press Y to punch forward, and then A to jump.

Very, very simple.

Gotcha.

All three directions.

Go ahead.

All I need is punch.

Can you?

Impact feed feels good.

Can you punch a hole

into the ocean and just literally just?

It feels like you can just keep punching for a long, long time.

You can just basically spelunk and create your own Minecraft caves.

Oh, really?

I guess, yeah.

It's basically like Minecraft, except like maybe a lot more limited.

So I hit the I hit the core of the earth where like

here is something that you can't punch.

So that's for like they'll have boundaries there.

You know, I don't think I don't think Donkey Kong can go to the center of the earth.

Yeah, yeah, but maybe who knows?

Okay, no, that's actually like if you can Minecraft tunnel underground, like that's a different kind of game.

Because

yeah, like interacting with all structures on the earth versus the earth itself and then you know up or down.

And I guess, you know,

if there's a like a wide enough open area for you to find shit underground or do things or punch your way into an underground cavern or something like that.

Totally.

There's all kinds of secret shit down there.

Right on.

Okay.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like if the ground was an ocean.

Okay.

And you can just explore it.

It's ridiculous.

And I mean, and yeah, and I feel like beyond that, like all of the

tropical freeze big boss moments or, you know, Odyssey style big moments, like all that stuff.

The actual traversal and gameplay and everything is going to be exciting and fun and solid.

Like I don't have any doubts about that being

great, but I'm just curious about this particular digging and breaking sort of part of it, you know?

You can just break everything.

There's a platform, just break it.

You don't have to jump on it.

Don't jump on it.

Why?

Just punch through it.

Hulk Ultimate Destruction.

Climb it, too.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can climb anything too.

It's very Breath of the Wild.

Again,

you can tell Breath of the Wild is the most inspirational game for them.

It's very freeing.

It feels like in Tears of the Kingdom, you didn't play it, but there's an ascend move where you can just warp up.

Right, right, right.

Right?

So

that's like that move, except anywhere direction, like downward, mostly.

Ooh, what's down here?

Let's figure this out.

So you have to kind of like...

think in an x-axis or y-axis completely as you're playing this this 3d platformer you know drop your nintendo characters into a sandbox Nintendo has hired this man, finally.

Finally.

Yeah, okay.

And it seems like a Donkey Kong like origins type of story where this is like Donkey Kong as a minor

in both meanings.

Oh, it's early.

He's a kid.

Oh.

Yeah.

He's a kid and he's a minor.

So.

Huh.

Okay.

Yeah, it seems like, yeah, it seems like this is like early, like, this is like the Donkey Kong country that we know, and this is like him growing up, you know.

It takes place beforehand, okay.

So, yeah, so

I certainly don't know who the fuck Pauline is.

Yeah, well, well, there's that, and then there's whatever that new furry bait character is,

right?

The, the, oh, I haven't even seen that, Jesus.

Yeah, there is, there's some new, where was it?

Let me see if I can find it.

Um,

Concy Kong.

I mean, I, I, I'm, hmm,

hmm, probably not.

Um,

Probably, probably wrong.

Also, actively demonetizing everything that this shows up on because that's actually a problem now.

Oh, seriously.

Oh, the one with the purple.

Oh, keep testing.

The one with the purple hair?

Test it out on YouTube and see what happens.

I'm Australian.

Yeah.

Australians are getting wrecked on YouTube's filters.

Oh, well, just bleep me out.

Yeah.

The purple hair, exactly.

Is it the purple hair monkey?

Yes, yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

You didn't run into that character?

No?

Okay.

No, no, not yet.

Okay.

What else did they initially

go off?

Played Cyberpunk.

Yeah,

I heard it runs at 40 FPS.

It does.

Yeah, in performance mode.

And that's a seven-week old build, so I don't know if it's going to run 40 FPS forever.

That's early.

Yeah.

And it plays, and the demo was in Dogtown, because it is trying to remind you,

remember, Phantom Liberty was not available in last-gen consoles.

This is a current-gen console area only, and here it is running on the Switch 2 just fine.

Wait, really?

Phantom Liberty didn't come to all versions?

No, not for PS4 and Xbox One.

Whoa.

And here is the PS5-only content running on the Switch 2.

Okay.

And

I texted our good friend's friend of the show,

Susie the Sphere Hunter, saying, Susie, you are going to be in a Nintendo console launch game.

Cool.

Huh.

Ball on the cart, 64 gigs.

What did that happen with?

Integrade.

FF7.

Yeah,

yeah.

Integrade 2.

Yeah, we're getting Integrade 2 for the remake.

Okay, got your hands on that.

Yeah, and I played a ton of Cyberpunk on the Steam Deck.

And I can just tell you just by eyeballing it, that this looks better than the Steam Deck.

That's not surprising.

The Stream Deck's pretty low tier on technical shenanigans.

Fuck that up.

It's just, it's underpowered.

The Steam Deck's underpowered.

The Steam Deck is for Hades, is what it's for.

Yeah.

Well, it seems like there's a constant conversation with anything that I'm looking to install on it is like going to see how does this run.

Did you have to tweak any settings?

Did you have to jump through any hoops?

It's like it has a wide, like, install whatever you want.

You're free to, but no guarantees on how it's going to run.

Yeah, install Monster Hunter Wilds on the fucking Steam Decks.

Just go for it.

Whatever.

You don't need frames.

Did you try out the updated Forgotten Land?

Oh, no, I did not.

I did look at it, though, because it looks really nice.

So I just eyeballed it.

Tears of the Kingdom was the only one I think I just really wanted to touch and feel

myself.

How does it feel?

Feels fantastic.

I couldn't believe it.

This is the first time I'm playing Zelda at 60 frames per second, you know?

So that's what it is.

It's pretty Zelda.

And I got, I don't know, got maybe 40% in, and I'm like, I'm just going to wait for the fucking Switch 2 version.

Like, I actually just had that thought.

I was like, because once you started building

large-scale materials, the game started to really not like you doing that.

You didn't see the console UI, right?

No, not at all.

Okay.

You couldn't.

I wonder if they're going to let you use the mouse to navigate.

Oh, that'd be crazy.

Right?

To just be like, to just quickly move around, like click on your game, Steam, shop.

That'd be fun.

browsing the eShop with a mouse would be really quick and convenient, you know.

You know what would be really awful, though?

If they're like, well, since mouse input's

a possibility, let's just use the destiny-style horrible controller moves a mouse cursor interface for everything.

Now, the cursor, now you have to select all your games from the fucking slow joystick thumbstick cursor.

Yeah, yeah, fuck that.

Yeah,

okay.

Did you try out fucking Waggle Fighter VI extreme modes?

No, I didn't.

I did not get to play Street Fighter VI.

Caliber Burner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I did play some Soul Calibur 2.

That was fun.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's Soul Calibur 2.

I love it.

Is it the exact same D-pad?

I know the sticks have gotten Dernow Hall effects.

No, they're not.

They unconfirmed that.

Oh, fuck off.

God damn it, dude.

I am surprised at that.

Shut the fuck up.

It's still going to stop working.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

Yeah.

What's going on D-pad-wise?

It's the same thing.

It sucks.

So, you know, yeah.

Pro controller, it is.

Or use the old one for you because it has the backpads.

And I mean,

it feels like

the magnetic thing.

Like, it says they said it's very strong, but I kind of like it's very sturdy i couldn't like i couldn't it feels sturdier than a regular switch honestly i feel like i think regular switch is like

okay well

when you get an intensity

give it a shot fucking rip those joy-cons off how dare you well no the question is more like is like are kids going to do that you know are they going to just not press the button and go meh because you go

listen man if the kids aren't going to be able to pull it apart but if a kid wants to fuck on not pay attention and destroy their handheld console they're going to figure out there's a there's a big piece of glass on the front of that thing well yeah but like the game boy that was made of gundanium alloy that as a kid was made for you to spike it like a football yeah but that thing weighed 45 pounds and it survived nukes right yeah and that is not the same handhelds that we have today

all right well just saying i mean the children the children destroy things this is a reality like for example Like, I mean, listen, listen,

I'm watching the Switch 2 thing, right?

And I'm like, oh, there's, I have a human baby.

There's a human child in my house that I need to get Mario Kart.

Like, that's just a fucking absolute mandatory expense, right?

And then my brain went, and the child will not be allowed to hold on to the Nintendo Switch 2 with their hands.

They will be handed a controller if need be.

Right.

Never the actual console.

Never, ever.

Right.

On that note, Pat, how was your week?

Not a whole lot of note.

I've been playing more Monster Hunter, been playing the usual stuff that I've been up to.

I went back and beat Home Safety Hotline,

the game about doing tech support for ghosts.

Great game, great final boss, great ending.

Just

super good.

What could a final boss be in a fucking phone helpline game?

That's interesting.

Do you want me to tell you?

Because it's very clear.

I bought it, so I'm going to check it out.

Yeah.

Okay.

The final boss is.

It's fairly difficult.

Okay.

I would say.

And let's see.

I went back to Hollow Knight.

I'm now streaming Hollow Knight again because I believe that Silk Song is for real this time.

Mainly because their PR guy is talking about what versions it's coming out on and they're uploading new screenshots, and there's new changes on the website.

Like, things are actually occurring with Silk Song.

You're getting bought in.

You're getting sconged.

You're getting duped.

Yeah.

But at the same time, like, Hollow Knight is absolutely incredible.

It's a fantastic video.

Darn, I'm playing one of the best games I've ever played in my life.

Of course.

That's the bit.

Are you starting from scratch?

Yeah, starting from scratch.

I deleted my file

at the very beginning, and my 102% file and everyone had a fucking conniption.

Yeah, why would you not just take the next one?

Why would I fucking why would I play a game in the fucking like bitch made slot two

instead of the fucking Chad slot one?

You know, just screaming about this and using like Wojax is not gonna make your deleting slot one shit make any sense.

No, no, do you want the answer?

Do you want the like the

fucking I made myself a Chad Beard guy that says yes, so I'm right.

And you're two.

And you're crying.

And you're soy, and you have thick glasses, so you're wrong.

Okay, no, do you want the real, like the real, real, real, real, real reason?

Not just goblins.

No, not just goblins.

Like, it is a real reason, but people will be like, that's crazy.

When I start the game, I don't want to hit down on the d-pad once to get to the second slot.

Yeah, that's still crazy.

That's nothing.

It's literally, that's nothing.

That's not a reason.

but like, yeah, but it's also nothing to delete the file because I'm not going to go back and play a completed file.

I guess.

That's, you know, I'm not.

I'm like, Wooly, do you load into your

fully completed Symphony of the Night file and go dick around in it?

Or do you start a new game?

When I started my, my, when I started Disco for a different run and I wanted to try out a different character, I didn't want to delete my last one.

You know, I kind of was like, okay, I have one.

When are you going to go back to it?

I don't know.

I might go.

I might Never.

The answer is never.

I've never known anyone to ever go back to any of these files.

Oh, look, I have an absolutely complete file.

The only thing they do is they go back to it and they look at it.

So that's not true because

there are times when, like, if I want to remember something for talking about it, like on video or on stream or something,

I might go back to like a, say, if I have from something earlier, you know, a metaphor, there's something from the end of that game that's like in my rotation that I want to go back and grab.

So having that around.

Yeah, yeah, but Woolly, okay, this is specific to you.

Yeah.

This is in the context of me planning to replay the whole thing.

The whole game again.

Right.

This is not in the context of I will never play the game again because why would I play it a second time?

So I need to keep the file so I can go look at it in case I forget.

I am planning to do the whole game again.

Sure, sure.

Just hitting that.

I just, I'm just hitting down on the deep pad is not a big deal.

You know, that's it.

That's the beginning and end of the thought.

Deleting the file isn't a big deal.

I guess for me, it feels like more of a loss, but you know, eh.

All right.

If you delete the file, how will you ever know you even played it?

I just.

It's like,

like, we're not, like, I'm like, I'm not even going to go down this road of like, no, but like, it's still that down is the problem, not the having the save file around or whatever.

How do you feel about this, Gene?

I see you percolating some thoughts.

Fucking.

But your rhetoric is up for framing it that way.

But go on.

No,

my face is because I'm reading an interview by Addie Shagar.

Oh, yeah.

So the other thing that I did...

You don't have to talk about his dad.

Have you seen...

There's a TV show called The White Lotus.

It takes place at a resort.

It's a drama series.

Me and Paige have been watching

over the past eight weeks.

Oh, Goggins.

That's right.

Yeah, because the Goggins is there.

Everyone's talking.

Here, it's very, very good.

It's all right.

Okay.

A lot of pop-offs in social media around the latest season of that.

So I was going to get around to that.

It's all right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You get to the end of the show and you're like, wow, there were like a lot of

storylines that just didn't go anywhere.

And then you find out that a bunch of them got cut, like that the resolutions to a bunch of storylines got cut, and you're like.

Although I do have to say, the Goggins Everywhere Systems feels like it's starting to be a thing because I was watching something.

I was watching something else entirely that I didn't realize that he was in.

I was watching it.

Like Invincible?

Invincible.

I didn't know that was him.

I didn't know that was him.

Yeah, that's crazy.

He's like, oh, shit.

So Paige and I were talking about this.

If you want to have a 40-ish-year-old guy play the most stressed person you've ever seen in your entire life

you need to go get Walton Goggins because in the shield and in this

like he he just plays like I'm so upset I'm sweating I'm so stressed out so it's weird because watching Invincible in particular, he plays Cecil and the character he plays, he does not look like a match for that face at all, right?

He's a balding

He's a balding old man with like he's got like the warped face and damage and stuff, but like he looks so much older than he sounds.

His voice is very young and sharp, you know, he's got that Paul Dobson kind of like grit underneath it or the Steve Bloom kind of thing.

And

it ends up working out really well, you know, and like by the time you go through it, you're like, oh, he's perfect.

He's a great voice actor.

But

it takes a minute

to attach.

Because, did you watch The Shield?

Did you guys watch The Shield?

But I heard.

So The Shield's pretty good.

Goggins plays

a piece of shit on that show.

Plays one of the dirty cops.

And on that show, this is like 20 years ago now.

He looks,

bluntly,

like

way uglier than he does now.

Like, he's in his 20s, and he looks like shit

compared to what he looks like now.

And

one of the things that is not helping him out is that his hair is leaving.

Like

it is padding away.

Like it is going away.

And all of a sudden, he got super ripped and somehow grew some of his hair back.

He's still balding.

But he's been balding for decades with more hair than what he started with.

So it looks like what he went and got plugs so he could look like an older guy who's kind of losing his hair instead of just getting the full head back.

Okay.

So you mentioned Cecil.

Like, yes, his future was Cecil.

Okay.

Like, that was what the Goggins was going to turn into before some

creative management.

Well, a couple more roles, and he'll just be the I can be anything guy, right?

Which is, you know, that's a cool place to be in.

But yes, yes, more to the point.

Look,

obviously, you know,

I'll just head this off at the pass.

I did not finish or start DMC yet, so I'll get around to that as soon as I can.

But I've, despite my best efforts, have had a full week and have not been able to get through it.

Too much of a drink.

Did you watch the whole thing?

I watched the whole thing, and I finished it yesterday.

I think I finished it the day before.

Yeah.

So I have some thoughts.

How Devil May Cry.

Please lead.

So Wooly, a little bit ago, when we watched that trailer that came out,

and I said,

I think the trailer looks okay.

Like I was like,

I was like,

and my basic takeaway was, I did not like that Ragne and what was it?

Agni and Rudra?

No.

Was I more negative than I was?

Yeah, you went, oh, that's a piece of shit, is what you said, verbatim.

And you said, this thing's going to be dog shit.

And I went,

I'm hoping it's going to be good.

You're like, why do they have heads?

I'm like, yeah, I don't know.

That is that, you know, but like

you were falling into my trap here, Wooly, because I was trying not to toot my own horn because I was super right.

Right.

And the fact that Agni and Rudra have heads is a really, really

good preview of what it should be.

I think it's with this thing.

Yeah.

So I've seen the energy.

I've seen the energy from outside the room.

I've heard the music and the thumping, and I'm hearing a lot of people are not very happy with it.

I've seen one or two people say they enjoyed it, but for the most part, the energy has been negative.

I would say...

While dodging spoilers.

So

it is better made than the older anime.

Okay.

Like it it is better acted.

It is has

more dialogue.

It's well acted action scenes unlike well acted.

And yeah, you're right.

There's no question there.

However,

I think that your personal enjoyment of the adaptation of the Devil May Cry video game series is inversely proportional to how much you personally enjoy the Devil May Cry video game series.

Because this is on its own show, like as a completely separate thing with no Dante and no lady and no demons and no Virgil, etc.

It's all right.

Okay.

Like it's okay.

Okay.

As an adaptation of Devil May Cry,

I would describe it as antithetical, anti-canon.

It is, it is

explicitly ignorant of all the things that you liked in Devil May Cry that were not wacky woohoo pizzaman.

Okay.

Okay.

It reads like a person wrote it after playing

Devil May Cry 5 only

and then

looked on Google for

wiki entries about the manga or DMC3 or whatnot.

Okay.

It's interesting because I'm thinking about how I watched Castlevania season one and two,

and as someone who was not strongly attached to Castlevania, I really enjoyed those shows, but I don't know if

that continues to be the case for anyone that's a Castlevania diehard.

And that's another Addie Shankar example, right?

This is the exact path this conversation was going to go.

Because Devil May Cry is a...

Would you agree, Gene, that it is a remarkably poor adaptation?

a thousand percent okay so castlevania is also not a particularly good adaptation and part of that is because castlevania 3 i don't know if that game even has any fucking dialogue story or dialogue yes that is a nest game and the story of castlevania 3 is there's a castle kill jerkala right now later on uh we have curse of darkness and lament of innocence where hector and isaac come from And then they were very, very, very substantially changed from their origins.

But the core of Castlevania for tons of games is Kill Dracula.

Right.

Is Dracula is a bad vampire.

Kill fucking Dracula.

So they had a lot of room

to work with.

There wasn't a series of detailed voiced cutscenes and

massive dialogue that had to fit into the characterization of these established tones.

So when I see Trevor Belt

super, super crass and super rude and

Alacard is very snippy and all that shit, I'm not really comparing that to any existing source material because Trevor Belmont, I think he only spoke in that, like, in the win quotes of the shitty Wii fighting game, Judgment, or whatever the fuck that was called.

There's not a lot to go on.

He was in Smash 2, and that's it.

Yeah.

And as long as they told their own decent story, which I think Castlevania, those first four seasons, are pretty good.

I like the second season the best, but shocker.

And it has really cool animated action,

and they include the gimmis.

They have the Morningstar whip.

They have, you know, crosses.

They kill vampires.

They have the music.

They have the right music in the right places.

That kind of thing.

Yeah, okay.

That season three was not great.

As somebody in the chat said it, and I have to agree.

So I look at these two, and they're like, they're not very faithful adaptations.

The problem here is that, like, Devil May Cry has like tons of voice acting, tons of cutscenes,

established characters, established way characters that,

established ways that characters act, talk to each other, establish voice actors.

So

when they're adapting it and they're using like Johnny Young Bosch does a pretty good job.

I think Johnny Young Bosch is great.

I think

they should have picked literally anyone else to be Dante because this isn't like bad casting.

This is like the wrong person

is playing Dante.

It's, in fact, the only

wrong person that could get to play Dante.

And for no fault of his own, certainly.

Yeah.

Right?

And because

I know Johnny Young Bosch as Nero, it takes me out of it.

Whereas somebody who didn't have that association wouldn't have a problem with that.

And he's a great voice actor.

Yeah.

So

something I've heard come up as well well is that like a lot of I've seen pop I've seen popping up saying, this is Addie's fan fiction story, right?

And

the question there is, that in and of itself is not like a damning indictment

unless it's poorly done and I guess you're...

I guess in what you're saying is like if it's like betraying some of the existing material there, right?

If someone creates something and goes, yeah, this is not canon, this is its own world, but it's still an interesting treatment of existing property and material, then

that could be fine, right?

So it's not canon.

It is wildly, insanely not canon.

It is as not canon as you could get.

And they set that up right away because there is no magic

in this.

Everything is technology.

Demon magic?

That's actually demons being really advanced with quantum entanglement.

Lots of technobabble.

They take the time to actually explain that.

The amulet, Sparta's amulet,

that is a wormhole generator.

That is

for using quantum entanglement.

They have a dedicated scientist character in the first couple of episodes who will point at things that would be magic and explain the magic.

That's uh, and give you some Star Trek psychobabble.

Yeah,

we're explaining this instead of seeing Dante do cool stuff by the way.

Okay, so the first episode is really so Agni and Ruger are red and blue for scientific reasons, right?

Yes.

No, it's still magic, but they're using quantum demons, would just have natural quantum entanglement.

Okay,

this goes on further in the metaphor because it's not like it's hell, but it's not hell hell they're not really demons they're actually like aliens oh so it's just science fiction that's forcing its way into the setting without just hell having demons and magic bullshit like it's for it's changing the genre into sci-fi yeah a little bit yeah

it's kind of like doom 2016 yeah it's kind of yeah um right

and um furthermore

when sparta wakes up to justice, which is never said, by the way, the phrase

woke up to justice is not in the thing,

and he seals off the human realm and the demon realm.

This is a minor spoiler for two or three episodes in.

You know how demons present and devils present in the Devil May Cry series as 99.99% slobbering freak beasts that are demons?

And then there's the cool, super strong ones.

In the Devil May Cry television show,

99.9% of demons are

people

that are also just aliens.

And

Sparta woke up to justice and sealed them off, and that's a problem.

So hell is

just an alternate reality where

quantum entangled demons exist.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

It starts to get

the metaphors that they are using for the story start to get really messy and kind of gross.

You know, Dante has his moment where he turns into a devil.

He's a devil trigger, right?

I have a lot of words to say about that, but I'll let you get to that.

He describes it as being overcome with rage and hate and violence

but we just established that devils are just like regular people so

what the fuck what no no that doesn't make any sense bro

um

so the whole theme of even a devil may cry

doesn't make any sense at all Like at all.

Also, the part where he's half human and half devil, and they're both parts of him, and

you're rejecting one.

Well, what is he overcoming if devils are just like regular people?

And then we come to

well,

if devils are just regular people,

well, we need to have

characters really fight that narrative.

So, what we're going to do

is turn Lady into the worst character I have ever seen in my life.

Gene, can you back me up on that?

The biggest problem with the show is the portrayal of Lady and how she is a completely unlikable person.

Doesn't really have an arc that

doesn't really have an arc, kind of.

She's

kind of awful the whole time.

SWAT team, Tech Soldier, Lady?

No, more like

Word.

More like America Defense Force.

I am so sorry.

America Defense Force.

Okay.

Okay.

But dress in the fucking skin of Captain Commando.

Yeah, she's dressed up like Captain Commando, and

she is the worst example I have seen to date of this character needs to stop swearing.

Every single line of dialogue has one or two

F-bombs in it.

Edgy to the max.

Insanely unlikable.

Her own narrative doesn't make any sense.

She is stupid.

Like, she's actively stupid.

She's stupid.

She's not a good shot.

She's not a good shot.

She's She's missing all the time.

I really

shooting anything.

When she hits something, it's because the story needs to progress.

And the story says now is the time for Lady to shoot somebody.

Or she would sneak up on somebody and shoot them because they didn't know she was there.

But other than that, though, she is missing like 99% of her shots.

Well, if I just, I would say.

I really would say that

Lady is actually the series' main character.

I'm pretty sure she has more scenes than Dante.

Yeah.

Wow.

And Woolley, let me ask you,

if there was a big fight

and

Dante was able to fight Agni and Rudra and Angelo Calavier and Echidna from DMC4 to a standstill, would you think that's maybe pushing it?

If Dante could fight all of them together at the same time to a standstill.

Yeah.

Young early Dante.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so, perhaps.

Okay, well, what if Lady did?

Okay, okay.

I really enjoyed Lady's simple but basic arc that was really angry about her parents

stubborn kid, into

like the chilled-out version who looks at Nero and goes, it's true, you never forgive yourself for that, or you never recover from killing your parents, and just kind of has a little

arc in the background.

And that's what I enjoy about her.

That is what we enjoy about her.

So you're like, okay, well, it's not, it is not the same universe.

This is a different interpretation interpretation of the character.

Right up until Ari Shakar says that actually this is stuff that he felt was going on in the background that you couldn't see in Devil May Cry 3.

And this is the real version of Lady that was always there.

And this is very accurate to the character.

And you're like, no!

Do you remember?

When he made all those tweets about how Virgil was actually a hero.

Misunderstood.

And anti-hero was misunderstood in the joke of the music.

And then he rolled those back and was like trolling.

And then we saw the stage play character and stuff.

I don't think he was trolling.

I think he was lying.

I think he was lying when he backpedaled.

I think he was like

super serious.

I don't think he really believes all that shit.

I just, well, I just, you know, I'll go experience this myself and see what's going on, but I definitely am curious about the things where there's like each season is going to have different flavors to it, and there's a whole arcade

multiple seasons and talking about it from that kind of like larger perspective.

It's like,

it's not a Castlevania situation where you jump forward a generation and bring in a whole new cast of characters, right?

So whatever the groundwork is from here is the groundwork that has to go forward.

Huh.

Okay.

So I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to talk around this in a way that I hope isn't specific enough, but it needs to be said and I need to talk to Gene about it.

If you you need me to just...

No, no, I need you to hear it.

I need to talk to you about it.

And I'm going to dance around in a way that you'll get the gut gist, but not the specifics.

So one of the things that I was struggling to articulate until someone I was talking to mentioned it to me was the Roland song in the intro, right?

And Evanescence.

And it was like...

Well, because that's the kind of music that was popular and came out in 2003, 2004, 2005 when DMC3 came out.

So it seems really appropriate.

And I didn't really have

a good

gist of why I thought that wasn't perfect.

I was like, oh, that's really cool, putting an evanescent song.

And Roland's fun for the title.

It wasn't the music in the games at the time.

Right.

So I was like, oh, well, that's promotional stuff.

Oh, no, that's the whole anime soundtrack.

Okay.

That's licensed stuff.

Yeah.

That doesn't bother me as much.

No, I'm building this.

Okay, okay.

I'm building a song.

Okay.

And they've said that, you know, certain songs from the Devil May Cry series are going to be present in key moments and stuff like that.

You're like, okay.

Because, you know, the original, the games tend to have an industrial metal kind of, or then sometimes some dance music kind of thing in there, like EDM.

And like, that's fine, it's a different thing.

But

more specifically, it is the soundtrack of 2005, 2004, 2003.

And

the show takes place in

the mid-aughts, right?

And it's very like grounded in that, and the sound is leading to that.

And the themes

of this taking place in New York City are also extraordinarily strongly grounded in the early to mid-aughts United States

in a way that

is

wildly

out of touch for the Devil May Cry show, where he fights demons and goes, wahah, wacky woohoo man.

And

I'm sitting there, and I know, and Gene, I was talking to you about this.

You're sitting there about halfway through the show,

and you're looking at it like, are we fucking, are we doing this?

Really?

We're doing, ah, this is, this is where the show is going.

Really?

Huh.

Okay.

All right.

To add to that,

I learned that Addie Shankar moved to the United States two days.

He moved to Rhode Island.

Rhode Island.

Not New York City, not New Jersey.

Rhode Island two days before 9-11 happened.

And then so now I'm seeing all these tweets that were very vague about the show saying why didn't Dante stop 9-11?

And then I watched the show and I was like, oh, I get

why they were saying that.

Well, the other thing is that, you know,

Roland,

the biscuit song, the music piece,

filmed on top of the World Trade Center.

World Trade Center, yeah.

Mr.

President,

it's all connected.

Mr.

President, a second Argo Sax has hit the tower.

The fucking demon in DMC2 that comes out of that building sure does look like a giant demon terrorist attack.

You know,

Woolly?

Wooly?

Wooly?

There's one good episode here.

And when I say good, I mean great.

There is one great episode in here.

And it is the episode that has no dialogue.

There is an episode that has no speaking at all.

until the last like 90 seconds.

And then it goes terrible game.

And I was like, this is awesome.

Like, this is great.

And then Lady speaks at the end of it, and the episode is ruined.

Yep.

It is like a microcosm of the experience of watching the show where you're like, yeah, oh, we're doing, oh, Lady talks.

Oh, gross.

Oh, is there.

I guess the one thing that I was curious about is, is there a style meter

present at any point?

That's a great question.

And this is like where I'm living with it.

Where it's like, so Castlevania was

not super faithful and its political themes were religious.

And that makes sense because vampires.

Yep.

But regardless of its lack of faithfulness in a lot of cases, you would get some

fucking incredible animated action scenes.

like the season four Day Armor and, you know, Alucard versus Trevor and the fight against Dracula.

Just like just peak, like animated action scenes.

And that would have helped if I was annoyed by the lack of faithfulness.

It would have been really nice if I wasn't bored during all of Devil May Cry's action scenes.

They're not good.

They're fine.

I was talking to a friend of the show.

who pointed out that it's Studio Mir who does the animation for this,

that the

action scenes they animated for the Boondocks are of a significantly higher quality

than the ones they animated here.

I did see some scenes using 3D in some of the footage that was showing off, and I did see there was a lot more than I expected there to be.

That's not just that highway scene, that kind of is a persistent thing, I guess.

There's more.

Gene,

what was your experience watching it?

Well,

real quick, the interview that I was making BD Eyes earlier on, it has to do with this, and this is not a spoiler, but it's Addie Shankar talking about how this is inspired by the movies of the 2003s,

Mission Impossible 2, Underworld, The Matrix.

And he says, But one of the things, quote, but one of the things I found when I watched these movies is the villain was...

didn't really reflect my experience of life where I found that everyone is the hero of their own story.

The villain has a story going on in their head in which they are the hero.

They are sometimes a victim, sometimes not, but they are the hero.

And I'm like, why don't these blockbusters ever explore that?

So that's kind of like

the level of thinking and inspiration going here.

And he ends this interview by saying, I am absolutely the white rabbit, which is the villain.

Right, the

character.

I would like to recommend Incredible.

He did so.

He's chewing up the scenery, and he's great.

I would love to hear Rabbit talk.

Yeah, Hoon Lee, great actor.

Sorry, Willie Williams.

No, I just, there's nothing, like, providing that you're saying that

when a villain is misguidedly thinking they are correct in their actions and convicted by them, that's good.

But there's a lot of things that explore that from

Chan Park movies.

I would recommend all of those, really, for great examples of it.

Like various manga and stories we can describe where there's a compelling villain who's like, I believe I am correct and I'm doing the right thing.

Like, yes, that is good, and that does get explored.

That's a strange thing.

I think that

White Rabbit is super compelling, actually.

I think the villain of the show, White Rabbit, is by far the best part.

Every time he's on screen, the best part of the show.

He's so excited.

And part of that compellingness is because

mistakes were made in the genesis of the show's premise that

give the villain a little bit more juice uh uh more morality-wise than he should have oh okay okay are we hitting that magneto style like it's not quite there but it's like it's it's quite close

like the whole yeah yeah pretty close actually it's like okay like like there's horrible things happening here but let him cook let him let him cook yeah

yeah um okay you can also feel like that this thing was like trapped in some kind of dev hell

because a main character that is in every single episode of the show is voiced by Kevin Conroy.

Yes, it's his final role, right?

That's a shame.

Raw Julia.

He's not used well either.

Raw Julia.

No.

So when I walked away from his show, when I tweeted, I said I called it mean-spirited.

Wow.

Yeah.

Because

that's how I felt.

Interesting.

I felt that the show is mean.

So when Pat says that it is antithetical to the spirit of the games, when you walk away from a Devil May Cry game, you know, you feel empowered, excited, exhausted, but enthralled.

Kind of looking forward to the future.

Oh, I just named our shop.

You know, oh, I didn't die in DMC2 for some reason, you know.

Oh,

you know, my family is still alive.

Oh, the legacy is being continued on, like in DMC4.

When you end DMC the series, you just feel like, ugh, and the characters didn't really do anything or feel anything that was exciting or fun or hopeful.

You just kind of end on like an ugh note.

And like, I can't even say more without spoiling it, but it just, you leave feeling bad and not excited

and not like energy.

Okay, go ahead.

I just want to grab this.

So Paige and I have a baby, which means our time watching television is highly regulated to the minutes after a baby falls asleep, usually around 9.30, 10 p.m., right?

So we have to be like really like, you know, on ball.

Like, are we watching something?

If we're going to watch it, it has to be, you know, scheduled.

We have to plan for it.

And it's valuable, right?

So halfway through the second episode, Paige went to bed.

Okay.

She just got up and said, enjoy your show, and went to bed.

But then,

and I mean this, I mean this, when I finished the TV show, I went, yo, Paige, you got to get in here.

And she's like, what?

You have to watch the last actual five minutes of this show.

And she walked in and just went, what the fuck is going on?

What the fuck is this?

And

so I was like, kind of not enjoying it.

And I was like, I don't think this is very good.

And then it like, it dive bombs straight into the toilet

on the finish line.

Interesting.

Okay.

Okay.

It's

another thing I'll say.

So is it, it is, so I'm, yeah, I'm really curious because, again, like, hearing all this, I'm like, okay, I'm still

going to go in and.

Oh, you've got to watch it.

I want to talk to you.

You've got to watch it.

Yeah, Yeah, but I'm going to go in clear because

what I'm hearing doesn't sound great, but I'm going to be as whiteroom with it as possible.

But

the

let me.

Yeah, go ahead.

No, no, go ahead.

Oh, I just want to add one more thing about the action sequences that Pat said, where he said they were not good and not exciting, right?

I will, it's not a spoiler that Devil Trigger happens in the show, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, no, I, I, uh, but

I would assume so.

We are all Devil May Cry fans.

We love and worship at the altar of Devil May Cry 3.

I think we all can understand that the moment Dante becomes Devil Trigger in Devil May Cry 3 is an incredibly inspiring hype moment where he met his match and he realized he needed to discover more about himself to be able to fight in this very difficult struggle and overcome the challenge, right?

Devil Trigger in this show reminded me, like, it's like if Goku went Super Saiyan when he was fighting Nappa.

Like, dramatically,

that's kind of like, like, in DMC3, that's like the Frieza moment, right?

Where you're just like, oh, this is the time where he has to go Devil Trigger, right?

This is the Shonen moment.

This is the Super Sentai moment, right?

But it's like dramatically if Goku decided to just go Super Saiyan early and when he's fighting Nappa and then he loses.

You understand what I'm saying?

And he will lose.

Okay.

It's.

Am I right, Pat?

Yeah, yeah, I know, you know.

Also,

the timing of what you say works well, because you know when Goku goes Super Saiyan on the Piccolo planet, and it has

the floating rocks, and it has

the good background.

I think it's like dark green to contrast with the the the bright yellow hair i don't think

my hero academia blue skies

in at noon to 1 p.m in the middle of the afternoon was the right place to show off the devil trigger transformation in fucking full view with no shading.

I think that was a bad art decision that makes it look way worse.

Because you see the DT at night in the show with shading.

It looks

better.

But

on a fucking blue Photoshop background with nothing,

it's

tonally, aesthetically, it just feels completely off.

And it's like, why is this the first time we're seeing Devil Trigger?

Okay, I guess.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Can I also make a minor complaint?

I think it is wrong for characters in a Devil May Cry property to say the words Devil Trigger out loud with their mouth.

I think that is wrong to do.

Yeah,

I'm going to agree with that because

in my perspective, that is something where Virgil is like, no, that is my true form.

That is my father's form.

And for him, he's like, I hate this, actually.

I'm like my mom.

Leave me alone, right?

So that's just two sides of the coin that they are as the duality of human and demon.

Okay.

Well, I mean, look,

they sell dope.

So I've seen some bits.

I've seen the like, oh, wacky woohoo pizza man has done irreparable harm to the Devil They Cry franchise and

the idea that like

as an outside observer, looking at it simply for that being what it is.

And I guess almost like looking at like, you know, old God of War is like Kratos' angry killer godman.

You know, there's, there's a one, there's a singular dimension to this.

And

like, now here's the thing is, with the idea of a lot of that being misunderstood, I definitely don't want to go in setting expectations to be like, no, Devil May Cry is like, this is a Harry Du Bois level character that we need to

sink into.

Like, you know what I mean?

I'm like, dying is not that deep.

No, and so with, so my, my kind of of hope with this show, I guess, and expectations were in terms of what I'm setting it at, it has been just like, well, it's not just wacky woohoo pizza, man, but I'm just kind of hoping, okay, if we're getting sad boys masking their sadness with style and pizza and such, then sure, right?

We're a little bit closer to that part of it.

There's the bit of like family, there's the bit of, you know, the demon lineage and legacy exactly in finding your own thing, separation versus unity, yada yada, right?

But I guess the whole thing with it and why I was looking at the trailer going, okay, let's see how this goes, is because I was also very prepared and still am for like a one-piece live action style.

Oh, this is not the thing you love, but yeah,

that was an interesting thing, right?

And

like I also feel that, you know, when we talk about adaptations and things, like and how they're not necessary and all that bit i'm like yeah no devil may cry fret medium without gameplay is ever going to

encapsulate what that thing is and why i care about it fully and in the same when i talk about the other things i love where i'm just like yeah we don't need to see this shift into that uh uh space necessarily With this, it's like, okay, Netflix adaptations of things are going to happen.

They're going to do this.

There's no way to be like, the games are fine.

We don't need this.

It is what it is.

My hope is that you would get a short and sweet, completely different thing

that was still just like, okay, well, that's fine for what it was.

Right.

But I also say that about One Piece while having zero connection to the original source material there as well, mind you, right?

Yeah.

So

One Piece is a bad example to use as something different.

One Piece Netflix is like more faithful to One Piece than the Lord of the Rings films are.

Okay.

Like, like, it is, is, it is, it is, like, because

he was there overseeing them, right?

Yeah, the changes that it makes are the changes that are required for TV.

Okay.

But, like, it is, it is absolutely like we're doing a One Piece.

And because Oda was there, and Oda had the kill switch, he could ripcord it at any time.

Gotcha.

Okay, okay.

Yeah, so it's more faithful then than as a thing.

Okay, right.

Fair enough.

I think it's closer to the Cowboy Bebop Netflix show, honestly.

Well, yeah,

trying to think of

an example of something perhaps that was like a short and sweet but different thing that was like, this is not at all what the source thing was.

But in the end, for its own thing, I was like, yeah, that's fine.

It's just a different thing over there.

Well, right down to Faye Valentine saying, Welcome to the ouch, motherfuckers.

I'm going to say something brave.

Okay, here we go.

This television show

does not feel like Devil May Cry at all.

I would say at all.

This television show feels like it came out of the same writer's notebook

that DMC Devil May Cry came out of.

In tone, in characterization, in style.

I did not ask the obvious question, but the obvious question remains in the air.

I might even go further and say I think DMC Devil May Cry by Ninja Theory is a better written piece of work

than the show because when I say that it is mean spirited you know spoiler alert for DMC

when you think about mean spirited in the original DMC game you think about the moment

you think about the sniper moment, right?

You think about the sniper moment in DMC, right?

And why that was mean-spirited and gross, right?

But it also fed into the arc of Virgil becoming a scumbag.

It fed into the narrative that, oh,

this guy, Virgil, my brother, might not be a really good guy to align with.

But when gross and mean things happen in Devil May Cry, the Netflix series, I feel like it's not necessary because we already know things about that character that is only getting worse now.

The sniper moment gives a chance for Ninja Theory's Dante to go, What the fuck is wrong with you?

Holy shit!

And that kind of just never happens

in the movies.

It doesn't ever happen at all.

I'm not describing Lady as like particularly detestable.

Do you like Dante?

Lady is a Hitler in this show.

I'm so serious.

It's so she's a genocidomaniac.

Yeah, Jesus.

I have never seen a character swing so hard in one direction.

Do you like Dante?

Dante.

He's cool.

He's

too dumb.

He's dumb, and there is a story change to him that drastically changes the dynamic of how he interacts with the world and the story.

This is the second episode.

It's the second episode.

We find out something about this version of Dante that dramatically changes how he interacts with every single thing of the story.

Yeah.

Do you mind, Wooly?

It's an episode two.

Sure.

He doesn't know that Sparta is his father.

Okay.

Okay.

He doesn't know he's a demon either.

Okay.

So.

Okay.

Well, so

the damage, the damage is happening.

He doesn't know he's half demon either.

He doesn't know he's half demon either.

No, no, no, no, because personality needs to help.

Okay.

Fuck me.

That

affects everything.

That touches everything.

That's really not a good change to make.

It's pulling on a thread that keeps the garment together.

Oh, fuck.

Shit.

Fucking tasting blood.

Oh, my God.

Damn, that sucks, man.

Okay.

Oh, man.

The frenzy meter is going up right now.

Jesus.

Because I was about to ask, because I said, do you like Dante?

And then you said this.

And then I was going to ask, do you like Virgil?

No.

Okay.

No.

No.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

Gene, you with me on that?

Oh, yeah.

No.

I mean, how can you?

Okay.

You know?

Also of note is that existing songs in Devil May Cry are used nearly exclusively for a cappella slow credits.

Mad World style Gears of War, you know, slow down, car commercial slowdown.

There are like

three instances of like 30 seconds of famous songs playing throughout the show.

If Devil Trigger had no guitars or no drums or no

Devil Trigger in this show is bad.

I heard that it is bad.

It is a bad rendition of Devil Trigger.

Casey Edwards had a remix or something like that.

Well, you got to save the standard.

It'd be great if Casey Edwards had a remix.

I'm sorry.

No, I said you got to save the original version for Nero, right?

I guess.

You're going to reach that far.

I'm really stuck on the differences between a coming-of-age tale with a character that doesn't know he's this special

boy

versus the one who grew up with his family but didn't fully accept all of himself and the difference between him and his twin.

I'm going to save you from that dichotomy right now.

And the parental coming in of age story because he doesn't come of age.

Okay.

Okay.

That character development does not occur.

If he came of age, I would not be saying this, this is antithetical to DMC when you walk away from the ending feeling bad.

That's part of the bad feeling.

Just exit the story the same way they came in.

Yeah.

That's part of the bad feeling.

It's like, oh, nothing happened with that character.

And the other part, well,

I guess I shouldn't say too much because I'm still going to, I'll see.

But I guess I'm just thinking about how

there's so much grounded in, obviously, like, you know, the lineage, the family, et cetera, how everything they are,

the majority of their struggles.

But then also, how every other demon interfaces with Dante and Virgil is in relation to who the fuck their father was.

100% of the demons they talk to are all like, oh, oh, you're his kid, huh?

Oh, yeah, okay.

Well, I got a story about him, you know?

So

don't worry, because the demons have more dialogue with Lady than they do with Dante.

Okay.

Oh, yeah, totally.

Okay.

Yeah.

What does that mean?

Also, you can really tell during the writing process when Shakar watched the raid.

Shankar?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Totally.

Yeah.

Oh, so this is my I'm glad you brought him up.

I'm not watching his name.

I'm not

Addie Shankar.

Sorry.

That's I don't want to.

Addie Shankar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is my first exposure to Addie Shankar.

Well, I watched the Castlevania show, right?

But this is my first exposure to Addie Shankar as a person and as a personality.

You know, he has that pinned tweet of him addressed as Dante.

And if you notice, you know, and, you know, a good friend pointed this out, you look at his amulet, the Sparta amulet, and it is not the Sparta amulet from the regular series.

It is part of the the DMC, it's the DMC amulet.

It's a DMC reboot one, right?

So that might be informative.

That, on top of, and we already kind of touched on like, you know, how this show kind of touches on U.S.

imperialism and la de la, and not to get too spoilery, but it does do that, right?

It's hard to take that stuff

and not see it as disingenuous when he, just a couple months ago, uh, was attending the inauguration festivities for Donald Trump.

Uh, and I'm not

Don't point that out.

I think I can guess.

Have nothing to do with it.

Nothing.

No.

I think I can guess something about what you're saying, though, in terms of like, well, now I'm imagining with these, you know, very similar to human ass demons and Lady being, as you're describing her, like a fucking goose-stepping, you know,

marching Ziegeiler.

I'm kind of of like I'm calling Lady a Hitler in this show.

I mean it with my whole chest.

It's so extreme.

So I'm just kind of autocompleting the like

occupation of the demon world and the subjecting demons to, you know, yes,

yeah, yeah.

That'd be crazy.

Yeah, so, you know, what if we look at demons as people that are being colonized?

And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

But they never tell stories like this, Willie.

They never do.

Um, they never do.

Gene, you brought up that he cosplayed uh Dante at WWE Raw, and uh, I think the

actual damning indictment of that is that he's not smiling in the photo that he asked to be took and staring directly into the hard camera.

And it makes me think about, like,

Willie, we've talked about it over and over on the show.

It's like Dante is supposed to be a guy who is cool without smoking and

implicit, doesn't swear either.

Nero is like edgy and crass because he says shit.

Dino, on the other hand, smokes and bangs girls and fucking does the and does it while

streaming every day.

That's kind of what we got going on.

It's like,

fuck smoking.

Let's do drugs and swear every day.

Like, it's just, it just feels like

okay.

So, and not to say that attending any Donald Trump or anything means anything.

I'm just saying

to attend the inauguration ceremonies, like I, as somebody who has attended events with the presidents there and the White House, there are several steps along the way where you are making several decisions to continue to make that decision to attend these

festivities, including Secret Service background checks.

And you could just be like, man, this is kind of weird.

Maybe I should just not go.

But no, he just continued.

He committed to every single step to make it all the way up here so he can walk around the crowds and be like, wow, look at the crowds for the new president right now.

So

I guess he's

basically he's the kind of director that you guys are saying took something of his own and put that

into the IP, which a lot of

good directors do do that.

Absolutely.

But in this case, it's replacing what was there instead of like

I think the main problem is that the

specific nature of the commentary he wants to make is an incredibly clumsy and bad fit for Devil May Cry.

Like it is.

Like this is,

I remember there was an interview with Stan Lee in which he described that the analog of the X-Men to

gay people

was not perfect because gay people can't shoot laser beams out of their eyes.

It is way more awkward than that.

Also, something, something, civil rights and something, something.

And a million other versions of oppressed people in general and such.

I think,

yeah.

Well, none of those groups can shoot lasers out of their eyes either.

So the point more or less stands.

The fuck you know about black people, Pat.

I know you can't.

If you could shoot lasers out of your eyes, I would be in a crater somewhere 18, 19 years ago when you got sick of my shit and kicked me out of your house.

Or you wouldn't have been freaked out when that guy broke into your house to play Guilty Gear because you could have just laser beamed him out the window.

Well, he too was

true.

He also had to lay.

That's true.

It would have been a stalemate laser battle.

Sometimes we've got to save some shit and not tell y'all about everything.

All right?

The memo went around.

Listen, the electric powers are super real, by the way.

Yeah, I haven't seen them, but you know, I'll take your word.

We absolutely conduct electricity.

Just so you know, we wear yellow and we conduct electricity.

Don't get it twisted.

It's funny to think about this part where I kind of

describing,

you know, I guess the messaging and the personal story kind of put into this.

Because

the stuff that was like catching our attention about DMC back in the day, just like cool action, you know, air combos, doing the style of game,

having gameplay be as stylish as a really awesome cutscene be.

It's become more and more regular to games to kind of like do the thing that Devil May Cry once was special for doing, right?

Like, you're now seeing Final Fantasy be like, Yeah, we're gonna do some of that, right?

People have described for me like they're like Kingdom Hearts at peak is doing some crazy character action stuff.

And oh, yeah, absolutely.

And now we've got fucking, you know, you got your Zenlazone Zeros, Genshin Impacts, and Grand Blue all kind of doing little bits there too.

So that has been, you know, an interesting journey of watching things get more over the top with it.

But at the same time, in animation, animation, a lot of studios are also doing crazy high octane, Naruto, insane scenes, you know, of like Sakuga moments that have also become more frequent and they're become less of a rare thing.

So

when I think about Devil May Cry, I think there's probably a good number of choices you could have gone to to fit the action of what I want a Dante action scene to look like, you know?

There's a lot of different studios or places where they could have hit Sakuga.

So it kind of makes it more almost important to be like, okay, these people could have done really cool choreography, but

who's going to handle the rest of it?

Right?

And like that stuff becomes more important as a result because if it wasn't necessarily Studio Mirror, I don't think it would have been like, I mean, they're a very good studio, but I think there's others that definitely could do cool shit with characters slamming into walls, flipping off of them, and, you know, like, like, like dashing into, zooming, like all the effects and Itano circuses that we're seeing all over the place.

Like, a lot of the people making and directing action now grew up watching a lot of things like that and are inspired by that.

So, take that same rhythm into choreography, you know?

So, um,

they're kind of in a bad spot with this because whoever is gonna be directing this at this action in the Double Man Cry series is having to compete with Yuji Shimomura,

And that's hard because

the guy who worked with Kitamura on fucking Versus and went on to direct the action cutscenes and Bayonetta and Devil May Cry and Death Strant.

That's tough to reach.

And there's your direct one-to-one comparison, right?

It's like, this is the level of

bombastic action I expect out of Devil May Cry.

And I know that because I can watch

a Devil May Cry 5 or Devil May Cry 3 cutscene

and it's right there.

On the other hand, you have

Powerhouse Animation Studios who worked on the Castlevania series, and you're like, okay, well, for a Netflix-produced animated series featuring action game characters, this is the

expectation of what I think it would look like.

And these comparisons are unfavorable.

As direct as they are and as brotherly and

closely related as they are,

they're unfavorable.

The action in the Devil May Cry show is

fine.

It's there.

And it should be amazing.

It should be.

Yo, I don't care if this show sucks.

Look at these action scenes.

I'm putting that commercial from DMC2 where he breaks through the church glass window in to my outro because look at that shit, even though it's Devil May Cry 2.

Yeah.

Okay.

Like, why is the Devil May Cry show about air combos

significantly worse in action choreography than seven seasons of Avatar

made off of a budget of nothing?

I guess one

last bit I'm curious about here, because again, I feel like with Castlevania and Addie being the director there, it's just such a straight point of comparison.

And that was generally a success, minus, I guess, the seasons you said that, you know,

perhaps fell off.

When Castlevania did go bad for those seasons, did it...

One bad season.

A one bad season.

Okay, okay.

It wasn't that bad either.

Three is very mid, and four is pretty good.

Okay, okay, okay.

Because I was going to ask if it goes off for similar reasons in that it's like, is it about lack of faithfulness?

Is it about just the new shit not being that compelling?

You know,

does it stray in a similar way?

I can tell you what it is.

Season three has the overwhelming feeling of, we got the green lit for another season.

We don't know what to do with it.

Okay, a feeling of filler.

And

it is filler.

The dialogue also takes.

Kind of spinning wheels.

Yeah.

Kind of spinning wheels.

Narratively doesn't really go that far.

Characters, you know, the characters have an arc, but like, it's just, it just kind of happens.

There's also in something in season four of Castlevania that

is a one-off note that shows up in DMC Devil May Cry, and it's a scene in which Trevor holds up a cross,

and

Sifa says to him, Oh, yeah, the cross.

Vampires hate the cross because of God.

And he goes, Nah,

their eyes have weird convex parts of them for predator vision.

So, right angles on any architecture or object make them anxious and upset.

And it's just this absolutely ridiculous desire to demystify fucking vampires.

I totally forgot about that.

And Death May Cry has that all over the place.

I'm like, I don't get it.

Why can't it just be magic?

You have, you, they spend probably 15 to 20 total minutes over the course of eight episodes with exposition that only exists to tell you this isn't magic.

It's not magic.

It is science.

Magic's not real.

It's not real.

These guns are special.

These guns are not magic.

These are special tech.

Okay.

Oh, by the way, Dante barely shoots guns, by the way.

Yeah, too.

And it's just like, but why?

You could have saved so much time.

What was the purpose of...

We're talking about demons from hell.

Like,

plasma's turning into.

Oh, man, you know what?

Can I pull out a plinket-ism

for this?

So, one of the big complaints that Red Letter Media made about the directing style of the prequels was that every single time someone drops the lightsaber, the movies cut to a dropped lightsaber reaction shot.

Like, it is a 100%

hit rate.

In Devil May Cry, you have a character named Plasma.

He's the bat Cyclops guy made out of electricity that can turn into other characters.

And every single time he shows up on screen

as a different character that you saw him turn into, he will turn to the camera and flash his eyes red and go a little electricity-wise to make sure that you know

that that's plasma transformed.

That's plasma.

Action figure shot.

Yeah.

Okay.

Maybe you were doing the laundry while streaming the show in the background.

So we just want to make sure that you know that this guy is not actually the guy.

Man.

And yeah, seriously, this is like,

it's crazy every single time.

I guess it's just, it joins, you know, other company then, because really.

It seems like almost everything has struggled to adapt to Devil Day Cry when we think about like, there's not just, you know, DMC, Don't Dino, but there's also that comic book series that was really weird that I've got sitting around somewhere.

There was the manga.

I feel like Visions of V is the one that I hear

people really like, that I see getting used a lot as like a solid adaptation that was like faithful and expanded on the source material in a way that people are like, well, no, this is canon.

But just about every other version of it, I feel like, has just been like, oh my God, like the less we say about that, the better.

I think Devil McCry has shown itself to be uniquely difficult to adapt.

And I think there's a version of that thing you were just saying, Willie.

There's one of them you forgot: is that Devil May Cry has not just struggled to be adapted into TV and comics and manga, it has also struggled to be adapted into its own video game

by different people.

It is a very specific team with a very specific, sincere vision.

And it makes me think of

this show being the Ace Combat Assault Horizon

to the Ace Combat series.

A series that I love Ace Combat.

And I don't love Ace Combat just for planes shooting at each other.

I love Ace Combat for its absurdly emotional and sincere storytelling that is totally ridiculous in a dogfighting game.

I love the music.

And

kind of the same here with Devil May Cry.

Devil May Cry is hyper-sincere, despite the fact that it's stupid as shit.

So I guess I wonder then, like,

you know, we often talk about,

you know, when we say like, it'suno, talking about, like, the gameplay, and we talk about like Kamiya back in the day and, you know, all that.

But

the stories were always written by Bingo Morihashi.

And that's just right you know writer over at Capcom doing the scenario planning and everything and I'm kind of wondering like is that is this a kind of case where you like like with One Piece or with Oda you're just gonna be like hey can you oversee this and you know pull a plug or press a button if you need to to just see if it's coherent if it passes a sanity check

I don't know that Capcom necessarily would have sent anyone over to be like you know

review this to see if it if it takes or not.

They were also telling Ninja Theory to go further and further with Dino back in the day.

They were not different enough,

right?

But yeah, I kind of just wonder about the whole like, hey, the adaptation that worked for Netflix was the one where there was oversight from the original kind of creator of sorts.

And it's just, it's weird in Devil May Cry's case because it feels like you don't need to be like have the writer looking over it because it's, it is, it is pretty simple.

Um, I imagine there's a million ways to fuck up One Piece, just like there was a million ways to fuck up Cowboy Bebop and Death Note, right?

This shouldn't require that, but maybe it just needs it, you know?

I don't know.

Anyway,

okay.

Okay.

Yeah, so there are a lot of people who like this, and as a show, completely by itself,

absent of the world it exists in, this is probably a pretty enjoyable watch.

But every second,

every second I am watching it, I'm like, why are you making the characters that I like act like this?

Why?

What the fuck?

Why is Dante just Deadpool now?

Oh,

yeah, okay.

Because

combos, violence, action, and quips, you know?

Yeah.

I'm trying to think

I can compare Lady 2 that not just say she's a Hitler in terms of like unlikableness and violence.

And I am struggling.

But I can see it because it's like every, because she's always been dead serious and like angry and like kind of like Dante's like, woo, and then she's like, fuck you, shot.

And he's like, ha ha, you know, so I'd be great if that was just a dynamic, yeah.

So I could just see that like anger just like being like, okay, and then we're going to be able to do that.

Remember when you invented a new racial slur for Dante in Devil Man Cry 3?

Bathroom break?

Anybody?

Yeah, let's let's.

Yeah, you know, dog needs a bathroom break too.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah, we'll do it.

Sure.

All right.

One more thing.

I have one more observation about the DMC show that I think people might be interested in

is that

this show is meant to evoke the early aughts, right?

2003, 2005, or whatever that.

Which feels weird for the show, and I think I know the reason why.

Because because Devil May Cry

himself the character and the spirit of the games it's mostly inspired by the 80s to be quite honest right

glam rock metal hair metal and also Michael Jackson obviously and DMC 5

I think the spirit is like more punk 80s like 70s and 80s Yeah

versus

kind of shoehorning like the new metal aesthetic into this.

I think it's there in the sense that like you know genres inspire genres and like he's got a big long leather trench coat for sure.

But then there's also the discussion about how like each of those main characters represents a different genre of music.

You know, if

you know Dante is death metal and Nero is punk and that whole thing, you know, so

I think so.

But I guess when I think of 80s inspired things, like it

it I feel like Dante looking at him, he feels like he's coming more after the 90s.

He feels like he's coming post-grunge, you know, with, again, and then you just throw a big leather coat on it and stuff.

So

I'm not too sure.

But

yeah.

It's

I'm sure there's a discussion to be had where there's different influences and stuff.

But also pulling out nunchucks, you know what I mean?

And doing a lot of, yeah, yeah there's there's there's a little bit of that when i think of pizza i think of ninja turtle style characters from 90s cartoons as well so i don't know definitely a ninja turtle it's a little it's a little all over the place really it's a paste issue of the of different influences but before 2000 right and then now it's like oh we're adding you know limb biscuit and papa roach into the into the the dante the dante must die soup right basically i think uh i think a good indicator as well too is like you can do a lot with a character's hair to say something about what they're inspired by or what era they're from, you know.

And

they definitely chose to not go with long

locks.

They didn't go with a ponytail.

They didn't go with, you know, like shaved or mohawks or anything.

They just kind of went with like just quaffed, droopy

kid, you know, messy trunks hair.

You know, are you are you specifically referencing

like Dante's original design hair or this show?

Oh, I'm Dante's original design hair.

Yeah.

I mean, his hair is like that because he used to be Leon.

Okay, right?

Okay.

That's true.

That's true.

Yeah, that's true.

He was supposed to be handsome boy Leon.

That's why his hair looks like that.

But weren't

original

Dante and Virgil, the umbrella twins, were like original characters where you saw the baby with the umbrella logo on them and they were going to be.

The cry one is from an RE4 prototype, and then the prototype after that became hook man like it it it was leon

like he was tony redgrave and then they just

was there a step just kept rolling it forward so there was a step where the prototype went from being leon to being like these twins and then after that it just stopped being re together okay because yeah i thought i i knew it was like re related but i thought it was always an original character because of that that photo of the babies with the umbrella logo you know

okay well yeah you know that actually came and went in the actual Resident Evil series, and then it fucking just,

nothing happened with it.

Well, that storyline did come and go.

Isn't that just Jake, right?

Genetically engineered.

No, okay, all right.

That's the Weskers.

The Wesker baby.

Okay.

Well, Jake is a Wesker, right?

Weskers.

Plural.

Okay, okay, okay.

Gotcha.

The

genetically engineered Weskers.

Tony Redgrave, as that name carries forward.

Well, okay.

Speaking of

the Weskers and Jake,

I have had a week.

Tell me about your week, Mud.

In particular, the main thing is I played UMVC3 Community Edition.

I was originally planning to play Guilty Gear Strive because Venom came out, and then I said, you know what, that's pretty cool, but right now, fighting games need a win.

And I need to, I want to play something that celebrates how awesome these games are.

And just like,

I want to feel a dub.

So let's, instead, let's boot up Ultimate Marvel vs.

Capcom 3 Community Edition.

Which I talked about last week.

And after that clip went out to the jury

modder got in touch and was like, yeah, so no, there's no Bigfoot.

But actually, it wasn't 49 costumes.

It was 129.

There was an expansion pack to add more.

And the main reason why is because it's every single outfit from every game she's ever appeared in with every color.

And then some originals on top of that.

And not a one of them is a big gross foot?

Not a one.

Right?

Do Remember in Adventure Time when Finn got turned into a foot and he was just like his torso sticking out of a big foot?

That should be Jury's default costume.

That's what they wanted and it's what they were denied.

Okay, so the community edition is a giant mod overhaul of Marvel 3.

And well, not really a mod overhaul so much as it just added a bunch of characters, right?

When I first learned that you could mod

Marvel 3 and put original characters in, I was like, please let there be a way to add extra slots to the character select screen because everyone had to basically be hidden on someone else's costumes.

So you had to go pick Dante, color four, to get DMC1 Dante, for example, or something.

And

they figured it out, you know, kind of like when Max put out the bounty for Infinite to be like, how do we get extra slots in?

You know, they figured it out here too as well.

And

it's great because you can now scroll off screen and get these 68 extra characters.

And the other thing I really wanted was all the modders and, you know, fan creators to get together and unite and standardize to create like, okay, our characters are going to be balanced against each other and they're going to be balanced to work and fit in with the rest of the roster as well.

I mean, even if they're not that balanced, at least the attempt is made.

Yes.

Right.

And a standard for creation as well that can be, you know, like,

applied to all of them.

Because when I was kind of grabbing different mods from Nexus from people uploading stuff it's like okay so here's a cat like Urien was there he was incomplete and you know the idea was out was there but he was far from there was just a whole lot of cont stuff that's like oh that doesn't work out as well and then cyclops was super duper faithful to old uh marvel 2 cyclops uh and then there was like another character who was just extreme and could do anything and had you know broke all the rules kind of thing of the game so the standardization kind of creates a cool thing where you can be like we have one giant download where you could just slap this over your Marvel 3 folder.

And

it was fucking great, man.

It was so much fun.

I have to particularly say

front and center, the

love

put into Nero and DMC5 Dante is completely insane.

Nero...

I'm glad someone out there cares about these fucking characters.

So from the moment I saw footage of nero in marvel 3 i was like this looks incredible you're seeing him do a bunch of moves and he's using his devil arms and he's he's you know uh uh they're just the sound of everything looks proper faithful and yeah they went all the way they did they they went all the way with it and basically you have these characters that are they're more concerned with being faithful to the source than they are with being with fitting into marvel 3 like strangely.

Right, right, right.

They stand out exceptionally as these characters.

Watcher Cave is the creator behind, yeah, DMC5, Virgil, and Nero.

Nero has

every time you swing the sword, which is, you know, certain attacks, he's got kicks, certain attacks, he's got

the Red Queen swings.

And every time you hit someone with the Red Queen, you tap

jab

to activate your X Act, you know?

And so what you get is this really fun just tapping buttons character where you're going LL, ML, HL, launch, you know, and you're getting that like

with each hit.

And it's so fun to just hit the buttons and rev up and do the whole thing.

And like every move has the, you know, X-Act in it version.

So you have like the full second kit with all the flame versions on the moves and stuff.

And of course, by having it ignited, you get better launches, you get wall bounces, you know, all the things you would hope for off of

it's like Nero and Dante in their own game is are designed like they're defined by having a skill ceiling that is infinite.

Like, there's no

fucking top to it, right?

So, you're describing Nero to me having fucking EX act on its fucking normals.

Like, oh my god.

It's amazing.

Play this character.

It's so much fun.

I loved it.

I say X-Act, not Max Act for anybody who's heard us talking about Max Act all over the years, because

Max Act is when you get all three flames of your...

Oh, you get the full bar revved up in one shot.

X-Act is one at a time.

There's no stacking of the ignition.

There's only one at a time.

So you're specifically X-Acting each hit.

So

you get the ability to go down, down, launch, S, and then you can switch from Gerbera out to

I forgot which one it was, but, you know, you have two arms, and then he breaks them.

When he uses them, you gotta break age on his supers, you know, and he goes, sorry, Nico, and does a huge thing.

Overture, that's it.

He switches between Overture and,

yeah.

You get, like,

you know,

the ability to do all, to do your, your proper,

you know, buster command grabs.

You get the ability to do your, you know, your snatches and your your fucking uh wire arms and everything he's just a free-form full character that can do everything that he can do in in five and thus he's perfect for a marvel game um

i

uh

also with dmc5 virgil it's so insane because you know virgil regular is like just he's got a simple limited moveset but he's just insane he's busted strong um because with him and Dante, Dante's always been like, too many moves, there's a bunch of good ones in there, and a bunch of shit ones in there.

And find them yourself.

I don't know.

Everything Virgil has, on the other hand, is good.

Every single thing he has is the good, the best move you could do for that situation.

That's it.

Virgil is streamlined, and they're all excellent.

You don't need, you know, you don't have the full kit.

This is the opposite.

It's like every button with him is, if you hold back, you get the

the Beowulf

version of his move if you do neutral like light medium or heavy you get the Yamato and if you do forward you get force edge so that's a lot that's a lot you can so the entire triple set of weapons can be used while you're just on foot with him pressing buttons and then special wise yeah all of it all three specials from each weapon you know the ground explosion the the giant psycho crusher the you know judgment cut end and then

devil trigger for this, for him is a level three special because he stays in it longer, and it's just, it's crazy, it's the full moveset, you know,

and having that and then having DMC1 Dante as well, who has, you know, rocket launcher, he's got all the guns, he's got all the, he's just, he's got the full kit of what he had in just DMC1.

So when you devil trigger is him, you float and you air raid and shoot out the dumb fucking shots, and, you know, it's a very, it's a much more simplified simplified version compared to three Dante.

But having a team that is just like DMC1, Dante, DMC5, Virgil, and Nero, team fucking Devil May Cry, feels amazing.

Just put five Dantes in there.

Just put five Dantes in there.

I don't care.

Nobody asked for it, but there was also.

God damn it.

Ah, where is my list?

Jesus Christ.

My brain is mush.

I apologize.

Gloria.

Who what?

Is playable.

Not Trish.

Gloria.

Not Trish.

Whoa.

And Gloria.

For who?

Gloria has

low life.

She's got like an extremely...

She's got like a half-health bar.

But basically does non-stop round-trip combos.

So always has pressure out on the screen and is a way juiced up version of Trish that does the glorious shit.

It's insane that they did that.

I don't know why they did that, but yeah,

she's really fun to use.

Does she have grabs that just like wraps her legs around you and just like spins you around like a thousand times?

The big, the big, I

think so.

I don't fully remember.

I don't think I remember seeing that grab in particular, although

I would imagine because it's like one of the main things that she does.

But she is just like an insane alt-trish, you know?

They threw in okay, so surprise, surprise, Azura from Azura's Wrath is in it and is incredible.

Incredible.

Really good,

like faithful looking transition.

And

like the moveset is solid, very comboable.

Again, another character with an incredible amount of work put in.

It sucks, but unfortunately, Gene from God Hand, you know, not in the build.

And

the creator just, I think, wasn't able to had some life stuff going on, was not able to finish that in time.

So

that's too bad.

But you've got stars versions of the entire RE roster.

You've got

Hunk in there.

I hate how much I care about that.

Like, they had Chris fucking Marvel, and it was the RE5 BSAA version, and I'm like, fucking should be the fucking thing.

Stars.

Yeah, they got stars Chris, Stars Wesker, stars Jill.

They got Hunk.

And they got fucking Jake.

And you know me.

I'm like, yeah, show me that dude.

He played?

No, not at all.

He sucks.

I remember you telling me about how much it sucked.

And I'm like, it's the melee using guy in the shooter game.

I want to know.

Sucks.

I want to, you know?

And so, yeah, he's doing like a bunch of Wesker's moves without the teleports, and he's just a planer version of Wesker.

But he does do a bunch of, he does do the tiger uppercuts and the sweeps into kicks and stomps and chops.

So he's there.

Sherry's playable too.

And yeah, and then like going into

some of the older characters, like Colossus,

Bison, Onslaught, Saki from Tatsunoko.

They just put a bunch of older Capcom characters in that are just like perfect.

Like, again, one-to-one.

Captain Commando is insane because Captain Commando's never been in 3D.

And here he is, perfect, doing all the poses, pulls out the guitar, becomes a cowboy when you taunt, and calls in the full Captain Commando force.

You know, Baby Commando, Ginzu the Knight, Mac the Knife, you know, all of them are doing the whole thing.

Yun

in Marvel is insane because you're just dive kicking from the top of the screen at light speed.

Like, imagine, you know, when Zero does like a

lightning loop downward, that's Yun dive kicking on top of you, type of thing, you know?

So, um,

yeah, it's just a lot of fun, and it's crazy because to be able to go hours and hours playing just not using any of the original roster once, you know, because you have an entire second roster off screen.

Just a huge kudos to them for

this incredible job.

You know, Marvel Infinite and Beyond is definitely like a super fun new thing that looks different, and it takes a game that was struggling and, you know, makes it more fun, makes it look better and play better, and adds a whole bunch of stuff that are features beyond just the visual improvements in the new characters.

This is just taking an already fine game, which is Marvel 3 is already fine, and just throwing a billion more characters into it, you know.

Oh, yeah, Krauser's there too, and you can do a a bunch of knife shit with him, and he can like transform and do a bunch of blade arm stuff.

And he's a big knife gun man, you know.

He's got knife parries,

you know.

Yeah.

And then for every one of those, you get shocker, fucking

radioactive spider blood, shocker,

who's just zapping you and punching the ground and being lame.

A lot of fun with that.

You know, the rival school characters showed up, Kyosuke and Batsu and Hinata.

Oh, yeah.

It's a whole lot of fun.

And then, and then there's stuff where they put the thing in, and Thing is just a really well kind of fun, thought-out rock character that, you know, chunks up and clobber in time.

He does little rock rolling blanket balls at you and punches the ground.

He's just like a fun kid.

They thought of some really fun ideas for him.

It was great.

It was great.

I really hope that

people at events and stuff are down to run some

Marvel Community Edition tournaments from time to time and stuff.

Shout outs to

Heath Knopf, a name that you and I both know.

Oh, yeah, the guy who shows up in our streams and beats the absolute fucking shit out of us.

Yeah, Heath is real.

And Heath made Strider 2099 for this game.

Oh, shit, really?

Oh, man.

Good for you, man.

Yeah, Heath made, there's a Strider that looks and plays like the Strider game that came out not too long ago, 2017, I think.

No, way before that.

What am I talking about?

Anyway,

so yeah, good stuff there.

That's pretty much it.

I just wanted to shout that game out.

And again, Signal Pooh's go grab it.

It's up on

Nexus Mods.

If you just go,

yeah, look up the Ultimate Marvel vs.

Capcom 3 Community Edition and

get that.

And then, of course, once you download download it be sure to own to go and download uh the jury costume expansion pack so that you can get outfits 50 through 129

because it's mandatory and specifically I want to say costume 56

is

jury from the uh art book where she looked like the cool martial artist version that never happened back in the day where she had like the gi and kind of the the the hair covering her face and like like she looked like the badass fighter girl, you know?

So if you want to go play that version of her and then a bunch of others, go grab it.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I did, you know.

Been catching up on some other stuff and working on

things outside.

But this week, return to Phantom Liberty and get into fighting games.

You know, I got some ideas for what to jump into.

So I'll post my schedule up on Woolly Wools on my social media.

And yeah, Woolly versus, of course, on Twitch and YouTube.

Do you have anything to shout out for your week, Gene?

Is the Minecraft movie in the news section?

I don't know.

Nothing to say about it.

It's out.

It's there.

I don't got any.

Biggest box office opening for a video game movie ever.

How about that?

What did it beat?

$313 million in a weekend.

What did it beat?

Mario Brothers?

Mario?

Yeah.

Okay.

Hey, guess what?

Those iPad kids love Minecraft.

They're not kids anymore.

Oh, yeah, you're right.

They're like 20.

They're like 20 coming in.

They're much older anymore.

There are also young kids still watching that crap.

Well, not that crap.

I gave it a two and a half out of four stars.

But have you seen the video clips about chicken jockey?

I have no idea.

I know there's a.

I've seen articles about something called chicken jockey.

There's news stories about it, but it seems like it's, I guess, the big takeaway from this is: is it a.

what what the fuck is it?

I don't know.

Chicken jockey is a rare

chicken jockey is a rare spawn in Minecraft that just like attacks you or whatever.

Um, and then there is a scene where a chicken jockey is uh in a wrestling ring about to fight Jason Momoa, who is an updated version of the Uncle Rico character in Napoleon Dynamite, uh, made by the same director, Jared Hess.

Ah,

so the Minecraft movie, Napoleon Dynamite and Minecraft movie have the same director, uh, but as Jason Momo is, you know, squaring up to fight, a chicken drops out, and then the zombie Frankenstein person drops out.

I played 12 hours of Minecraft, so I'm not familiar with this at all.

And then he drops onto the chicken, and then Jack Black looks at him and says, chicken jockey.

And then there are numerous clips of people

doing backflips,

throwing food at the theater,

doing handstands, and just screaming their eyes off when he says chicken joints.

Oh, because it is louder.

It is louder than when Sam said on your left or to your left at the end of Avengers Endgame, and I was there too.

Okay, okay.

It's reference was made, yes.

He said the thing.

On your left wasn't the pop in my theater.

It was a symbol.

You know, that was the

And I'm not going to sit here and pretend I wasn't making that noise either, god damn it.

We were all there.

I was absolutely making that noise as well.

Don't front.

And I was there and I was present and I was also yelling.

But then when

Chicken Jockey happened, I was definitely a 43-year-old man sitting in a theater being surrounded by screaming children.

And I saw it in a media preview and I was like, this movie is going to be huge.

This is going to be the biggest movie ever.

And then so when the Washington Post asked me, do you think we should put Minecraft movie on the cover?

Do you think it's going to be big?

I was like, like, you should definitely put this on the cover.

I watched this movie.

This movie is going to crush shit in the theaters, and it sure is now.

The impression I get is that like the Minecraft kids have gotten a lot older, but like there's all, you know, there's that new generation always kind of coming in.

There's a new generation always coming in.

The broccoli hair.

The broccoli hair has

set in roots, right?

And this is one of those things that it's like, okay, people going to see that now that are like older, you know, well, almost like,

I don't know what the equivalent for us would be, but, but either way, like there's an older generation of people all excited that are going that used to be the Minecraft kids.

And because it's a kids movie, you also have a bunch of kids that are just like, oh, shit, this thing.

And like it can,

you know, reinvigorate itself and continue to be even bigger.

Because I feel as if Minecraft in the background continued to be massive, but there's definitely less of it being discussed as much out there because I hear, like, I have a niece and nephew that just talk about Roblox.

Um,

and then a bunch of older kids that are a movie is going to like destroy society.

That's pretty much where we're at, right?

And then a bunch of kids that are also like more Fortnite kids than anything that you know

weren't as in.

But I don't know if it's if that's the case or if it's just like Minecraft has been an upwards

arrow the entire time and it's just never stopped, you know.

It's hard to tell because I don't know.

I'm too old.

When someone make fun of me?

I'm making a question.

I am not making an assumption.

As dad here,

I have a dad perspective, despite not playing Minecraft.

I'd feel totally chill giving a three- or four-year-old Minecraft because it's fucking digital Legos.

So I assume that has just been going on in the background the whole time.

It is taught in schools.

There is Minecraft Education Edition.

And also, schools do have it.

I'm not going to let my child play fucking Roblox because that shit's where fucking creepozoids live.

But yeah, you can play with your block game and build a spaceship.

Yeah, I think so.

So, kind of what makes me well, whoopsie doodle, sorry about that.

I think what kind of makes me think about it

when I used to see it more, because what would pop up is just randomly scrolling Reddit, you would see like someone has created the library with all this knowledge that people can connect to and go to.

Someone has created Pokemon inside of Minecraft.

And this was like years and years, like 10 years ago or so, right?

And you'd kind of see these random things from like massive insane moments and massive insane creations.

You'd see a lot of YouTube creators as well, like their stuff would just be popping up more in the algorithm without you even looking up Minecraft necessarily.

You know, I remember I got contacted to do, it was, I think it was like one block per day or something.

I forgot the name of the channel, but I jumped into that.

I did a Minecraft thing and like put a place to block.

And this was, again, many, many years ago.

And a lot of that would just enter my periphery without me necessarily looking for it versus now where that doesn't happen as much.

So I can understand if my perspective is super old, boomer wrong, but I'm just

that's what

that's what I'm kind of saying is like, this is what I've seen less of, so I'm not sure where it's actually at, you know?

I'm right there with you.

I'm just as clueless as

i've had the same touch points of like oh my god someone made a computer inside minecraft and that was like eight years ago you know okay well um yeah you know so i remember my my interest and amazement at videos of i recreated the starship enterprise in minecraft completely cratered

when someone mentioned to me oh yeah no there's a there's an import tool And I'm like, what do you mean?

Oh, there's a tool you can use to import like 3D models into Minecraft and it'll just auto-build them.

Oh, oh, okay.

In

voxel-looking format.

Yeah.

Wow.

Holy shit.

But also,

well, that also, that's cool, but I guess it makes imported things less impressive than the hand-built, perfect

architectural marvels that I've seen.

It sure does, buddy.

Because, yeah, when, I mean, you want to talk about just like autism superpowers, right?

The ability to fucking

just do in Minecraft what architects accomplish over,

you know, insane amounts of time is incredible.

And, like, importing it and just fucking going, there it is, is like, ah, well, you shortcutted that.

That's not as, that's not as impressive.

God damn it.

That's what Jack Black does as Steve in Minecraft.

But yeah, Gary Garrison, Jason Momoa's character, is a 1989 Gamer of the Year, and

he has mentally never left that time period.

He is still there.

That's why he's dressed that way, because he runs a retro game shop in Idaho or wherever the hell this movie takes place.

Oh, I've met that guy as a real guy.

He's a real guy.

Jason Momoa?

He's a real guy.

Oh, that guy.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, no, no, no.

The guy

that Gene is describing.

Okay.

Trapped, mad out of time, just trapped in that era or whatever.

And so him and the kid Henry and Henry's sister and the real estate agent are all isekai'd into the Minecraft world.

That's literally it.

Was it enjoyable or was it just it?

It is a bad movie.

I was checking my clock to see when it was over, but then stuff like Chicken Jockey or Flint and Steel or

and every once in a while, an occasional joke would really hit.

There's an early joke where Henry, the little kid, the little boy, they're in a new town, so he's in a new school, and then he blew something up at school because he's so creative and he's a scientist or whatever.

So he blew something up at school, and he's in trouble.

But he met Jason Momo's character like five minutes earlier, and then

he's like, I need an adult.

Jason Momo is the only adult I know, so he calls Jason Mamo and says, Hey, can you come to my school and pretend to be my uncle or something?

And then Jason Momo replies, No, I don't do that kind kind of stuff anymore

what does that mean and I laughed

it's it's a weird because he's a weird old guy hanging around in schools

you know yeah well um

I guess the you know

the hope is there's like hey Sonic and Mario were pretty fun you know regardless as adaptations and uh still got to see most of those yeah you know it's like yeah that's that's they're they're that that that was enjoyable um and it's like okay well i guess chat also points out there's a six, there's a glider scene where Jack Black and Jason Mamar are basically doing a 69 when they're flying through the air.

So

that's funny.

Did they know the cameras are rolling?

Yeah,

it's all blue screen, green screen in there.

And also, Jennifer Coolidge has a whole side story.

And as you're watching that, I'm thinking, How brave and awesome would it have been if you just got rid of all this shit and it was just a Minecraft movie starring Jennifer Coolidge?

Oh, that would have been way better.

That would have been so much cooler.

You know, I feel like the Lego movie that happened, and that was a

nice

swerve version of how to do this property version of things that, you know, you could, you could kind of land here if you go, if you take a break, I guess a wild brave take on it, you know?

But I feel like Minecraft, you have a checkbox of things that you need to reference more than anything else.

And

that kind of is.

the flavor from when we

played story mode,

you know, was even though that was a podcast and we were just eyeballing it in the background,

it felt like it was like, okay, you got to run through the things, you got to show the pigs and the creepers and the enemies and the bitches,

the dragon.

Checkbox of things, and it doesn't necessarily matter outside of that context.

Creepers.

Wow.

That's that is just a lot of the movie is Jack Black saying a thing in the Minecraft world.

Flint and steel.

Pink house.

That is the world.

Chicken jockey.

Yeah.

He's just saying things in the Minecraft world so the kids will do a backflip in the theater.

So now, like, the theater's ending.

In the movie, Jack Black plays the role of the child's iPad.

Just basically.

Flashing lights and stimulation.

Don't learn how to sit still at a restaurant.

Top tier Smash Ultimate character, Steve.

Yeah,

it's okay.

It's not a Mario.

It's not a Sonic.

It's a Jumanji.

Yeah, okay.

Well, there you go.

It's a Jumanji.

I mean, it's literally the guy, right?

Sure.

Hello there.

All right, I guess let's see.

What am I doing this week?

So, well, my Wednesday opened up because

I was going to...

spend the day trying to get Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders because I wanted to get one for

myself and my nephew and

whatnot.

But that's not happening.

I have a free spot.

Welcome to the ouch, motherfucker.

What's that?

Welcome to the ouch, motherfucker.

As Faye Valentine, Kabbalah Bewot would say.

Why do you gotta do that to me?

So I got a free spot.

I'm not sure what I'll fill it with.

But right now, the plans for my channel this week, I'm gonna do more Rise.

We're gonna probably break into Master Rank.

Me and Paige are gonna play Split Fiction again on Friday.

And on Saturday, I'm starting much earlier.

I'm starting around noon Pacific because I have five games that I'm embargoed on right now, and they all came into my inbox simultaneously, and I can't talk about most of them.

So

I'm going to just take a quick look at all five of them on Saturday.

That's a lot.

It is.

It sure is.

So I'm starting at noon.

Okay.

They're cool looking.

I just can't talk about half of them.

They're embargoed.

That's over twitch.tv slash pat stairs at

all right

Also Gene let's do some mid mid episode plugs for you as well because asking people to wait till hour five to be like hey we're to check you out is stupid

oh yeah you can check out

me on Linktree slash

gene.meme and you can see all my links there,

including my Washington Post page where you can see all my Switch 2 coverage, my hands-on impressions of all the games we basically talked about, and my Minecraft movie review,

which is getting a lot of hits because a lot of people

wanted to watch that movie.

And

your Doug Bowser interview, which I believe,

to paraphrase, you kicked the door down and went, yo, Doug, what the fuck?

And that was kind of how that went.

No?

Pretty much.

Not quite.

All right.

Well, that was like, I was just like, why is this $80?

That's pretty much

where the conversation went.

But yes, Doug Bowser,

lots of busy, busy week.

And I also have a game that I'm working on that is embargoed.

But lots of other stuff I'm working on that I can't wait to talk about someday.

Okay.

Let's take a quick word from.

Thank you so much for having me on.

As always, CSB News, my favorite games journalism platform.

You have Switch 2

and Devil May Cry opinions.

You are welcome.

You're always welcome.

This is probably the premiere podcast for a conversation about Devil May Cry show, and I'm very excited that you're going to watch it.

It probably is.

Because we're going to get...

Yeah, it probably is.

And then we're going to get a whole part two once you watch it.

And it'll just be spoilers off.

It's fucking lit.

I love it.

and that'll be great because I can just like listen and watch to it instead of being here.

So, I'm excited for that as a fan.

See, but if I was a journalist, I would have done my obligation and made sure to have watched it by this week.

But I said, nah, you were doing other journalistings, that's why.

So, you went when duty calls because you have to report.

I'm like, um,

yeah, I'll let you know, right?

So, no, the beat was covered.

Pat and I both watched it.

Okay, okay, okay, we knew I was watching it.

Right, right, right.

Someone knew I was going to walk in here as somebody who would watch it, and you knew Gene watched it, so you provided the extra helpful neutral observer

point of view.

Yes,

that's what I've been doing for 13 years now.

Have you noticed?

Has it turned out you noticed that I'm question guy?

They're like, really?

Teach me more about everything.

I don't know how anything works.

I have a lot of questions.

Is it fluoride safe?

Yo, so these

survival horror games, you say, huh?

Yeah.

Huh.

Zapping system.

Okay.

All right.

Let's take a quick word from our sponsors.

I love our sponsors.

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You know, I always thought that the meme of anime conventions was just a meme.

You really?

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I didn't think it was that bad.

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I smell it, actually.

That's what I mean.

Different places, different events have different levels.

You know,

I feel like I've encountered some situations that are are like, oh,

and then I've encountered some that are like, yeah,

you know.

I've encountered the two worst situations.

I'm not joking.

I'm not saying this to mess with people or take pot shots.

The two worst places I've been is a Smash Brothers tournament, and that was number two.

The worst place I've ever been is inside a games workshop.

Games Workshop, right, right.

That is, that is

top shelf, absolutely by far, not even close.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's that elementary school lost and found wet winter gear.

Oh, my God.

Fuck.

Flavor.

That's so.

Oh.

So specific.

That specific scent memory

leaves your life and comes back around when you enter the sci-fi club.

But...

But at the same time,

I've been at events too where I've seen people go yo, this shit's fucking going off on it.

I'm like, yeah, it smelled like a crowd, right?

If you've walked around just a crowd at a festival

and have been around people moving and doing shit, you're like, yeah, and sometimes there's just crowd smell type of thing.

So it's more what it is.

There's a discussion about when it gets worse than average or so.

And yes, that is a very specific scent memory I'm eliciting right there.

That description caused a twinge in my eyebrows that

I'm feeling a headache coming on, so I had to take my pills.

That was too intense of a memory.

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And

last

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we have another conflicting service that should not be here because it doesn't make sense to put two of these in the same episode.

So, we're going to send an email and we're going to move on.

That's crazy.

Whoa.

Guys.

Guys, come on.

Oh, wow.

Come on.

All right.

You know, I gotta say, when you were reading about the Raycon happiness guarantee, my mind went like, hello, Raycon.

I would like to return my headphones.

I'm not happy.

Oh, really?

I'm sorry.

What's wrong?

Are the headphones a problem?

No, the headphones are amazing.

I'm just not happy.

Well, we can't really do anything about that.

Yeah.

Okay.

So

anyway, I guess into what else is going on this week.

We touched on a lot of Switch news, of course,

up top in the episode.

But one of the things that, you know, what happened was there was a story going around that someone contacted a UK support rep for Nintendo and

the rep told them that physical games like

that are getting switch 2 editions like Breath of the Wild and Kirby and Metroid Prime 4 will contain a download code and a physical switch one cart as a part of the packaging which sounded baffling and confusing.

I mean certainly anybody.

That's weird.

Yeah, certainly anybody that has an existing version of the game that wants to just be able to go get an upgrade code off the eShop, it's like, that's useful.

But if you're buying a physical edition of something, the whole point is to not have to connect to the internet, right?

The whole point of the physical is to not just go straight to the eShop and get the whole thing.

So it turns out that this is not a true story.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it got shared around pretty far, and some places, some sites were publishing it.

But then some people just emailed Nintendo directly and said, hey, is this true?

And they replied, no, the boxes will contain a

one cartridge cart that has the full thing on it, as you would expect as a Switch 2 cart So so much misinformation about a switch 2 these days weirdly so strangely so but I think it's it's but it's a new Nintendo console So like the attention getters

uncles are coming out to talk exactly That's the best way to put it right everyone's going Yeah, the uncles that have that work at Nintendo all have things to say it's it's weird because like

I don't feel like this happens around PlayStation and Xbox announcements It feels like Nintendo is always for the rest of our lives going to be the one that gets people telling the tallest tales.

It's because it caters more towards a younger audience and children lie.

Yep.

Yeah.

Like, let me give you the example.

You know what game I was playing with my son this morning?

Lying.

He ran over to it.

We have a chair that has like a cup holder built into it.

And he ran over to it and picked up something and ran over to me.

and dropped it in my hand.

And I looked at my hand and I went, it's nothing.

And he went, ah,

and fell over.

And then we did that for an hour.

That's a pretty good game.

That's a pretty good game.

We did that for an hour.

He just like, and he got to the point where he couldn't even pick up the nothing out of the spot without nearly tipping over.

He was so excited.

God is ass.

He's going, oh my god, there's nothing.

God is ass owned.

Got him.

Yeah, perfect.

That was the nailed it.

Great.

Love that game.

That game rules.

Lying to children is fun, too.

Yeah, it's good.

Lying two children.

Yeah.

Brown cows, they give chocolate milk, man.

That's where chocolate milk comes from.

Yeah, so anyway,

that was one of the stories that was popping up.

The other one was

the battery life is worse than the original Switch.

And so here we're seeing approximately 2 to 6.5 hours

is the range for, you know, I guess average use, you know, just playing through a game.

And then for the original Switch, OLED had 4.5 to 9.

Original SKU had 4.5 to 9.

And

there was a particular SKU that had serial numbers ending in XA.

It was a different version, 2.5 to 6.5.

And the Light had 3 to 7.

So

this is,

yeah, they all lasted longer.

It's the same size, it's the same weight, but it uses more power.

So

it doesn't last as long.

Yeah.

I hope that...

Well,

it's just like.

Elden Ring sessions can go longer than six hours.

Yeah.

You know.

but if you're playing Elden Ring at bed before you go to sleep, you should know that when the Nintendo dies, it's time for bed.

Um, I mean, will there be this rules?

Well, I'm hearing right, what you telling me, a low battery life right now, it's fucking awesome.

Okay, well, because you know what I'm hearing?

I'm hearing it will be easier to be like,

Sorry, buddy.

Time for bed.

The Nintendo's tired.

It's going to have to go to bed tonight, and it'll be awake tomorrow.

I'm sorry.

It's just,

it has to go sleep time.

Well, don't you want the console to just tell you that you've been playing too long and that it's time for bed?

You should take a break

as classic Nintendo fashion, you know?

Yeah, I hate that shit.

Like MGS4.

There is, there is that.

God, what game was it?

I was playing a game that, like, I want to say there was a character or a place where it said to take a break every time you played it.

Oh.

There's a punch that told you to take a break every time.

It wasn't based on how much you actually played, but it was literally just.

I think, oh, I think I might be thinking of like Earthbound, actually, when I played it the other day.

We're just like, yeah.

Earthbound did tell you.

Consider taking a break every single time you saved it.

Yeah.

Yeah, your mom or dad will tell you that shit.

Yeah.

We talked about it.

I'm going to have the ultimate take a break.

Yo, kid, it's dad's time on the Nintendo.

Get off.

I'm bigger than you.

just playing the

playing the did you poop game at like teenagers and like no and then ah and then running away and grabbing the controller

there we go what's up

that's a cute cat what was what was cat's name again

Jack

Jack Jack the Ripper Jack it's time to let her rip oh hey guys I am required Can I take a quick break?

Perfect.

Timing.

BRB.

Yes, sir.

What's up, y'all?

So, yeah.

Just a couple stories.

We talked about the Switch stuff, and

we talked about the interview with Doug Bowser.

So

they did have that little bit where he asked about, hey, what do you feel about

AI to develop video games and stuff?

And he said essentially oh well you know we want to make sure that our games always have a human touch to them which doesn't necessarily say anything or so but i guess in contrast to the microsoft quake inspired quake 2 inspired demo oh man

it means everything

because there's like an organized boycott going on against microsoft right now and it's incredible timing because like okay what am i boycotting oh the shittiest version of quake that's ever existed oh yeah that's gonna be no problem.

So basically, there is an AI-created demo for a something that is calling itself Quake, I suppose, but it's a tool that you run around in a Quake-like environment.

However, the game, you know, as AI kind of does, everything kind of is in that dream hazy sources of light are just interpreted to be the nearest possible thing.

So a wall you're looking at eventually becomes a box, eventually becomes nothing.

And then one of the first tweet right underneath it was someone showing how they're like, oh, once you know how this works, you can just see how completely ridiculous it is.

And the camera points down at feet and then back up and the whole world has changed.

And then down at feet and then back up and it changes again because it's just generating what it thinks should happen next.

Yeah.

to whatever you pan, whatever the camera pans towards.

This footage of you know walking around a corner.

It's like, what will be around that corner?

It's like, I don't know, something.

Nothing knows, actually.

but but uh, either way, it's like uh um

is unplayable, and uh, it's a complete, absolute fucking piece of shit to the point where

I don't understand.

So, I've seen uh like the development of these AI games, and they all have the same problem.

One is you can't let it run for more than like 40 seconds because if you do, most of them just completely devolve into sludge.

This one can run for longer than 30 seconds, but it it it runs like shit, and there's no continuity of anything.

Yeah.

It's a completely fucking worthless piece of shit.

And you're using it as like, look, guys, it's the future.

What?

This fucking piece of shit?

It's the future?

Are you serious?

I bet you we're going to see it used in a context where some game is going to have like a dream sequence.

And then that dream sequence will be like generated in this way.

And it'll be like, it's supposed to be weird and shitty and inconsistent because that's how dream brain whatever stuff works.

But it's funny because that weird sludgy look you see there the same thing happened on that last demo we we talked about like two weeks ago for uh was it killing floor um i don't think it was killing floor no what was it i forgot what it was i love myself some killing floor no not killing floor i forgot the name of the game but it was uh uh

bleeding edge maybe or

what the fuck was the game anyway oh yeah uh uh the other ninja theory game yeah bleeding edge bleeding edge bleeding edge thank you and um

both the the the asterisk that both of these tools put out is

it's a gameplay ideation tool, right?

So it's not that this is going to be making the end game, it's to inspire the developer to use this to

think of a level or come up with something, which is like, obviously, if you could go further and completely replace the human being, you would have done so a million, you know, fucking years ago.

But yeah, it's just rolling that out alongside

the Doug Bowser quote.

It's like, oh shit, okay.

Well, you know, does a human touch mean somebody who knows how to write the prompt?

No, I have something for you.

Are you ready?

Nintendo will never use generative AI in their products for two reasons.

One, they are obsessed with the quality of brand, of Mario, of Zelda, or whatever.

And second, and more importantly, there is no Japanese national generative AI algorithm source product company that they would be able to choose and use and whatever.

You think Nintendo of Japan is going to use an American AI generative source for fucking Mario?

No way!

I think those are...

Kimauchi's ghost would come and kill them.

I think those are two pretty good reasons, but I also think that time marches on, and I think that that we can eventually absolutely see some dog shit pop up.

At Nintendo, I think Nintendo would be the

holdout

of the conversation.

It would be the whole conversation.

It would have to be like an industry-wide

push in that direction that is

undeniable after generations of it, perhaps, you know?

But yeah, I feel like a lot of those things you said, like the philosophy of the company as well, the stubbornness, the same stubbornness that says we're going to charge you for our tech demo is perhaps the same kind of thing that would hold out here, you know?

Well, Miyamoto said in an interview a couple of years ago, or not even a couple of years ago, like last year or two years ago, he was like, well, if the whole industry is moving toward AI, then Nintendo will not because we do not follow trends.

We will do the opposite.

We will do the opposite of the industry trend.

Well, somewhere deep inside is the hope that, let's say they ever did,

Hayao Miyazaki would teleport into the room and look at them, and then they would immediately delete their work.

Just with one look, you know?

You would hope.

Yeah.

I think asking Nintendo that is like prudent, but it's also like,

yeah, they would be dead last on that.

Speaking of Miyazaki,

Hirataka Miyazaki did an interview to talk about the Duskbloods and talked a little bit more about what's going on there and

what it actually is.

And said a couple things that I found quite encouraging.

While I have no issue, certainly, with PvPVE as the, you know,

the

genre it's described as, and, you know, we're seeing

Night Reign as a multiplayer focused experience.

And we're looking at, we're talking about Exoprimal the other day.

He did straight up say here that

he is not a fan himself of like fully multiplayer experiences.

And he says you can still enjoy the game single player because he's not much of a PvP person in general.

And as someone who pretty much played through the entirety of Elden Ring without looking at multiplayer at all,

I enjoy those games as single player experiences myself too.

So I'm happy.

So he did not say the word single player.

Excuse me, PvP.

PvP.

Player versus environment.

Because when you load, basically, he described the gameplay loop.

You're going to load into a map, and it's going to be a big old map, and you're going to load in with seven other players.

And

your character will be given a set of goals to reach.

And those goals can be kill this boss, obtain first

enemies, acquire this item,

etc.

Or kill other players.

and it seems more along the lines that the the PvP the player versus player combat in this is not some of them are gonna be like go out and kill people right but it's it's mainly to stop other people from succeeding in their goals

rather than fighting for fighting's sake

the thought is is that if it is a non-PvP version of a like you know thing designed for multiplayer it could be like not as robust as like a fully single player experience you know in that case it's like more of a like adaptation of what your your your goals would be especially if they're like changing each time you play it or if it's more specific each session um

but you know you certainly get the impression from what you see in in the um the the trailer and stuff that yeah if this ends up being like

again a bloodborne night reignish

sort of thing that you can play alone and

you know um that there's enough to unlock there that is not a full insane single-player Elden experience or so, but is just a decent-sized game.

You can throw, you know, a couple dozen hours at the thing.

Uh, that would be that would be cool.

I'd be happy with that.

Um, I think a big part, too, is like, what's the character customization aspect going to be like, if at all?

Are you going to be apparently it's extremely in-depth, and all the story is going to be in the character customization.

Well, there you go, right?

Because I think a part of why Night Rain also is so streamlined is because you're just picking a set character and picking up random things.

Here, though, any game where you're going to be fully detailing out your character, like, yeah, adds a ton of freedom and

extra to the package.

You know, I gotta say, it took 14 years, but I am very excited for Anarchy Reigns 2.

Yeah?

Yeah,

let that stew in your mind for a second.

The E part, yeah, okay.

You had to, there were, there were bosses

and anti-computer stuff in Anarchy Reigns that you'd use to power up your character.

Okay.

I mean, most of it was,

or rather, most of the, I feel like most of what we talked about and played and everything was just a direct fucking battle royale go.

Well, yeah, no, Anarchy Reigns was more PvP than it was PvE, and Dustblood seems to be tilting the scale a little bit.

Yes, yes, okay.

This means that that when I stream Duskblood, I will be playing the Anarchy Reigns soundtrack over the game.

Because that is a great fucking soundtrack.

It's a great fucking soundtrack.

It's a great fucking soundtrack.

I still listen to that.

Oh, yeah.

I threw that some bitch on my fucking

loading music playlist the other day.

It's amazing.

Yeah, and then we also got, you know, obviously time is convoluted in Duskblood world.

Everyone is in their own area.

The Twilight of Humanity has occurred.

The Blood Sworn are summoned.

And times and places between different players don't have to make sense.

You know, we're setting up the lore and basically going, yes, Victorian era and Gothic

imagery, but jetpacks and guns too, deal with it.

I was talking to somebody in my chat

yesterday and they were disappointed that it's a multiplayer game and that Night Rain is also like kind of a multiplayer game because they're like, I just want a single-player game like Bloodborne.

And all I can feel is,

bro, Elden Ring is like the largest game ever made.

Like,

how can you possibly, how can you possibly complain?

Yeah, no, no, no, 100%.

I think I remember when we saw the trailer for like Sekiro and everyone, we were all just like, what, what am I looking at?

What?

Is this a soul?

Like, you're like, you know, Tenchu Souls?

What's the...

How how could I put the word souls onto what I'm looking at type of thing?

Well, that game is actually just straight up Tenchu.

It's just, it's a Tenchu game.

And I think, I think we're currently, yeah, and we're currently enough entries, like, like from soft entries in that you're like, okay, there are going to be flagship souls-like, big,

customizable, insane experiences.

You'll get those once a generation, you know.

And then you're going to now have these other smaller experiences that are much more streamlined, less customizability, but they're tighter, smaller things that let the company make some fucking money.

Like I'm really interested in that to be successful.

Like

I am very, very interested in learning.

I think if they have the basis covered where whatever type of experience, if you're like, I want a quick multiplayer romp, you know, or if you want like a

narrative, you know, dungeon go, that you can like pick up one of those two.

And they're like, yeah, we've got something covering both bases.

That'd be nice.

And also, you know, good on Nintendo for again, looking at that Bayonetta pocket and kind of going like, hey, there's a need here and y'all ain't, you're not going to, no, you don't want, all right, fucking give us Bloodborne.

Give it.

We'll fucking do it.

It, you know.

It might take a while

for it to happen after people are out crying for it and they're just like, no, no one's listening.

No one's hearing you.

But the idea that Nintendo might eventually swoop in and be like, yeah, we paid for our own version of that thing everybody wanted is like, cool, okay, dope.

Go ahead and sit in the chair, Sony.

Are you sure it's okay?

Yes, this is what I want.

And yeah, I think beyond that, we just saw a little, we saw a little bit of the...

Oh, yeah, this came up last week or so, but like Night Rain showed off the new archer.

Wall run, shoot arrows, do cool things.

Not much else to say except I hope that character select screen fills the fuck up.

I think,

you know.

I think that game's going to get a lot of DLC, man.

Yeah.

I feel like, you know, it's probably going to be way more characters focused than

areas showing up kind of thing.

But...

if they kind of go, all right, we've got a couple zones, but we've got a whole lot of characters to play as, and every once in a while, we we just dropped the fic, the nameless king into this zone.

Go get it.

We just dropped fucking Smelter, you know, or any random shit that you're going to be excited to see.

Then that would be cool.

The fact that, of course, again, every possible existing Souls boss is in the cards.

And one might say, even beyond.

You know, I think I saw mod footage of someone running around on

Torrent in the Placidus Axe arena while the giant fucking

first huge crazy boss from Armored Corps was

rolling around and doing like missile laser fucking targeting.

And I was just like, yeah, okay.

We can do anything.

We can do, there's no rules.

Oh, I gotta watch that.

That sounds sick.

Balteis.

Yeah.

Balteus rolling around in the fucking Elden Ring dragon arena.

It's insane.

Baltaus versus Placidis X.

That would be so sick.

Oh, man.

Versus you with your fucking

flask of

Wadrus Physique.

And then what else happened?

Right as we were getting started, rumors.

Rumors.

Very big rumors.

Big, big about the Street Fighter.

Oh, well, no, I was going to talk about rumors of Vivi.

Oh, so right when we started

fucking Square Nix's vague posting about FF9,

but nothing since then.

We have a potential Street Fighter VI season 3 leak from the person who

second season.

Yeah, I did see that list.

I don't know.

I didn't see how credible it was, so I kind of was like, okay.

It's the guy who leaked the second season.

So it's more credible than nothing.

It is

Alex,

C Viper, Sagat, and Ingrid.

Oh, C-Viper, hell yeah.

Can't win them all.

And it's like three out of four, A-Bat.

Three out of four is $5.75%

is all right.

Yeah, that's bad.

And that first 75%, it's very good.

Very good 75%.

Batten 75%, I ain't going to complain, you know?

And listen, all right?

We have to appeal to all kinds of people, all kinds of fans,

including those with good and shit taste.

So we need to cover our bases, and that's what a season pass should do.

So, hey,

I want to take a moment to talk about Ingrid because there's a really interesting thing happening with Ingrid, because people are talking about Ingrid, and the overall general reaction is people going, I fucking hate Ingrid.

Ah!

And I did not know that there was like a bunch of Ingrid stands out there that go, how can you hate this character?

You definitely didn't play any of the games she was in because she was only in Capcom Fighting Evo and a crossover game that didn't come out and Street Fighter Alpha 3 double upper Alpha 3 Upper Max.

And I would like to take the opportunity to point at Woolly and maybe Gene, but I know Wooly for sure.

I played Capcom Fighting Evo.

I played Street Fighter 3 Alpha Max Upper.

And she fucking sucked in those fucking games.

And I don't like her.

And I played as her and against her.

And she sucks.

Thank you for taking the torch.

As the resident Ingrid hater, I'll let you know that every time I've got off on Ingrid, I've gotten these people showing up to me.

So, if you can just take it and run that way, take the torch and run behind, and we'll split it.

Maybe we can confuse them.

I think this, this, this lives in the same dimension as people going, the only reason people hate Final Fantasy 13 is because they listened to YouTubers who didn't like it.

And I respond to that going, that was me.

That was me.

I'm the YouTuber that didn't like you.

And I told you.

You became that.

Don't tell me I got my opinion from me.

Yeah.

Yep.

We've seen so many incredible, awesome characters pop up in the Street Fighter franchise since Ingrid's creation.

And they all fit that world so much better.

So much better than she does.

It's just knockoff Athena.

With, with, yeah,

it's a magical girl for Street Fighter, but you can make a better, cooler, magical girl that fits Street Fighter better.

You can.

Minat is a cooler, Rose and Minot.

Minat is a cool, magical girl that is a way better fit.

That is, you could do that.

Yes, throw Rose in there if you want to.

Anyway, Rose.

Yeah, Rose.

Yeah, bring back Rose.

Listen.

You got to sell a season pass that gets everybody that is willing to...

you gotta cover your grounds.

Hey, hey, hey, Sea Viper, awesome, great.

That's one of those winner characters that should have come back sooner that didn't, but also

like unexpectedly popped up in like Marvel, you know, and you're like, oh, cool, okay.

And she was super interested in that.

So I'd love to see what she gets with the Street Fighter VI treatment.

I'd like to see what her look and kind of, you know, vibe changes to be now.

I hope they don't do the Vanessa thing where it's like, like, don't get too busy with the really cool suit in a way.

Wait, which Vanessa?

Oh,

sorry, KOF Vanessa.

Oh, okay.

I thought you were saying something very different.

I thought you were saying that you didn't want her to become suddenly extremely light-skinned.

No, although...

So I'm thinking about Virtua Fighter over.

No, no, not Virtual Fighter, Vanessa.

Although there was Sea Viper artwork with, I think, one of her endings in, I think, vanilla or so, where like her skin tone was confusingly off.

It was like Berserk 2016 Casca colored.

It was getting

weird.

No, no, no, no.

We love our light skins out here.

We're not, no colorism.

It's all good.

We're not going to start asking about whether or not Sea Viper has good hair.

All right.

Listen, that's not for everybody, but if you get it, you get it.

She's got red hair.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Is red hair good hair, Pat, then?

Is that

I like red hair.

But I'm a little biased.

Yeah.

And I say this as a person who listened to enough hip-hop back in the day that was like, yo, fuck these light-skinned niggas.

Like, they re light-skinned took a bad rap for a long time for no good reason.

You know,

well, for, for, and by no good reason, I mean horrible uh his historical colorism reasons and such but anyways um

this is a great drake thing was the most recent example where it's okay see

sea viper

you you set it off uh see

i was trying to say i was trying to say that um

uh no i i'm hoping that like when we get her back with the suit and the tie and the kind of outfit of course it's not going to be the same thing you got to kind of make the the look you know uh just put her in Vanessa's outfit.

Just like the head to toe.

But so Vanessa in KOF 14, they gave her back the tie and suit and stuff, but they added like kind of some trimmings to the pinstripes.

They added some details that are a little too busy.

You know, I like some of them.

The shirt got some nice, some touches, but they kind of...

No, I don't care for this.

I don't care for this at all.

She's wearing Jinx's pants.

They added some stuff that I was like, ah, you're getting a little too busy on what was a really solid, like, she's wearing a military uniform.

She's wearing Jinx, Jinx League of Legends pants.

That's a really weird design.

That's it.

That's it, right?

Her and Seth, who no one remembers Seth.

No one remembers Seth.

He's the guy with the blonde mohawk, right?

Yeah.

Well, not blonde, but like he, but like, yeah, Seth, like the other guy that was dressed up in the same outfit with the green and the red tie.

He's the guy who, in one of the homogeneouses, he kicks behind him.

He does the dive kicks in all directions.

Yeah, that's the one.

Okay.

Yeah.

So,

you know, they're both wearing their proper military outfits with their suspenders.

And

I kind of would just like them to not overdo Sea Viper's new look, you know, and just kind of keep in mind that formal attire thing and then just kind of put some extra flavor to it.

Maybe tech, maybe something else.

And then, yeah, Alex and Sagat plus Time.

Fuck yeah.

Alex needs to have a hair curtain.

Just all the way down.

Shaggy.

No, no, no.

Like the Hogan, like bald as shit.

Oh, oh.

The Hogan hair curtain.

Oh, he's he's become, okay, a bandana to hide it.

Yeah, absolutely.

He's becoming an old, he's becoming an old wrestler.

Yeah.

Sagat, I imagine, you know, fast-forwarding him becoming

the protector and more or less good guy at this point.

Yeah, for the children, man.

And having

having a tiger jump out as like a proper part of his move set now.

You know, maybe, maybe level two is just a tiger jumps on screen, and now there's a problem that you have to deal with automatically.

I hope you like parrying tiger shots.

I just have this image of my mind of because Sagat's good now, instead he has the move called tiger preservation.

And

because Marissa is vulnerable to not low pro no not low property attacks, but anything that just has a low hurt box or hitbox, tiger shots are going to break her out of her armor or her moves or her scootum, and she will get even worse when these characters come out.

Yeah, there's a I think it was it Rufflemonger put up a video that's just like season three, save us, and it's a fucking photo of Lily, Jamie, Honta, and Marissa

doing like fucking pog faces.

Like, no,

help us.

You didn't get the announcement that this new season is actually overriding and replacing those characters on the character select screen

they're getting removed from the game

it sucks because i really gravitated hard towards jamie and you gravitated hard towards mawissa and they're terrible they're not good but at least jamie kept getting sauce they kept giving him stuff Yeah, but it's never enough.

It's like a 1% increase in.

But

I feel like with Jamie, I can imagine the the builds where they gave him...

They just, they pushed it a little too far.

They're like, okay, what if he starts with one drink?

And they're like, no, no, too good.

He's too strong.

Even I'll tell you that.

But that's what I'm saying, right?

They're like, what if we...

And then each time they're like, ah,

we can't, you know, we can't give him too much.

I saw like a replay of like a YOLO swag

play where

Jamie got a stun off the wall, and instead of doing a full combo on the dizzy opponent, he just took four sips, and it's the all-in.

And I was like, damn, that's pretty hype, actually.

Sacrifice everything to get the full fucking guzzle.

You want to make Jamie better?

All right, here you go.

Okay.

Remove the fourth drink entirely and roll all his drink four abilities into drink three.

Done.

You can't do this.

It's like asking.

You really can't.

It's like asking to preserve drinks between rounds.

You can't fucking do it, man.

It's not monopoly.

Alternatively,

give him four drinks and give him really strong moves to cash out drinks.

Oh!

Oh, I like that.

Drink down, sober up moves.

That's interesting.

Shundi is Virtua Fighter, has really, really excellent moves that cashes drinks out.

That's interesting.

Yeah, Shun can go really high too, right?

He can just keep it going.

Okay, okay, I see you.

So, yeah,

that was pretty much what we were looking at there.

That's a decent, you know, again, packed together.

Although, four is a smaller number than five for a season.

Can we get some costumes, fuckerheads?

Come on.

But now you don't ask that with anger, but you ask it politely because you look around

at the other games and you're like, okay, Street Fighter, you're doing good.

Just some costumes, please.

Please, if you don't mind.

You know, we don't want to take for granted that you're not on fire right now.

It's Tekkens.

Yeah.

You know what's on fire positive right now?

Courtesy of friend of the show, Maximilian dude, there is a Virtua Fighter tournament.

Called Virtua Fighter Lives this Saturday.

Let's go.

Is that...

I think Max put in $1,000 of his own cash into the prize pool?

It's on.

You can go watch his channel.

It's over at StartGG.

With the Lives tournament.

Is he running it?

I feel like that naming convention he's used before.

I can't watch the video because I'm doing the podcast.

Okay.

But

I do know that

he put up a video that he is helping run it and he has partnered with Sega to do it.

Sick.

All right.

Cool.

Yeah.

I,

you know, fully expect to see you in top eight.

That's the day that I'm playing five embargoed games in a row.

I don't know if I'll be able to do that.

Content or a fighting game tournament, Pat.

Are we, is history repeating itself a little bit?

Do is time a fucking flat circle?

Well, I mean, the answer that I went with way back in the day was content.

It sure was, right?

Anyway.

You know what?

You know what?

I'll let one of the Max's fans win.

Ah.

No, you know what's going to happen, right?

Ruffel's going to take the whole thing.

Well, no, what's going to happen is I'm going to be on break on my stream and I'll look over.

I'm like, oh, I wonder if I recognize, oh, there's Heath.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

I hope you enjoy your free money, Heath.

He's got it locked.

FYI, however much you might think Rufflemonger hates Leon,

he hates him way more than that.

It is

simply saying the name elicits

a fugue state.

You know what, man?

When I eventually collaborate with Rufflemonger when a VF6 comes out, I will hold this conversation to heart and figure out who to practice based on this.

Like, what you go look at his content where he's teaching you how to play every character or like who to pick and all these, all this amazing Virtual Fighter V content.

And then when he gets to the Let's Teach You Lion videos, it's like, okay, so hello and welcome.

We're learning Lion today.

I don't know why.

Fuck you for watching this.

Let's go.

Like just the most begrudging tutorials, but I, but you have to do it anyway.

Like, it's really funny.

So, anyways.

Let's take some letters.

He's got good kicks.

He's got a great medium kick.

And he's long.

And he doesn't make make allowances for old men.

Let's take some letters.

If you want to send in a letter, send it to castle superbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castle superbeastmail at gmail.com.

Make a good email.

Like, write it, look at it, read it, and be like, is this good?

If the answer is no, then stop.

Zell and Ardor Enjoyer in AK says,

dear two of them,

have you had a new game or music album or other media come out that wasn't remotely what you wanted, but what you got instead was so good you actually went, fuck what I wanted, this is better.

That's a pretty good question.

I have one that comes to mind for sure.

Oh, yeah, what is it?

It'll give me time to think of mine that I've stalled out.

Mr.

Morale and the Big Steppers was not at all what I expected or wanted from a new Kendrick album.

But holy fuck, did it work out really well?

And I walked away going, yeah, okay.

Because the idea of going as hard as he did and then eventually being the like, yo, I can't save you.

I'm not Jesus, right?

That whole bit.

I am not your civil rights leader.

Don't don't look to me.

But the idea of like the therapy album that was basically him just working through his shit, literally taking every one of those tracks and going over all the shit that he's been through and having it out loud, you know, over like We Cry Together and Count Me Out and Auntie Diaries, Mother Eye Sober, him working on like his addiction, his like

his

aunt who transitioned, like all this insane shit.

And then working through all these major moments in his life through that album.

And it sounds so different and completely, it's like softer, and it's not, it's not militant.

If you were looking for some big, angry hits, it just comes in way more sobering to use the word, you know.

Um, and it's the realest shit ever.

It's fucking gut-wrenching, like, realness.

And I was like, I fucking appreciate that.

I didn't think I wanted or needed that, but um,

yeah.

I kind of was coming in for some bops and like, you know, like a level of aggression.

And instead, I got like therapy out of that album, but it was great.

I grieve different.

I think maybe the closest thing for me is Cyberpunk.

Oh, yeah.

Because I was disappointed that it wasn't going to be a third-person adventure like The Witcher 3.

I just wanted The Witcher 3, but with Cyberpunks.

And then when I actually got to play the first-person game, I was like, oh, they really did the first-person thing really, really well.

And now it's my favorite first-person game of all time.

I just like,

it's my favorite game that's in first person.

I agree with everything you're saying, but I wish I could make it third person.

That's why I ride

so often.

I also wish I could make it third person still.

If they could figure that out, that'd be nice.

The one that I'm thinking of is probably the wrongest I've ever been about any game in my life.

And it's Resident Evil 4.

I did not want Resident Evil to be a fucking third-person

dude bro shooter.

I want my fucking fixed cameras and my limited items and all that shit.

And I was incredibly disappointed when they were showing that shit off.

And that is...

That's a good one.

Definitely the wrongest I have ever been

about the game's quality.

That's a super good one.

Yep.

I'm seeing one pop up, and that's super true, too.

I think what we all wanted from a post-Konami Kojima was something familiar, something nice and cozy, and we're like, oh man, Metal Gear is great.

And wow, PT was going to be so cool.

And what the fuck is Death Stranding?

Oh, I totally disagree.

It's amazing is what it is.

But we didn't.

So down for his Go Jumbo's wild ride.

But what I mean is we didn't know what it was.

We had no idea what to make of any of those trailers.

And it was like, it's a delivery game?

It's carrying boxes and driving around the road.

What does that have to do with invisible god Titans floating in the distance, you know, and impossible, unknowable

Eldritch horrors?

Like,

fuck it.

It was great.

It was just not what anyone expected or was asking for.

DS2 looks like more of the crazy nonsense that you want, though, Pat, right?

DS2.

Well, I mean, it's still, it's just, there's ziplining and

you're still delivering boxes, but there's a lot of gun action and whatnot.

Yeah, I mean, someone asked me yesterday, hey,

what's my number one thing I want in Death Stranding?

And my answer was more roads to build.

I want to build more highways.

Because that was the number one thing that I enjoyed doing in Death Stranding.

When I finished the whole highway network, oh, I was in fucking bliss.

Delivered the fuck out of that pizza.

I was surrounded many years ago by people who saw the debut trailer for Wind Waker and were fucking mad because it was not the Space World dark, extra mature Zelda game because Twilight Princess didn't exist yet.

And after seeing Ocarina of Time and thinking that the Space World demo was going to lean and point towards something much more edgy and more Lord of the Rings at the time, which was blowing the fuck up, we got this cartoon thing.

And I was like, that shit's awesome.

That shit rules.

You know, it's so fun.

But I remember it was a very unpopular opinion at the time.

And they went on to make their lists on Game Facts of the top 10 most serious games.

You know?

Did you?

Hey, this is a bit out of pocket, but there's a lot.

You know, I got a baby now, and I'm thinking about the course of my life and the way that I've thought about myself.

Do you guys have moments in your life that you look back on where you were like 10 years old, and you were either dealing with adults or children your age, or maybe kids older than you, and you were like,

Why am I handling this better as a little baby than

the adults in my life or these kids?

Like,

in high school, you'd see somebody have like a complete fucking crash out over some bullshit and you'd be like 11 and you'd be like, what the fuck is

where

calm down?

What the fuck is that?

Yeah, Pat.

When people are having

medical emergencies and the adults around you are like, we need to pray instead of

calling the

fucking 911 to get help over here, it's like I'm a fucking baby that knows nothing.

Why do I understand the real solution and these grown-ass adults don't?

I was actually referring to stuff like my mom was wrong in an argument with me when I was a kid about how to load the dishwasher.

Okay, well, you know,

I was thinking about that.

We all have our own.

Yeah.

All right.

Pigman asks, dear Dusk, Wooly, and Blood Pat.

Writing to provide some extra context for Pat about the writer of the new Silent Hill F.

I'm a huge

guy with the cry.

As someone who's a huge mark for Umineko, and I'll keep it short.

Ryukishi's writing is informed a lot by the fact that he worked as a social worker for several years before becoming a visual novel author.

So

a lot of his writing deals with stuff he witnessed firsthand.

He's really good at talking about abusive family dynamics, generational trauma, isolation, and the stigmatization of society.

I say this mostly to inform Pat

of the kind of things to expect out of Silent Hill F.

It makes him a pretty good pick to write for this new entry in the franchise because all of his horror writing is really good, and he's particularly excellent at grounding that horror in real-ass, uncomfortable, hard-to-look at dynamics.

Okay, that's very interesting.

Used to be a social worker.

That's like the worst job in the whole goddamn world.

You see a lot of shit.

You see a lot of shit.

Got a couple of...

You want to write up reports on the eye of human misery?

Got multiple people in my life that know what that's about firsthand.

Yeah,

that's a solid place to start from.

I mean, just getting to the end of any one of these stories and being like, yeah, okay, so everything except for the giant monster that attacked you at the end is a real story that happened.

You know, like,

um,

all right, and uh, last one over here.

Um,

uh, someone asks, uh, I noticed recently that I navigate every game menu with the D-pad, but I didn't do so a few years back.

And after a bit of thinking, I concluded that the turning point was when I played DS1, Dark Souls, that is,

since you can only use the D-pad in those menus.

Do you have any habits like that that developed due to a certain game and it carried over to everything else?

Oh, inverted controls.

Totally.

Which game starting?

Mario 64.

Ah!

Mario 64.

Okay.

Yeah.

Which was so frustrating because when I was at the Switch 2 event, there's no way I can change the controls to inverted when I'm trying to play Metroid Prime.

So I had to...

That's why I was using the mouse, because the mouse is fine.

I don't do inverted mouse, but I do inverted joysticks because of Mario 64, and I'm sitting there at a Nintendo event, and it's like, it's your fault that I'm inverting things.

This is your fault.

Yeah, it's I didn't start this.

I just remember I saw a vision, a graphic that was just like the camera is stuck to the back of your character's head.

Yeah, yeah, and you're like, that's why it feels so natural.

That's it.

It's very simple.

The example that the person writing in gives is also me.

That is absolutely exactly what happened to me.

I use menus exclusively on the D-pad

because of Dark Souls.

Because you can still move with the analog stick while you're doing some D-pad stuff with the Dark Souls.

I also

learned

to not death grip my controller

to hold it a little bit more lightly when I was younger.

Probably when I turned

six or seven years old because I wasn't a little baby anymore and could control my hands

that's cool cool story bro

uh i

feel like for me i always default to using the d-pad um because i used it for my entire formative

years on console gaming So from Nintendo to Super Nintendo to the eventual analog introduction as a secondary control device

on the controller, I kind of went, yeah, I always just prefer precision with the D-pad and quick touches.

And I, and like, you know, in a game where the ability to go slow and then fast didn't matter as much, you know, but then, of course, when games become more about that and sneaking and stuff, analog starts to matter.

GameCube kind of forced you because the D-pad was in a weird place.

It felt really far.

It felt far away from the natural resting place of your thumb.

But when I play like on a 360 controller or like anything like that, where it's like, you know, they're both pretty close to resting, resting.

I just like using a D-pad for movement in almost all situations.

But like, obviously a Souls game where like creeping slowly, anything 3D like that matters a lot more than no.

But I just, I like using the D-pad for most stuff, for sure.

Yeah.

I think that's it.

I think that's it.

All right, Gene, I love you.

I'm so glad you were here today.

Happy to be here.

This was fun times.

And I can't wait

till Wooly finishes the show so we can watch it.

Oh, we've got to watch by the end of next week, man.

Yeah, because

I can't wait to hear his thoughts.

I will do.

I will do.

And, you know, he continued.

Like, I've got a death grip on the controller, but that just allows me to choke the shit out of you when I get my hands around your gym.

I thought

I even set it up for you because I said I was not a little, like, I don't grip it with my hands because I'm not a little baby, to which offer you the built-in,

you're an adult, but I still have little baby hands.

No, because my hands are small, like a child's.

No, I was just thinking that I was gonna just go start on slot two.

Oh, you can't do that.

You can't do this.

You can't do it.

Thank you, Gene.

Take it easy.

Thanks, guys.