CSB314: No Way Street Fighter Alpha Generations

Wow, it's a slow week, huh?

Oh, I don't know if we're going to find enough shit to talk about on the podcast.

Well,

let's start here.

Hey, Booz.

We need to put

a shutdown on

real human beings in fighting games until we can figure out what the fuck is going on.

We need to just put a moratorium on the entire process of human beings and fighting into fighting games until

we can assess the situation and verify what the fuck is happening.

I think that's where we can start.

The past couple of days, you and Punch Mom and Reggie came over and hung out and you stayed the night and you were a wonderful guest and I was so glad to have you.

And it was very, very endearing

to see all three of you spend

like a good portion of your time trying to be the first one to endear yourself to that fucked up little dog.

And he turned around on all of you because he was scared and he loved you all.

And that was very sweet.

But it is a great thing to start with here in fighting games and real people because that was the first thing you started to talk about coming into the house.

You did a little dance.

I sure did.

Do you remember the lyrics to the dance?

They put a rapist in Mark of the Wolves.

Something to that effect.

Very similar to that.

That was kind of how that went.

Yeah.

It's not like in the door, hey, Paige, hey, baby.

Hey, dog.

Hey, cat.

Ah, shit.

Fucking, what the fuck?

Yeah.

I think it was something along the lines of they put a rapist in Mark of the Wolves.

Something like that.

That was it.

Something like that.

Quite the tune to it.

Yep.

That's what they did.

That's what.

Allegedly.

Allegedly.

I think.

Well, look, I don't think it's great.

Okay.

It's not great when I don't know who the second person that got announced was and I have to

Google

the name name.

And then I also am like, should I press spacebar and type allegations just in case?

You know?

Just in case.

So

I think I can actually boil down

the

Ronaldo soccer man alleged probably, let's be a real rapist,

being a real human being being put into a fighting game that we were interested in.

I can break this whole controversy down

into like a single interaction I had in chat talking about this.

I think it was yesterday, but it might have been the day before.

Where

he kicks the soccer ball really good.

This is a truth that that is unmitigated.

That everybody knows he kicked the soccer ball really good.

One of the most famous human beings on planet Earth.

Yeah.

So I

mentioned the other day that we had discussed and how you walked in going, oh my God, I can't believe they put a rapist in Mark of the Wolves.

Allegedly.

And my chat went, huh?

What?

And then before I could even get into it, someone went, oh, yeah, Ronaldo.

Period.

Yeah, yeah.

Which

people hearing this like the whole discussion?

Yeah, and I guess folks are, you know, are similarly confused, as were myself and Reggie upon seeing that, because you see that and you go, you know, suddenly Arabia, yes, okay, all right, we're doing the whole bit.

And, you know, we like for a while, I remember when it was kind of like, okay, so, you know, they say that their creative decisions are not, are still going to be in the hands of the people that are making the things and nothing's going to get handed down on an edict.

And then you're like, well, that sure seems like it when he's got a contract with them and his likeness and team and everything are now associated.

And then, you know,

well, this current confusion with this new character that just got announced an hour ago aside.

Oh, I didn't even know there was one.

Oh, okay, because

there's a second one.

So, but the first one was just like,

ah,

like, like, that's confusing and goofy, but okay, whatever.

I guess that's, that's what they're doing.

And, you know, it'll, I, soccer, um, the humongous football player will get uh eyeballs on the game.

So that's the move.

That's totally true.

That's the play that they're making.

And then immediately a message came in going, Yeah, shame about those allegations, though.

And it's like,

what?

Oh, no.

And so, like, hey, you know, my favorite part about this is that I was like, you know what?

I'm talking about this.

I should double check just to make sure.

And I type in the guy's name and allegations.

And not only do I get the first batch of allegations, I get the second court case about the hush money he paid to make the first court case go away.

Yeah, I saw someone.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

So I saw a screenshot of like, hey, his win quote just dropped.

And it was the quote of the thing he said to his lawyer that then was posted in the story about what he did.

How did that happen?

And that was dropped.

And it was like, Jesus fucking Christ.

So that doesn't sound great.

That doesn't sound great at all.

That sounds pretty bad.

I think I agree that we should maybe not put, Hey, let's just stop.

This is a stance that I've taken for a long time.

If you don't know somebody in your personal life

well,

you should just not look up to them ever.

I mean,

that's the most zoomed-out take you can have.

That's my zoomed-out take.

That's the most zoomed-out take you can have, and that's fine.

I want to grow up to be a cool football player like OJ Simpson.

Um,

or hold on, hold on, I saw the uh, you saw the naked gun trailer, yeah, where they just go,

Fuck me.

I watched that naked gun trailer.

Okay, I watched the naked gun trailer sidebar.

I watched the naked gun trailer, and I was like, okay, I see the, I see the angle here.

Liam Neeson's pretty funny, sure, that's fine.

And the last two seconds of that thing got got me and went up.

Yeah, oh, yeah, it really did.

It's excellent.

The last two seconds actually got me laughing.

So, so well played to the 2025 teaser for the new naked gun movie.

Yeah, I don't think you should, I think, but maybe we should not put real people in.

Okay, okay.

But yeah, I was going to say, if we could just, if we could just zoom in a little bit and just pare it down to something much more simple, you know, much more easy at that point.

And at the very least, just like, you know, or and if there's no way to avoid this, can we can we do some background checks?

Can we figure out what the fuck's going on?

Can we just, you know, can we, can we that but no, no, no, because yes, of course,

no, the people who are who are super down for it are, in fact, they've got their own shit going on, clearly, right?

I, uh, um, I foresee a

very interesting cultural

dialogue

in the FGC about this character.

Um, and when I was talking to my chat about about it, I'm like, if you want a preview

of the back and forth that's going to happen around City of the Wolves and competition and the character and whatnot, just travel back in time a little bit and go read any argument or in-person discussion about whether or not you should let infiltration compete at your tournament.

Right.

And

the back and forth of, yo, fuck that guy,

versus, yeah, I don't care.

I just want good fight game.

Who gives a shit?

Yeah.

And, of course, you know, the entire discussion

about

slow ownership over SNK that we've been talking about for a while ago as well.

And then there's events that happen over there and people go over.

And then some folks are like, I'm not comfortable with that.

You know, and it's becoming more and more

unavoidable, I'd say, at every turn.

Oh, absolutely.

I feel like also at the same time,

back then, there was the percentage ownership thing that they had.

And then kind of now that number has increased across all video game companies, any games that you like.

There's an ownership number that is starting at 10% up to 40%, up to, in some cases, way above that

with ownership over or shares that they've bought and stuff.

So it's like, it's just everywhere, right?

On a sidebar.

But

with this, I just remember like, we're like, okay, like that's nuts.

And then you're like, oh.

The way things have been going, there's also this like distinct possibility that because balancing stuff has been, it's insane at first and then getting toned down afterwards because of the second beta,

there's a decent chance that he might also be really high tier, which means you might see a top eight that has a whole lot of Ronaldos in it potentially.

I don't know if that's going to happen, but like

the

cool thing for SMK to do would be to make him really bad on purpose.

I mean, that would be interesting.

That would be like, well, we put him in.

We didn't want to.

So there's a couple, my mind's racing because I can't keep.

I'm losing track of all these

logs and lines.

But one was

catching win that, or hearsay, that,

yeah, there's definitely

the decision for him to be in there, as well as what's going on now, is coming from above Oda's head.

So it's coming from above the

and it's that's that's definitely a no-brainer.

Um, there's the uh uh god, what was the other thing?

Um, oh, the fact that it's baseline roster means that if somebody wanted to say, like, I go like, well, I'm not going to buy that DLC, or I don't want that, I don't want them on the roster or whatever.

It's included in, which also makes sense because you're not trying to, the people,

the world that you're trying to appeal to with a giant football player is going to not really be about spending extra money for DLC necessarily.

You're going to want to just have that in the baseline roster to advertise the game anyway.

Plus, holy shit, this included season test.

Oh my God.

Sorry, I just saw him.

Okay, so yes, Mr.

President, a second real human being has hit City of the Wolves.

I repeat, a second real person has hit the roster of Garo.

Oh, that's a real person?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He looks terrible.

Oh, my God.

So there's two trailers.

There's the reveal one like last time, and then there's the gameplay footage.

And it's Salvatore Garachi, a DJ.

And yeah, nobody really can figure it out.

About an an hour ago, they just dropped it and it's like, hey, Salvatore Ganachi's in the game and is going to be a fully playable character and everything.

I think two weeks ago, they announced some collaborative

artists they're working with and he was one of them.

But then from there, it's a playable character.

I'm like, I don't know how or why, but here we are.

The first thing that would strike my mind again is something like this is like, if you're working with a DJ, wouldn't you immediately go like, let's make a big stage that's taking place at a concert that he's holding and put some of his music in the game and have it be like, Oh, every time you load in that stage, a set list will play, and you'll have him in the background playing the music and reacting to the fights.

And the whole thing is just an elaborate regularly in Saudi Arabia, and he's a friend of the royal family.

Yeah, so he's literally just their buddy.

So, that's the bit, right?

You're like,

you could just that's so fucking funny.

Oh, man, could have been that way, you know, but that's not the way it's going.

Whoa.

Wow.

So,

yeah, I've never seen, you know, because you'll say, like, oh, you know,

put your foot on the scale.

You know, like, is the boss, you know, messing with it?

And, like, this is like,

this is like, yeah, my, my friend's little brother wants to be in the fighting tournament.

Put him in.

That's it.

And make sure he wins.

Unavoidably so, it seems.

This is crazy.

And the nutso part, so you said something last time, too, which is like, or during the first beta, where it's like,

you know, if the game was bad while the netplay was bad and matchmaking was bad, then it would be easy to just kind of like write it off.

I just found it.

So the second beta came out, and it dropped while we were out there.

And hey, guess what?

The game was amazing.

The gameplay is

super tight.

And the online is super good.

Yeah, so the first day of matchmaking

was a bit rough, and then they switched the switch in the first couple hours, and then matchmaking got good.

And then

from they included the training mode, they included Versus Offline, and they included T-Zock as well.

And yeah, it's like, I mean, I'm going to quote Reggie here.

He's like,

this is the most interesting defensive game that's been released in the last 20 years in fighting games.

It's doing a whole lot, and

it's really well thought out as a game that feels like an old school fighter, but still has newer mechanics in it.

It has

a lot for you.

It has a lot for you on defense, and it has a lot for you on offense.

And it's very rewarding to

go all in on these moves linking into each other and such versus just defending or like hyper defense is this other type of thing.

There's so much going on.

It's really, really sick.

Good defense with Ronaldo on the roster.

There you go.

And, and so that's the thing that you get is

like

they really thought about it, and it's being designed as a proper, like,

Garo 2.

You know, it's not half-assed.

It just seems like there's going to be a like

section of it that you're like, this is the actual game.

There was, um, and then there's this layer on top of that.

That the end of that discussion is like we had this long and back and forth.

It's like, yeah, tons of people don't care about this shit at all.

Any of it.

Any of it at all.

No, of course.

And we like our audience is like, I would say our audience is like, or audiences, depending on how you want to split it, it's like significantly more progressive than the internet at large.

For sure.

So we're going to run into, I just saw, I just, I just saw it scroll by a lot of people who are going to like, I am not touching this game with a 10-foot pole.

And it's never been easier to go, yeah, okay.

I get it, of course.

Yeah, absolutely.

But for sure, I mean, and I would say too, that, you know,

there's a huge difference in vibes from just like, okay, there's the trailer that gets released.

You can go see feedback on that.

There's, you know, any other FGC content creator and this channel and then the feedback and then the amount of discussing that happens there.

And then with us, it's much higher concentrated in that regard.

You know, absolutely.

No, in no, in no small part due to the fact that like, I think we openly talk about this shit.

We have pretty candid conversations over the years about a lot of it.

So folks are pretty used to that.

And people that are much more, I guess, you know, aware of or in tuned with and concerned about things like that are going to be around.

So I think I...

To just echo your statement, yeah, when folks are like, yeah, I'm out.

I'm like, I, what am I supposed to say?

Like,

uh-huh.

I get it.

Somebody made a great point going by where it's like, there's a subtype of person who is out now that the DJ is in, but not when the soccer player is in.

And that is a highly specified cross-section of tastes that needs to be studied.

Listen.

Fascinating.

I can abide a lot of things, but that new character looks bad.

So

I did see there were, I did see some of that too.

I did see some of that.

Yeah, man.

You know,

I,

you're, you're not going to see

me trying to change anyone's opinion on that, certainly.

Oh, I've never, I've never wanted to change someone's opinion less talking about a game.

That being, and, and, and the wild part that is like, yo, we even got some sets in at your place.

And

they were great.

They were incredible.

Game's great.

Feels really fun.

It's, it's, it's the sequel I've wanted for 24 years.

You know, like, I just, oh,

you know, but I mean, listen, this episode in general, we're going to be talking about fighting games in Nintendo.

There's a whole lot of that going on.

There was a moment when we were talking about Garrow.

And, you bully, you pulled out, sorry, I had recently pulled out an old arcade stick that you had made me ages ago, and you were remarking on its wonderful craftsmanship, right?

And how gorgeous it was.

And I was talking about

how I'm going to play games with the boy, right?

And you said to me, you don't even know if this kid is going to be into video games, right?

And I put the stick down, and the kid runs over to it and grabs the stick and starts banging on the buttons and trying to pick the stick off the floor and leave with it.

And it's like, nah, man, nah.

As soon as he saw me touch the fucking thing, all of a sudden he's like, ah.

So, you know what I found out?

You know what he was trying to do?

He's trying to pull the stick apart.

He wants the red ball.

Ah,

the red, yeah, the ball top on it.

Because he told me the day after you guys left, he pointed at it, went, ball, ball, and started trying to pull it apart.

And I was saying, like, when he put his hands on it, I was like, yo, get that grip proper.

You know, start getting that 360 ready.

Awesome.

Okay.

Also, that's a great first reaction to not never see it.

I have to thank you extraordinarily.

I've told this story before, but me and Paige, when we moved in, there was this wonderful little table built into one of the parts of our kitchen, but it was so low, like it was built into the floor.

It was so low that it's actually hard to sit at because it would like pinch your legs.

And it turns all out, all we needed was a helpful big man

to come help me lift it.

And Wooly, you have now lifted our kitchen table, and our kitchen table is now easy to sit at.

There you are.

I've been so happy about it.

Thank you very much.

You just needed it.

And it was really great for being a big man to help me.

Look at that.

All you needed was a big man.

Sometimes you just need a big man around the house, you know?

And yeah.

Yeah.

What was the ad?

Two Sturdy Dudes or Two Sturdy Dude?

There's a moving company out here called Two Burly Men.

Two Burly Men.

Yeah, they move your stuff and then they fuck you.

It's a.

Have you seen the ad where they're standing next to you?

I'm pretty sure

I remember a Bear Barra energy ad with yet shirtless burly men just going, sometimes you just need two burly men.

Sometimes you just need, and it's like, what is this?

Oh, it's for moving.

Oh, it's for moving things.

Right, okay.

Anyway, so,

yeah, so that's that's going on.

I did make it out to Vancouver, and I guess the first thought I had pulling up to the city was:

this is Toronto with mountains behind it.

Absolutely.

Because the condo skyline and then going into it, I'm like, oh, yeah, this feels identical to being downtown at Young and Dundas or Blur or any of those spots and just being endlessly enveloped in giant construction condos.

But the mountains behind them were nice.

And

I'll tell you what, people around here do not like the description of Toronto plus mountains.

I'm sure they won't, but I'm just being honest.

But I will say upon closer inspection of said mountains, I was like, oh, those mountains are pretty.

They're very pretty.

Yeah.

Plus 200 days of rain a year.

Yeah,

a whole lot of rain, actually.

Like, that was the...

If you flip a coin, it is more likely to land on rain than any other weather.

I did not know that was a thing.

And you know what?

That's great.

You know what the rain has, Willie?

It has sun-blocking powers.

So I can go outside without fear.

Right.

Okay.

So, I mean, yeah, I did, you know, I was like, okay, this is

definitely mountainy, fresh air.

That was cool.

I will also say, pretty good Asian cuisine.

You would fucking hope so.

Yeah.

Given the population, that is a fucking crazy cup.

It would be crazy if it wasn't.

But it was very legit, as recommended by one Justin Wong.

So I went out there and,

yeah, first thing was the Red Bull Kumite.

So shout outs to them for the

Red Bull Kumite Canadian qualifiers.

Did some commentary with Justin Wong and Rufflemonger.

Had a good time yucking it up.

Did some,

I'm sure at some point something will pop up, but did some dumb like straight for social media, straight for TikTok, like

quiz type videos and challenges and stuff.

So

we'll see where that, where, where those go.

Including some,

like Justin had some, some extreme difficulty challenges where we we played for a bit.

So we'll see how it goes.

But it was fun to do some commentary with.

And yeah, overall,

a pretty hype event.

It was a part of the Battle of BC, which is

a

God, a BC tournament.

And then

the winner of that, Safe, who won, a Canadian player, will get flown out to Paris for a chance to enter the Red Bull last chance qualifier to get a spot in the Kumite.

So it's this whole gauntlet, but did an incredible job.

Shoutouts to Safe and Riddles and Zykles, the other Canadian strong players, and Chris CCH, who came up from the States as well.

A really good Ed.

And yeah, also met Geordi2D, a Fortnite and Marvel Rivals

influencer.

Shot a couple things

with them as well.

And surprise, surprise, out of nowhere,

one Gerald Lee from Corey Gaming was

there, popped over and did a talk for an esports conference, and it just happened to be happening at the same time.

So, just

like that as awesome.

Oh, shit.

There you are, IRL.

That's cool.

Um,

yeah,

if only I had the prescient knowledge, I would have been like, let me pick your brain about what's going on in Tech N8, buffs over nerfs.

But we'll get to that in a second.

Um, because I feel like uh, that video is getting I'm I'm excited because like I'm watching people are like, You see what's happening with Tekken?

I'm like, oh, I talked about it with Woolly, there's a bad patch.

What could other be happening overwhelmingly negative on Steam?

What the fuck?

How bad could this patch be?

It's a bit of a, it's a bit of a doozy.

Um,

and I think also I think his video is getting dragged, uh, uh, I think a little unfairly because people are taking the worst interpretation of it, but um,

the

yeah, well, anyway, we'll get into Tekken later.

There's a whole lot going on with fighting games.

But the Kumite was cool.

And

yeah, I mean, obviously, again, thanks for hosting over at your place.

You are welcome.

You and Punch Mom and Reggie are welcome.

Anytime you're in this neck of the woods, just come on by.

There's always a bed ready for y'all.

It's quite nice.

And yeah,

it was cozy.

Hey, I'd like to apologize.

So

of all the people, I did not expect this to happen, but Reggie left his door open.

And what happened was, is that Elmo got in there.

Oh, yeah, you wore it.

And Elmo, like, kept his ass up for hours because Elmo demands pets.

And Reggie was like, he was willing to oblige.

Yeah.

And that was really sweet.

And like eventually he like pretended to be asleep until the cat got bored and left.

So that's like a sweet story.

However, later that day, you like touched the cat and then touched your face and exploded.

So that's the thing is like Boosie is like at first nervous and then like shuffles away and has his butt.

in your face but then afterwards chills on the couch and is totally fine becomes like a doll yeah so i just sat there and scritched him for a while and he was totally chill.

Um,

but uh, Elmo, on the other hand, yeah, Reggie was like, Oh, yeah, sure, let him in.

And then, you know, you gave us the heads up that uh

the

Boosie is in Lil Boosie, as in Caboose, Lil Boosie, get the

little boozy man, and so, and so letting Elmo into the room is the results.

I think you described it as him going, Ah,

like after you stop paying attention, and And,

you know.

And so that was, that was funny.

But yeah, no,

sat on Elmo's couch on Elmo's throne for a minute.

And then I think, yeah, just touching my eye.

And then my eye swole the fuck up.

It's crazy.

I did not know you were allergic to cats.

So I have a cat allergy, but it has not.

acted up in a long time.

The last time it acted up was at a friend's place who has like three cats and has been living that way for 20 20 plus years.

And it's just been like, the dander is in the air when you inhale.

And like, she had to give me cat pills the whole time.

And I was like, ugh, right.

But one is usually quite fine.

So we didn't think this would be a problem because Elmo is like a long, fluffy cat and they tend to be hypoallergenic.

But we forget Elmo is insane and eats chunks of his own fur off his body for fun.

So there's patches on that cat that are just bare, which means there's nothing to stop the dander from leaking onto any particular surface.

And I didn't know as well.

So when you do the allergy test, you know, they stick you with a bunch and then you see the bumps and you go, oh, these bumps are the ones that are the worst.

Therefore, you're allergic to that.

Yeah.

And mine always reacted.

But I didn't know that like,

I know when an allergy is going off, like your nose and your eyes get itchy as a, as a side effect kind of thing.

Yeah.

But the idea that like touching the surface of the eyeball is the same as the surface of the skin is just it just i didn't really connect that that would be a thing, you know?

Because it's almost like, yeah, it's almost like, okay, like if you touch your skin, it bubbles up.

All right.

Imagine touching your nail and then your nail bubbles.

Or you touch your hair and then your hair bubbles.

Eyeball is all that sensitive meat.

Yeah.

So because it feels like your eyeball is like a, or your, it feels like your eyeball is almost like your teeth or it's like enamel or something.

It's like a different, you know, part of your body.

I just did.

It's like meat.

You know?

So yeah, it's a soft tissue and it's way more sensitive.

And so as a result, my eye started to swell up with a like pus sack.

And it was crazy.

It was protruding.

Yeah, you undersold it.

You were kind of like, oh yeah, you know?

But like when I looked in the mirror and then like Punch Mom saw it and everything, I was like, no, that's really scary.

You got to remember, I live with Paige.

My threshold for.

No, you're good.

Is

different from the regular household.

But what it was, was there is like, basically, like there was the iris and then the eyeball next to it was doing like a bump.

You know, it was sticking out and then there was fluid in it.

Fine.

Just a little cat juice.

Yeah, well, I mean, it turns out that I guess, like, you know, with a Benadryl, thank you, Paige, you know, like, um, and I guess some time and some eye drops, uh, it does go down.

And, you know, later on that day, it was, it was massively reduced.

And there was a moment of being like, do we gotta go somewhere?

Or

it's fine.

You know.

But yes, uh, I will be certainly much more alert about sitting in

anything

touching your face.

That's the that's the number one, yeah.

I, I just, I, it was, you know, it was a little like vibrating like chair thing with heat, and I was like, ooh, I could, I could warm up and try that out.

And I got Elmo's revenge, so it was cool.

Um,

yeah, and and uh,

you know, I guess uh, not much beyond that.

What's going on with your week?

Well, I mean, you did the Kumite and you hung out.

Yeah.

You played Mark City of the Wharves.

That boy's coming along strong.

Oh, isn't he cute?

We're in the yes phase where everything is yes.

Doesn't mean it.

Doesn't know what he's saying yes to, but just like, hey, man, you want to overthrow the government?

Yeah.

Should that stupid.

Yeah, should the worker seize the means of production?

Yeah.

Just say yes to anything.

It's fucking hilarious.

So, yeah,

that was cool.

And yeah, beyond that,

what?

Okay, so

I was going to touch on how insane and busted T-Zock was.

He's also busted, but he's bugged and crazy.

That's not going to stay.

No, no.

He can

Izuna drop you while you're on the ground

multiple times in a row.

Test level broken.

Accidentally at that.

So, yeah, there's no way, no way for sure that's going to stay.

But he's fun to play.

That's what really matters.

Yeah, and

it's interesting that he's fun and he's also different from King of Dinosaurs, which is his heel persona in King of Fighters.

I love the idea of there being like, it's the same human being, but depending on which series he's in, he's just a huge mask.

Yeah, then he changes his whole persona up and he, you know, does more dinosaur moves or more Griffin moves.

Versatile as a wrestler.

Anyway,

while I was on the plane, was listening to that.

I talked about a podcast with Argo Tulik, one of the writers of Disco Elysium and one of the founding folks that

was friends with Martin Luiga and Robert Kurwitz, the original Overcoats, as the group was named back in the day.

It's really interesting to hear about behind the scenes about how that game came to be and the

kind of like just kids skipping school to hang out in Estonian cafes, smoking cigarettes when you're way too young and writing a DD campaign where you're like, regular DD is boring and not interesting.

Let's make some real shit and designing the world of Elysium.

it's a really interesting listening.

I've not done it so far.

It's very long.

It's like some nine hours or some crazy.

It's like, it's really crazy.

But

going partway through it, I can definitely say if you're interested in that stuff, it's worth checking out.

It's called the Human Can Opener.

And there's three parts to it.

The

yeah, little things like...

He kind of pointed out that like some people caught onto the fact that like disco, even though it's written and used in the word in the sense of the game and described as like a, you know, it's an attitude, it's an era, it's a time that we all remember, it's also

Latin for I learn.

And

therefore, disco Elysium is kind of a way of saying, I like this, this is the beginning of learning about the world of Elysium.

That's what that title actually implies, you know?

Yeah, it's, it's, it's quite, it's quite cool.

And anyway, just other little, other, other little tidbits, all of which come into play this week, as well as some very pertinent disco news

dropped.

So we'll get into that in the in the weeks too.

But yeah, definitely an interesting

thing to listen to as well.

And

I'll check back in certainly once I'm through with it.

Beyond that, I mean, there's just too much other shit to get to go into with the weeks.

So I'll just call it there.

All right.

So on my end.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Blah, before that,

Cyberpunk started Phantom Liberty.

That's awesome.

That's really cool.

Phantom Liberty has a nice intro sequence that does...

It really does the most to like immerse you in that setting because I didn't realize until I was in it, but like, um,

you know, it can, there's a soft lead-in to the DLC, it's like an area of the map, and then uh

you get to a market and you walk through a cyberpunk market while a bunch of people are holding up their wares and everyone's got stuff to sell you.

And I kind of realize, I'm like, oh shit, this is your demolition man going down underground underground and seeing the

Dennis Leary and the goons.

Right.

This is your

arriving at the town in Fallout

and looking at the, from, from the top view, looking down at the marketplace, the town square.

And any setting, especially a cyberpunk or post-apocalyptic setting, you know, Star Wars, all these things, when you show a marketplace and commerce happening, that's such a strong, establishing thing that says so much about life, you know,

what people are eating, how they're living.

How much is it being sold for?

What's the currency?

Exactly.

How they're like, whether violence is a part of that.

Who are the authorities?

What are the dynamics and interpersonal things where, you know, are a bunch of guards that are getting paid coming down and getting bribed?

Or are people on their own, you know, settling it?

Is someone going to turn their head and go back to their drink if someone gets shot behind them?

Or are they going to freak out?

You know, like, there's so much to learn from these like marketplace establishing moments.

And Cyberpunk has one, and it's fantastic.

It's great.

I kind of didn't know I was missing it until this DLC did that.

And it actually lets you take your time going through it as long as you want to.

Like, it's pointing you towards like a critical path, but

you can just walk circles around this upper and lower level, learn more about what is essentially

a stronghold, which is a group that basically took a football stadium and locked it down as their own secure spot, you know, away from corporate influence, or at the very least, shielded against their complete takeover.

It's really, it's really cool.

So that all kind of bleeds in to an explosive,

insane

your job is to protect the president mission.

And

the way that all...

Full-on escape from New York.

I mean, like, full, like, like full-on, and then,

you know, with some Air Force One

get off my plane,

you know, going on there too.

And yeah, it's also sick to see alongside that introduction with a, you know, a cool...

It's a cool escort mission, it feels like.

It's an escort mission where, you know, a charismatic character that you're hanging out with is not a chore to walk next to.

And

you get the unlock of

the DLC abilities, which are just adding some great powers to whatever style of play you want.

So if you're doing melee, you get some really cool rewards for melee in particular.

Always love that.

It feels a lot like

the boosts in

Elden Ring, right?

You have your ghost, I forgot what they're called, but secondary DLC strengtheners, you know.

And, like, sure enough, you come across at some point,

there is a fucking spider tank, and everything you would want to occur with that spider tank based on Ghost in the Shell occurs.

They do, they understand the assignment, and they deliver.

So,

so far, that DLC is fucking great, and I have yet to even meet Susie or Idris Elba.

Very strong.

I'm so excited to see if Susie runs you over with her car.

Well,

I've been threatening.

I've heard that threat from day one of the game.

So we'll see what happens.

But ever since people started writing that in the beginning, I'm on the lookout for cars that are going to QTE me or just come out of nowhere.

So we'll see.

But yes, Cyberpunk continues.

And this week as well, we're going to take a look at Venom and Guilty Gear Strive.

So that's going to be popping up on Get into Fighting Games on Saturday.

All right.

All right.

That's Wooly versus.

So, what's going on with me?

The kid's in the yes phase.

He's adorable.

He's the best ever.

I have a minor piece of Jimothy news that would be a Jimmy-based piece of information.

So

last week I described the hilarious message that Jimmy sent me weeks prior that I missed.

And

the new news, which you can find out more details on Paige's recent Nintendo Direct stream, where she went into the Jimmy updates afterwards,

is that we did not know this, but Jimmy is the admin of our local neighborhood

DD and mini painting Facebook group and kicked her out

And is now demanding an apology

for

her blocking him on Facebook.

The unabridged story, as told around

a really nice charcuterie spread, by the way.

Good stuff.

Yeah, it was nice, wasn't it?

Appreciate that.

Is quite wild.

The details as told on podcast are wild, and the full thing, of course, is just.

So there's ways.

Woo!

It continues.

There's way more detail that I'm going to go, that I'm not even going to bother going into because Paige talked about this for like an hour on her recent stream.

So you can go check that out over at Peach Saliva.

It's the Nintendo Direct 2 stream.

It's the back half and the Jimmy updates.

But yeah, no, she has now been frozen out of the primary form of communication in our neighborhood

because she blocked him because he was sending creepy messages to me.

And she was like, I don't want to get creepy messages from fucking after hours, Jimmy.

And so we're navigating this situation now.

On the other hand,

we went to DD and had the first post-Jimmy DD.

Okay.

Because, yeah, I left off with the.

Yeah, we were going the next day.

With it the next day.

Correct.

And guess what?

It was awesome.

It was fucking great.

It was fun.

It was the best game of DD I ever played.

Paige said it was the best DD game she ever played.

And we're just sitting around going, holy fucking shit.

Yeah.

It literally just was all Jimmy.

All Jimmy.

All negative things in those sessions were Jimmy times.

I also just want to take

an important factor too to mention here because I remember when we were recapping it for Reggie as well.

And like, it's like, there's an important stinger to just keep aware of, which is every one of these sessions is

with the cost of a babysitter for the night.

Oh, yeah.

So, you know, you pay the babysitter to go to the night.

There is

this bullshit.

There is an investment in making sure that these are fun nights because, holy shit, it takes time and planning and cost.

It's not just random whatever.

So the DD is going great, though.

Now, on the larger thing, we're now managing people, people, us going, like, well, how are we going to get back in?

And people go, well, you know,

you know, he's having a hard time.

And, you know, he's just, he's emotional.

And all this fuck, all this gentle hands, BC, non-confrontational nonsense.

Though I will say,

somebody in one of the comments that we saw recently really did put it into perspective, which is, it's amazing what people will tolerate in a DD or Warhammer group from the guy who has a 3D printer.

Like, it is astonishing the level of bad behavior they will tolerate from the one guy who has

oh man

yeah what are you gonna do you know hard time

he's got the fucking printer dude yeah yeah that's funny that's good right like I said you can go check out paige's recent Nintendo direct stream for more details side sidebar on on what you said about the the the the you know the the bc soft hands bit but um out here gentle hands gentle hands well out here seeing as well the amount of just like, there's a whole lot of

gluten-free and

health-adjacent like choices in stores that, like, I was like, y'all got this, you got it like this, you know,

that kind of explained to as well where some folks I know from BC that the gluten, you got to get rid of the fluoride, you can't have that stuff.

So, some folks I know from BC are, were, that are very, very, very particular about like their choices of things.

And coming down here, they were like,

I can't eat.

I can't do anything.

And I was like, it's not that bad.

And then I was like, oh, because out here it's like this.

Okay, I see.

Yeah, there's a

there's a variety of

granola good vibes only.

There's a granola vibe.

The little spirit

provides

gluten and fluoride are the enemy.

Did I tell you that I was in my dentist's office and she's like, yeah, you look good.

No problem.

And I could overhear

the dentist, you know, like the, the, there's nothing that blocks the, the two, the two,

you know, kiosks or whatever the fuck you.

And I was listening to an older woman be told by the other dentist, ma'am, if you do not start using fluoride, every single tooth is going to flaw out of your life.

Oh, man, you got it.

And the phrase that came out of her mouth was, well, me and my husband don't believe in fluoride.

Okay, well, yeah.

And the dentist's like, ma'am, every single one of your teeth is about to go.

And she's like,

I guess I'll talk to my husband about it, but I don't know.

Well, what I, because what I believe manifests into reality, right?

That's the way things work.

Obviously, I'm not talking to anyone who's actually celiac, you know, if they've got a gluten allergy problem.

No one's ever met anyone with celiac disease.

Just, you know, but yeah, the, the,

that's a vibe.

That is a vibe.

Um, fuck.

Damn, Might be time to invest in a 3D printer.

Oh, man.

Wouldn't that be?

Look at the little woolly.

It's so cool.

It's so cool.

Anyway.

Well, that's from one of our cherished sponsors, and they do everything a million times better than we could with even the nicest 3D printer.

But yeah, that's basically what's going on with that.

I also watched, I'm working and streaming a lot.

So if you want to watch me check out

Split Fiction with Paige Paige tonight, we're going to stream at 5 p.m.

East Western

Pacific, 5 p.m.

Pacific.

Tomorrow, I'm going to do a normal, I'm going to do a late night monster hunter stream, and I'm also going to check out the remainder of the treehouse streams.

And that'll be it for me.

I'm not streaming this weekend.

I'm going to be tired.

Could you imagine if y'all just posted like, checking out this new 3D printer and then the energy of everyone around you just suddenly shifted.

You know what, man?

I genuinely, I wouldn't even be surprised.

I wouldn't.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Thank God.

All right.

Like, what are we doing here?

Execute Order 66.

Yeah, okay.

All right.

One of the things that I've discovered about BC is that on the East Coast,

People will confront you just to do it.

Like, there's no problem, but let's have a confrontation.

And on the west coast, people will tolerate

like everything short of being stabbed so that they don't have to have an awkward conversation.

Well, what if we

get mad?

Well, it's funny how the coastal

word and energy applies in the same way that New York and LA describe themselves to

Canada as well.

Like East Coast versus West Coast.

It's the air.

It's the

same thing.

Shit is soft out west, y'all.

But yeah, but yeah.

It's yeah, Paige in the chat says, I bet I could shit on the floor during DD and everyone would just look the other way.

I think I should just shit my pants the next time I go.

Well, the important part.

Well, the important part is like mid-drop to be looking up at everyone and saying that you're having a hard time.

Right?

It needs to be like

while you're squeezing to like make the break, you need to be going.

I'm sorry, sorry, I'm under a lot of time.

I'm having a hard time.

Just make sure you say that.

I'm sorry.

All right.

Now you're all having a hard time, and I'm sorry about that.

There you go.

Right?

Right.

Yeah.

Very important.

So.

I mean, oh man, we're trucking on this podcast.

We are trucking, but I'm.

Oh, man.

I mean, there's barely any news.

So we're just about out of here.

All right.

Well, look, let's take our quick sponsor break let's get that uh taken care of and then let's

let's get into to what's going on

um

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by

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Okili Dokali.

So

let's see over here.

Now, the big chonky parts,

let's get the small things out of the way, I suppose, first, right?

Yeah, let's do it like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so one,

I talked a little bit earlier about

listening to Argo Tulik, who was one of the Disco Elydium writers

on the whole process of

how Disco Elysium came and started and continued and

when things split up and so on.

There's a really long thing.

It was really interesting hearing that because as that happened, simultaneous,

I got sent a message with a little video going, hey, check this out.

And I was reading about how

essentially there was a whole thing where like, so Robert Kurvitz had the initial falling out and then left.

And then some folks that we we know from the staff, before Zaum completely was devoid of any of the original staff,

there were still some people that stuck around and were still working on Discord Elysium-related projects.

As we were describing,

obviously,

people need to eat.

It's understandable.

That's true.

And some of the things that got announced, there was a full-fledged sequel that was supposed to happen.

I think it was called Project Y9.

And then at some point after that, there was the announcement of Project X7, which was a standalone expansion

to disco.

And so what we got

was a video showing off Project X7,

the DLC,

that was going to be called Locust City, an Elysium story.

Essentially, Jamra Kobo, who's one of the, you know, premier, premier, I'd say, like, Disco Elysium content creators online, who grabbed us playing through the game in our various playthroughs and stuck us in some compilations to like some of the wildest moments and stuff.

Good stuff.

Shout outs to Jamrock,

got sent a video from someone who is, you know, in the know that was just like, hey, upload this.

And it was a full project meeting internally discussing Locust City and Elysium story.

So that was not an

April 1st, was when it got uploaded, but it was way too elaborate.

And if you looked, if you watched the video, you could see this is way too in-depth for this to be an April Fool's joke.

There's no way, right?

Because it's getting into each team's development, where they're at.

and them showing off how their tech is going.

So what it is, is a story starring Kuno and Kuno S.

And it was actually interesting to see some of the pitch and what they had in mind.

It got taken down, but of course, people bade some copies, so I'm sure it can be found

to get to it fast enough.

Yeah, the original video, exactly.

You're right.

It must be backed up a million places.

But Kuno and Kuno S basically yuck it up, running through as essentially Kuno's dad gets murdered, and then he goes on an adventure to figure out what the fuck happened.

So

it starts out with an overlap of two voices that sound very similar to

the limbic system and the ancient reptilian brain.

But they're actually the inner kind of ego voices of Kuno and Kuno S separately.

It would have been a game where you control both of them.

And as they go around and interact with things, you can switch from one to the other while talking to people and have the conversation switch between the two.

Some thoughts that Kuno starts, Kuno S has to finish, and vice versa, right?

They have individual

stats that are the voices in their heads.

They have individual bits and pieces that play off of each other.

And there was a whole two-in-one sort of setting to them that was quite interesting.

One of the

bits was that like something about Kuno S's past, for example, involved being near the ocean so she could hear things differently and pay attention to the sound of water differently from him.

So when you clicked on her, she would notice the sound of like a running river somewhere nearby or a fountain.

And on

his side, when you click on him, he can't hear that because what he hears are like chattering locusts because he's got a box of locusts.

and he's poked holes in them to keep to keep them alive.

And you don't know what he's going to do with this box of locusts, but they're there.

And every once in a while, he can peek at them to see what's happening in the box.

And depending on how you've been playing him, the civilization of locusts inside the box will evolve differently to reflect his psyche.

That's so weird.

Because his psyche and everything about Kudo, obviously, being as fucked up as it is, can go in a lot of different places.

And overall, kind of like a thought cabinet in a way, which was also there, this would be like, it sounds like you could have them create a civilization of like, you know, prosperity prosperity and they can build up buildings and structures and talk to each other.

Or it becomes like dank feudalism or just all-out war and bloodbath.

And you're just like, what is he going to do with this box of bugs?

You know?

And yeah, it was broken up into these five major acts where, you know, it starts with them.

That's so cool.

Yeah, discovering and then leaving and going on, I guess, you know, what might be a coming of age for these two shit kids.

And then that intro narration in particular as well.

It was just so interesting to see like Kudo's inner voice just be like this badass, strong, confident, nothing fucks on Kudo.

Who's that?

You know, like, and

her inner voice is like this kind of like sassy adult, self-confident, sure, British woman speaking with like

sharking about their soda being mingen.

Yeah, but but but like what she hears herself is like this sassy, confident, strong voice, you know?

And it was a whole, it was a whole setup they had where the two played off of each other, you know.

And of course, again, sometimes you, you, you, you look at one character and you do a red check, but you can switch over to the other to like swerve the conversation a different way.

Very interesting setup in it, and you can go check it out.

It's about a 15-minute, you know, presentation on where they were going with it.

But Locust City was what it it was called.

Um,

that was Project X7, and that is what Argo Tulik was working on

before

he got

ousted and before the whole thing fell apart.

And now, of course, the lawsuits are happening to make sure that he can't work on anything anywhere and such.

So, it's a whole fucking mess.

But we got to look at at least one of those, one of those, you know, disco plus type things.

Um,

quite interesting as as a premise and the idea of having a the main character be that fucking kudos that fucking cat like in your head you know the whole time would have been kind of nuts um

would have been really really interesting

um

yeah

i i i feel like you know well obviously we don't know what's going to happen but the

idea of some of the original creators at least being around to like steer the ship or guide it in some way meant that you know what you you could you could you could you could see something interesting like this potentially come out of it even if kervitz is not around you know but like who the fuck knows with with nothing there you know

um you obviously we saw that that

first person kind of mobile version of things and and who you know we'll see how that comes along because they're doing that uh uh made-for phone change up in the format and such.

But

overall, that seems like a promising idea, you know?

Huge shame.

Yeah, go check that.

Go check that out.

Watch none of these come out, man.

Like, not a single one.

Of all the

successors, all the sequels, all this, all the deal.

They all just sue each other into oblivion.

Into oblivion.

Yeah.

Just crash the

fucking Estonian game.

I mean, this is the Estonian games market, really, right?

Oh, boy.

Anyway,

okay, so beyond that, what else is going on?

Well, real quick, they just showed off the Marvel Rival Season 2 Hellfire Gala.

So we got to see Ultron and

White Queen.

And there's something just...

So simple in that all of this is going on, and there's currently

a limited edition thing, which which if you get on, I think pretty much like right away or so, you can get your chance at twerking Venom.

And isn't Twerking Venom just the perfect microcosm for what every other game we're about to talk about should be doing?

Is that not just like people just want Twerking Venom?

Because people were like, oh man, it'd be cool if Venom twerked because Venom's got a big butt.

And then they went, yeah, okay.

Yeah, sure, fucking.

You know, not unknown random DJs and

potential fucking

criminals and God knows what else happening here.

Just

Venom dropping it.

I tell you what, I'll tell you what.

Tropping it low.

Marvel Rivals is like a really good example for me of how badly the FOMO spell has broken for me.

Because I was playing other things and then realized that I had missed out on some fucking seasonal event.

I think it was like the Chinese New Year costumes.

Oh, right.

Arrivals.

And then as soon as I realized that, I'm like, oh, okay, I'm done.

It broke.

As soon as the FOMO kicked in, I'm like, oh, I missed out on some.

Okay, no, I'm done.

I'm done forever.

Okay.

Like, I'm not going to chase

any time-limited fucking thing or battle pass on this fucking game.

Like, no.

I think there's a bit where I look, because I popped on just to look and see what was going on, and I saw the Spider-Punk outfit.

I was like, ooh,

Spider-Punk looks really good.

But I'm like, I don't play Spider-Man,

but still, but,

you know, and I'm kind of like, I'm like, okay, for the characters I care about and the ones I play, I think I can be like, let me get the ones, let me get those, you know?

But anything, anything that's not going to be super time-limited for a character I don't play,

I think I might be a little more willing to chill on, but I, you know, that being said, like Torquing Venom with the Marvel vs.

Capcom colors, yeah, let's fucking run that, you know, yeah, um,

and yeah, it's Spider-Punk 2099, but he's still, but he has like the

filter, the popped explosion color filter on him on some of those animations, really, really good job there, anyway.

Um, yeah, that orange venom looks fucking great, Marvel one.

Uh, okay,

then

um,

uh let's you know what here let me let me uh early spotlight as well some some some good some cool stuff that's happening.

Uh one someone pointed me in the direction of uh a fan game called Mega Man X Corrupted.

Uh I watched it.

There's a there's a some footage over this over the years.

I think the video I saw was the the cyber lab um And I was like, okay, Mega Man X fan game, let's take a look.

Oh my god, I'm I'm watching this whole video.

I just, within like a minute of watching what was going on, I was like, fuck me, this looks incredible.

It looks just, it's just Mega Man.

It's like, you know, you're watching like Zero running through like a mission.

You're meeting characters, talking,

a whole setup where it's like, like the map is broken up in a zero-like way where you're going to different directions.

There's a level up screen where you're looking at your different

upgrade branching routes.

And it just looked really compelling.

And it was like the punchline.

There's no punchline.

It's just this could have been what the franchise was if we continued to make those games, I suppose.

You know, it's just kind of a bit of a like, yeah,

the fan community still knows what we kind of wanted, and it just looks dope as hell.

Um, when

do uh, how do I play it?

Uh, not out yet, and

uh, how long long has it been been worked on seems like a while so that's the punchline okay there it is

seems like a while

15 years get the fuck out of here are you serious oh that's a good punchline

oh yeah

oh no

Because Wooly, you started to talk about it, and I started watching Mega Man X corrupted Cyber Lab.

And the text says, I'm proud of the amazing work work the team has done, which I interpreted as the game's not out yet.

And now I'm like, okay,

where is it?

What's what it?

All right.

Well, it's hey, it's either that or, you know, tap the sign on my video.

But since we're already talking about it, and,

you know, there was that one time that Capcom officially endorsed the fan game.

So that you can do that.

The Capcom product is like probably the safest.

If you're going to

do a fan game of anybody, like Capcom does occasionally endorse fan games and Sega.

Sega would be the safest, I'd say.

They have a whole ages celebration of it, you know.

They also like need you to keep putting out Sonic games that people want to play because they won't.

But the litmus tests, infinite data.

Oh, man, you know the Capcom test?

Yeah.

Like, Sega has the Sonic test made for them every single year over and over and over again.

There's so much info and so much data on exactly what

to do there.

But I overall, I'm like, hey, I'm glad if a company is like, yeah, let the fan game rock.

But if it's been 15 years in the making, Jesus Christ.

I guess it's gone under the radar.

All right.

Well, if you want to go watch a cool 20-minute video of a game that may or may not come out, Mega Manics Corrupted Cyber Lab was pretty dope.

I think today is a really good day to say the phrase, I think games are good when they come out.

And you know what came out?

Speaking of which?

What's that?

Ultimate Marvel vs.

Capcom 3 Community Edition is out.

Cool.

I thought it was out this whole time.

No, it was a working version.

Basically,

I think the person that was working on Nero for a long time was unable to complete the project due to some personal stuff.

But it looks like it's finally gotten finished.

In the meantime, let me tell you,

the amount of fucking shit they put in is obscene.

What I thought was going to be a healthy 10, maybe 15 characters has turned out to be perhaps more than that.

Would you like a quick run through?

Hit me.

So obviously

the full roster that you know.

And then Shadow Lady, Evil Ryu, Lilith, Orange Hulk, Spider Gwen, a new Wolverine, Starz, Wesker, Red She-Hulk, Phoenix and Maya, Captain Marvel, Marvel 2 Sentinel, Shinakuma, Chris from Stars, Ken, Cyclops, Gene Gray, DMC1, Dante, Thanos, Cylock, Rashid, Monster Hunter, Hunk, Cami, Ultron, Asura, Moonstone, Guile, Charlie, Leon, Krauser, Jake, Sherry, Sakura, Batsu, Bishop, Iceman, Gambit, Venom, Carnage, Captain, Commando, Tail, Bane, Shocker, Blackheart,

Mega Man X, King Thor, Stranger, Jill from Stars, US Agent, Clea, Servebot, Dan, Hibiki, Gloria, The Thing, DMC5, Virgil, Nero, Strider 2099, M.

Bison, Colossus, Onslaught, Hayato, Carter, Slade, Kyosuke, Saki, Yun,

War Machine, Bad Box Art, Mega Man, and Jury with 49 costumes.

Why does Jury have 49 costumes?

You know exactly why.

Okay.

I want to ask you a question, and I want a yes-no answer.

Is one of Jury's costumes

just the entire model is replaced with the model of her bare foot?

And it works like Daytona USA, like car from fighting Megamix.

Someone failed the assignment if that isn't the case.

I'm seeing people say the word yes.

A giant foot must obviously be costume number 49.

Are you serious?

Like, actually,

I have no idea, but if you go look at the trailer,

I think the last five minutes is just jury costumes going from one into the other.

It's absolute madness.

It's absolutely.

What's the exact name of this?

Infinite Beyond?

No, no, no.

This is Ultimate Marvel vs.

Capcom 3 Community Edition.

Infinite and Beyond is Marvel 4.

Oh, okay.

This is different.

This is Marvel 3, not the Infinite game.

This is the one that was fine the whole time.

They just added more.

They just added more.

This is not the one that needed fixing.

So yeah, head over to Nexus Mods and grab it.

I can tell you this, just looking at footage of Nero,

he's perfect and incredible.

That on its own is worth the price of entry, which is obviously nothing.

It's a mod, but Nero is perfect.

It's a perfect Marvel 3 Nero.

And

they improve the net code.

I think you can play with other people who have it installed.

Yeah.

But

isn't the net code better?

I mean, I don't think that was part of the overhaul.

No, I think you've got what you got.

That's cool.

Insane.

Insane.

And yeah, I do know that

folks were running Parsec.

Is Parsec good now?

Or like,

is good?

Parsec's been a solution for that for a while.

But is it good?

Yeah.

Yeah, you can play.

Yeah, you can play it.

And you can feel like input, you know.

So I'm told.

Okay.

So I'm I'm told.

All right.

That's pretty crazy.

That's bananas.

Someone was that number.

What's the number up to on that?

Someone was working on a rollback patch, but they abandoned it due to personal issues.

Damn.

Okay.

I mean,

if you want full numbers,

68 characters added to the base roster.

That's pretty good.

In fact,

I would say

that in a

fast tag game

in today's world, you would be crazy to release your game with less than even half of 68 characters.

I mean, that's a very extreme number

to force 34 out of 10.

Just cut that in half to be reasonable.

34.

The last bit.

is just to say that the thing I wanted the most about this is the case, which is by having these all released together, there are also new characters that are balanced together and

around each other in a standardized way, too.

So they all kind of fit in.

So

here we go.

There's a discussion about balance and a discussion about roster.

Which way, young FGC gamer?

That

is a false equivalence.

We have played a lot of games that had rosters of 10 to 15 characters that were fucking balanced like shit.

No, what I mean is this segue can swerve into Tekken or to 2xKO.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Let's go to 2xKO.

Okay.

You know what?

No, no.

I actually want to know why is the Tekken patch so bad?

I've never seen the FGC just turn on a whole game.

So this one.

A whole game.

So this one is difficult because...

like I don't play Tekken A.

So

I'm casual on Tekken, right?

Like I play and I have a character and I enjoy playing it and

stuff is cool, but I definitely

have to refer to those who know and are in there

much more

frequently to learn.

Fortunately,

God damn it.

Let me try to find it.

Phi

released

a Street Fighter equivalent of what these patches would be like if they were in Street Fighter VI.

Because to me,

there was a divining rod, right?

One was somebody in chat asks me, hey, man, you see this shit happening with Tekken?

And I'm like, and I went on Steam.

I was like, you know, I opened up the browser and I went, how bad?

Overwhelmingly negative.

Holy shit.

And then I checked my Discord, I think, the next day, and Punk Duck had reached out to me out of nowhere and said, okay, well, Tekken 8 is abysmal.

I'm switching to Virtual Fighter.

And I was like, whoa,

that's a big statement.

That's a lot.

That is a crazy statement.

Whoa.

Yeah.

And so there's the tricky part, too, is as well as the part where

Like there's been a lot so tech and as well as a community.

There's been a lot of moments of like people you know it's hard to tell when it's like oh this shit's garbage and it's like okay is it or is it kind of like a character yeah yeah yeah because you know it's not not this not a cry wolf situation as much as it is there's been times where you're like damn it this game is over it's fucking dead and it's like it's it's not that bad but admittedly heard that statement a lot but admittedly they but basically they released a new character whose balance is all fucked up and they're gonna need to address it right um

what i will say is and so this is one of those cases where you're like, is that what's happening here?

And it's like, it seems like it's quite a bit more.

And that's why the overwhelming amount of

feedback is happening.

Here, let me get you this

tweet.

It feels like, I will say,

so far, despite the fact that like, you know, don't ask me for shit is the Harada meme.

Over time, when there's been these big moments of backlash, it usually feels like there's a correction moment, like with the with the Heihachi stage inclusion and shit like that there's a moment where they actually go okay no wait we fucked up hold on let's go let's go fix this right um

so here is

a tweet from uh phi dx

who translated tekken season two changes for street fighter players oh that's so good so yeah okay i got this up go ahead and read it because this is fun okay so we can assume our audience is more familiar with street fighter than tekken okay so this is like saying

Akuma.

Go Hidoken, which is the Hidokin.

Damage has been

reduced by 50, 100.

Okay, hold on.

Shit, it shrunk.

Sorry.

Damage has been reduced by 50, 100, 150 on light, medium, heavy.

Akuma, damage reduced by 50, 100, 150, light, medium heavy.

Input changed to down, down, plus punch.

So what if Shoriuken became down, down, plus punch, right?

Okay,

so Akuma's Tatsu frame advantage on block increased from minus 13 to minus one.

So what if Tatsu was just almost safe, right?

His health increases from 9,000 to 10,000, which is standardized health.

So the big weakness Akuma usually has.

Yeah, we just took that away.

Okay, his

demon flip kick increased startup speed, making it harder to react to.

uh shengoku satsu which is the raging demon changed input to down down kick plus punch so you can just do it right away uh and it's invincible to projectiles from the first frame um but to make up for this uh damage has been reduced for uh to 4000 from 4700 right and then they then a little also at the bottom cami uh quick spin knuckle uh projectile involve uh from the first frame instead of the ninth

and uh frame advantage on hit changed to plus eight, which is enough time for her to do a standing heavy punch, which allows a full combo afterwards.

You know what the best part about this is?

I absolutely perfectly understand exactly how this would translate into Tekken.

Yes.

It's like, okay, so everything is faster,

scarier, less, less, less threatening.

It's less safe on block, but hey, you know what?

Hey,

did you get a hit in?

Just go.

Just go do whatever.

Just go crazy.

Okay.

But we tone the damage down.

We toned it down so it's safe.

Also, Anders new moves that track and do everything and basically create 50-50 situations after you block them because you were mistaken for blocking it.

You should not have been there.

And now they're going to be.

Yeah, they turned it into killer instinct without combo breakers.

So

it all goes pretty intense, right?

And

anyway,

that level of like the translation, like going over, now they're like, the idea is what if you applied that to like the whole cast, right?

That would be insane.

Why would you do that?

So this all started with a,

initially they revealed that they're like,

throw teching, which is when you break a throw, was going to change for the first time.

You're going to have it be so that breaking a throw led to you taking a little bit of damage.

while the person who tried to throw is in heat, right?

So that's

an activated point during the round.

Wait, is that how they say it?

In heat?

Is that how people in Tekken say it?

It's like when your opponent is in heat?

During heat.

Yeah, you know, that's the mechanic is called heat, and you activate it.

So when you're in heat, these are the things that happen.

That's so funny.

Yeah, I mean, I know.

For you can say phrasing all you want.

That's how it's referred to.

Characters go in heat.

They do.

It's true.

They do do that.

This has been a thing.

It's the whole time.

Anyway, so

that's so fucking funny.

Oh my God.

So a big part of this has been,

so that was an initial change.

And then also they made a change so that

when you do key charge, which was, you know, originally in every Tekken game, you press all four buttons and then you go

and you see a little spark.

Usually that means that you, one, you can't block and two, the next thing you do will act as if it were a counter hit, which changes the properties of the attack in a lot of cases, allowing you to do different types of combos or strings and such.

They change that as well so that it's just a damage increase instead of a

hit type property change, right?

People were understandably pretty upset about that because they're like, these are part of the identity of the franchise.

They've been there for so long, and it's really strange to just do that.

You know, there's a discussion point around like when

Street Fighter V launched and reversal

like wake-up Shoryukin type situations where like Shoryukens were not invulnerable, you know, and then they had to like eventually go like, okay, no, only if you press, if you do it as an EX move or so.

But it was just very weird because it was just like, this has been a part of this franchise for a really long time.

People were really

upset about that.

And then they were like, also, there's going to be character specific changes that are coming later on.

But

that was the first one.

People, you know,

were upset, and

they did respond before patch 2.0 for Tech N8 dropped.

And the response was,

and this is the thing where I'm like, Radiant and the 2XKO folks and everything, like explaining your patch notes and why you do things is very important because perception is super, super crucial to people perceiving and understanding why things are the way they are, right?

It's part of the meta game of balance.

Like, we've had games in the past buff guns in Call of Duty by changing their sound effect, right?

And it works.

It works on player psychology.

But explaining, like, no, here's the actual design mentality behind

why we nerf this or change this.

It also affects player mentality because people who understand and don't just do, why is it different?

Yeah.

i've often said how much i love rising thunder's patch notes and to that end when

yeah and and the same energy is going into like when they're breaking down details about 2xko um

excuse me like when you describe what you're changing you go here's what it was here's what we wanted it to do here's where it was failing to do that people were doing something else and it wasn't working that same way and so here's why we're changing it and here's what we're changing it to um and so that initial thing of people just seeing that and going i don't understand why you're doing this.

What the fuck is going on?

Especially if it's a thing that's been a legacy part of the franchise for the entire time, you know, rightfully understandably confused as to what the fuck is going on, right?

Why, why are you doing this?

So then an explanation kind of came out and addressed it, and it did go into why.

And I feel like something that has unfortunately happened with a lot of Japanese fighting games over the years has been like a, because I'm thinking of like specifically as well, when Killer Instincts would also have have like Keats do those streams where he's like we're gonna do like a three hour stream cracking over every one of these changes and what y'all wanted and what you're looking for and great walking you through

so everyone was very under everyone understood where they're where you were coming from where you were going and what the intention was and then I remember the days of just like yeah a lot of games that were just like no there's a way of doing things and that is we make a change we don't want to tell you what it is and you have to discover for yourself why and what that means but by playing everything close to the chest, you know, you're just kind of like, you don't want to dictate how people should play, but also you create frustration when you're like, I don't know why you did this.

It's baffling.

I mean, I'm watching like, right?

Somebody posted a tweet in here, and it's like a trivial touch of death off of like a trade.

So I really.

It's like a touch of death.

Like, that's crazy.

I remember when, I remember when we got updates to like, I think it was like Super Street Fighter 4, and I saw like a phalong or a couple of other things where it's just like various adjustments have been made, and you're like, go fuck yourself.

How about that?

How about go fuck your very how about you go fuck yourself in a various amount of ways that I won't specify?

It really, really, really sucked to just not know what the fuck that meant.

So, um, with this, even getting into the specifics of the detail of like, you know, here's what the frame data changes are and the property changes are, the explaining the why part is something that's really important.

So, an explanation came out afterwards where where they said, okay, so in terms of the feedback on throws,

here's what we were getting at.

And this is something, and like with throws, there's always been like

this kind of thing where throwing in Tekken is if you're a top player, you can recognize whether the left hand is above the right hand or the right hand is above the left.

Tech it 100% of the time.

And you can always tech what you see because you have the reactions and you're just that good.

You've trained yourself and you have, you know, the skill for that.

If you're not amongst that list, if you're everyone else, you're getting thrown all the time non-stop.

You can't break shit, right?

So, so it's this really like interesting thing when you have like a like you have a character that's built around throws like a king or so, where you're like, oh, your kit doesn't work on people that can react to this, but a whole bunch of players are unable to react to throws and just get thrown constantly.

I can't react to throws in Tekken.

Yeah, it's an aggressive thing.

You have to train for this.

And honestly, like, I was talking with a bunch of folks this week about it, but like, Tekken does feel like a game where

it is very difficult to make that your secondary game while you main something else, especially like a 2D fighter.

If Street Fighter or Guilty Gear or so is your main game and you have Tekken as your secondary or so, it feels like it's much more difficult than if you make Tekken your main game and then you put something else secondary because of how much unique stuff that doesn't apply to all the other fighters Tekken requires of you.

I would say it's the same with like Virtual Fighter.

It's like, yeah, I play Virtual Fighter on the side.

No, you don't.

You either play Virtual Fighter and other shit, or you fucking just shit Virtual Fighter.

Playing Tekken makes you, can help you with Soul Calibur and vice versa.

Absolutely.

But

that's a two-way street and it's locked in its own place, you know, versus a lot of other 2D fighters where, you know what, getting better at blocking in Strive or Exerc is going to apply to certain Marvel games or certain hyper games, playing Dragon Ball, playing a team fighter, playing Skullgirls.

A lot of these skills are

interchangeable.

They all have more shared DNA than all of the 3D fighters.

Exactly.

Like, Mortal Kombat with a block button is obviously out over here on the side.

We're talking about fighting games.

But, yeah, but like, you know, things where there's a lot that's interchangeable.

But yeah, Tekken really is doing its own, you know?

So, um, so with that, you have something difficult where they're like, okay, how do we address throws when so many people are having trouble with it, but at the same time, competitively, it's not as much of a threat as it needs to be, right?

Well, I mean, certainly there's things where like King has obviously there's one plus two breaks, which is like you break by pressing both one and two together or he has a throw that you break with three i believe uh renato explained to me so um

what they explained after they made those changes was uh essentially that yeah people have struggled with throw breaking uh and what uh people that are really good uh you know certainly are able to do so but a large majority of players are are struggling and so what they wanted to do was uh alongside this they've made so with this change they made it so that um one plus two breaks, which require you to hit, to think and recognize them and break them, it takes a little bit more attention.

They are, there's a larger window of time when you can break that, right?

So those throw breaks get easier.

And if you try to throw somebody and you whiff, Also, you're going to be slower to recover from that whiff, which means going for a throw and messing up is more punishable.

And so that was the idea was essentially, we're going to make it so that

it's easier for most people who struggle with throws to break and punish them.

And so in exchange for that at high level, if you are already able to break all these throws, well, you shouldn't be there to begin with.

You should be either sidestepping or doing something because you're a good enough player to not avoid this.

Therefore, you don't take the little bit of damage that you're that you, you know, that that's the idea behind it, right?

And here's where you get to this weird place in your life where you hear somebody make a calm and reasonable argument from a position of knowledge and all you have in your gut is that sounds stupid as fuck

um so that's like that's still that's something that they ultimately went okay we're gonna roll back the part where um the person who tried to throw gets one uh bit of recovered health and we're gonna make it so that the person who takes the throw is gonna get a little bit of recover uh health that can be recovered over time um but overall that explanation i do understand where they're coming from when it's like

yeah

throws are something completely different to like the competitive level of player versus 90 of everyone else right i get that explanation um

what ends up happening is uh alongside this there's then the full release of the 2.0 patch which is like uh

everyone now has all their like everyone's abilities.

There's new moves, stuff has been adjusted drastically, like that Akuma thing we did earlier, where it's like, oh, this kind of discussion about throws and key charges are like way in the background now because the overall game has gotten way more insane.

And it's effectively what people are calling like a Kusoge patch, which is the equivalent of like what the insane Dragon Ball Fighters thing they did on the way out is kind of happening now while Tekken 8 is live, you know?

And it was like, in the case of Dragon Ball, when it was like, hey, we're getting out of here with one last hurrah while the game, you know, was kind of retiring.

That's very different from we're in the peak of this game's life in the middle of a second season, you know?

But it led to

it led to what people are kind of, so everyone's got their different takes on it, but essentially they're like, the discussion from players are that like, there are now like 20 characters in S tier is kind of the idea.

Oh, so it's really well balanced balanced then.

Everyone, including the already strongest characters, has gotten buffed and incredible improvements.

In a lot of cases, they've been given stuff that's so strong that they lose their identity.

What was special about the character or unique about their kit

falls by the wayside?

Oh my God, I just saw Paul do 60% on a single counter-hit punch.

So give me a second.

I'll get to what you're looking at in that video.

What ends up happening is people end up having a lot of, they have new moves and new things where the risk reward for doing this new thing is just so much better than anything else their old kit did that you should just do this new thing, right?

So everyone,

like whether they needed it or not, got buffed to oblivion.

And so the philosophy now is being challenged of the like, don't nerf, just buff, in which we've had this discussion quite a bit.

So we're going to have together so strong you don't even have to play the game.

So we're going to have to like, you you know put the asterisk and disclaim and explain explain that a little bit further i think um that video there's a video of paul uh doing the punch and

and strongest in the universe and like you see 60 damage in one hit right and so that's them take that's um uh counter hit damage plus heat plus rage plus um

I think the

key charge as well.

Don't care, right?

Don't care.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And a clean hit, And it's like five or so like unique impossible type situations all stacked on each other

to create that outcome.

So what that's too much.

Even with all that.

So all that, just the point of the sentence being that like it's it would be pretty impossible for all those things to occur in a in a real match to get that damage, but still

That being it's that shouldn't that that shouldn't be numerically like achievable through your fighting game.

But that's a bad example of things being dumb because that's not a real one, right?

The real one is when you see Jack doing an endless stream of lunging elbows.

I also saw that.

Where you're like unable to do shit and the mistake you made was blocking it.

Or where

things that, again, that were safe and already strong and advancing also track.

So if you try to sidestep, you get blown up for it.

That's mean.

And a lot of other things that, you know, overall changed some of the game worked was the

ability to sidestep forward from crouch.

Just some major stuff that has never been the case in the game is now just open up and open-ended, you know?

So it does.

So I kind of wondered, I'm like, oh, were they going for a Dragon Ball Fighters-esque like Kusoge-style patch with the way that Dragon Ball went out and kind of went, we're just fundamentally changing the spirit of what we think the goal of the game is here, you know?

Hard to say, but

I think, you know, initially, so let me see here, because I believe there was an explanation document for some of these changes.

And

kind of getting into like what they're overall getting at.

But the end result has been people, even everyone that has a stronger character, have been really upset going like, this isn't what I wanted this game to be.

This isn't fun.

And, you know, overall, even I feel like I'm like, it feels like I'm robbed and robbing people in a way where

the one thing that they expected was based on a previous statement, which they said we're going to be buffing defense, right?

They claimed.

That's not true.

They claimed that defense was going to be improved in the future.

And here,

not only is defense not improved it's completely gone the opposite way where it's all offense or nothing and that has made everyone go well what the fuck was the why'd you say that right

um

so yeah it has it has erupted in a massive review uh bomb obviously we're seeing it be overwhelmingly negative uh people are basically quitting the game and are switching to virtual fighter or you know various players are basically going i don't want to compete uh overall the craziest part about this was like when uh i was talking about it with reggie we kind of went man this is nuts because all of this just out of nowhere um

not even with a piece of new content huh and i was like yeah that's crazy and completely forgot like everyone else did that anna was released with this patch and anna is not discussed at all nobody knows anything about how anna's doing because i remember i remember that that i remembered that this is part of it but like i have not seen the word anna

No one has any idea how Anna is doing.

And also, she was someone who was 50-50 heavy as like a part of what she was about.

Like, you know, in irony.

But yeah, who knows?

Because no one's discussing the new character, you know?

So, yeah, it's kind of just this really nutso moment where a lot of, again, what people describe as the identity of the franchise just feels like it's gone.

And there has been, I believe, earlier today, essentially, an emergency patch discussion.

So they're talking about adjusting Paul's hammer of the gods and Jack's elbow are two things that are going to be pushed out.

And they're going to be looking at feedback from everyone else to further go on and adjust more and perhaps, you know, tweak or maybe even remove things as time goes on.

The messaging is vague at the moment.

The issue that a lot of people have is that this is such a large, sweeping change where the whole cast has has gotten a whole bunch of new shit and so many things has changed that like a couple of tweaks and flips here and there are not going to cut it like it would have to almost be like a full overhaul a full rollback you know um

so yeah like pulling back on some stuff is not going to fix you know uh uh what they're doing there i was looking at what was going on with steve fox and like they gave him a bunch of shit where if i'm just reading that i'm going like oh my god that's incredible you know but then also stuff where he doesn't have the freedom

in which everyone else

And overall, it's like, what, what, yeah.

So the, the, the, I understand the idea.

Syndrome from the Incredibles fucking balancing Tekken now.

So what ends up

ends up sucking exactly is the, like, when everybody is like really strong, but they're strong in the same homogenized way, that's not as fun.

That's, and that certainly makes people who have been spending a really long time getting good at these games feel like, well, what was I doing?

Right.

And that ends up, that ends up being a lot of the struggle, I feel like when I feel people talk about Tekken and are upset with the way things are going.

Because there's people that were upset with the way things were going already, you know, with like heat mode.

A lot of legacy players, as the term was described in the tweet, a lot of older players are like, yeah, this is a spectator feature that's a lot more hyperactive and kind of just made for us viewers, but as a player,

this doesn't feel as good.

And, you know, it makes it even harder to be strong defensively.

And

so it's just like a doubling down on that philosophy, you know?

Well,

so what I'm getting from this conversation

is that Tekken 8 is suffering from severe structural problems because the team went out there and did far too much.

And

I can think that our friends over

at 2xKO

are not going to have that problem.

Well, hold that thought for a second before we switch out.

Just to say,

that's two.

We're not ready yet.

The last thing I wanted to say that I think is interesting and a little more relevant because we've been hammering on this, and this is a very in-depth, we're talking.

I literally talked about frame data, which is a like, I made a mental thing to be like, don't bring up frame data as much as you can.

You avoid it, you know, in general.

But we're here.

Right.

But every once in a while, you got to get into it because that's what's fucking happening.

And to explain this to anybody who's like, why is Tekken on fire?

You have to explain why, which involves getting there, right?

So they they gave everyone a gun seems to be the short answer.

But I just wanted to say that, like, I remember that, like, part of this is that, like, the Core A gaming buffs are better than nerfs video, was a pretty good one that we've discussed and brought up many times.

You can put a little asterisk, within reason.

Within reason, because

I did see some people are just like, yo, this video has done irreparable damage.

You know, it's like, it's the perspective on.

watching gerald's video

ticking advice i would not be surprised if people some people were but overall the idea in general that like when we're talking about it as a like common understanding of like oh when seth killian said back in the day we try to buff up instead of nerfing down because it feels better what that means you know in the long term right and um we always talk about like the the idea of the um

the I think it was, what was it, the La Loss proposition where it's like, it feels better to get something.

It feels twice as good, twice as bad to lose something than it does to gain something.

It's driving a concept known as loss aversion.

Loss aversion, right?

Yeah.

So that's a big part of it.

So I think, exactly, like the overall idea there

that

applies is in this case, if you're buffing already buffed characters further into oblivion, if it comes at sacrificing, again, identity of the characters and a lot of the fun, you know, the same video also describes how the perfectly balanced balanced game that is street fighter one is the least fun in the world you know and um nobody wants

street fighter one does have perfect balance nobody wants that game where everybody is strong but everybody can do the same thing and everybody is on that same level because they're all the best right that's i think i think five five matchups across the board is it's and that's why you know i think gerald says like this isn't exactly the 5-5 utopia everyone dreams of exactly right um

And so, you know, you bring up the, it also goes in to describe the idea of how, like, hey, there was a really tall basketball player who stopped the game because he could hold the ball forever and make it so that nobody could do anything.

And thus, you know, we had to invent the shot clock.

And the shot clock made it, while nerfing that guy, it made the game fun for everybody and it increased the score and increased attention and added something as well.

You know, so that's a form of nerf that makes the game better.

And, you know, here's a reasonable example.

Everybody else gets buffed by the shot clock that is not seven feet tall, you know?

And then for anyone who's shorter than that, even, here's the other side of it.

You get the three-point line, which then allows people who are able to shoot, no matter what their height, to score.

and increase the tension and stakes of the game as well in a different way strategically that has nothing to do with your ability to stand there, hold the ball forever.

Right.

So, taking those points into account, that's also like here.

It's like we're seeing buff ups with no consideration for any of those other factors.

And that's where I would say, you know, you can't just blindly say, yes, never nerf only buff, you know?

And

that's what happened.

So.

Speaking of shot clocks,

the one over at Riot is about to run out and they're going to have to shoot their shot.

Are you guys ready to make a three-pointer?

So here's the thing with the 2XKO open discussion, right?

They broke down a lot of changes and a lot of what they described sounded really interesting and cool.

And I want to get into those, but obviously the big gut punch is the one that it reveals that they're like, it's going to be launching with 10 characters.

That is less than we were unhappy about when it comes to Hunter Hunter.

That is, I think, the second smallest tag roster ever.

Tag games.

Skull Girls is the only one.

Skullgirls at Launch

was one of those examples.

And we talk about how when you play a game that uses more than one fighter on your team, you see them more often.

So it wears out a little faster.

I would like to talk about the best case scenario and the worst case scenario for a 10-character tag game.

The best case scenario, you're playing with 40%

of the game's entire roster per match.

And the worst case scenario is the balance is a little off, and you're playing with the same

5%

of the roster in every single match.

Because Ari is on every team.

One of your assists is locked in for a universal, yeah, for every single player.

Like the threat of like a ranked mode decided entirely by mirrors is very real with a 10 character roster.

So obviously it feels like this is

a pace, one character per year of development that was not intended.

That's pretty insane.

And I think,

you know, going with this, Riot did give them the ability to be like, hey, take take as long as you need to make the thing do what you got to do too long but over time eventually yes right and and and the thing is as well i guess the idea is like okay they also want their releases to be um massive gangbusters drops into whatever genre right so you don't just put out a rune terra for it to not be the big card game you don't put out a valorant for not for it to not be the big shooter um you know everything

has that kind of like energy behind it And so here, it seems like that extra time was taken to make sure that this is like a really sick tag fighter that has a bunch of cool shit in it.

But in exchange, the roster has not been developed at a pace that, yeah, would be reasonably comparable to any other tag fighter.

So I'd like to take on a steal and straw man on something you said, which is a roster of one character per year, which is something that I was also saying when I talked about on stream and social media.

To which the immediate response, which is completely true and reasonable, they weren't taking 11 and a half months to make a character.

No, that's just an average.

That's a rhetoric point to make an average.

It's not going to be 11 months before the next character.

Obviously, they had to reboot development maybe once, maybe twice, maybe thrice.

Or there were other concerns or whatever, to which my built-in response is,

One, who cares?

And two,

if they had to reboot development multiple times to the point where now, after a nine-year development cycle, we're up to 10 characters, it doesn't give me a lot of faith that development will continue smoothly going forward now that they have deadlines and a live game to deal with.

And the Steel...

The Steelman there being

the same video saying that they were planning on ramping up character releases, and they didn't put a time frame on how frequently we would see them.

But it'll obviously be faster than

what we're looking at now.

But yes, and you know, so in our heads, we think of like, okay, well, how fast do characters come out and other things, right?

Certainly not going to be hitting that.

You can't compare it to Marvel Rivals with the 90-day turnaround bit or whatever.

But like where it's at 80, it's eight weeks.

Every eight weeks is a new character.

Well,

is that the comparison, or is it to a fighting game where, or to like Street Fighter or so, where where it's like, oh, you have like a month or two, in some cases, you know, more or less, depending on what's happening with the, with the, the character.

Um,

so, uh, what I'll say as well is that, like, it looks like a lot of consideration is going into each character's kit, and they're being very, very detail-oriented with it.

And

that means that each character can do a whole lot of cool shit.

Like, when they showed off what Jinx can do, it's impressive.

It's super, she's a super cool looking zoner.

Absolutely.

With a lot of rad shit put into it, I bet most players would satisfy, would be satisfied with a little bit less to get a little bit more when it comes to that, right?

With a perhaps okay,

not that a perfectionist, if someone has a perfectionist attitude, then like you want to make sure you really they have a standard that they want to release to.

That is to say, what the average person is happy with might not necessarily apply.

But if there was a compromise to be made there, I feel like that would be it.

Okay.

So I have like a wide variety of thoughts on that.

uh and i i have spent some time in league i'm not a league player right but i've spent time in league uh league play league characters are not super complex what they are is many there's lots of them right

um and i'm seeing that they have they like so they said hey there's only going to be 10 characters but we're up to like six fuses now which is like a groove it's a gameplay variation on how the character would play so the first thing that i noticed notice is that now every sorry character build.

Sorry, I just realized people might misinterpret what I said.

I think most people would want more characters in exchange for a little less polish is what I'm saying.

Absolutely.

But yeah,

I should.

Just to clarify, go ahead.

Yeah.

So

I think we're up to six fuses, which is like a groove.

Okay, so now what I'm hearing is that every single character they make, they have to balance around six different modes for that character.

Not one, like in Street Fighter or Tekken or Virtual Fighter, but six.

That's a lot.

They have given themselves a lot of work to make a new character not busted.

Second of which, hey, man, you know, there's only 10 characters, but each character can be seen six different characters.

Do they look different?

No.

Do they have different moves?

No.

Oh, but I would rather they have zero fuses

and six times as many characters like Marvel versus Capcom because this is a League of Legends game,

a property defined primarily by having an enormous roster.

Like, that is the number one thing about League is that it has a gigantic roster.

Not that it's super deep, but that there's a million characters.

And amongst those characters.

It's totally inverted in importance.

And while you've got different archetypes here, definitely when we talk about the importance of some good old freak picks, you know, for the appeal, it sounds like League has a giant roster of

freak picks and regular humans to choose from.

So, I gave Billy my phone and I went to the League of Legends character website and I told him to put his finger on it and just swipe as hard as he could.

And he landed on a page that was one normal human and three freaks.

And then he did it again and landed on one normal human and three freaks.

The roster is

caked with freaks.

I always remember, though, when we looked at that list of like popular in North America versus popular in Asia and seeing like, oh, yeah, the freaks are not popular in Asia.

You know, like, we have a localized preference.

We want freaks out here in the West,

not

international.

But

so, so this is, yeah, obviously I think like, you know, you have this as like, this is an example of like, things are not obviously going according to plan with the timing on that.

And and here's

go ahead i have to stop you there was one other thing because you were saying you would prefer less characters but more pal polish no and you know what that's not what i said no no sorry many would prefer less characters but with more polish that's right that's no i said the opposite

i said most would prefer less polish for more characters yes okay sorry i am getting to that sorry however they are saying but hey look our characters are super super super polished right And that's true.

Except for the fact that on the last Alpha Lab, the Ari

assist shit was wildly out of fucking control.

Yeah.

And

with a character roster of 10, like,

we can't be sitting around waiting three months.

for Ari's assist to get fixed when there's a roster of 10 and that means Ari just becomes the secondary pick in every single fucking match.

So kill that game.

So, the best-cased, optimistic, half-glass-full scenario is

all of the struggles up to now have been ironed out.

And from this point forward, after Alpha Lab 2, we're going to be racing towards a production

rate that has characters popping out every two months or something like that, right?

So, hey,

that's my next question.

What is the reasonable, optimal rate of character release for you?

Like, like, reasonable.

Like, that you think would be a possibility.

So here's, here's, there's two parts to it, right?

I feel like there's a rate that would need to be accelerated in order to catch up to an amount people would want to see it launch, and then a relaxed rate after that.

Because I saw, I did math on it, and I was like,

if we do four a year, how long is it going to take?

And the answer is it would take like

two years to catch up to like X-Men versus Street Fighter.

Yeah, that's fucking ridiculous.

No, I think people would want something like six a year,

and then after perhaps two years,

then we can then we see that pace

relax a little bit.

That would make sense.

Now,

this is without getting into like the specifics of what they discussed yet, but I have to lay, of course, here's a and there's one huge factor that

is on the opposite side of this argument, right?

With a cost of $3.99.

Free $99.

They are going to be the most competitive free fighting game in the free fighting game space, no matter what happens.

And no matter what, no matter what.

And this is where I get to a point I brought up to you at lunch

where...

What does a dead free game look like?

I don't know.

It's weird.

Looks like...

You tell me, you know?

What's the business model?

The business model is aesthetics, costumes, doodads, right?

Yeah.

Like Marvel Rivals.

Yeah, shutting down the servers, obviously, after

Marvel Rivals and 2XKO have the exact same business model.

Okay.

I am looking at a roster of 10.

Do you know what characters I want to play, Wooly?

I want to play Ilaui and I want to play Darius.

Why are people saying Concord when that costs money?

I don't know.

They also no longer exist.

But yeah, I want to play Ilaui and Darius.

That's pretty of the existing roster, those are the only two characters I want to play.

Yep.

This means

there is a cap of like $15 to $25 that I can spend on that game because I'm going to buy one costume for Darius and I'm going to buy one costume for Ilaui.

And that's it.

That's it.

That is the

cap.

Here's, and here's the other thing now, and this is where I hate like

You have to get into the balance between expectation versus like on one hand you have healthy reasonable expectations for like participating and playing a game and buying stuff in it and then you have the other hand you have entitled whatever gamer gimme now now whatever

right and you're like okay so are you gonna look at a premium costume and go i want that premium costume but if it's one that you don't want then you go damn damn it, that resource should have been spent making a character.

And it's like, it's not, it's apples and oranges.

It doesn't work that way.

But you're like, that really cool costume that's a huge overwork visually of everything with the character should have been a new character.

And it's like, it's,

it's a trap.

So let me tell you, it's a goddamn trap.

Ari the fox girl in Kedah is going to have many costumes.

Many, many, many, many costumes.

Gotta sell.

And other characters will have less.

And then you will look at the amount of costumes that Ari has, and you're going to go, you could definitely have cut half of these costumes to make a new character.

On a, on a man-hour, like visual level, not on a gameplay or design level.

Now, we'll see if they end up doing the, like, let's roll out a, a, um, microtransaction suite that is, like,

fucking constantly pumping cosmetics for people to buy or whatever to keep their, they're, the, you know, keep it making money or so

But I feel like you know whereas other Free to play games are certainly like quick to get to that point

If I'm not mistaken Riot has been willing to do things with like Rune Terra and stuff where they're like kind of operating with the game at a loss for a while giving you too much hit currently exists as a single player game okay so that's its current life so they're kind of it seems like they're kind of willing to just put something out let it take a hit and try to get it to be the number one thing in that genre until they eventually go, all right, well, fuck it, it's not working out.

And you know what?

That makes sense.

But if we get to a version of the world in which 2XKO builds itself up for nine years and then goes into maintenance mode with 12 characters,

boo

fuckers, holy shit,

you should have released a way, way, way worse game with 20 characters.

So, yeah, sometimes you have to take the pie out of the oven and serve it.

Sometimes you do, you know.

Now, we get to have this conversation without the part that goes, um, people paid for something and then like didn't get that, and now they feel like they're owed a refund or something.

Absolutely, right?

The only thing we're having paid for for the alpha lab is our attention.

Yeah, so so this is currently in that space where it's just like, okay,

we're just operating on interest and goodwill, you know.

Um,

I'm

I think it being free will buy it a lot of leeway where

this would not have flown for

absolutely 100%.

$80 U.S.

It's not Street Fighter V, right?

Because I bought Street Fighter V, you bought Street Fighter V, and there were a lot to complain about Street Fighter V.

But with 2xKO, what am I going to do?

I'm going to stream it a bunch when it comes out.

Yeah.

And then I'm going to complain a bunch about it to you on the podcast.

And at the end of that hour-long discussion of 2XKO's problems and how their rollout of new characters isn't long enough, you're gonna go, but is it free, though?

And I'm gonna go, Yeah, and you're gonna do that shrug that you do, and I'm gonna do the shrug that I do, and we're both gonna go, but it's free, though.

Because the thing where any other game at this point where people would be going, like, fuck this, pre-order canceled, refunding the game, or whatever, it's like, nothing to refund.

You click play now.

You know, so yes, you can't refund it you get away with you get away with more when for when your game is free 99 100 and and then and and we expect microtransactions at that point versus you know being a fully like just like turned off in that regard i will say that

i want to make a point i played that alpha lab i think that game is great so i think that we i kind of bury that I think 2xko is great.

It played great.

So that's where I wanted to go next is that we front-loaded a lot of the negativity around why 10 characters feels like it's too low for this type of game.

With that being said, the Alpha Lab 2 video was a crazy one-hour, all right, guys, you want to know what we've been up to?

Well, here we're going to dump all of it.

And it's an information overload, you know, which they self-described as like it being like passive-aggressive almost to be like, all right, let's give you more info than you possibly can handle.

And a lot of this.

I could handle it.

And a lot of the stuff they discussed was some understandable, pretty cool changes, you know.

Yeah, something that didn't work the way they wanted it to was the ability for assist characters to just travel across the screen and then wait to see what you did and then essentially like either hit you and can switch handshake tag to pick up the combo, wait for you to jump and then jump and grab you, or just wait for you to swing at the assist and then you can use your point character to stop them.

And they're like, we got rid of that because that made the game not fun.

And everyone was just jumping in with Ari and going nuts with that.

They also made a big deal to like like combos are smaller.

They last less time.

Yes.

Now, what they then went on to explain as well, which is pretty huge, is the fuses, the grooves, if you would.

They added Sidekick and Juggernaut, which sidekick is a fucking version that I would like to play.

We have discussed this about getting, you know, the whole like learning how to play kind of thing in there.

If you want to play a support character in league or so, what you have here is a version of the game where one player, when you're two people, plays the point character, and then one person is the assist for the entire match.

So instead of switching between the two of you actively, you can be somebody who's going to learn how to play just by supporting your friend and having your character jump out to like extend their combos at the right time.

And furthermore, you also get to

do

bracing, it's called, which is as your partner is getting hit, if you press the button, press a button at the same time as them getting hit,

they take less damage.

So you soften their damage, and that effect teaches you the rhythm of hitting buttons at the right speed or timing, you know?

So, on defense, while not playing the main character, there's still enough for you to do to get used to how to play the game a little bit, the pace of how it works, and how to like save your partner.

You also have to be responsible on defense for breaking them out of a combo that they're taking damage from,

or while they're blocking, jumping in and pushing the opponent away to the other side of the screen.

You know, this is all on the support character's job.

So there's enough for them to do, and then in exchange for that, the main point character gets a little bit more life and

a little bit more meter as well.

And if you want to play as just this one person, one character, there's now Juggernaut fuse, which is, yep, you're all one character.

You've got five bars instead of three, and

you've got more, and you've got more life and more damage, and you're just going to go all in on one.

It's interesting because a lot of people that, you know, every time we talk about like a, I mean, you've described as well for yourself, games with assists and like hyper games and stuff, it's like hard to get used to using a second character and when to use them.

And I will say that, like, so Skull Girls is a game where like you can pick assists or single.

I don't think playing a single character in this game will be enough to to make up for not having an assist.

Having an assist lets you do so much that I just, it's going to be hard to imagine it being

competitively strong enough, but who knows?

We'll see if they balance it to make it that way.

Maybe it'll be like in Capcom versus SNK2, where you could pick one fucking How Maru that just cuts the shit out of everybody on your opponent's team, you know?

But

if you are like, okay, I just want to learn the one character at a time, this is, you know, at least perhaps casually, I would say at the, you know, at the beginning levels, probably a decent way to go about doing that.

You know, if you're just overwhelmed by having a second character to think about.

Something smart about the way they did that, too, is even when you're just picking the Juggernaut one-point character, you still pick a second character.

And they sit as a dead life bar.

And what that allows is in between rounds, you can hold to switch to your backup character yeah because you're playing king of fighters now instead you know so if you if you were comfortable with your main and you had a second one you were trying out you can try that character for round one and then if the if you lose maybe switch to your more comfortable one and then stay on that you know between at the beginning of each round uh further furthermore online if you're two people you can both be you can be somebody you can both be on juggernaut so that you're watching your friend play and then he tags you in instead.

And now you're the full juggernaut if you're not doing the support mode thing.

And then you can basically be on a team of two together, you know.

So that basically will help people play together and overall let you squad up, which I've really wanted fighting games to do.

I

want to get, I got to take a break in it in a minute.

But I want to just have some final thoughts.

I feel like there's a massive mistake of implied expectations that the 2xKO team was like happy to let go.

So League of Legends fighting game, game, and then they said that it was a tag game.

I think it was maybe the most realistic expectation of anything in the world that this game would come out with a large roster to start, or at least a normal roster, right?

You said not according to plan, and I totally believe that 100%,

but like

I made joke bad rosters

for this game after the Alpha Lab made of nothing but humans.

And even my joke, worst roster ever, still had like 18 characters on it.

Just like

crazy.

But more than that, more than anything, all I can think of is that when I play Master

rank Street Fighter, which is not that hard, I'm not trying to brag, but it's like, you know, upper echelon of the ranked mode and Street Fighter, I'm really tired of fighting Ken.

I'm just overwhelmingly tired of fighting Ken, and that is a roster of 26 people in which Ken is good and happens to be super popular.

Because the game is free to play and you will have to unlock certain characters to play them,

I am

genuinely afraid for a user experience playing 2xKO in which you run into like 180 matches of Darius and Ari in a row, in a row, because they're the first characters that are available and they're good.

Yeah.

That is terrible.

And yeah, and I think you're also describing, I think you're describing top 8%.

So don't sell yourself short there.

But

regardless, the

variety, like I remember when I started playing Marvel 3, right, in particular, and I just wanted to pick the three characters I liked and tried to make a team work around that and lost so hard and so bad, so consistently that I was sad and was like, damn, this just doesn't work.

Synergy matters more.

And I eventually had to concede and be like, no, I have to give up on at least one of these two characters to get a useful beam or arrow or projectile, you know?

I only like two characters in this roster.

If they're both bad or one of them is bad, I'm just not going to play the fucking game.

Yeah.

If Darius and Ilawi are bad at launch, there is no one I want to play that game with.

So I don't know.

I would love to know how long Rising Thunder took to make

to the point it got to.

Well, they got six characters, so that means it took eight years.

So I'd like to know how the pacing on that went and such, just for an idea, because now we're not just dealing, because there's two factors here that are clearly happening.

One is they have an internal quality metric that's quite high

that they are striving for.

But then also there is the riot.

pressure that must be tangible at some point to be like, this has to disrupt and be on the main stage right away, right?

It can't be coming out and being like, congrats, you're doing numbers over MK1 and

Uniest, you know, like

it's got to be up there with Tek Ed and Street Fighter.

If the game

is at Evo and Top 8 is literally the same team eight times, then the game's a joke.

And that's a threat when there's only 45 combinations.

It is.

I think the same thing applies to every fighting game we're discussing today, which is, man, if it drops and it's fun to play, that'll be great.

You know?

But I will say that, like, overall, there is that thing where with 2XKO, it could be a slow-ass rollout.

And maybe people will be like, yeah, I'll check back in when that roster comes along.

And then sometime from now, it does, you know, but I think if it continues to exist.

But I don't know what the riot time limit is.

The play game has to hit right away.

What is right away?

And we don't know what the riot limit is.

Rune Terra didn't.

And Rune Terra got to live for a year and a half in its competitive state.

We saw Rumbleverse fucking die.

Ryuk, I will take the death note eyes to see the number above 2XKO's head to know how long it has to fucking get there.

It needs to have a roster of 16 by the end of 2026.

Or it's cooked.

I think you're being conservative.

Oh, yeah?

Really?

Yeah.

Really?

Six characters between two years from now?

No, because it's going to come out in fall of 25.

Okay, okay, okay.

From fall 25 to end, so a year and a half.

Yeah, I'll give them 14 months to do six characters.

i'm still calling that conservative yeah so it does have to be every

weeks huh yeah it has to be every eight weeks we got a roll you know we do need to roll that's hard and you know what i'm afraid of if they do announce like this is me being a fucking nitpicker to hell if they announce character every eight weeks i'm gonna go like well shit it took you fucking nine years to make these fucking characters and you're banging out these ones in eight weeks shit are they gonna be like shit like compared to the existing roster are they gonna like look bad and play bad compared to like brom and alawi and and

because the answer to your question earlier was, like I said, I think you need to catch up to where expectations are, then you can go with a relaxed pace.

But the catch-up time frame is like, go, go, go, go, go.

And, you know, we have an idea of what we've heard about from stuff about what might be coming, but it's just like, yeah, I...

I really, really hope we can see it deliver what they imply is a good pace after launch, you know?

I got to take a quick break.

I got a pee, and we got to come back and talk about Nintendo because we only have like an hour and a half left.

BRB,

all right.

Um,

I wanted to drop one last thought.

Do it,

drop it like a big turd right in the fucking middle of the Tuxkayo.

I really hope that right in Jinx's mouth.

Jesus fucking Christ, man.

Anyway.

She's depressed.

She won't even care.

I'm just saying, I really hope that in a year from now, these are all just temporary woes and they're not going to be these issues at the forefront while everyone's just enjoying the game.

But like

I'm thinking of...

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

But I'm thinking of, so Arslan Ash.

It's a thought, guys.

It's a thought.

Arslan Ash made a tweet where where he said, after he's been, he was very, very vocally upset about Tekken 8 season 1.

And then, like, he tweeted out, guys, I think we were too ungrateful for season one.

Sad face.

Yeah.

Right.

And it's just like, the difference in golf is just like, okay, this is business as usual upset versus, holy fuck, how did we get here?

And it just kind of makes me think,

Street Fighter VI really is just currently the best consumer product fighting game?

Yeah, we had this discussion and

you said that.

I'm like, yeah, you know what my number one complaint about Street Fighter VI is?

There's not enough costumes for me to buy.

Yeah, like the fact that there's modes, like extreme versus modes and team modes and shit that everyone forgot about means you've already gotten more than you've bargained for there.

There's shit you don't even have to think about with the package, right?

And like whilst previous Smash Bros games have put out like insane amounts of content as well, those games didn't have rollback and they had terrible online.

So this is the best, including the ability to fucking play it and have really good online matches, you know?

Yeah, I just kind of am like things are going to have to try to aim for what Street Fighter VI did, essentially, from here on out.

All right.

All right.

So the Nintendo Direct happened at the ass end of yesterday, a couple of days ago morning.

It was way too early.

Fuck you, Nintendo.

Fuck you, you pieces of shit.

6 p.m., 6 a.m.

Pacific.

That's a pile of fucking bullshit.

I waited and watched a bunch of trailers.

Yeah, what it did allowed me.

Well, watching it live was much better, though, because what I did is the end of that fucking presentation, I talked to chat for 10 minutes, then I sprinted to the house, snuck into the bedroom, and stole Paige's phone.

Then I went downstairs and and turned the internet off to every device that could connect to it.

And then said, you got to get up.

You got to go stream now.

And she went, what?

Why?

And I said, the Nintendo Direct was something.

And she said, what is it?

And I said, it's all things to all people.

Get over to the office and fucking stream a reaction.

No, I will not give you your phone back.

Until she promised to not look at it.

Really?

Wow.

You will create React content.

God damn.

Okay.

Well, there was a lot there.

There was a lot there.

Yeah, I would say that, you know,

Nintendo dropping a console announcement with 60 games, I think, were dropping.

It's a lot.

Was pretty impressive.

It's a lot.

And it sounds like everyone

was super, duper thrilled until the price dropped.

So, yeah, let's talk about the price first.

Sure, because there's a whole lot of games.

So, $450 USD, which turns into $600 Canadian.

$629

Canadian.

And $80 USD for games, which turns into $110 Canadian.

Now, this is really important.

I want to say two things to our primarily American audience.

There is a certain level of Schedenfraud.

Schaudenfreud, whatever.

Shadmanship.

Schadenfreude.

Schaddenfreude.

Seeing Americans go, oh my God, $80 for a video game?

That's

welcome to fucking 2013 of my life.

That's the number we were screaming at a couple years ago.

Okay.

And yes, I know relative value of the dollar, obviously, but it's just, it's just funny, right?

And of note,

and that that was $450 US dollars as of

the morning of the direct,

whereas two or three hours later,

national

economic policy changes came into play that could kick up the price of a Nintendo Switch 2 in the United States to approximately $650 to $700

at retail.

Now,

I've seen people saying

that this is not, that, like, I've signed people, I've seen people say that, like, oh, tariffs are not a part of this, and that that's a misunderstanding.

I'm not an economist, so I can't get to the bottom of it, but I can say that that doesn't sound right to me because when I see the extra story, which is Japan is getting a Japan-only version of the Switch that's locked,

that's way cheaper and locked to language.

I go, well, that doesn't seem to be a thing that would not be affected by tariffs.

Otherwise, why would they make that?

Right.

So I, yeah,

I saw a bunch of people go, no, it's not related.

I'm like, I don't know.

It seems like it is.

Global economy is related to the price of things.

Yeah.

So making like

the economic times in which we live does affect the prices of things.

And I feel like a very clear, like, oh, don't worry.

If you are Japanese and live here, you can buy it for a normal price

option

kind of underlines that point right because of the the nature of the back and forth on this there's the conceivable possibility that at retail in local dollars a switch 2 will cost the same in canadian as it would in local dollars in the u.s

which is going to cause every canadian town near the border to be flooded on june 5th with sudden american visitors going hey man you got those switch twos and the answer will be no no yeah we don't actually.

You know,

let's see.

A return to region locking because of the policy is wild.

I really thought we were over the best of it.

But

yeah,

and I've seen as well, like I kind of saw the live treehouse thing going for day two or so, clicked it and I just saw like the chat just going,

I'm like, yeah, that's about right.

There are,

there are

definitely enough people amongst us that are like, there's a point that I would have been upset at, but you're like, God fucking damn it.

Of course, they're going to slowly cook the pot up and

cook the frog in the pot by turning it up point by point.

This threshold has blown past people's ability to actually get the console and get the gates.

Like,

straight up, it is a

clear, like, no, I cannot participate.

So it's this thing.

It's like, am I going to sit here and go, the political realities of our time mean that Nintendo has to charge this much?

Of course, that's not what I'm saying.

Of course, Nintendo saw increased costs and went, I bet we could juice it just a little bit extra, you know, make it a little cut, you know, ride this out and we transfer manufacturing to Vietnam to dodge some of these costs.

And whoops, that was actually a really fucking terrible idea.

Holy shit.

All of a sudden.

Wow.

Wow.

Holy fucking shit.

All of a sudden, that ASUS Microsoft Game Pass box maybe seems like it has a place.

Right.

But yeah, no,

you can't possibly ignore the economic realities of our time in various nations as a result of the increased prices of these things.

And I genuinely believe that that 450 figure is going to be the MSRP from Nintendo to Best Buy USA.

I don't think Best Buy USA, the people that would have to pay the increased cost to import, are going to eat a fucking 40% surcharge on an imported electronic and sell it below cost.

I think

consumers

making memes that are just like Nintendo like roping themselves while

Sony and Microsoft sit on the side and stay winning or PC stay winning or so.

And I'm like, you fucking idiots.

These pieces are all built in the same countries.

If a new PlayStation 6,

if we were discussing a PlayStation 6 announcement, you don't think it would be even more insane?

You don't get that this is all relative

who is sweating their ass off right now?

Do you remember two years ago

when we were told the next Xbox is going to be the most powerful console ever created in the history of the medium, i.e., the most expensive PC in a box ever released.

So, if they were planning to send that out at $600 or $700, that thing's going to cost $1,200 fucking dollars.

That's what they're fucking freaking out.

Like,

the level of stupidity to just be like, it's just Nintendo.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no.

Like, $6.99,

right, back in the day was that wild number when this was...

That was the company just deciding its price point.

Throw on the cost of a fucking new console with that level of like greed on it while also doing tariff damage.

Yeah, because we have

$1,000.

So we just throw the cost on plus the new cost the investors want.

Like,

it's insane.

So yeah.

You can't afford this.

We'll be playing these games on stream, so don't worry about it.

But just that is, that is across the globe, you know?

Just switched to PC gaming.

What, you think the fucking semiconductors in a fucking NVIDIA card are gonna be safe from that worldwide economic calamity?

Uh well, fucking insane.

Well,

you switch to the thing you currently have.

Do you currently own it?

You know,

a buddy of mine in Discord just like an hour ago said it's called the switch to because you switched to a more affordable hobby.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, I mean, Jesus Christ with the fucking Nvidia shit

on top of it.

Yeah, you know, it's, it's, um,

anyway,

saving all of that for the treehouse post direct thing, I guess, was probably the right move because, like, in the thing themselves, they're like, we're currently eyeing the tariff situation, and we'll let you know, because we don't fucking know how this is going to shake out.

Anyway, nobody, nobody foresaw this level of tariff, so it was difficult to plan.

I bet

that if they knew these numbers were coming, we would have looked at a different base price.

And honestly, if they knew this was coming a couple years ago, the hardware changes a different base hardware.

Exactly, exactly, right?

Nintendo's in an extra weird place because they always sit in the pocket, never dropping their prices, but also coming in below the level of the other competition to be like, nah, we're doing our own thing.

And, you know, we can be a little bit more affordable, but we're going to offer you a little bit less and you're just going to buy it because you know the characters you want to see, you know and like here that's coming in they're coming in first and and hot on this new world we live in

um

just

who knows how things will go but

if they are the way they are now any new releases and consoles and hardware announcements points announcements will follow suit My main thing is that yelling at Nintendo to drop the price is cathartic and feels good, but ultimately useless because part of the realities of why they set those prices have nothing to do with them.

Some of them is.

They want the money and they don't drop their prices because they want the money.

But the world changed around them.

Keep your eyes on them.

Very suddenly, actually.

Keep your eyes on anything else from Japan that you buy and see how that goes.

And yeah, and then also this kind of just is like, well, Toby Fox is out here being nuts, you know, like he just doesn't care.

Of course he is.

Of course he is.

Yeah, just that's that's what that is, you know?

Okay, so in terms of the actual thing, well,

let's start with the exciting, the Dusk Bloods.

Motherfucker.

So the one that caused everyone to become Tails from the seminal work Tails Gets Trolled?

I mean, just

fine.

You don't want to make Bloodborne?

Well, do it in fucking throats.

How about I smudge the fucking name off it and just write it in with marker?

Oh, man.

Crazy.

Sony sitting in the cuck chair while Nintendo and Fromsoft as the wife are like, are you sure it's okay?

You know, just it is.

As Sony desperately tries to find the key to its chastity belt.

I mean.

Oh no, I think I threw it out with those papers.

So I will say this.

This is a bit of

a Night Rain situation, though, because the scope seems to be smaller than we might think.

Yeah, it's a player versus player versus an environment multiplayer game.

Which, like Night Rain, is,

you know, I'm thinking of as well the other,

whatever, the Mashback mode of, you know, the mecha breakthrough I just played.

But

yeah, what you're getting there is you're getting, okay, so that trailer starts off with the hands and the thing, and you're like, from soft voice acting, from soft direction,

sure enough.

And you're like, cool, it's vampires, and that's a dinosaur, and that's a jetpack, and those are guns.

My brain, even as I speak to you right now, keeps calling it the Palebloods.

I kept calling it Duskborn for an entire day, despite the fact that that's not the name of the game.

No, I can't stop thinking Palebloods.

It's just locked in, you know?

But yeah, if this is in fact going to be a game that is mainly about going into multiplayer sessions with up to eight players and then your two teams of eight while there's a boss to deal with and you can deal with each other as well, it's going to be much smaller in scope.

It's not going to be a big, large, lower mise-an send to the full nth degree, you know, souls entry.

It's going to be one of these kind of side things.

But I'm sure, you know, Nintendo was proper happy to have that exist.

And I kind of wonder, is this being funded like Bayo was in the back, you know, to where

100%

make us our own bloodboard.

Or else it would be on everything.

We'll see.

Or else it would be on everything.

Yeah, but I just know that I'm like times exclusive sometimes happen, whatever.

But

if that's Nintendo just going like, do it, do what they won't do, then sure.

It still like...

would not fully scratch the itch as a proper full ass from sovere souls entry but hey man i'll take it It'll probably be cool.

Yeah.

And I think that's why the releases that we've seen from them, it's like, oh, that's why they can put out this many is because, like,

they're going into smaller, you know, multiplayer-focused releases, you know?

Also, um,

I feel like there's a

Japanese man out in Osaka

working at Capcom

watching this trailer, going,

Yo, what the fuck?

People love this dinosaur shit, but they don't show up for Exoprimal.

PVP.

Pv dinosaurs.

God damn it.

We did it first.

It's different because it's from software.

What?

People like Capcom games.

You don't get it, man.

You see that fucking jetpack?

We had a jetpack.

I see that jetpack.

We had a jetpack.

Anyway,

so that's cool.

Mario Kart World.

As I was watching the treehouse shit this morning.

Oh, yeah.

It's

yeah, okay.

It's gonna be it's gonna be fucking good, man.

Okay,

good Mario Kart groom.

Because I had to say, like, as I was watching the trailer, like the first half of it, I had that thing where I was like, kind of like the last ones.

I'm like, yeah.

I loved me some Mario Kart.

I enjoyed this series thoroughly back in the day, but I think it's kind of passed me by.

It'll definitely continue to be something that if it's on at a friend's place and it's going on, I'll be down for it.

Or hell, I'll be down to throw it on if people are over.

But in terms of like actively going it, I'm like, yeah, I'm kind of just a little over.

They may burn out paradise into a Mario Kart game.

And then they swerved off the track and went actually go anywhere.

And I'm like, oh, ooh, wait, hold on, hold on.

When they just swerved off and went anywhere, I was like, ah,

that's pretty good.

Let me look at you and your eyes.

Let me look at you and your ocular sockets.

Are you ready?

I have an almost two-year-old.

Okay.

Mario Kart World,

best game ever made.

Yeah, sure.

Sure.

Just

straight up, best game ever made.

It wasn't until I saw that part that I was interested.

If it was like just another new update to the franchise, I was like, okay, yeah, we know.

That's cool.

But

that certainly got an interest point there.

And then what?

Donkey Kong Bonanza.

Yeah, sure.

Cool.

Run it.

I watched the preview of it this morning.

Hey, guess what?

It looks incredible.

Shout outs to the edit on Triple Q's channel.

I think it's Red Faction Gorilla.

Yeah.

Just

breaking through the ground and throwing shit.

And just, yeah, Donkey Kong is great.

Donkey Kong is too strong for the planet.

He's a threat.

He's an existential threat.

Looks amazing.

Looks like what

the whole

64 did

going back in the day where,

you know, what a proper 3D Donkey Kong should have been.

Looks cool.

The welcome tour,

which is

bafflingly

Fizume is gone

and can't tell him to include Wii Sports.

Shout out to Gene Park.

Gene went and dug up the article where Reggie Fizume begged Miyamoto to make Wii Sports free and he didn't want to because he did not believe that anything that they worked hard on should be given away for free.

And it's like, what happened?

Boy, was Reggie right about that.

Boy, oh my God.

Well, he convinced him because it's a new technology and he thought like, oh, we need to convince people what this new thing is and give them an idea.

And it's so crazy because I'm like, what happened to the Mario and Duck Hunt Nintendo?

You know, like 50 years ago.

Yeah.

And when people saw a game included with the Wii, they remembered that and went, that's cool.

I I bet Miyamoto was pissed off about that in fucking 86 way back when.

This is fucking bullshit.

I distinctly remember how friends of mine and family were like, legit, like, cool.

There's this good game that it comes with.

And then from there, you can pick what else to get.

You know, the attachment rates.

I was like, I was like, I got a PlayStation and it didn't come with a game.

And my parents were like, what the fuck?

I got a bunch of demo discs with my magazines.

You know, yeah.

So this is a guide around the Switch, and it's going to look cool.

$80 USD?

No, it's like $20.

Yeah, I'm sure.

I'm sure.

I'm sure.

It should really be included.

It's ridiculous that it's not.

Especially since it's like learn about the console, you know.

Yeah, no, it's ridiculous.

The Astrobot thing was free.

If they just came out and said the game is free, but you have to pay the cost of the tariffs,

then that would have been one.

Yeah,

specifically.

Motherfucking Kirby Air Riders.

And the moment it says director, I'm like, oh, you're hanging too long for it to be anyone else.

Right?

And it's like, hey, why are they releasing Mario Kart World?

And then like three months later, Air Riders.

Isn't that some racing game overlap?

And all I can think of is Sakurai was like, I will only work for you again if you let me make another Kirby Air Riders game.

Right?

He got exactly what he wanted because he was ready to chill right into the sunset.

And they will allow him to make the Air Riders game.

And afterwards, he will have his arms replaced with spikes and get right on to making the new Smash.

Well, at least he gets a chance to fucking just mentally reset and come back at this thing.

Because I hope that whatever Smash does next is a change.

You know?

I think the change that Smash Brothers needs to make

is to add 25 more characters.

characters.

I hate it.

I hate it so much.

It's so upsetting.

We got Hyrule Warriors, Age of Imprisonment.

All right, that looks good.

Fine.

Sir.

And Dusk X Drive, which is cool.

Wheelchair basketball looking like

fucking, whatchamacallit?

Soccer cars.

Yeah, all dope.

I mean, Kirby Air Riders in particular.

I just fucking shit's going to be banging.

We've got Switch 2 versions of existing games.

We've got a lot of performance patches that have been announced.

Diamond X Mackinaw.

Various games.

Titanic Scion looked rattish shit.

It did look good.

I hope it doesn't have so much story in it because the Diamond Mackinac story was terrible.

And my thought too, here's extra confirmation that

the Dusk Bloods, god damn it, is going to be a kind of, you know, side serving, is that they're properly porting Elden Ring as a whole to be like, here's your major single-player adventure that you want.

By the way, to folks in the chat who are saying paid patches for the performance stuff, some games on the Switch 2 are going to get updated versions that have new stuff, and that's how they're going to convince people to pay for them.

Many games are just going to get patched to just work better on the Switch 2.

There's a list of them out right now, but there's more coming.

It's a whole confusing mess.

But there's a bunch of those games you can transfer ownership over to the two and then just boot it on the two

without the paid upgrade, right?

And then what did we see?

Deltarune chapters one to fucking four on launch.

Two, three,

four.

Which

I was waiting for my wife to see that announcement, and she took that announcement like a gun to her head because

Deltarune one and two.

We were talking about this.

Deltarune one and two were a million years ago.

We lived in a different place, in a different house.

We were not married.

We did not have a child.

So Deltarune chapter one came out.

You know what we did when Deltarune chapter one came out

2018 and 2021 god damn you know what we did when deltarune chapter one came out

we've went okay

and ran down to the basement and started streaming like 30 minutes later yeah you know what we and blew through it in a single fucking oh maybe we were married um for the second one but i can't i can't remember 2021 uh uh probably um

when we when deltarune chapter 2 came out you know what we did we went okay and ran down to the basement and fired it up and did the whole thing in one shot.

Holy shit, I didn't now, yeah, Deltarune 3 and 4.

Oh,

we have to plan a whole week around this, we have to purge our social medias.

We have to, like, it's like a fucking to-do.

Um, yeah, same here, you know, going through it with Punch Mom.

I

did not feel like Deltarune 1 was 20, it was six years ago, it was 20 years ago.

Holy shit.

I mean, if that's the way you can make your Undertale follow-up piece by piece, that's cool.

Four to seven will come later.

But the feeling that I did not have just now is the magic of this being released in chapters every three years, I guess.

Right?

Well, so chapter one, two, three, four are going to come out on June 5th, and 5, 6, and 7 are going to be downloads, which means that what you will get is the same experience you had for every chapter of Deltarune is, hey, guess what, shithead, it's out

or is out in two weeks or a month or what like, yeah, just shadow dropping every single part of it.

And I get it because obviously Undertale was a long, huge in-the-making moment that you don't know how that's going to get received, you know?

But now that you're in the shadow of that and everyone's looking, you can't go about it the same way, or you can, and then you get your little silk song drop in that

in that montage.

2025,

it was there.

No one can say it wasn't.

Enter the Gungeon 2 is 3D.

Bro.

So

I had to switch from the US stream to the UK stream because it was really behind.

It was like five seconds behind

in audio.

Like the audio was desynced.

So I switched over and just saw the giant gungeon bullet man and the logo and just went,

That's cool.

That's cool.

Like, I oh, I squealed.

I fucking squealed.

That's an art style.

That's an art style that can make the jump and still keep the charm, I think.

Yeah, for sure.

Fucking love enter the gungeon man.

I don't remember if I already knew this or forgot and forgot, but

IO working on a 007 game sounds pretty interesting.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'd like to see if it

has that element to it where instead of just being like a first-person shooter or something like that, if it's much more spy-based.

Well, I mean, it's IO, you know, precise.

So that makes perfect sense, right?

Because the gadgets and the traps.

Exactly.

The hope is that

the goofy shit.

Just make a Hitman game and just fucking call it 007 and just have some of the objectives not be murder.

Well, I was going to say, because like that's 47 is just offing people left and right, and Bond is too, but he's got to be, you know, like sleeping with them first and so on.

So

you know what looks fucking dope and

Marvel Cosmic Invasion.

It does.

It looks fucking great.

It looks super cool.

You know what doesn't look fucking dope?

Nintendo deciding to empower you in your fucking weirdo controller bullshit with their Joy-Con and a a mouse setup being built into their fucking console.

It's not my fault that

the world finally caught up.

Disgusting.

Damn.

Wow.

Disgusting.

Who knew?

You know, me?

Couldn't be.

It's not like I'm prophetic or anything.

Oh, also, the Joy-Cons have Hall Effect sensors for the analog sticks.

Yeah, they lock in.

That was confusing.

You don't have springs to fucking wear off, which is great.

That should just become the standard.

Boy, squinting and looking at that Street Fighter VI default layout on one Joy-Con is insane.

It's like, okay,

you've got two lights, two mediums, you got heavies up here, and then drive impact and parry, and then click, no, no, click R3 for DI.

Crazy.

Oh, God.

I really, really hope no one needs me to drive rush cancel any buttons.

You know,

just tiny little, little, our little stick.

Pardon me.

But yeah, that's going to come with its own wacky switch modes.

And then,

what else do we see there?

Yeah, just ports of other stuff.

Yeah, there was a port of a game called Sulk Song that was announced for this year, and then they just skipped past it like it wasn't important.

I think too, as well, they made a point to say, like, hey, look, we're getting Cyberpunk, we're getting Elden Ring,

we're getting FF7, so real games are here, guys.

We can do it.

We're powerful enough, right?

It's like anything current gen

can

show up here.

So it'll be fine until the next gen gets jumped into.

Yeah, absolutely.

Then we're fucked.

So now that

we've done our bit and skipped past it like the Nintendo presentation did, did it not feel like an act of ridiculous violence to throw a three-second clip of Silk Song in the sizzle reel for the 2025 release date?

My brain filtered it.

What the f-

What?

My brain filtered it.

I saw colors blur across the screen, and then I had a seizure and woke up, and the rest of it came up.

Like, I looked at it, and like, my eyes bugged out of my head, and before I could even speak, I was like, it was gone.

Like, I know, big.

Yeah, it's this here.

Come on.

Like, I thought I saw Silk Song, but it was just Randy Pitchford in a suit

and a bad toupee.

And then Nintendo put out a tweet that said,

hey, it's coming to the Switch 2 this year, 2025.

And then the Team Cherry guys retweet it, but

notably,

did not make any announcements or responses of their own,

which I think is because Microsoft has to advertise it as a Game Pass game, which makes me think that this is maybe the worst deal anyone's ever taken.

I'm strongly considering starting a bit where I pretend this game does not exist from this point forward.

Yeah, even even like you can stream it and just be like, it's weird.

It's a shame Sulk Song never came out.

Like, I don't even know what you're talking about.

Change the titles of the uploads to Hollow Knight 2.

Don't include the word Sulk Song.

Is anyone else seeing this weird thing where the game title is just not showing up on Twitch?

I don't know what the fuck is going on.

Yeah,

so, and then, you know, a bunch of other stuff thrown in there and

so on.

But

i think uh metroid prime 4 is a rad ass thing that we got to see a little bit more of earlier in the week as well um

yeah hey new suit looks sick psychic powers for the whatever new gimmick to do things okay sure no problem run it i i don't care like

whatever you know dumb new like uh accessory ability or hey you know what i'll play a new metroid game hell yeah yeah Yeah.

And since I've gotten Dread the other day and that 2D and Need is out of my system, I'm super game for some Primen, you know?

Absolutely.

Let's yuck it up.

Let's have some fun.

Can't wait for fucking just essentially

any of those physics puzzles where you from playing

first-person puzzle games for the last 10 years are finally going to be like, ooh, Samus, slide the block and put the square into the square and then unlock the chozo path did you put the star in the star

cool

um

anyway cool stuff good music all i'll find

you see nintendo deciding to reinvent discord

you know what man they're trying They're giving it a shot when beforehand they were like, we pretend we do not see it.

So I'll tell you what.

I'll tell you what, Wooly.

Fucking whatever.

You know what I saw?

I saw an incredible tool for content.

That's what I saw.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Hey, Wooly, you want to play Mario Kart on stream together?

Yeah, cool.

All right, here's me on Wooly's stream in the corner, and Woolly on Pat's stream in the corner.

With a terrible quality camera.

10 FPS feed ever.

The worst fucking, again, Discord filtering out the background level green screen bullshit happening, you know?

Hey, man.

But yeah, press the C button.

Now, at least you can chat with friends and have shit happen now, as opposed to the past when it was like, okay, did you turn your keys at the same time?

I can't wait to load in and just like have the camera focused on some dude's fucking dong.

Oh, just spread cheeks, you know, absolutely.

Which, you know what?

I'll take that if the trade-off was send each other your social insurance numbers and add those to your friend account.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

100%.

100%.

Yeah.

Somebody asked in the chat how long until someone spreads their asshole right under the camera.

They've done that at Nintendo.

They're testing it now.

They're trying to figure out an algorithm that detects asshole.

How do we make sure?

How do we catch it while the green screen is happening behind it?

And it has the auto noise filtering crisp tech as well.

So it's an NVIDIA thing, so it's the stuff that we've been using

cards every now and then.

I will decent.

Yeah, but like when bad background shit starts going off, you also start sounding like shit as well, depending on how high-pitched it is.

Also, we've discovered that the noise cancellation removes Paige's voice

from all recordings.

If it's trained to your voice, then yes.

Okay, so the default setting?

Interesting.

When I turn the NVIDIA

thing on, if Paige is anywhere but sitting directly in front of this microphone, it just removes her completely.

Is she

a vampire?

Something about

her voice registers to technology as noise.

Like, ooh, filter that.

Yeah, no, no, you don't need.

Oh, no.

Hey.

Oh, no.

You can't even hear her saying hey in the background there.

It's gone.

Absolutely.

Yeah, exactly.

I know.

It's crazy.

No, people who watch the streams in which I had that on can vouch.

Like, it would, she would be visible in the background and she would be being actively erased.

Oh, that's great.

That's solid.

Good bit.

Anyway, yeah, so that's pretty much all there was to it, I suppose.

I didn't check out much beyond the Treehouse extras, though.

Did they get into anything else interesting after the fact?

They showed off Donkey Kong.

They showed off a lot of Mario Kart World.

They showed off Metroid.

Okay.

Oh, of special note for the GameCube games coming back.

Oh, yeah.

Soul Caliber 2G.

Everybody in the whole world is losing their mind at Soul Calibur 2.

It's weird to see.

I'm glad.

That's really cool that that's included as same for F-Zero GX.

It's weird that Wind Waker is going to be there when there's an upgraded Wind Waker that

came out the other day.

that's that's a weird one but that's a Wii U game man yeah I know but that's that's what I'm saying right it's just

like if I want it to go back might as well just fucking you know what you know what I really fucking think is genuinely incredible they are releasing a special Nintendo Switch 2 GameCube controller so you can play your GameCube games

and then they were like we should really put a fighting game on this back GameCube backwards compatibility roster.

Let's make sure that it's a fighting game that people want and will want to play.

That's right.

Soul Calibur 2 is a game that people are going to itch to play with their GameCube controller on their Nintendo Switch 2.

And that's the only one that will ever show up.

There is a fighting game that they actually own completely.

They never, ever put on that shit.

I wonder.

I wonder if they will concede that point eventually.

Because I think it's trapped behind glass and it's directly antithetical to selling copies of Ultimate.

However,

I totally just, I think

the melee community, while loud and ever-present and smelly, is actually in a numerical sense incredibly small.

Like a raw worldwide numbers sense, very small.

And they will never, ever, ever

like sabotage the new Smash ever.

I'll see you and I'll raise you.

I think, I think, I think a version, because they went back and they added multiplayer to GX as well, right?

They did.

That was a big deal.

I bet you Melee with upgraded multiplayer exists inside Nintendo's offices and they went no.

I bet you that project exists in a folder somewhere on a build.

You know?

Oh,

I bet you someone worked on it at some point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, we'll see how that comes along.

I think if Nintendo could go to your house and snap your melee disc,

they would.

Like genuinely.

They said there's two USB-C ports, top and bottom, and then they showed the top.

Dude, that's like such a no-big deal feature.

It is so awesome.

It's really nice.

It's so awesome.

It's really nice to not have to choose between, you know, power and accessory and a camera now, I guess.

But that's why I'm not sure.

Also, you don't have to argue with the designer

post-buying the thing of like, oh, I wish the port was on the top.

Man, I wish the port was on the bottom, depending on where you're sitting and where your plug is.

And, you know,

did we see an Ethernet cable?

It's part of the dock.

Great.

Great.

The internet cable is part of the dock.

Wonderful.

Cool.

Yeah.

Okay.

And there's an audio jack in the controller.

Oh, sick.

Is it a headphone jack or is it a

headphone jack?

16.

I don't know what

the tiny one

is.

Because there's a tiny one and then there's a standard size.

And like I'm, you know.

Yeah, it's a standard size.

Okay, sick.

Great.

And the pro controller comes with extra buttons on the back that you can map to anything in any game.

Turn that

shit off.

Immediately turning off those paddles.

I hate paddles.

I can't.

Because my

No, I fat hand grape.

I can't.

I can't.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

I want to ask you a legitimate question.

Yep.

And I don't want you to roll your eyes because it's not something you usually do.

Yeah, that's okay.

When you are playing Call of Duty and you want to reload and jump without pulling your thumb off the analog stick and you don't have paddles, what do you do?

Understood.

Okay, they're not for me.

I hate them.

That is the reason for those.

Got it.

Every game I play ever, I always hate them.

I need them off the controller.

I accidentally hit them too often, and I've played with them when they first came out on the Elite Xbox 360 controller or whatever, the black one.

And then that shit was terrible.

And then I got them again.

They're on the PS5 Dual Sense

special and they're just the worst.

And I take them off because I always hit them accidentally.

And I, you know,

if you guys are out there and you're like, you know, you don't grip it as hard, and that's not an issue for you, that's awesome.

I wish I had your hands, but for me, it's just anti-man.

It's a non-starter.

I cannot play a video game with the paddles on the back like that.

So, like, that is a design element that was created for a genre, and it just happens to be the most popular genre.

Fortnite, Call of Duty.

Fortunately, on both the 360 Elite or Xbox Elite and Dual Sense, whatever.

Yeah, you can actually just pull them off.

They come right off.

So it's never been an issue.

You know, I've taken them off, put them away, and it's not a problem whatsoever.

But yeah, it's like not even when I'm not death gripping, because I know that sometimes I do in a stressful thing or whatever, like that's the way I respond to things.

If I'm, you know,

stimulus is happening, even if I take a moment to actively be like, hold it lightly, my hands are still resting in such a way where it's feeling secure.

It's accidentally triggering sometimes.

My fingers just do, you know.

People's hands are different, man.

You know,

yeah, it just doesn't work for me.

So, this, I'm holding a PlayStation 5 controller in my hand.

This is my favorite controller ever.

No question.

Like, absolutely no question.

I love this fucking thing.

Hall effect sensors on the pro controller for the analog sticks and these back buttons.

I might switch to Nintendo Switch 2 controllers for everything

on my PC.

Oh, for yeah, for Bluetooth connection purposes.

Because, like, I want those things.

And I've been playing Pro Controller with Monster GU lately, and that Pro Controller, the Nintendo one, is solid.

It is a solid game.

Yeah,

I've gotten pretty used to the dual sensor as my standard right now.

I'll have to see how this feels before switching it up.

I also hate them on the back of the

Steam Deck as well.

And in fact, whenever I can, I like using the Steam Deck with a controller in the USB, you know?

I much prefer a better controller than using the default side stuff.

Those don't feel as good to me.

Okay,

let's take some emails.

Hey, if you want to send in an email, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

I can't believe we got it all in.

That's what she said.

uh

or he i don't care

or them i don't whatever yeah

you're you're you're available all holes open

did you did you ever read that fucking am i the asshole about no loads refused

That's that's one of the funniest fucking ones ever.

So that's I was going for the alt version of that effectively because I'm like, well, it's one of of those two, right?

Yeah, it's like all holes open or no loads refused.

There you go.

All right, we got one coming in

Hey Iron, Woolly, and Patman.

I've been playing a lot of Marvel rivals, and I noticed a weird reaction within the community regarding costumes.

Sometimes the skin releases and people complain that it's too similar, waste of money, and dev time.

For example, people complained that the Insomniac Spidey suit was another boring red and blue suit, or the MCU Moon Knight skin was another white suit with a hooded cape.

I can totally understand that.

My theory is that these people don't really engage with the superhero comic book stuff and are coming from other games like Overwatch.

Characters that are original to that game, they can go wild with skins and redesigns, while Rivals is based off of decades of characters with iconic designs and color schemes with slight variations.

So those skins are made for fans for those specific versions, like the Insomniac suit.

That's absolutely true.

Yeah.

I mean, shit,

there's the

Flash Thompson Venom.

Well, there's the Space Knight Venom outfit, right?

And then there's the new one as well.

That's like, again, the military look, and it has a little bit more symbiote to it, but they kind of have the similar energy.

And I mean, the new one looks a lot cooler, but yeah, these details make a huge difference for years of legacy and you for caring about that.

Of course, look at the Spider-Man suits in the Spider-Man game, right?

Um, yeah, do you have other examples of things that are like that, I guess, where it's easy to tell apart old fans versus new in their demands?

Um, I'm gonna play SVC Chaos and it's got fucking 10 Shotos on there and go, but they're all all different.

And like, shut up.

Put a different type of character in there, you fucking freak.

No.

I don't give a shit that they're all technically different.

Rio's how Shikoken, you know, you do the extra input and then his regular Shikoken fades out a few steps in front of him.

By the way, I want to respond to the emails, like text particularly, in that I completely understand what they mean by specific comic runs having specific looks, even if they're similar to other looks.

I totally agree with the people that you are describing.

If you are putting out new costumes for purchase, they should all look different from other existing costumes.

Like, there are 400 million Spider-Man costumes.

Do not make two that look the same.

So, I okay, slightly.

I disagree with you there.

I think that, like, there's like legacy shit that's like important that's based on like popularity of a particular thing.

I think, though, you should put them in an order that allows for the most variety, right?

So, if you want to put your X-Men in their bright yellow and blues, and then you want to get their black leather old movie outfits, and then you want to go with their, you know, Days of Future Past outfits.

Make a rotation where you get the unique and the

classics kind of out of the way so that you don't put two back-to-back that are too similar, right?

Yeah.

But if you're going to work in shit that is classic, you're going to have to eventually get those similar ones in.

And I think it's fine.

Just space them out.

So I think a really good example of both of these is Spider-Man 1 and Spider-Man 2.

Spider-Man 1 has an incredibly varied selection of classic costumes and a bunch of new ones.

And then Spider-Man 2, responding to complaints about the costume selection in Spider-Man 1, put in like every single variation of every movie suit, and it takes up like half of all total costumes.

And it's fucking terrible.

So you have like all the Raimi suits and all the amazing Spider-Man suits all in a row in a row of like 10 and movie nerds and fucking weirdo goes, see, I wanted the one with the slightly different black lattice on the red.

I'm like, oh my God, who gives a shit, shit, dude?

Well, they do, right?

And the reason why, and the problem is that, like, instead of doing what I just described, they've prioritized the MCU.

And so Moon Knight has a new outfit that's like hood and cape, and it's, it's a variation of the default, but it's the one from the show.

And so when they have it available, it says Marvel's, Marvel Studios, Moon Knight with the show logo, or this cap that looks kind of like Chris, you know?

Like they have like the slight variations there that they want to push as like the priority definitely going for variety and uniqueness i think is is yeah the the way for that i'm of the opinion that um on on like mobo rules for costumes is that uh recolors should be dirt cheap minor alterations should be half price and full-scale complete model reworks should be full price so when i see moon knight for the from the mcu which is really similar to his default that thing should cost like $2.

So you know what's interesting?

What you're describing is essentially the difference between colors and costumes in like a fighting game,

but we don't do colors in proper hero shooters, right?

The costume is the costume, is the brand, and that's everything.

But absolutely, there being color variations would be

a big deal here.

I think as well, at the very least, the more popular the character, character, the more you're going to see all those little subtle variations.

Spider-Man is fucking Spider-Man.

It's right.

Spider-Man, dude.

I don't know if you've known him, but people care about Spider-Man.

I have a big old Spider-Man doll at the house.

It's my baby's favorite doll.

We go, Do you want to kiss Spider-Man?

And he runs over to his gigantic baby-sized Spider-Man and picks him up and goes,

Bucky's outfits are not going to be as diverse and in as numerous as Spider-Man.

He's going to get a couple distinct ones.

How many different looks has the Winter Soldier had?

Three,

yeah.

You know, yeah.

So that's just going to be the case with the high-profile characters because there's a ton of money to make there.

You know what?

If you go to Street Fighter V and look at all those Chun Lee costumes, there's a whole lot of similar overlap in those two.

Yeah, but I need to goon.

I remember

one of the mods I saw for DMC 5 on PC was we made Dante's coat bright red again.

And that was it.

I'm like, damn.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay

right i know exactly i i know i get it i super get it i don't you know the dark leather is like i know the realistic look but yeah no yeah don't hate that one

uh all right let's take one over here from

uh

let's see no name given hello oh king plant says hello fortress ultra monsters was talking to my friends about an mmo we play with terrible acronyms uh combat power abbreviated to CP, determines

your ratioing, which can increase by training your

EI resonance points, aka ERP.

So you must ERP to get CP.

What are the worst acronyms you've heard in games or in general?

CP is the worst ever.

Yeah,

completion points in Yakuza are.

Every single game that uses the acronym CP needs to stop.

Extremely unfortunate with that one.

But on just a peeve level, I will never not get upset every time I see Fighting EX Layer abbreviated as Fexel.

It's the most infuriating thing.

What do you want it to be?

The original game it was based on was called Fighting Layer.

All they had to do was call it Fighting Layer EX.

And the acronym.

Flex would have been awesome.

The acronym would have been Flex, but instead it's F-E-X-L.

I'm going to give a shout out to our boys over at Riot and that 2XKO is still a god-awful name and launching with a terrible roster is distracting from your god-awful name.

It's terrible as fuck.

I have started completing in my brain double-cross knockout for copium purposes.

I'm like, it's double cross knockout.

I saw an interview in which someone said, well, we want people to call it 2x for short.

And it's like, it's already an acronym for a Street Fighter.

Why are you calling it?

Why are you short?

What the fuck?

Super Turbo Street in Japan is called 2X.

Yeah.

But that almost made me go, oh, it's deliberate because they're old school fighting game fans and they wanted to hit on that acronym.

I think there's a part of it that was like...

going for that almost, you know?

All right, and Proxy Fox says, hello.

Oh, hold on.

We got somebody who got picked up by Auto Mod for incredibly obvious reasons because there is a highly customizable model kit girls produced by Koto Bukia

named the Frame Arms Girls.

Oh,

dude.

Street Fighter Alpha Generations.

Yeah.

When Street Fighter Alpha the movie came out, there was then a second animated movie called Street Fighter Alpha Generations.

We saw that and lost our collective shit

for a couple years, actually, because wow, what a bad idea.

Can't talk about it nowadays.

Don't

call that

thing.

Don't do that.

That's bad.

Every time you have ever heard anyone on the best friends in the old videos or me and you recently that's described it, we literally always call it alpha generations.

Street Fighter Alpha Generations.

To just.

Yep, the full armor gundam is, in fact, the full armor gundam.

That's true.

It is the full armor gundam every time, every single time.

All right, one over here from Proxy Fox who says,

no way, Street Fighter Alpha Generations.

Hello, Fort Mediocre Mammal.

It's not a good movie either.

No, no.

The best part of the movie movie is when he just beats the fucking shit out of Sakura.

Hadouken beams slicing through Akuma's junk while undead Chinese ghost armies attack.

Yeah, well, you know.

A couple of weeks ago, Pat was talking about Wyvern milk as a plotline in Monster Hunter Wilds and how much it sounded like they were talking about super-powered monstrous.

Well, in Japanese, the word for cow milk is gyūnyū, right?

So So that's yeah, that's what milk is called in Japan.

In Monster Hunter Wilds, the Japanese word for wyvern milk is ryu nyū.

Oh, okay.

So it's combining the words for dragon and milk, ryū and nyū.

This innocent pun became something that sounds really gross because there's no way to translate the pun into English.

It sounds like shit, nigga.

God damn it.

All the cutscenes are

gross.

That makes so much sense.

It's just a cute little pun.

Instead of gyū nyu, it's ryu-nyu.

um any other so

this batch of emails is stop using the acronym cp

stop stop calling things street fire alpha generations and check what types of milks foreign audiences use in their day-to-day lives or like or at the very least find out what like milk can mean

colloquially or otherwise.

Like they talk to the translation guys and then like, how does this sound?

And it's up to it's the responsibility of translation guy to go, that sounds like shit.

You shouldn't call it that in any

language.

It just happens to rhyme.

That's great.

That's great.

Well, there you go.

Yeah.

Do you know any other impossible to translate?

No.

No.

That's a good one.

That's a good one.

Thank Thank you for clarifying.

I now understand.

Look at that Wilk.

Y-W-Y-L-K.

I mean,

yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sure.

That, you know, that.

No, Wilkes refused, man.