CSB309: Underwater Chinese Ghost Layoffs

Alrighty.

Yeah, sounds good.

Okay.

Should I see you right now?

Now you should.

Yeah, there you are.

Hey, Woolly.

Looking good.

Much better than a OBS logo.

Yeah.

So, you know, once again, absolutely nothing.

Just

whatever.

That was a dumb one.

But hey, there we are.

Isn't the internet fun?

fun?

Isn't making mistakes live fun?

It's like Saturday Night Live, but nobody laughs when you corpse like Jimmy Fallon.

I yearn for the days when we did this and no one was around.

And it was just, okay, into the mic it goes, and then they'll hear it eventually.

I actually, I have to actually disagree.

As somebody who says many wrong things fast.

The autocorrection.

The glance over at like maybe a thousand people going, what the fuck are you talking about, you fucking idiot?

It's actually really useful.

So, no, there are pros and cons to it for sure.

And yes, the auto-correction is a wild one,

as well as anytime an unfinished thought

floats into the ether that pops up, you know.

But at the same time,

There's just, there's something simple about the process for sure that used to just be, it doesn't matter what time time we decide to record.

It doesn't matter what day we start to record.

Nothing matters.

All that matters is the publish button.

And now this.

Hey, man, it's like it just happened.

It's like it just happened.

Yeah.

It's like it got magicked out.

Well, everything.

Everything that I do live was never intended to be live.

It just became live by virtue of like

showing the process of it getting made.

It was always meant for post-related.

You know, there's a person you can blame for that specifically.

Twitch?

Bezos?

No, you can blame Mark Zuckerberg for that specifically

because he directed Facebook to lie on all their ad research that showed that video was so much more lucrative than text,

even though it wasn't.

Wait.

Which caused the push to video.

Wait, that thing about how people see video streaming, people tune into that more than text and tune into that more than.

Oh, that was a complete, that was a complete fucking sham

to push video.

Wow.

Absolutely.

I still remember that.

Yeah, and that changed the nature of all social media.

Oh, yeah.

And so once video became the de facto, then there was only two forms, video and faster video.

But it is true that when people are scrolling through a feed and then a video auto-plays, they are going to stop and look.

That's the whole basis.

No, they're going to stop and go, oh,

kill it.

But the basis of how TikTok and auto-scrollers work is on that idea of like, before you have a chance to make a decision on the content, you're already being forced to watch.

Ads work on TikTok because when I see an ad on TikTok, it has hit my eyeball for like less than 100 milliseconds.

Well, I mean, I mean, like, it's just.

Yeah.

But, but, but, but that is to say the general nature of like ad or not, your brain doesn't have time to decide.

You're what, you're watching a thing and if the first two seconds are like hey god that's it stick around don't scroll you know whatever no you know no yeah nope no i use tick tock the way most people use tick tock which is at at the window into a completely dead society it's awesome well all this to say that if if if zuck did lie about the that then one thing is true for sure is like the the Instagram, well, every single social media platform adopting the autoplay, auto-scroller is clear that, like, well, no, people are clearly using that more than stopping to read text, you know?

Yeah, well, that's, I mean,

no, because, like, text in this case was like articles.

Like, remember College Humor?

Yeah, you'd stop, you'd click on an article to go to an off to go to a different website or so.

But that's also, that's, that is one thing that's also proven is like getting people going from one place to another, um, especially if the place they are is comfortable, they don't enjoy doing it, which is why people use TikTok to Google things sometimes.

Right.

Yeah.

There's an age group that will post a, hey, guys, can you answer this question instead of going to Google?

I don't think that.

So I have a child, which means I'm on teacher TikTok, which I get to see teachers complaining about how the kids are stupid now.

First of all, man, the kids are stupid.

But second of all, I don't believe that is

instead of Google.

I believe that is

a genre of child that literally does not know how to use non-app functions.

That would make sense, too.

There's an age where you just know what you've been exposed to, and all you know is the one app.

No, no, that age is now like 15.

But

there's been quite a few years now of

the search bar in the app that I'm in the social media app I'm using or video app or whatever is also my life search bar.

There's no idea that, like, there are different places that you would might go for some information, you know, or whatever the case.

So, yeah,

learning to internet is

who knew, you know, never mind us.

Do you remember that period of time when like all the boomers in your life just offloaded like professional levels of technical labor to like six-year-olds?

Do you remember that?

I was one of those kids.

Do you remember how I was one of those IT kids that had to do tech support for a bunch of boomers?

Yeah, for sure.

Like you, 30, 40-year-old man, it's too hard to learn.

It's impossible.

Hey, six-year-old, can you manage my fucking Excel spreadsheets and video shit for me?

It's just too hard to learn.

Yeah, no, what I got, no, when

mom was asking me about an email problem 10 years later, that was the same one after a decade.

I went, stop.

You have chosen to not learn this.

10 years later, you've made a decision.

Even though you use this almost every week, this is a regular part of your life now.

You have chosen that you don't care to learn it.

And that's your choice.

This is not about, I don't understand, it's too hard because I had exposed myself to this less than you have now, a decade later, you know,

when I was explaining how it worked the first time.

You need to actually give a shit about the thing you're using constantly if you're going to always be asking for help about it at the very least.

Or decide you don't need it and go, I don't use these things.

That's one thing.

But if you're constantly using it, fuck off with that.

That's crazy.

Woolly, we're talking about a generation that graduated from high school, got their GED or high school diploma, and went, all right, not only do I never need to learn anything ever again as long as I live, but also I won't need to because here's a great job I can work at for the next year.

Of course, of course, of course, you know.

But it's just, it's like, yeah, I, if you never use the thing and then every once in a blue moon you need to, I'll give you some benefit of the doubt.

But if you're using it fucking constantly, I'm that's crazy.

That's crazy that you won't learn.

My mom uses a Chromebook, and I don't know how she uses it because I could never teach her how to use her own email.

Right.

I don't get it.

Yep.

Like my dad,

my dad, me, and my sister all spent what I'm going to say is like a high school computer class level of time

trying to teach my mother how to use email addresses to send photos of her kids to her friends over like a period of 10 years.

Just never took.

Never took.

We are still stuck on the step of which things you double click on and which things you single click on

and the difference between where you do that and why

we're still stuck there.

You know, it's it's funny because I almost fell into the trap where, like,

I have a baby, and I'm like, oh, well, babies are so good with computers, they can lap that shit up, no problem.

And it's like, oh, actually, no, the reason we got good with computers is because the adults in our lives didn't know how to fucking use them, so we had to learn

and they were hard to use

anyway.

Yeah.

I got to teach my kid how to format a hard drive

and defrag it.

Yeah.

Well, depends if you don't really defrag an SSD.

And, you know, how to open up the case properly and touch the sides and get your static out, you know?

Yes.

Create a perimeter.

Like, I'm telling you, like, like, there's pictures.

I think I might have showed you at some point, like, a picture of me in Grenada at like six years old or something, holding a Nintendo controller.

You know, there's like whatever those baby pictures.

And it's like...

Like three years after that photo of little scrawny me like playing in, you know, in the islands, three years later, I've got a case open and I'm clicking fucking, you know, uh, RAM into place.

Like it's, and, and moving power supply cables around.

Like, come on, man.

We can,

if you just, just just give the slightest amount of a shit you know anyways um

yeah uh i guess a week happened but uh i guess uh on my end it was really it's just it's it's all wharf town it's wharftown wharf tags you got your wharf tag on mark of the wharves oh my god i thought you meant i thought you were gonna tell me you were just watching star trek no no you're the one that corrects it every time so now you are is it warfare hoisted by your own petard.

Oh.

Oh, I did get hoisted.

See, so here's how stupid I am.

I have become so enamored with city of the wars that I thought the singular of warves was warv.

I say warf.

Not warf.

No, I say warf because V-E-S is pluralizing.

Oh, no, that's how it would actually work.

Yeah.

So, but

and then when you make your online account, you make a warf tag and then you jump into that online beta.

Um, yeah, so you got more time in that online beta than I did, I assume.

Got a bit more time in there, yeah, um, and got a feel for what's going on with the system and what's going on with the game as a whole, and perhaps a little more than that, even.

I have heard that you got a little bit more than they wanted you to get out of that online beta, a little bit more than I bargained for.

Um,

so the uh, the long-awaited sequel to Garo, Mark of the Wolves,

I think, SNK's

fucking one of their peak releases, the answer to Third Strike that they released, for

the 25 years we've been waiting.

We finally got to take a look at what's going on.

And they have, with the gameplay, found a really

awesome way to balance and blend

like old school challenging mechanics that require you to like activate all neurons to like play properly and to like, you know, act and to play at a higher level, and newer mechanics that are forgiving and allow you to do like a flashy combo and get a bread and butter down and kind of feel your way through the game and learn characters kind of quickly, you know?

They've taken the bones of an old fighting game, which Mark of the Wolves always felt like, and those are still in place.

What that means is

your combos,

the first part of a combo is the most old school thing ever.

You jump in and you land one button, and you better land it really late.

Because if you jump in,

you gotta land it deep.

If you jump in and you hit them too high up in the head, by the time you hit the ground, they can already block.

So you've got to do what King of Fighters games tend to do, and you have to hit that button late.

All right, now that you've landed, pick a button,

right?

You're going to get one in there, and then you're going to go from straight from that button into a special move, and that'll be what a normal old-school combo used to look like.

A two-in-one, like a street fighter jump in two-in-one, exactly.

Um, now, if you're feeling frisky and you're like, hold on a minute, I'm kind of nice, then you can do a feint move, which is basically you can do like fake Hadoukens Hadoukens or fake Shoryukens.

And

they serve the purpose of like, you know, making somebody jump when you did actually nothing to bait something out.

But they also allow you to quickly cancel from that first button into like a second one, you know?

So you're like, oh shit, I did something fancy.

I pressed hard punch.

I did like a fake Hadouken.

And then I pressed Light Punch.

And I landed that extra light punch.

And now I'm going to go into the special move.

So you added one extra button.

Holy shit.

You know, that's crazy.

And then that's your combo.

That's it, you know?

But

the new modern way of things is that like if you decide to go into like an EX move, you know,

then you can just go from one EX move to another to another and the game just lets you like cancel it.

Just burn it.

Burn every fucking button you got.

Yep.

And then at the bottom of the screen, your little accelerometer will go

and then you'll overheat, you know, but it just lets you go as nuts as you want to from the moment the game starts.

And so having the,

like, watching you do a bunch of EX special moves in a row is something very modern, you know, in fighting games.

But the first part of that combo requires you to play it kind of old school and like traditionally land and execute your your your your your fundamental, you know buttons and work and stuff like that.

So, what that means is a lot of old school players, a lot of FGC people, and a lot of people that are looking for

a higher skill ceiling are really, really happy with this game because

you can see that it's requiring

more neurons to be activated in moment-to-moment play, right?

Something that Reggie was talking about that a discussion is that's happening now is

the cancel that I'm talking about, when you press a button and then do like a fake Hadokun,

requires you to press two buttons to do that fake.

And just and some people are like, oh, please put a button config so that it can be a single button instead.

And Reggie and Kizy K and a couple of other FGC folks are kind of like, no, keep it two, because the fact that you have to think about that second one is just enough to like make it a little more challenging in the moment.

And like means, and it kind of means like you can't just get it, you can't just autopilot it in your brain and like, you know, make it like a rote memorization thing.

Like, you have to stay a little bit more present

to always think about hitting heavy punch, two buttons, light kick, two buttons,

you know, and then the next thing.

It kind of adds that extra to it, you know?

Um, which I'm like, yeah, I, I, I, I get that, you know, I like the idea that you don't need to do this, but if you're feeling yourself, if you want to swag, if you want to optimize and get the nicest possible combos going with every ounce of damage, then you you have to add this extra level of execution to it.

Which,

you know, characters like Crimson Viper and Street Fighter 4 kind of are asking people to do that a little bit.

And

it's completely unnecessary for moment-to-moment gameplay.

And I spent the entire weekend not really using those feints, you know, like I used the, I used them like to kind of like like in the middle of standing there trying to bait someone into doing something, but I didn't use them to cancel my buttons at all.

So like it's a mechanic that is, um, you can, you can just, you know, you love, you can look at that and be like, I'll learn that eventually or not.

For now, you can approach it at your own pace, but it is there for you.

And that's a cool thing to do with your gameplay.

I think there's been a lot of really interesting discussion in fighting games and other words, but we're talking about fighting games right now, about like

the

ease of accessibility for higher functions in gameplay can, in many cases, go too far and basically ruin your ability to actually express yourself.

So, do we need to go back to

fucking eight-frame reversals on jump-ins and like Street Fighter 2 or like fucking tick throw nightmare shit with ballrock that you can't get out of?

No, no, God, no, it is, but

like increasing the input leniency on things too far.

Like, I saw people complaining about it in Street Fighter V can create situations where, like, yes, parrying stuff with Ryu's thing in five is not very exciting because it's it's fucking free.

It's not the same, right?

Certainly, no, right.

Um, but there's something to be said as well about, like, uh, there's a I've seen a an

advanced uh uh the next level of player expression when people are discussing that in the context of fighting games.

What that meant back in the day when you think about that is like different people would play their own character very different from each other, even though they all play the same character, right?

Yeah, there'd be people who, like, if you want to pick Guile as an example, people would hide in the corner and just throw down an infinity of Sonic Booms, and then the guy that would run up in your head with upside-down kick.

But now there's a counterpoint which says that, like, oh, player expression just means sub-optimal play.

It does.

And then it literally does.

And then eventually, when people, when everyone shares the online data and and goes into the information researching mode and labs it all out, we all know that this is the best way to play.

And if you're not doing that, then you're not, you know what I mean?

Like there's that level of like expression goes away when knowledge increases, which is hilarious.

I've played enough fighting games and MOBAs and MMOs to feel like the pendulum has swung in a certain direction on that discussion, which is in

limited spaces with small amounts of people, you can have infinite player expression because no one actually gets any good.

Right?

Like, people get like kind of good,

but they only get as big as their local pond.

Yeah, to some degree.

Like, you can, in your local pond, you can just learn to outplay each other

as individuals.

But that's to say, but you can't, but then people like Arsalan Ash exist as like tech end gods because

they found a way to make that pond represent Mount Olympus, you know?

So you instead get this thing where it's like, okay, well, there aren't like 400 different ways to play Guile for each person that plays Guile at your local arcade.

And so the solution tends to be for all of these games is

instead of saying, well, I want to play Ryu like this, or I want to play Guile like this, the answer is, we're going to make a new character that plays in the style that you want to play.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Perhaps they're not.

So that you like, I started to notice that with like

FF14 and MMOs in general, which is like, well, what's the class fantasy?

And how do you want that class to play?

Do they, do you want to be fast?

Do you want to be slow?

Do you want to be supportive?

Do you want to be, et cetera, right?

And so then it all builds up to, this is the correct way to play this class.

If you don't want to play this class this way, go to that other class that we made to play that way.

Yeah.

If you want a particular way that a Shoto plays, if you're looking for an evil Ryu, like, that's going to be a specific, like, second slot character over here with some particular differences that are not the same as Akuma, that are not the same as the way Ken pressures you, and all this other stuff, right?

That has become something that has

happened.

The interesting thing, too, is that,

so while describing this kind of like, this is what Mark of the Wolves used to be, you know, like there's a level of old schoolness to the basics of the game here, but

the skill ceiling is high if you want to approach it.

At the same time, when it comes to

how you want to

deal with modern mode, right?

It's interesting because here they've decided to do their own version of modern mode, which is very...

Which is good.

Everything should have a modern mode.

And it's very similar to Street Fighters, but oh,

is it not identical?

And it is much more limiting.

To the point that

it feels like while modern mode was

and is something that good players can use for particular styles of play that can compete with classic players in Street Fighter VI,

in this case, I would not say that it's viable for higher level play against people that are playing on classic.

Ah, so SNK's modern mode is forbade.

It is meant to get you started and it is meant to get you like to play with your friends and have fun, but like there is going to be a limit to how far you can go because you that's fine.

That's okay.

I wish it did encompass more, but like you can't do the feints or the breaks that I was just describing in

the modern mode equivalent of City of the Wolves.

Those mechanics don't exist, right?

You have a special move button, like you did with Street Fighter, and then you have,

yeah, like two buttons for normals, and then one button for performing combos.

But essentially, and

like, you do have the ability to start training yourself.

Like, if you want to manually attempt a fireball, if you're not used to that, you can do that.

But you can't,

but like, it doesn't let you manually do like a full super, for example.

Like, so it's, it's not completely the same.

And I think it could do a little bit more to encourage people starting out that way to take a chance on one of these

other inputs if they wanted to try it out.

But it's there, nonetheless.

And it means that people can pick it up and just start pressing buttons regardless.

I think that's honestly what modern modes intended purpose is supposed to be.

Yeah, if you're someone who is just looking like, okay, I want to just move my character around the screen.

And then when I get close to my opponent, try to land a combo.

And then when I've earned enough meter, meter, occasionally I'll try to throw a super out, and that's basically what your entire game plan is.

This is perfect for that, right?

Yeah, it's like, hey, can we make a okay, can we have our genre have a situation where the first time somebody plays our game, it's not an abjectly miserable fucking experience?

Can we do that?

Can we have something to mitigate?

That being said, the over the years, the easy operation stylish modes and stuff that we've gone through in earlier games, the reason why modern was

stood out was because of the fact that it does allow you to get 90% of the way there, depending on which characteristics.

Oh, absolutely.

So in this case.

And depending on the character, some of those changes are worth it.

Yeah.

Some might argue even closer to 99.

But in this case,

it's much, the percentage is much further back than that.

So in any case, I didn't see too much discussion about that over the weekend.

But

well, because the people hopping on to an online multiplayer beta for an SNK game are typically going to be old heads that, like, can do raging storms.

Oh, yeah.

So, like, the

discourse around modern mode is going to be light.

Um, but that is what I,

yeah, and that's, that's, that's what I, you know, spent the weekend kind of running into, uh, you know, some SNK old heads and stuff.

And, uh, part of that as well was participating in Rome himself's Regime Royale, which was just a collection of some players getting on for an exhibition.

They had some content creators, had some tournament players, just a whole bunch of FGC people got involved and did a bunch of first to fives.

Ran a set with Reggie and participated.

That was a lot of fun.

So thanks to Rome for doing that.

I wonder what kind of world we would have lived in if Third Strike had Just Effend and Garot had the parry.

Capcom versus S and K 2 would have P groove and K groove inverted from each other, I suppose.

You know, that's the biggest thing I can think of.

But yeah, the idea, like parrying in Street Fighter 3 Third Strike, it gives you, you recover faster and you can, you know, instantly punish and it requires you to, you know, have the balls to like

to like move into the attack, attack right as i as the way i described it in that that that uh that video the evo video um just defending is like be a coward at the last second you know yeah it's be a smart yeah yeah yeah um

and uh the weirdness of that is evo moment 37 with just defends is uh daigo is healing

as he's doing all of those

you know as he's just defending you're getting life back because the crazy thing with just defend, and now in this game, especially, is that like every single resource.

Hello?

Hello?

Did I disconnect from you?

Yeah, you disconnected for a second.

Weird.

Okay, well, I'm glad we're back.

Did you just defend your internet?

Perhaps, and I healed a little bit.

Here we are.

There's a slight lag on it.

So every single resource that you have in that game, your life,

your special meter, your Excel meter, everything

gets improved and healed a little bit by just defending, right?

So it lets you recover faster, it gives you life, it gives you, it's so much of a reward for doing it.

And that on its own is great, but if you feel really, really sick, you can instantly block a thing at the last second, get all those rewards, and then also instantly cancel into a super, and the super will come out faster than it usually does.

So again, skill ceiling is up there, you know?

So I love you, Just Defend.

Yeah, I'm looking at this as like, cool, I managed to pull off a

just defend guard cancel super twice

the entire time.

I did it two times and I felt like a god and that's it, you know?

It's pretty hard to do it feels like um

and then um yeah there's uh there's other things that are there where you know you kind of have these like dodging high or dodging low mechanics and those are meant to break um or avoid throws or avoid lows but they also work into the rock paper scissors of um

these big like drive impact style uh rev attacks that you can do the top attacks now essentially uh so the system plays well together with all with everything going on.

And

yeah, it just, it feels like an old school fighting game, but the moment you

land that touch and you do that combo, the end of your combo is getting modern and fancy, you know?

It becomes 10 years later.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And

then, you know, some of the design is very smart too in the sense that,

so earlier I was describing how you can do EX into EX over and over until you burn yourself out.

When you burn yourself out, you don't have access to any of your special mechanics or any of the stuff I just described.

You're kind of like stuck and you can get

chip-blocked to death.

However, landing your big super secret level three

resets your entire EX meter to zero.

So, oh, I did not catch that.

So, if you land a combo and

you look and you realize I have the money to spend on a full cash-out super, like level three, everything, I can spur I can burn my full meter spend everything I have and the end of that super it's all reset to zero So you get a massive reward, which is like that's a really cool almost like doom eternal loop You know of cooldowns.

It's it's a cooldown system happening where you've you've you've done you've spent every resource you have you've done the full loop and at the beginning of the loop your cool your your first thing that you spent is now back to normal, right?

That's the um the rotation, excuse me, is that the word, right?

You've got this game has the rotation in it.

I mean, Wooly, if you want to talk about rotations, like fighting in combos are just rotations.

Yeah.

That's all they are.

But here you can only do it for like that one third of your life that you choose, you know?

So

quite interesting.

You pick which which third of your life you want.

You want to start the round with it.

Do you want it to be in the middle or do you want it to be your comeback at the end?

Um, while being fully aware that you can easily get juggled into a combo that takes away the entire section of life where that special ability would have unlocked, you know, yeah, which is why you put it at the end,

terrible

end is terrible placement.

I've like so so far, it feels like that's just like you get touched and like, nah, you're not gonna get extra.

All right, Wooly, who gives a shit about any of that?

Geese is alive.

So

we were laughing at how stupid it would be if geese howard just showed up in city of the wars and was like hey i'm fine and guess what idiot oh my god so it's weird because um so there's a there's apparently some some stuff leaking going on whatever i on my own with my own two saw some shit

because uh folks uh discovered a a fairly simple way to uh access a training mode And inside of that training mode, you can go practice and whatever, and you can see a couple things.

You can see that there's a stage where the line system returns, which is hilarious.

You can see

there's that Terry Bogart stage, or the Rock Howard-like stage with the little cafe and stuff, you know.

But then you can also see all the music and of the music collection that you can select for each stage.

There is a full, every Final Fury game's music is all there.

And then the game's

full soundtrack includes characters who have not necessarily shown up yet anywhere.

And

well, that's crazy.

Who would show up?

Nightmare Geese,

Fallen Rock,

Howard, you know.

Tons of characters they haven't announced that are like not that surprising.

Artifighting statements.

And Bogart and Hokotomaru or something.

Yeah, he's

him being plus Time.

He's older now.

And there was a little bit of all the there's a Ryo in there, there's some stuff, and there was a Rick Stroud

mentioned.

So that's crazy.

I love Rick Stroud, um, not as much as I love Vanessa, but he's cool.

But that feels like it's for the Rick Stroud fanboys out there, which literally became a gag online.

Rick Stroud fanboys are like people like me, like, shut the fuck up about Rick Stroud.

So

it's quite, it's quite exciting to see that they're like, okay, we know some people care.

And yeah, like, you know, a bunch of that.

And then, of course, you even got your full version of

the theme song, Chain Reaction,

which now that we can hear that thing, you're like, this is a perfect punk emo, rather emo pop, like.

2000s, early 2000s theme song that should be, if Mark of the Wolves 2 came out right after the first game, this was the era that it happened in, right?

And the lyrics are all talking about Rock Howard's journey, how he's outrunning the circle of time, undecided.

Fate is irrelevant.

And his heart feels one way, but the blood in his veins is another.

And they're causing a chain reaction that no one can contain.

I fucking love it.

I love that stupid emo pop song.

It's the best.

It's my favorite thing.

So So

I feel really happy that we had a discussion about this.

I want to say six months ago, and I think it was about Heihachi.

But I feel like now it's happened enough times, and Capcom people have said that, like, Gen is alive and shit like that, that we can now conclusively state that no one in a fighting game that has been a playable character has ever died.

Nope.

And if you think they did, you're wrong.

It's like comic books, right?

It's the same rule, 100%.

If a character exists and you know about them, there's value in them returning, especially if they're playable at some point.

It is much more extreme than I thought it would be with characters that like entire games were built around them being dead and then decades went by.

You are dead if you were never playable,

except for when you become playable and undead.

Shout outs to Gouken.

So here's the question.

You are dead inso much as your moveset was not very cool.

If your moveset was pretty cool,

you will undead.

Now, people are saying Cliff in Guilty Gear.

And

okay, give it a minute.

Because Guilty Gear has dream matches.

Guilty Gear has killed and brought back the same characters multiple times.

I would pop off so hard for a young Cliff flashback character.

Just someone that shows up only in a flashback of story mode, but it's young Cliff.

That would be so sick.

That's so, it would be so sick.

But no, I think here you just need to, yep, we just, like, nightmare geese a million years, never forget.

And it makes more sense, too, because

I guess the whole thing where the, the, the, Kane, Kine, and Grant were like the villains of the first Garrow.

And now that Rock is joining his side because he tells him that his mom is alive and that we can go find her, like you can see that they're kind of like chummy to each other now.

And even Terry is kind of like, okay, I guess I understand why you're doing all this.

So fine.

You talk and monologue like a super evil villain, but we kind of are growing to deal with you.

So whatever.

I would be astonished if that Grant is actually dead.

I assume he will show up in an ending or a title part.

He was there.

Oh,

he was there.

Oh, there you go.

Confirmed.

You don't even have to.

So this does do something that is probably annoying when you're making a fighting game like Tekken.

And people are like, where the fuck is Heihachi on my roster?

And you go, he's dead, though.

And now more than ever, the response is, who gives a shit?

Well, the weird.

Who gives a fucking fit?

Well, the weirdest one is the idea of like, okay, so Vox Reaper is the replacements for Grant.

He's the new student.

Um, and you know, you see that with some characters that are pronounced replacements, combat kids, and um, well, they're kind of their own thing, you're right, that uh, versus like I think Aki might be the best example ever

because, like, Fong isn't dead, but he is permanently replaced forever.

We and I think when we talk about like the Caliber kids, right, you know, those are those are replacements, and like the combat kids kind of are their own new things that are hybrids and stuff.

But um,

then you have the ones where it's so replaced that you didn't even know that there was a different person.

Like King and Sub-Zero are characters

that died and then got replaced by new versions of new of people doing their moves and you didn't even know.

No one did.

If you play Armor King in Tekken, you are playing, I think, Armor King 3.

And you're playing King 2.

And then, yeah, well, at one point, that's it.

So

then there's the Armor King that

there's an Armor King 2 that takes on the mantle, you know?

Yeah.

So it's wild with that, you know, where there's just like, yeah,

you couldn't tell it was a character and a different person in the same match.

And then there's characters that they're not dead,

but the new replacement is so similar that if you stare at the game and don't read the title, you wouldn't know the difference.

Like, whatever Sophidia's fucking daughter's name is in SoulCal 5.

Sandra.

Because, no, no, that's her younger sister.

Sophia.

Sophia, was her name fucking Sophia?

Are you actually serious with me?

Is it Sophira?

People are saying it's Opira 5.

Okay, okay, okay.

Yeah,

okay.

Dude,

that is like a Tekken-style one-to-one Julia Chang fuck situation.

Yeah, that is.

No, yeah, just the complete report.

replacement.

Kunimitsu as well is a different Kunimitsu.

It's not the same as that's Kunimitsu 2.

Yoshimitsu, weirdly enough, the same

one, same robot.

That's the reverse of the same robot alien, can't get rid of them.

Every jack is a different jack.

Yoshimitsu is forever.

Yeah, it turns out you can't replace decades of love and memories for specific characters, no matter what you do to their moveset or look.

I love Guile and Bison

and Balrog.

Like, I love them.

Shout out to

Vox Reaper being like, stay away from my billionaires.

Oh, that's great.

Protect the rich.

What a villain.

Truly, it's like, oh, the new guy on the bad team, huh?

Okay, let's see how dark he is.

He's like, hey.

He says a shirt on, a t-shirt that just says

I love rich people

and law it's i need i need him and and fucking forest law standing next to each other martial law standing next to each other like cena and that black guy with the shirts saying i hate anime and i love anime

it's perfect it's absolutely perfect which way kid which way which path do you take you know um truly truly the villain that's that that's like and you know what he's a assassin that like was taken in and reformed and is now defending the more the most bourgeois ass kind our heinland you know and his dreams so of course you got to be on board you got to be super on board

it's great

um

yeah that that was uh all there

um

what was it i love i love that gen is alive that's my favorite one that is by far my favorite one out of every fighting game character to ever not die.

It's got to be Gen

dying of what?

Lung cancer, leukemia, or some shit back in like the early 90s, then objectively killed by Akuma only to be like, ah, he's fucked up.

No, he didn't kill him, though.

He let he stopped.

In fact, he stopped thinking Shun Gokusatsu'd the cancer.

Yeah, yeah.

He grabbed a hold of Gen and took his cancer.

And Gen felt better afterwards.

I can't wait to see what happens to Lau in virtual fighter it's it's it's gonna be great it's gonna be dead man let's see

um

yeah so there was all that

uh i think as well uh well whatever the s and k lore will continue i'm sure we'll we'll

we'll have bits and pieces to dive into

um you know and then there's what happens when you're not playing the the the fighting game um that yeah what's that what's happening when you're not playing city of the warves you're trying to

matchmake.

You're trying to find games, and it's taking forever because the matchmaking is really, really bad.

And it's...

Seems like a cataclysmic problem.

It's a step down, even though they had the same problem in KOF-15.

And then KOF-15 at launch had a huge matchmaking problem.

tweaked it so that it got a bit better at a certain point.

And now we're back to a worse version of it, which is just like,

why would it be this way?

And you're like, I guess with the people that are the gameplay battle designers, you know, I mean, Neo G and all the, all the, all the, the, the folks that made a bunch of great fighting games over the years are over back at SNK.

So that side of the, of the, the game is running smoothly.

But I don't know if the

new board, you know, the, I forgot the name of the Chinese company, but like, whatever the, the, they are, whatever they're doing,

online seems to be enough of a property, a priority that they have rollback, but not enough that they have a smooth matchmaking experience.

Hey, and you know, it's a fun thing the way we had this discussion.

We're like, man, this fighting game is so cool to play.

And then

we segued into, if you can.

Yeah, if you can play it.

You know,

the menus are a little bit clunky and weird with

the negative edge buttons to like like you release to move the screen over sometimes, which is very strange.

And it's not very straightforward to get to some places as well.

Going in and out of your online profile is like 10 seconds of loading.

Getting, you know, doing anything relating to essentially your account.

I never really thought too much about the big deal it was when Capcom announced CFN as like, hey, we've invented a thing called CFN.

It's a big registered online network where you put in a fighter tag and it tracks your records and whatever, right?

And I remember, like, okay, they brought that out there for five.

And, you know, five had its own problems.

So we were kind of just like, okay, well, at least, you know, you don't really think about that feature as anything special because you're just like, well, yeah, duh, that should be the case.

I should be able to register my shit online and play.

And now you're kind of like, oh my God, actually, that is a humongous deal because it means that like, I don't have this weird problem where you go into the records and data screen on City of the Wolves and you get a message that says if you delete your save data,

you're going to lose your record of all of data and matches and analytics for everything you've done.

Are you fucking serious?

So it's like

you literally

and it's your that shit's tied to your save file.

This is especially bad because Samurai Showdown.

That means you can just hack your fucking client side ranking so not your ranking not your ranking your other info right oh samurai showdown had a problem when it released where your ranking was tied to your saved data and that broke the online entirely it was completely batch it because if you ever you know deleted formatted whatever lost a console anything happens you just lose your your entire ranking right you can't log back in anywhere there's the game had no i guess budget to have an online registered account of any kind.

So there was no way to just make sure that that shit was saved on the cloud and whatever, right?

So Samurai Shodon, they learned a huge, stupid lesson from that, which was don't tie your progression and ranking and online shit to the save file.

And so here, now your save progression, your actual rank is the only thing that doesn't get lost.

But all other metrics, stats, usage data, et cetera, everything else associated

is all gone there.

And it's just like, if you just had the ability to have an account of some kind, this wouldn't be a problem.

But then now it's like, oh, but do they just are like, we don't have the money for that?

You got to get the bare bones experience.

You know, that's what I can't wait for them to release this game and spend like 18 months patching it

and then be like, look, we fixed the online long after it has completely died.

Well, so this is why I was saying that when I see something like this, where the game itself is super fun to play, but you've got really long matchmaking issues, and everything outside of that is just struggling.

Unfortunately, my brain goes, damn, I guess Second Impact is going to be the one that fixes all of this, you know, because

this is KOF-12 and KOF-13 is going to be great, right?

You're going to come along and find a better package.

Like, the meat is good.

The bones are brittle.

you know we need to replace those bones with some steel rods and we don't have the fucking time to wait for that surgery to recover because this game's coming out in two months um

so that's what unfortunately you know uh that's the that's the bad side about this is that maybe over the course of releasing like six or seven games snk can make a decent online like because they get a little bit better every time right they do get a little bit every time but now we got to step backwards

um

and another thing that gets a little bit better every time is like you know, the way their games look, right?

And I will say that, you know, as a

stepping off the

other two subjects there, the way this game looks, this is the best looking new SNK game they've released.

It has a lot of fun.

When you go into the, if you screenshot any moment in one of the big specials, you see their answer to paint and ink splatches from Street Fighter is dot tone, right?

You see pop art dot tones in the background.

You see really bright colors.

You see a big white outline around the active character.

And it looks very fun.

And like the filters and stuff are very aggressive and stylish.

The 3D models are still kind of struggling, though, to look as impressive as anything that the other like mainline fighting games are.

It's okay, man.

SNK is just like a little little baby company.

They just look a little, they're just a little birthday boy.

It's some really cool visual effects laid over some 3D models that are still not 100% there.

You know, better than 14, way better than 14, better than 15, but way subpar to, I mean, it's going to be unfair, but Guilty Gear Strive is the best looking fucking thing I've ever seen.

You know,

I would like to actually

stop you right there and ask you, how is that unfair?

Because

I know that this is a company that died and resurrected in the hands of a completely different owner that has a fraction of the team size, budget, and operating costs

by comparison to Arxys and Team Red and everything going on over there.

But nonetheless, the history of this company and why that comparison feels normal is because SNK used to be second to Capcom.

You know?

I'm going to have to take a quick break in

like two seconds.

But before I go, I have to say I totally understand exactly what you mean about the team size and the historical thing, but I just googled it on the Steam.

No, I Steam searched it.

And

City of the Wharves costs $83, and Guilty Gear Strive costs $53.

So,

how is not fair to compare new game that is $30 more to old game?

It's a version of the why is this why isn't every game hitting Baldur's Gate three levels of complexity, right?

It's it's a new version of that applied to this.

We'll get into it in a second.

Oh, yeah.

Well, I mean,

I would say that KOF 14 started this discussion because

KOF 14 looks bad.

Yes.

Style.

Like it looks poor.

SNK returning with KOF 14 was them essentially when Nintendo dropped out of the main two race and became like, we're going to be third forever and we're just going to sit back here.

We'll continue the thought.

So, yeah,

to finish the thought, I think

that

most major releases of like all the fighting games we know and franchises we know have been like striking upon first sight.

And that

and that leaves an impression with a new buyer,

a new audience, a potential person that you can appeal to.

When you see how good Street Fighter 6 looks, when you see how good Strive looks, Dragon Ball Fighters,

all of these things are like, there's a holy shit, you know, impression to it.

And

even Mark of the Wolves, the original, was the most impressive looking thing they'd ever made at the time as well, back then.

It comes from that place.

And now we're in a place where each game is kind of releasing its own, like, check this shit out.

This is some crazy level,

next level visuals you've never seen before.

And here, it's just like, yeah, the style is

just improved upon what they previously released.

And it's their most stylish, but this new era feels like it's only compared.

SNK is almost only comparing themselves to themselves, like Nintendo in

this third slot of like, we're just going to be compared to what we do over here.

We're not in the main race anymore, you know?

It feels like the,

when you look at the, the, the, the, the modeling in particular, like you can see it's clearly not a completely new team from scratch or anything.

It's probably the same folks that worked on 14, got better over time, and then made 15, and now got better again, and you're seeing the best they can do right now, um,

which is, you know, but it's just like, it's not hitting that level of the showstopper when you saw like, oh my God, Goku is just Goku, You know?

So, like, yes, but I also feel like these are kind of all intertwined because, like, I don't know, maybe it's because I'm older, or maybe it's because I use Steam almost exclusively, and there's a billion fucking games that are always fighting for your time.

Like, hey, I love fighting games, and I want to play an SNK fighting game.

And notice that this brand new fighting game is

I really like the style City of the Wolves has.

Me too.

But, like, it's not, it's not the best looking game in the world, but I like it.

I do.

That's, that's it.

That's it.

And I care care about these characters.

That's exactly it.

Yeah.

And so it's like, okay, so I'm looking at a situation where it's like, okay, well, it's not the best looking game in the world, but I really like these characters in this system.

So if I want to pay full price for it,

so like,

in order to make me not feel stupid,

it's got to have like

banger online, right?

Yeah, I like

it.

If you're going to charge full price

price,

then I kind of expect certain de facto settings and features to exist.

It just can't be a discussion anymore.

We need to be past this part.

And yeah, including all of season one, every edition, a special edition is the way they're selling it.

Yeah, no, of course, when I say Nintendo and third, I mean like they're not competing in the same race anymore.

No, Nintendo pretends they exist in their own games industry.

And to be fair, considering some of the news we're going to talk about later today, maybe that's a better games industry.

And so I think something

so the same thing.

While I like the way this game looks and I like what's going on with it,

it's just when you start comparing is where we get this discussion kind of happens, you know?

Not to put like the undue amount of weight over here, but it's but it's it's it is interesting considering that the history of the franchise.

Something that I noticed as well tells the tale of the tape even more than the character models is the particle effects.

Because they've struggled with particle effects for a couple of games now, right?

The way the fire and flames and explosions all kind of look.

How is the power geyser looking in each game, you know?

Holy fuck, the power geyser in Street Fighter VI looks incredible.

Oh, it looks good.

There's two of them.

It's SNK's men.

There's two of them, you know?

And I think here you see some examples where it looks fantastic, right?

So as a big old Rock Howard fanboy, the wings look great.

I love when he does it, and you see now the petals drop down afterwards.

They're like, oh, we know you like those wings.

We're going to push them.

We're going to put them in his extra super.

Like,

it looks fantastic.

And then when I think about, and I look specifically at Kane and his windpose, right?

That's the one where it's like Kane's windpose in the original game was this amazing shot of him holding his hands open and a giant explosion of fire pops off.

You hear the sound of the oxygen in the room burning away, and it looks incredible, right?

And the team or the animators that like looked at that and said, Let's convert this to 3D didn't notice the specific little details to make that feel as intimidating, you know?

So

either they didn't notice or it's hard.

Maybe, I don't know, but one way or another, the things, there's little things there where you're like, I love this part of that, and you, oh, you didn't do that here.

You kind of, he floats up, and it's like a softer, more flaccid version of it.

And you're like, damn, we didn't both feel the same thing looking at this.

And

another,

imagine if you saw a new animation of Ryu doing a Hadouken, but now his shirt doesn't explode backwards.

Right?

Well, that would just be.

And you're like, well, it didn't used to in the past, but then ever since we saw that in Street Fighter 3, and we all went, oh my God, that's such a cool thing.

His clothing gets blown back by the fireball.

And you're like, yeah, we're never not doing that again.

And then someone comes along and then forgets to do that.

And you're like, oh, but didn't you notice how cool that was?

Why would you not do that?

You know, it's just those little bits where you're like, that's what made that game back in the day go and put it above everything they'd previously done, you know?

I think that

I think these two topics are like intrinsic.

Because no one would be complaining about the way the game looks if they were just spending time playing matches.

Yeah, you know, there's a yeah, that's it.

That's it.

That's it.

You know, that's true, too.

And there is a level of like, you don't want to become that, that, the, the, the, the person that, like, you spend more time complaining about this game than actually playing playing it.

That's a that's a crowd in the FGC that is that is out there getting exposed all the time for sure.

Kim's not just the FGC.

Kim's pants is a really good, you know, uh thing we've looked at over the years: of like, look how amazing those pants looked, almost too good in 13, and we just had to,

if you want to, if you want to be like super unfair in a way that's technically fair, hey, how come none of the stages in any of the 3D KOF games look as good as that Sweden stage where it's raining?

Sure.

How come they don't look that good?

Oh, is it because that's literally impossible due to the way technology works?

Empty

the empty sandy desert in KOF 2000, even.

Like

even that, there's some character to the sand.

Yeah, so all that to say, you know, that

there's the, there's those little bits that you kind of are like, yeah, I guess that that's just not what we're getting here.

But I am glad we are still getting another entry into the Fatal Fury franchise proper.

And I'm, look, I'm here to huff the Copium.

This is a good game, and I want to see it succeed.

I think it can get there.

And I look forward to seeing, you know, if it can get patched into solving a lot of these problems, because

it really is like a really fun fighting game.

And they did a great job

just taking something that a challenging thing to do on paper with the gameplay and and nailed that you know um i think it's wild that uh me cope master extreme over here virtual fighter fan

i look at v5 evo oh sorry evo and i'm like yeah no that that that that online was always going to suffer really badly because of the lack of players

right that that was its fate and it's really cool that they're supporting that game for people like me and like the 2000 other people that play it almost every other day but like yeah that was its fate.

But I look at Mark of the sorry, City of the Wharves,

and I'm just like, man,

if you, if you, if people pick that game up on day one

and fucking spend a couple minutes trying to get into a match in that first five-minute period, that game is cooked.

That game is fucked.

It has a five-minute window to get you into a match and have a good experience and then get you into a second match.

And if it doesn't do that, it's fucking cooked.

Yeah, again, I mentioned it before, but the fact that you share your rank across characters is just a really dumb thing that needs to change as well while we're talking about it.

Well, no, because Wooly, you're just as good with every character.

Everyone will get their ranking with their best character and be afraid to play ranked with anybody else because

you're going to de-rank with anybody that is not your best character, you know

Yeah, yeah,

no you like when uh on the little stream on on get out of fighting games there um you you know you mentioned it, but it's like okay, so What's gonna come out is a game that's really a fighting game that's really fun to play that's gonna be plagued by other issues and You're like I don't know if it's worse or better because

oh yeah yeah, because you want it to be shit, and then it's like, oh, I didn't even care about that.

You can just dismiss it entirely, or do you want it to be, god damn it, it's actually really good, but it's being held back, you know?

But look, what has this, what has this genre been if not a series of good games held back by other bullshit, right?

That's the oh, that's that's that's the story of every fucking release.

I mean, we talked about easy operation, all that stuff, but like, and you know, online play.

So if

if Garo doesn't work out, if City of the Wharves Wharves doesn't work out, there's always multiverses.

Yeah.

That is the exact laugh I wanted, by the way.

I guess there's a time when

quality of life becomes

mandatory to life.

Right?

You know, it's one of those things.

It's one of those things.

I saw this person talking about the other day

where they're they're like, people don't appreciate shit because up a hundred years ago, ain't nobody was getting hot showers, right?

Now a hot shower is just part of your day-to-day routine, right?

And you should appreciate that for the miracle that it is.

Nah, people should have hot showers.

Fuck you.

Hot showers rule.

My online game should work when I pay money for it.

Quality of life becomes life support.

That's, it really does, man.

The base functionality of my life now is to be able to wash my butt in not cold water.

I'm not going back.

Well, you see, this region you could move to is actually, it's amazing.

There's no electricity, though.

But look, it's so pretty.

No, you know what?

Electricity is important.

Hot water heater is important.

I, I, Mark of the Wolves.

The most formative and beloved fighting games of my life were played without ever touching an online connection.

Yeah, and now you live in the current world and you're an adult man and you're not in high school.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It does feel like

it does feel a bit like one whirlwind of a like.

of a director can kind of look at that and go like,

we got to whip this thing into shape.

What the fuck are we doing?

Oh, yeah, that happens all the time all over the game.

Spitz.

Somebody comes into the room and goes, Why are you doing it like this?

This is stupid.

Fix it.

Oh, well, that's the way we've always done it.

Well, shut up then.

Um, but yeah, yeah, yeah, that is uh, Fatal Fury, City of the Wolves.

And you know what?

I promise you right now, my brain will not stop saying Garrow.

So, uh, I don't know if you've noticed, but I have almost called it Mark of the the Wolves almost every single time.

Yeah, yeah,

um, I have not acclimated to the wharf city yet.

I like saying Garrow, it feels good, it sounds cool.

I enjoy those words.

Um,

yeah,

all right, so we'll see what happens.

Um, and that I just wanted to talk about that, obviously.

That's all I got to talk about.

So, um, anything with you?

Uh, Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii's out.

Yeah.

This is the deepest.

It's not shocking, but it's the deepest into the zany side quest land that the Leica Dragon games have ever been.

To the point where I am wondering if the events taking place are even real.

Like it is the absolute peak of absurdity.

Okay, so I mean Ichiban is insane and then infects Kiryu with his insane juice.

Is Majima not also just losing his mind?

Majima's, he was doing it for long, okay.

Great, perfect.

Um, so I think, I think there's a lot of things I could, I could play.

Old men going insane

to really establish the tone.

Um, so one of the things, if you played Yakuza 7 or 8 or 5,

you would know that Majima has the ability to spawn shadow clones.

This has happened so many times

in so many cutscenes that the shadow clones are real.

Are they solid clones or

illusions?

They are ghosts.

No, they are not illusions.

They are real.

Okay.

If you thought it was some kind of like metaphor for fighting Majima, how fast it is.

It's Kagebunshin.

It's like they're hard and physical.

Oh, shit.

Oh, absolutely.

It stabs people.

But more than that is

when you wake up on the beach as Goro Majima, nameless because he can't remember, and you speak to Noah Rich in Hawaii,

an island off the coast of Hawaii, right?

And you're in America,

and Majima has never spoken anything other than Japanese in his life,

they do a cutaway in which he says, Yeah, so there was a real language barrier, but we got over that anyway.

And then the game just continues

and just it's never going to come up ever again.

Shut the fuck up.

The fact that he doesn't speak English

and no one around him speaks Japanese, and you have a bunch of people that are co-mingling constantly.

No, they are speaking the dragon language.

Well, so I was ready for a world where this was the same as

Terrace House, Hawaii, where they kind of were like, there's enough of a Japanese population here that fuck it, it's fine.

That's what they did in

80.

Yeah, okay.

Where they're like, you're in little Japanese.

It's fine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It just happens to be that everybody you deal with speaks Japanese.

Now they've just completely given up.

Like, it's Majima is inexplicably speaking fluid English, I guess.

No?

I don't know.

Are they making pun jokes about his bad words or hisone is fluent?

Everybody.

You gotta love that, like, everyone's speaking English, but then somebody says the wrong thing at some point, and everyone goes, What?

That's stupid.

Why would you mispronounce that?

And it's completely lost in translation.

Okay.

The reason for for becoming a pirate is nothing.

There is literally no reason to become a pirate at all other than fucking

fucking

good good.

Strong motivation.

And then you start traveling to areas which

the pirate cove Madlantis

is the most like physically impossible location the series has ever done.

It's got like multiple cruise ships like in the fucking cave wall.

Like, it's, it's, it's nonsense.

It's complete fucking buffoonery.

Like, he's not just taking a trip to

a theme park and just daydreaming.

No, it is, it is happening.

And you have your pirate ship combat, which is not as good as Black Flag, but it's serviceable.

Okay.

It's fun.

Okay.

It's very blue skies Sega pirate ship battle.

Okay.

Skies of Arcadia pirate ship battles, you know, there's I like the concept, but obviously Black Flag was the fucking

that was the bar.

So what do you do?

I mean, you can shoot your machine guns straightforward and you can broadside people and you have boost, but it's it's very arcade.

Okay, okay.

And you can ram people.

Of note, though, is that this goofiness goes on to the gameplay as well.

So, in

Like a Dragon Gaiden, the man who lost his name,

Kiryu had a secret agent style in addition to his dragon style,

which was like shoot drones at people and throw a cigarette and it blows up and rocket boots and shit like that.

And it was horribly unbalanced.

And it was a little, it was like like Sidequest Dimension fighting style.

Majima's pirate style has a fucking grappling hook for snatch

and a chargeable gun that colors up.

And

you can round trip your fucking

cutlass.

Yeah.

And you are fighting

30 to 50 to 100 guys at once sometimes.

Wow.

Okay.

Like I went to an island and it was fight 100 guys and they came in at like groups of 25.

So are there silly it has become dynasty warriors.

Okay.

Is there still a ratio of silly side quests that are now just pirate themed?

Yes.

But like the main story is also

that silly

because

the introduction of pirating in and of itself can be a major game mechanic, kind of like

cabaret running, that can take over gameplay if they wanted to.

But is that what they did with this?

Or is it like it's just a regular Yakuza game, but you're doing this?

No, no, it's it's the whole game's a side quest.

Okay, okay.

The whole fucking thing.

Like,

and your big mechanic, your big like metagame mechanic is staff up your pirate ship with people.

And

it's everybody

it's it's like every

somewhat unique NPC

you've ever fucking seen in the Hawaii zone.

You want to bring the nightmare mascot Aloe Happy, the fucking palm tree freak on your pirate ship.

Do you want to bring in

Hollywood actress Nikkel Kidman who needs to learn how to be a pirate for her method act?

I saw a screenshot of that, yeah.

Do you want to bring in like the Obitarian or the chickenhead or sheep man?

Pirate, um,

pirate, uh, uh, libido.

I haven't seen him yet, okay, but maybe who knows.

Yeah.

Um, and the way that this has been integrated is every single goddamn mini-game has a dude next to it that if you do well on the mini-game or side content, they go, you know what?

I'm thinking about being a pirate.

Do you want me to be on your pirate ship?

So, like, I got a guy on my fucking pirate ship because I got, like, I beat the normal version of Trick Pool in the pool hole.

And then I used my pool points to buy Sheep Man.

Okay, I have a to join my crew.

This is a very important question.

Are you actually pirating anything or are you just living the Yo-Ho-Ho lifestyle?

You are searching for buried treasure, which is the game's main collectible, which increases your pirate rate.

Okay.

You're not

attacking corsairs and privateers and...

No, everybody on the ocean wants to fuck you up, so you kill them and you get like rabbit meat or superb components off their pirate ships.

You'll sink like an entire three-frigate pirate ship battle, and you'll get like $12.

Okay.

And then you are going to little islands all over the place to do like little micro-dungeons to find buried treasure.

Okay, yeah.

No, pirating

means wholesome buried treasure finding, not

marooning people

attacking innocent ships.

So much like the Yakuza, who are notorious violent criminals.

Right, right, right, right.

The other pirates are the mean pirates.

Okay.

They're very mean.

And whenever you run into a good pirate and they're cool guess what

they're gonna join your pirate ship once you beat them up so majima's ship doesn't have a boo-boo box

no okay

uh it is

it is so cartoon nonsense

that i'm i'm feeling

that

like the next spin-off game will be sci-fi

like reality

add a genre to each character.

I mean,

because they've already killed.

Kiryu is Spider-Man, spy, like 007.

Spy slash Spider-Man.

Yeah.

So, and I mean,

Ichiban is Dragon Quest.

Yeah, a video game.

So now Majima is that.

So, I mean, yeah, I guess you can go to space, but who would do it?

I don't know.

I saw people in the chat saying, Akiyama in space.

Why not?

People, like, but the spin-off potential is now infinite because you could have a

tokusatsu, sure.

It can, it can, you could, like, whatever team RGG fucking feels like, there's no limit on

anything.

It is, it is really strange that the core storyline is also complete nonsense banana shit.

Um,

like,

they're like,

you meet characters from earlier Yakuza games and they're like, Hey, Majma, remember me?

And he's like, Nope, gonna be a pirate.

Bye.

I think one of the smartest things this brand could have done was essentially turn like a dragon as a name into the same thing as Monty Python.

It doesn't mean anything, it's just okay.

This kind of implies who the actors are going to be here, but what's going to happen when it actually starts playing is fucking up in the air.

Yeah,

awesome.

Brilliant.

It's

kind of awesome.

And

the gameplay is getting faster and faster

in the spin-off games.

Like, Majima, Majima is like halfway to a Devil Man Cry character.

Are they consolidating and ditching styles?

Or like.

Yeah,

well,

Gaiden and this, the spin-off games, both had two styles.

And Judgment had two styles.

And Lost Judgment had three styles.

So they're doing styles.

it's just two or three.

Um, and

um,

yeah, Majima's got air combos, and he's got Stinger, and he's got round trip, and he's got like he's

he's he's got everything.

But I was thinking, I was talking to uh, I was talking to chat the other day, and it's like, all right, we've done crime drama, we've done detective drama, we've done high school drama, we've done multiple samurai movies, we've done zombies,

We've done pirates.

We've done secret agent.

Like,

this is.

They're rolling through a bunch of these fucking things.

It's so funny that I remember when Seven first got details and

we there was a discussion about how, like, oh shit, I guess Yakuza has made a decision to become an RPG series.

Well, I really liked the combat.

That was dumb and fun, but I guess we can say goodbye because it'll it'll be turn-based from now on.

And like they have aggressively kept the action alive in these side games and other things.

In fact, there's more action games now than there are the RPG ones.

So

I hated that discussion.

And I think I talked about that when

we brought it up.

Because those games were always RPGs.

They just had brawler combat.

Like from Yakuza 1 onwards, you are fighting random battles and leveling up your fucking character and and going to the item shop going on.

But I guess in a tail sense, where like reactions and timing matters versus standing still

turns, exactly.

That's a hugely

difference.

Yeah, so it turns out when you put out a game every 10 months, you can totally keep your spin-off action games going.

It's so fucking ridiculous.

So I haven't gotten very far into it.

It is really, really interesting how they have...

This is probably the best integrated any of the side content has been because behind every type of side mini-game or side content, there is somebody to join your pirate crew.

So, if I want Aloha,

the absolute freak mascot character who joins up, helps Ichimon change his jobs, then I have to go do photo hunt.

If I want Camulop, the fucking Camarocho mascot that's an old man in a sweaty bunny suit, then I gotta go get some

good fortunes off the street by collectibles.

Ryo Hazuki could never be a pirate.

No, he never was.

He could never.

He couldn't even dream it.

I'm just thinking, one of the best things about the Like a Dragon series in terms of them having the flexibility to do all sorts of things is they have built up a situation where by default, all characters are morally flexible,

just a little bit because they're gangsters by default, because they're gangsters, yeah, they're all gangsters and cops.

Right on, that's pretty much it for me.

Uh, Pirate Yakus is cool.

I've been playing a million hours of Kingdom Come Deliverance.

Uh, I had a fun little thing where, you know, in a big open game, and they say, Hey, you know what?

You're off.

So, in Cyberpunk, it would be when you get Johnny in your brain, right?

And they go, All right,

go, you can go anyway.

You finish the the heist, and the game begins for real, real.

Yep.

Well, in Kingdom Come Deliverance, what I did is I got to that part where I got a horse, and then I did every single side quest in the entire game.

Oh, and then I did all available DLCs.

And then

the game built up to like, I went back to the main story, and then it built up to a big fight against a bandit called Runt.

And it was a very climactic battle with a huge pre-battle.

And I climbed him up into a burned-out church.

And then I literally went bop literally once literally bopped him on the top of the head and he died yeah that's you that's that's all you then the cuts then the cutscene starts and it's a big dramatic fight and like nah I bopped him and or and you're all beat up and you're like

yeah absolutely absolutely

no I bopped his shit out

great

so that game's amazing that game's absolutely incredible I cannot wait to get to the second one

You know what's an interesting game?

Oh, this is still the first one, right?

Not even the new release.

Still the first one.

True, true.

Still the one from six years ago.

Not the one that just came out.

Right, right, right.

Not the one that just came out.

Because if I ever play that second one, I'll never go back to play the first one.

Right.

And I'm having a great time with the first one.

But you know what's really interesting?

Have you ever played a DLC

and before you played it, you were aware that the reviews for it were terrible?

I must have at some point.

Yeah.

So

the DLCs for

Kingdom Come Deliverance

have a wide variety of mixed reviews.

And I played one called A Woman's Lot, which has extremely negative reviews on stream.

Really, really, really negative reviews on stream.

And

I liked it.

I liked it quite a bit, actually.

But I can easily see

why it is hated.

And that is people weren't using the mod to save anywhere.

Because you've modded the game.

Because

Teresa,

DLC, A Woman's Lot, has a lot of stealth sections, and it has limited saves.

And it also has wandering around on the side of a mountain in the pitch black at night, trying to find herbs to heal somebody, and there's patrols.

I'm like, boy, if you got caught and lost your property,

if I wasn't just saving the game every five fucking minutes, every time I succeeded in one of these things, oh man, this would take me like twice as long, and I'd be fucking super mad.

Holy shit!

That could be miserable.

That makes perfect sense.

It also has a different problem, which is

after the game's tutorial, it is the very first person you talk to.

The very first prompt at the top of their thing is, hey, what's the DLC?

And Teresa's DLC, because she's a peasant girl instead of a peasant boy, is much harder than everything else in the entire game.

And it might be like the first thing that you do.

Okay.

So I had been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance for about 60 hours before I did it.

And I knew what potions were good to use and what times.

I knew how to gimmick the archery system.

I knew this and that and that.

But if you are going in at like base stats, don't know anything about the game, it's definitely the hardest part of the whole game.

Okay.

And it might be the first content you do after the fucking tutorial.

Is it like you're the kind of like you're switching to like a full non-combatant type of thing?

Yes.

Yeah, okay.

Gotcha.

You can shoot a bow and arrow, but shooting a bow and arrow in that thing sucks.

And you can stealth kill people,

but there's no ability to defend yourself at all if you get caught.

And God forbid you get caught after 15 minutes of stealthing through the mine shaft.

Okay.

Or whatever the fuck.

Genre switch becomes a like survival horror bit.

Yeah.

Okay.

Someone in the chat asked, hey, did the combat ever get any easier for me in Kingdom Come Deliverance?

Oh, yeah.

No,

my character's combat stats are completely maxed out.

So now I just walk into a battle with a mace and I just go, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.

And they all fall down unconscious.

And then you mercy kill them.

And mercy killing somebody with a fucking hammer doesn't look very merciful.

You just

crush them.

I was turning.

the hamster wheel in my brain trying to think of a DLC that I knew was bad in advance and the only thing I could think of is Persona 3, the answer,

which is not DLC, but my brain decides that it is.

It was DLC.

It feels like DLC.

Yeah.

That's about it.

But yeah, that's what's been going on with Over and Me.

Not a whole lot going on this week.

If you want to hang out with me this week, go down to twitch.tv slash patstares at.

Not tomorrow, but Thursday, we're going to be playing.

We're going to finish Metal Gear.

We're going to play Monster Hunter.

It's going to be a lot of Monster Hunter.

Apparently, Monster Hunter is really short.

I might beat it by this weekend.

That's ridiculous.

Damn.

Well, but hey, we'll play it.

If you feel like you get your fill and you want more, you can always switch over to Dauntless.

I could switch over to Dauntless.

Could I?

We'll get there.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, over here, Woolly versus on YouTube and on Twitch played some more Thousand Times Resist.

And I feel like, yeah, we got to chapter six of that.

So I believe there's 10 total.

Should be maybe one session, maybe another left.

Hey, let me ask you a question about Thousand Times Resist.

So I don't know anything about Thousand Times Resist other than the same conversation as last time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

Okay.

This is a slightly different conversation.

And like, I'll catch like a 10-second clip of your stream when I'm like going through my Twitch thing, and I'll be like, oh, please play in a thousand.

How,

like,

how sad gay robot is it?

Because it, it's giving off massive, sad, gay, robot vibes.

Uh, sad, gay, not robot,

okay, but it is

sad gay futurism,

okay.

Um,

and

um,

it also is

very gun-shy

about giving answers to things.

It likes being cryptic.

It likes not telling you what's happening.

It likes being obtuse.

And every once in a while,

impactful moments occur.

And you kind of are learning more about things, but it is really playing its cards super close to its chest right now.

Because every time I physically see it, I think that this is like the background footage for like a chapel row and music.

Sure, sure.

Um, I mean, you, you are, you are walking and talking and um

scanning,

um,

and yes, it is big, sad, gay, sick futurism.

Um, oh no, but and uh and uh you know, emotional baggage, trauma, parental uh damage and inherited

bullshit, right?

A lot of a lot of...

Wooly, I'm sick of generational trauma.

Generational trauma is the name of the game.

I'm sick of generational.

Can I just divest myself of this generational trauma, please?

Turning red,

turning red automata a little bit.

And this is a turning red that is brave and can talk about 9-11.

Can.

And

does.

And does, but maybe not necessarily 9-11, but does talk about Hong Kong and the umbrellas

is a crucial plot point in the setting.

So,

yeah.

Yeah, I'm still...

I'm in the third act

and

there's a lot that I really enjoy, but it's so weird to say this.

I'm still waiting for a shoe to drop.

It's still playing its cards close to its chest, going,

you know, like it's leaving you hanging.

Oh, that's

in the right places, you know,

in a lot of ways.

But it's really being like,

you're still just going to get a whiff.

You're not getting the full bit yet, you know?

So

we will see.

There was a

fake out moment that like

properly will terrify you if you're like that's it, you know

Oh, yeah, there's one of those but

yeah, but it but you're when I see when I say near I mean that to the full extent they're doing a lot of those things too, you know

I got to get on that.

It's it has has that good overwhelmingly positive review score.

I'm really gonna let you know when it's done.

That's all I can say.

And the other thing too is that like,

so something,

it's interesting because like it's something where like, because you're connecting themes with every line of dialogue,

your like processing power is high.

Your CPU is high the whole time.

Because as soon as you hear any line, you go, has anyone said anything like that before?

Does that relate to any conversation that's happened before?

Does that look like anything I've already seen?

Does that look like or resemble anything we've already encountered?

And in some cases, they do.

In some cases, they don't.

But you're kind of like always trying to process that part of it.

And it does something really strange and different, which is think of the pace of a dialogue box in a given like visual novel, right?

Got it.

Yeah.

In Disco Elysium, you get a paragraph at a time.

In a random persona game, you're going to get a couple, two, three sentences together.

In Near Automata, it kerns alongside the voice acting.

In this game, every

thought in every sentence is isolated.

So one sentence will get broken up into three

A button presses.

I got to watch this.

I got to see what the fuck you're talking about.

And it'll be like, this is...

Well,

A.

We started the podcast a little late today.

Like, say around press A,

10 minutes later.

You know, like it breaks each thought up more

and it slows things down.

But it makes you like think a bit more about what they're saying.

At the same time, it's, it's, it's like, it's a pace slowing down thing,

but like it does make things have a bit more emphasis during sentimental moments, you know?

It's theatrical.

It's theatrical.

Think of people on a stage in a play

speaking, enunciating a thought, a word, an idea.

Each one of those.

This is making me so frustrated.

Each one of those commas were like a button.

I'm getting so

fucking triggered here.

I swear to God.

I know.

But it's trying to do things and it's doing art things, and it's doing art things that I like that you might not like.

So

when you see the overwhelming positive, remember that that doesn't necessarily mean pat positive.

You know, it's true.

You're a weirdo.

So.

Oh, you're not a weirdo?

Shut the fuck up.

I just wanted to act indignant.

You didn't have to fucking.

Yeah, so we're continuing a little bit of that and, you know, cyberpunk and such over on Woolly Versus on

YouTube and on Twitch.

And yeah, Willie Wool's on my socials as well.

Let's take a quick word from our sponsors.

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Yeah.

Yes, that is all one word.

Alrighty.

So,

as I was saying earlier on, don't you worry about your Monster Hunter

being cut short because there's always Dauntless, the Monster Hunter-like that's been around for a couple years now and

has a very

beloved fan base that people.

No, it doesn't.

People are enjoying.

No, that game's been trash.

No, people are enjoying Dauntless.

No, no,

that game is straight garbage.

You can shoot the guns and you can.

No, no, that game's fucking shit.

So, for whatever it was.

It's been shit the whole time.

So, that,

it seems like there are people who will fight you on whether or not that be the case.

Oh, it got way worse.

It got way worse.

One thing is clear.

Yes.

Over time, and specifically with the last update in particular,

it became completely

just...

It was dead in the water.

Hey, is that because they got bought by new people and then they tried to wring every single ounce of blood out of the stone that they had?

That is correct.

Ding, ding, ding.

Oh, that's crazy.

So the story is that free-to-play monster hunter like Dauntless is shutting down on May 29th following Mass Studio layoffs.

Hey, there's that word again.

Sure, hope we don't hear that over and over and over and over and over again.

But yes, so Dauntless was in a state, state, apparently, that had

two years go by with no new updates or anything for a while.

What happened was at some point, the company behind it, Phoenix Labs, got bought by a company called Garina, which basically

bought out their studios.

And after being with them for a while, Phoenix Labs bought themselves out of the deal.

So they retained their own rights.

And then

with their freedom, they sold themselves to an NFT blockchain dev named Forte.

With their freedom, they discovered that they too could kill themselves.

I'm free.

Give me that knife.

And so what ends up happening in-game

is

probably should, yeah, well,

I was going to tell the story and then hit that point as the...

the explanation after the fact, but it doesn't matter.

After two years of nothing, they eventually did

have a big update where they introduced something like one of the big new features was weapon switching mid-hunt, which was something you couldn't previously do before.

And that sounded great.

But the trade-off was every player's unlocked progression and weapon unlocks were all taken away.

Everything that you'd possibly spent the hundreds of hours unlocking and such over the case of, of course, of a free-to-play game you can imagine,

got pulled away from everyone and so you instead received tokens um they sunset me boss they sunset my ass so depending on how much uh you had unlocked you would receive tokens to make up for that progress however the token purchasing power could barely buy back one or two of the strongest weapons or if you had a collection of them you oh and also now weapon subtypes were now limited to loot boxes and the weapons that you were buying back that you could barely afford to buy back were unupgraded.

And if you lost upgrades, which also took tons of time, you now had to go through hundreds of hunts worth of grinding to regain the same level that you were at before with said weapons and shit.

So yeah,

they took away what people had already gotten and then dropped in a a token-based system.

Of course, they did.

And then, of course, all the original devs by that that point were fired.

Everyone was laid off.

And so it just kind of seems like

the NFT blockchain dev decided to run one last grift on the game before shutting it down in May 29.

On May 29th.

Now, I want to be super clear.

I'm going to say it again.

These guys totally ruined

an already bad game.

Like, it was bad and not worth playing before, and then they ruined it more.

There is something interesting about, like,

um, when I was looking up when I saw this story, and people who did like Dauntless were kind of

overall were like, yeah, when the game stopped getting updated and we were still playing it, they were kind of expecting at some point it would just announce it it would be shut down at some point, and they were kind of waiting, you know, for that while being fine with it, essentially, being like, yeah, okay, I guess the, the, the, you know, ride's coming to an end.

But no one could have foreseen the we're actively going to kill it harder and faster than you ever could have imagined with a nice big shit on the floor on the way out the door.

So I just, maybe this is the wrong battle to have right now, but we have some Dauntless fans in the chat.

And they like Dauntless, and that's fine.

I hope you enjoyed it.

But out of the multiple Monster Hunter clones that came out, Dauntless was like one of the worst ones.

Okay.

I don't know.

I've never touched it.

So that's not even.

I don't even care about that part of the story per se.

For anyone that.

Oh, you know what?

Do you know what part of the story this is?

This is what we were talking about earlier with City of the Warves.

Oh, okay.

Is it better?

If the game was worse.

Is it better if you just never heard about it or cared at all?

Yeah, well,

like,

what matters ultimately is that like the moment you're doing this like

um we're changing the entire system of progression fuck you but here's here's some tokens for here's a pittance for your troubles um

and you go that's this that's scummy as who would do that oh

oh that's who would do it i've

this this game has been so cursed throughout throughout its life because it got announced a long time ago, and it was like, hey, guys,

you know, they're never going to bring Monster Hunter to PC or to consoles ever again.

It's just going to be handheld.

So, you know what?

We're going to make a Monster Hunter-like game that you can play on PC.

And then, like,

I feel like it was like two months before the game came out, World got announced.

A Monster Hunter-style game you can play on PC like Wild Hearts?

No, I'm talking about like seven, eight years ago.

Oh, okay, a while ago.

Yeah, I'm talking pre-world.

Okay, okay.

And then Monster Hunter World gets announced as, hey, man, it's a Monster Hunter for consoles like Dauntless.

But

it's actually Monster Hunter.

Well, again, the timing couldn't be better

to drop this right on

Wild's o'clock.

Yeah,

those are probably related.

I wonder if you'll be able to beat Monster Hunter Wild so fast that you'll be able to play Dauntless before it shuts down.

You can play up until May 29th.

Oh, then definitely.

Yeah, definitely.

All right.

So, yeah, that's going on.

Beyond that,

what is going on with Destiny 2?

So,

this is a follow-up to an earlier story.

Basically,

there's a gentleman who put up

this essentially fan fiction or what if on his WordPress about

an enemy faction that Destiny could have.

And then he was very surprised

when

that enemy faction became like the major enemy antagonist of Destiny 2, almost down to the letter.

I believe it was like this, the Red Legion faction.

And he's like, it really looks like they stole that shit off my WordPress page.

And whether or not that's viable or not is not actually the part that's funny.

It does, I read over some of it.

It does really look like they fucking lifted it.

But

what's funny is that during the court case,

they're submitting a YouTuber, MyName is Biff, or Bif, or

his YouTube videos as proof of the details of the game's campaign because the campaign no longer exists.

And apparently, Bungie doesn't even have videos of the campaign anymore.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay.

So they're submitting Destiny's Vati Vidia

lore videos as court case documents.

Don't let anyone ever tell you that what you do is not important.

It might be exhibit A someday if the company themselves can't be asked

to actually have footage of their own shit.

That's incredible.

Their own policies meant they couldn't go back and pull what they needed.

I can't believe that they don't have a build

or

that can, like, that they actually deleted it?

Like, what the fuck?

I mean, I'm not going to lie.

If the, if I can catch the words, Your Honor, I present exhibit B, Heaven or Hell, Duel 2,

Timeline of Guilty Gear X,

I would be super pumped to fucking have that be the deciding factor in some kind of case.

That's, that's great.

So, yeah,

it is total nonsense.

And

Destiny 2 becoming the be-all live service thing and then just making every live service thing mistake possible.

It's just been fascinating to watch.

It's so interesting how outside of the industry.

You know, there's a feeling a lot of the time that is like, okay, there's the official thing and every major IP has its Bible and its world and everything happening internally is like a closed bubble.

And then people outside are looking in at the glass of the fishbowl, trying to interpret and writing it down and telling everybody about what's going on.

But you have no idea about the inner workings and details and things that are being hinted at and such.

And then finding out that like fast forwarding a couple of years, it's like, no, man, internally, when someone's writing something and they go, yeah, let me just YouTube what this person, what this YouTuber said about this thing in the last game.

And then that's the canon, you know, like not everything has a Bible or a reference pointer or whatever.

The shit that's going out there that the fans are discussing is the most in-depth parts of the entire IP.

And the actual official shit is way more shallow and nobody's in charge of or knows what's where.

The video that

is being referenced here is from eight months ago, and it's the complete story of Destiny.

So

is it My Name is Bif?

My mistake, everybody, but My Name is Bife has made a huge amount of success off of Destiny, and he has extraordinarily well-produced,

complete, well-researched Destiny lore videos.

It's very similar to like Fati video, which is for Destiny.

And a large part of

the success of those videos is not just his incredible production and hot British voice or Australian.

It's on there, but it's the fact that the

comparative difficulty of acquiring any of that information yourself is almost impossible.

Okay, so

Destiny won't all of its codecs, like its Mass Effect codec stuff, all the poetry, all the

stories, all the details, all that.

That was all on like a third-party website that you had to scan in game and then go to your account that you linked to it on a different website

um

every single piece of interesting thing that you've heard about destiny was from people learning it off of this guy's videos because it's impossible to actually get it out of the game yourself yeah yep

hey did you play the pachinko guilty gear game

Then you're missing out on Crucial Lore.

Did you browse the Miiverse?

Then you're missing out on Crucial Kirby lore.

It's the only place to get it.

I mean, there's tons of people saying things, but somebody points just every main antagonists,

their backstories or what they do or how the religion of the main antagonist faction works.

It's not available in the game.

You have to go to this dude's YouTube to get it.

Insane.

And I don't know where he's getting it, but he's getting it from somewhere.

And then when it comes down to official resources, what they go and grab is what the fans are making.

Huh.

Yeah, it's just they.

Embarrassing.

Embarrassing.

And this is any time that an original writer or so is no longer around and things have moved on and we're fast forwarding a decade or two into a franchise where a whole new team are coming in and basically picking up and trying to get into writing a world or so.

Um, it's not someone's straight original vision for sure.

There's YouTubing going on, there's absolutely

YouTubing and there's wiki diving happening officially on company time.

And like, that's not even getting into the vaulted stuff or the seasonal.

Like, they'll have like, I remember the time I stopped playing Destiny, they had had this massive like seasonal event where you went into like the, I forget what it was called.

It was like the Vex Infinite Hallway or whatever to save a character who had died years prior.

And then he became a character in the game's narrative and he hung out on the hub and all that.

And then after that three-month period ended,

hey, how come Saint 14 is here?

Isn't he dead?

Yeah, yeah, no, we saved him.

Really?

How?

Oh, it's gone now.

You can't do that mission anymore.

And all the dialogue around it is gone.

And there is not a single piece of information in the live game now that will tell you why Saint 14 is standing over there alive.

This is strange as

someone who's seen snippets of that game through, you know, a couple bits of gameplay here and there, but the overall impression from launch, because that's what I played, was like the Peter Dinklage early.

Million years ago.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like, that was a thing where the feeling was the story of the traveler and this world and all of this, the lore is going to be the bigger deal.

You know?

The lore is the biggest deal.

It's actually very interesting once you go to Bife's YouTube channel.

Like when Epic Name Bro and Vadi Vidia started doing this for Dark Souls, it was because of Dark Souls' narrative style, which is fucking read it.

But nobody read that shit, right?

And so, you as a player, when you started doing Elden Ring, because you've been trained by multiple games, you could excise a huge proportion of that game's hidden narrative and hidden lore for yourself.

But with Destiny, it's not about being able to know where to look.

It's gone.

It's not there.

I would even say that, like, if those videos didn't exist, like, sure, someone might be able to grab a guide and get the info they need from there with like Souls games, but the loading loading screens were training you to go look at the item descriptions because you would see something on a loading screen and go, wait, what was that?

And then you'd have to go find it in the item descriptions and realize that, oh shit, there's lore in the item descriptions.

That's where the story is being told.

So the game itself still taught you to do that.

Yeah, no, the way that Bungie has treated their own franchise and the lack of respect they've given their own light story is so weird.

Because they want you to care about a story but you don't know what's happening because you can't know because they took it away from you and time-limited shit because of like marketing and business and money-making purposes

actively destroys your ability to tell stories because you could only access or know something if you were there for that moment in time

It's we've been doing

live service FOMO shit.

No, it's just the comment of this, and it's also a bad story immediately followed by, and the story's really good.

Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

I love that.

Yeah,

no, this is this is chaos.

Chaos is important.

If you are playing destiny and you have all this background

information and world building in your head, yeah, the things that are happening in the story can be pretty good sometimes.

If you don't, it's just complete nonsense that has no rhyme or reason and nothing leads to whatever.

And people are just doing things because the plot needs to get them right

it's just it it's it's a mess

well

well speaking of messes um oh yeah

hey oh oh oh oh i got it um we've been doing this live service thing for a while right

the gas shit um and i believe there i believe there was like quantitative data on this but if there isn't i'm just going based off of vibes when you are causing FOMO as the driving force to stay subscribed or stay in,

as soon as the person misses that shit once, they're

the spell's broken, right?

The spell is instantaneously broken.

Yeah, we've talked and they're done.

We've talked about this with MMOs and such because

I despise FOMO as

a motivator, you know?

But

yeah,

that's that I get it.

Look at Marvel Rock.

I don't look at how I don't actually want to be here.

I kind of was just stuck in a pattern.

Oh, yeah.

So speaking of messes.

Here I thought Wonder Woman died because of Kill the Justice League.

That's true.

Turns out

it's actually just Warner Brothers Games doing the assassinating.

So I saw someone in the chat mention that they work for Monolith, or rather, worked for Monolith until this morning.

And

I welcome you into the Brotherhood of being fired by Warner Brothers.

Big, big, big club.

Big club.

A lot of numbers in that club.

So Monolith Productions,

the Shadows of Mortar people, not to be confused with Monolith Soft of the Monado fame,

are

being shut down by Warner Brothers games.

They're making huge cuts with that.

Obviously, Player First Games, who are responsible for Multiversus, and WB games San Diego as well.

The Wonder Woman game that's been in development for a really long time is also cancelled, of course.

And yeah, all projects are shuttered.

So, hey, no more Batman, no more Shadow of War, no more fear, no more.

What happens to the Nemesis system?

It's on patent until 2036.

Okay.

But now, does that patent get dissolved?

No.

It's on patent until 2036.

Warner Brothers, as a company, still exists.

Yep.

Therefore.

And they don't have to use it until 2036.

Damn.

My eye, I'll never forgive you for taking my eye.

People are pointing out that the Nemesis system does exist in other games, like it is in Warframe.

It's just not called that.

That's okay.

All right.

It's called the fucking lich Kuva, Kuva Lich system, or whatever the fuck.

It's the revenge, contextual revenge system.

Like, yes, this is a design that video games can have.

You think if anybody makes a story where the player makes a choice over

something and then there's a get back over that later, they can get sued?

So, um,

this is essentially all of like Warner Brothers' games, right?

Like, what else they got?

They got Mortal Kombat, they got

Rocksteady,

they said that

well, Rocksteady's probably next because they canceled the Wonder Woman game on them.

Um, Netherrealm, Rocksteady, and Netherrealm.

MK is

MK.

Oh, yeah.

Who made Harry Potter?

I have no idea.

But they're going to focus on Mortal Kombat, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones, vital gaming franchises.

It's part of their Hogwarts Legacy was developed by

Avalanche and Shiver.

Avalanche, is that the same folks that did

Justice League

Heroes?

Who knows?

You would.

Yeah, I literally went into the studio to work on that game on a hit squad.

So, someone in the chat

something out that's the most interesting part of the story because how devious and evil it is.

So,

a couple years ago, when Warner Brothers started a clean house.

People asked the lead on multiverses, what does this mean for multiverses?

Right?

This is like 23, I think, or early 24.

To which he said, don't worry.

And we talked about it on the podcast.

Multiverses has a multi-year support contract with Warner Brothers.

We're locked in, right?

I'm sure you remember that.

Well,

Warner Brothers bought player first First games last year in the summer,

which means they now had a contract with themselves, which they no longer had to abide by.

So buying Ready First

was probably so they could fire them.

Like in order to kill Multiverses, they would need to own the company.

Don't worry until it's time to worry.

I'm sure the gamble was, but what if it comes back strong?

What if it's fine?

What if they come back and the whole thing's a huge success?

I don't think it would have mattered the way that they're running things over WB.

Well,

using someone's services and then letting them go regardless of success or not success is starting to become more and more of a recognizable trend, certainly.

Yeah, surprise to Pikachu face.

Those studios and getting shut down and yeah, Player First, whether or not multiverses, well, multiversus having a long online service

tail is always like

one of those things that you can imagine.

Well, okay, we need someone to keep this going if it continues to make money, and the cost of keeping the servers up is worth it because of, you know, whatever, whatever the costs are.

But

that exact same playbook, well, guess what?

We saw, we were talking about Marvel Rivals last week.

Net Ease is also making tons of cuts.

Oh, Net Ease is making some deep cuts.

They are in a lot of places in the industry as well.

And yeah, the decision to pull back to Just China

was not the only thing.

So

the studio, Worlds Untold, from that was by Mass Effect veteran Mac Walters,

got closed.

Jar of Sparks, the Halo Infinite design boss Jerry Hook's team.

Liquid Sword, the company founded by the creators of Just Cause.

A lot of

shit has been

getting shut.

Nagoshi and Suda 51

games are being told that they're not going to get

any more time, any more money, and no, they won't get any advertising.

And they're probably going to be shown the door the day those games came out.

Remember,

I was streaming a sponsored

fucking Visions of Mana stream when they fired those people.

Like, they did not even wait for the advertisement bump to go to finish.

So, um,

the story there is uh, Yakuza Creator's next game could be in trouble.

So, yeah, it's not a cancellation announcement, but it certainly is a woo-hoo-hoo-hmm.

Put it out so we can be done with you.

No additional funding.

Yeah, exactly.

And

the idea that, like, no matter what happens, it's unlikely to meet expectations.

But you know who's going to be fine, though?

Who's going to be fine?

Quantic Dream.

Are they?

Yeah.

I didn't know that Quantic Dream was owned by Net Ease, but they are.

They are.

They are.

Quantic Dream, the Net Ease-owned developer behind Heavy Rain Detroit and the upcoming Star Wars Eclipse, has broken its silence following the layoffs and shutdowns across numerous other NetEase studios.

Upcoming Star Wars Eclipse.

Get that.

In a statement posted,

the Quantic Dream CEO, Guillaume de Fond de Mer

said that the studio's teams had not been impacted by Net Ease's dramatic cuts, and they were continuing to develop projects at full pace

yeah yeah are they

show it

I had no idea NetEase was involved with Quantic Dream and that is now something to consider anytime we hear any announcements about anything they work on

also

that's another Disney

connection that Net Ease makes is making at a high level there

So

if they're working with them on multiple projects and properties and being like, okay, who do you have that's big that can take this thing?

That's why they took Star Wars and put it over there.

And they took Marvel Comics and put it over here.

Yeah, that checks out a little bit more with their

overall branding decision.

Oh, man, that Star Wars game that they're making, apparently, that I don't believe is going to be really good.

I bet when it comes out, it's not going to come out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know,

we all know that David Cage has displayed tons of cultural understanding about China

when you look back at his librarian character.

Oh, they probably love that shit.

And don't forget

the other librarian character.

both of which

there was there a third there might have been a third librarian

That's possible.

Yeah.

With the voice and the teeth and the hat and everything.

Like, all in.

Dude,

I just want to put this back out

into the airwaves that, like,

Star Wars Eclipse got fucking announced.

And then the very first piece of news after that from Quantic Dream was we are having an incredibly difficult time staffing up because of all the lost.

Nah, full force, guys.

Full force.

Full steam ahead.

Yeah.

Oh, and then the piece of news after that was that they were modeling full actor bodies naked without permission

after showing up with a stalker journal

to the first meeting.

It's fine.

Yeah.

Sacre bleu.

Damn.

I hope

David Cage can ease his

way out of that.

Anyway.

Whatever the case is.

Also, speaking on side note on that, apparently there's a.

There's a...

Not Detroit.

Not heavy.

God, what the fuck is it called?

Not Detroit, not Heavy Rain.

Beyond Two Souls.

Apparently, Elliot Page has got the rights to a movie for that or something.

And so there might actually be

a film production or something.

So

we'll see whatever happens.

But it's already like a movie.

Why bother, Elliot?

It's already a movie.

I got to take a quick break.

I'm being messaged by the ghost of myself.

Excuse me.

All Alrighty, what were we talking about?

Don't work in the games business.

Don't do it.

Quantic Dream, Net Ease.

I can't believe that we also got fired by WB.

That's so fucking crazy.

Chinese underwater ghost layoffs?

Hard to lay off ghosts.

Especially if they're secretly Chinese and underwater.

Then you have to go.

I can't stop thinking about that fucking tweet about I became Chinese in prison.

You have to go find them.

I can't stop thinking about it.

Alright, well, that aside, I guess, there are some announcements for some new stuff.

Apparently,

well, actually, we kind of knew this already, but Konami and Blooper team are working on a new game following the success of Silent Hill 2.

It's Silent Hill 3.

Based on Konami's IP, but not explicitly confirmed to be SH.

It's Silent Hill 3.

It's like...

Why jump to 3 without doing 1, though?

Because you have the assets that you made for 2.

But then the narrative is weird.

Nah, you can do it.

It's fine.

You could.

I guess it would just be like...

not as strong as if you, you know, did the 1-3.

Yeah, you're right.

Konami really gives a shit about the integrity of its sequel.

I know.

I know.

By the way, buy Metal Gear Solid Donald.

The first game canonically in the series.

Like, I knew that was coming.

And I'm like, yeah, it's the origin.

Having said they should do four,

they should do four.

It's going to be three, but they should do four.

Four needs it the most.

Well, everyone asks, like, hey, we got an email about this.

Why don't they make remakes of bad games?

It's like, well, because they're shit and no one loves them.

But like,

sorry, MGS4 and Silent Hill 4, both bad games, right?

Right, they could be saved.

We've we've we had this discussion and we talked about Devil May Cry 2.

Yeah,

why would you not just make Devil May Cry 6 instead of Devil May Cry 2 again?

Okay, Monkey's Paw.

Um, um,

Kamiya is back working with Capcom.

He gets to make Devil May Cry 2,

but it's his Dante and his Devil May Cry,

and

not the one, not the Itsuno one, but it's replacing Devil May Cry 2, though.

I don't care.

It's not the ones we know and love, but it's replacing the worst game because that's the only game he canonically, you know.

Yeah.

That's what a weird situation there.

That's funny.

If they did do that, it should be called Devil May Cry 2, but it should be spelled T-O-2.

T-O-O.

It's just because, like, even if DMC2 was good,

you know that Camille would just DMC2's best game, dude.

Come on.

But he would still want to just replace two anyway, because it's like my game stopped with one.

We saw that.

Seems like Tony Hawk is going to be

his teasing 3 plus 4 remake.

Fucking thank God.

It's now such a bummer.

It was rated in Singapore as well, so it's pretty much confirmed.

You know, I've literally, I own Tony Hawk Bro Skater 1 and 2, the remake, and I've never even bothered to boot it.

Oh, yeah.

Damn.

Why?

So I can just get super mad about how I can't stream it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's that.

Well, you do it for yourself, I suppose.

No, I don't do that.

You don't do that anymore.

Fuck yourself.

Fuck having fun alone.

I'm playing KCD 1 so I can stream KCD two.

I'm one of those

folks that has way more attachment to four than to three.

Really?

Because I skipped, I didn't, I didn't have three.

I got two.

Oh, well, then that's, then that's when revert came in for you, and that's, that's all.

Yep.

I completely missed three, and then I went back to it after, but I got four when it was on GameCube, you know, so because I missed it, it's just, it's just,

I have no major attachment to it or the soundtrack.

It's like a bit of a

blank space.

Three had that

Canada map.

That was cool.

Whatever happens, as long as we eventually get to Thug.

Oh, no.

I feel like

the world needs to know about Eric Sparrow.

You are dreaming.

But here's the thing.

Tony Hawk needs a paycheck, man.

I'm fine.

Do what you got to do.

Does he?

Yeah.

Does he?

He's got a podcast.

He's out there figuring it out.

He's not skating anymore as like to the fullest extent.

Fucking skateboard company.

He's doing his thing.

I think.

I think Tony Hawk is fine, man.

I think he's doing great.

I guess

maybe it's about maybe it's more about

God, what's his name?

His podcast is over, apparently.

The one with

Wolf.

What's his name?

Fuck.

Yeah.

Anyway, it's gone.

The one with Wolf.

The Hawkins Word and Wolf or whatever.

Anyway, it was

Jason Akira?

Yeah, Jason Ellis.

Jason Ellis, the crazy

Australian dude.

Well.

My impression was that

I guess he needed the paycheck then, perhaps.

Whatever the case was.

I don't want Tony Hawk to swoop in from the sky and steal my child.

Can we just get that red hawk sound effect on a button?

Well, you didn't even

try.

You didn't even really go.

Didn't try.

You just kind of mumbled it.

Yeah.

I, I, I don't know, I think uh, perhaps I'm misremembering some something

about um Tony having a rough go of it, you know.

But I mean, he's old now, not actually old, but old for his pro skater.

Yeah, I guess old, but not necessarily broke, you know.

Um,

he's not, you know, what he's he's doing better than Bam Margera.

Is there news?

No.

That's just a statement.

And that's actually all the more reason why we need to get to thug so that Eric Sparrow and his legacy and

Team Bam versus Team Tony can be a lesson that the world learns about.

A new generation.

You just ruined my day.

You just ruined my day.

You made me think that the next piece of news was going to be about Bam Martier.

I got so excited.

Did you see how excited I got?

You got very excited.

It was almost as if Bam was a member of the royal family.

I'm kind of surprised.

I'm surprised.

Almost.

Oh no, I know at least one friend of mine that's going to have the same reaction listening to this podcast.

What the shit was that?

Oh, oh, I don't like Bam Margera.

Okay.

Okay.

And like, I, I, I, every time I see the phrase Bam Margera on an article, I'm like, oh, it's today the dies

in jail or something.

Jesus, Bam.

It's getting crazy out here.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I remember watching like the Bam Margera on Jackass and being like,

nah, he's he's really mean to fill that.

Yeah, well

I was like around his age and just being like, come on.

But as a teenage white boy, you were supposed to be way into that.

How did it not work on you?

He went way too far, dude.

Jesus, man.

Way too far.

The hell

getting crazy out here.

anyway.

Um, you see uh Anna Williams,

she's back in Tekken 8.

She has a rocket launcher and jury's hairstyle.

She also got younger again.

Oh, they don't, they don't age, they don't age.

Oh, yeah,

all right, because of the freezing, the freezing process, you know, yeah, that's fine.

Yeah, she looks cool, man.

Um, I'm, I'm, I, I don't, I i feel as if the jury hair is like

that's a choice you know of course it is um but hey the rocket launcher is now part of her her kit in the way that nina's got the guns and you know what nina fucking deserves it so fine

hit her ass with the stinger she murdered your husband on your wedding day

That was awesome.

Like, you

Nina super deserves everything she has coming.

You know, Like, like, Anna's, like, the crazy kind of, like, Yandere energy one.

She's all, like, laughing and sultry and going nuts while Nina's all stoic.

But, like, Nina fucking deserves everything she has coming.

The best thing Nina ever did was give birth to a more fun, playable character.

That's fucking the way that sentence should have ended.

Like, there's one ending to that sentence.

Damn straight.

All right.

Let's take some letters.

If you want to send in a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castle superbeast.

Oh, fuck it.

My head is splitting.

I feel like I'm going to die.

Apologies.

CastleSuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Is that the right email?

Yep.

We got one coming in from

Dragon86.

Says, hello, swirl gamer and small gamer.

Oh, swollen small.

I recently learned through Eurogamer how Valve have banned a game forcing players to watch ads, and they reiterated their stance about in-game ads and how they won't allow that on the platform.

True, we did talk about that.

They've already had the anti-mobile game style thing.

From a PC gamer's perspective, this is obviously great, but I'm thinking that this is Valve trying to cut a problem off at the pass.

Absolutely.

The inevitable response from gamers to unskippable in-game ads is to take to the high seas or to just not play those games entirely, which would reduce the number of sales and cut into the health of the industry.

I don't know about that part.

It's got me thinking.

I think you're thinking a little bit too far ahead on that.

Yeah, I'm not.

That second conclusion, I don't agree with.

This got me thinking about.

I think the first conclusion is rock solid, which is they looked at it and go, oh, this is going to be a fucking problem.

Ugh.

Gross.

This got me thinking about how the big corps like Mega, like Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, et cetera, are pushing people into using their game streaming services, and how other streaming services like Amazon and Netflix have pushed ads in their lower-paid tiers.

Do you think it's a guarantee that ads are coming to Game Pass/slash GeForce Now/slash PlayStation Streaming?

And how bad do you think the response is going to be?

No, I don't think it's inevitable at all.

I think it is the single most likely audience to quit and

pirate.

Like,

It is the most informed audience in their ability to just give up on the whole system.

And furthermore, I will say that alongside that,

the likelihood to see various companies trying to test the waters is high.

But it will be very, I think it'll show very clearly after a certain point that, like, yeah, the rejection will be through the roof on that.

Phones created that type of environment, and then like they were that, like, the phone game market kind of didn't emulate console gaming from the jump.

It came into and created a whole business around quick serve mini-games that have a different purpose entirely.

And like, it's a parallel game industry, you know?

It doesn't, like, it doesn't run the same way.

It doesn't have the same base core concepts.

I think.

Yeah.

Like even mobile games just don't do it that much anymore.

Like the shittier, more Garbo ones do it.

But you're going to see testing of the waters.

I'm seeing someone mention sports games have been doing it.

Yeah, but see, that's the opposite of what I described.

Sports game players are the most bought-in captive audience of dumb fucks ever because quality and like basic stability have not mattered to them at all.

And so you go, hey, you know what?

Watch 10 10 ads for Arby's.

And they go, it's just like the football.

But

it's like, but I have to look at Arby's at the football.

Whoa.

Well, if the ads are Super Bowl quality commercial, then, you know, hey, maybe you want to stick around and fucking whatever.

Anyway.

I want to.

After you ask.

No,

it's just to say that, like, that doesn't make that group of people exempt because it's it's like that's still a part of what we're talking about and there will be examples like for example in sports games where you can probably get it you can test the waters a little bit you can see how that goes right there will be attempts to do this because for sure um I'm sure a company like that like an Amazon games that has been struggling to launch forever, you know, or to get anything off the ground, a, I've seen TVs now where it's like the TV is a big screen TV that's free and there's a second screen underneath it that always has an ad, right?

Like, that is something that they will continue to try, for sure.

But the ability for that to actually

work broadly on a main console platform is highly limited, in my opinion.

Okay, so I want to say two things.

One, I'm going to change my mind.

Game Pass is going to have a free version that's ad supported.

Game Pass is going to want to do the ad-supported Netflix and it's going to bomb

because

the only way to make Game Pass work with the ads is, boy, those ads are going to have to be fucking a lot.

Are you saying like very a lot?

Are you saying this because Xbox is going to need to do whatever it can?

No, I'm saying that Microsoft seems like the kind of motherfuckers to try that kind of shit.

Look, all video games are free.

If you watch a one-minute ad every nine minutes, and also it doesn't pause the game.

Can we force, can we check to make sure that your eyeballs are locked onto the screen?

Yeah.

And the second thing is that I want to be very clear.

I hate people who play modern sports games so much because I used to be one of them.

And I am, I, Willie, you had a, you played Pegagenesis games.

Tons of Madden games over the years.

Sports games used to be fucking peak up until like 2014.

I bought.

regular amounts of fucking Madden on a regular basis.

Yeah, I was played and I was subscribed.

I was a fucking first game I could get my fucking hands on.

I could and I knew the differences between quarterback club and Madden back in the day, and then the 2K friends.

They've been dog shit for decades, decades of the worst sports games.

It is unbelievable.

So, all this to say, I think I would draw a distinction between seeing companies testing the waters and seeing it actually take off and work for them.

You know, I think those are two things that

are highly different probabilities

um

let's take one over here from hot pink bunny hello garris and fish garrison oh cool can i be fish garrison i want to be fish garrison okay i'll just be regular garrison i've been having fun playing avowed but as pat pointed out it's noticeable that the devs were working on a smaller budget the game's writing however does some heavy lifting to smooth that out in skyrim if you lockpick an open chest found in military barracks surrounded by soldiers they'll arrest you instantly.

In a vowed, if you're the king's envoy, then everyone has been told to just let you do whatever you want so you can keep the contents of that chest after picking it open and the soldiers don't budge.

Can you think of other times where the devs smartly hid the game's budget?

I mean, I don't know if I would call that smart.

That just feels...

I don't think that's smart.

That's just a concern.

That just feels lazy.

Because also, like, and then

my brain goes, well, you know,

in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2,

people were confused about how the fucking crime system worked because they were like, no one saw me break into this house and steal anything until people figured out that if you walk out of an open door and an NPC sees you, they will then go search their house.

And if they find shit missing, they will assume that you stole.

That's true.

You just talked about the actual in-depth nature of that game by comparison.

Yeah, that seems extremely contrived.

Yeah, in Superman 64, Lex Luster released kryptonite gas into the city, and that meant that you couldn't see Metropolis from more than a couple feet away.

And that's why Superman had a hard time making it through Metropolis.

But the plot wasn't integral to why you couldn't see beyond the draw distance of a couple feet.

I

have one for development budget, like performance budget.

And I think about Metal Gear Solid one, and I think about an interview with Kojumbo

in which they asked him why is the game so dark and why does it take place entirely at night?

He's like, Oh, because uh, you can hide the really ugly parts of the textures in dark corners.

There's always a seed that needs hiding, stick it over there.

Yeah, okay, okay, or you can make a really big, expensive texture that loads and makes the game game way bigger.

Nah, fuck that.

I like Avowed, but it is missing something.

I agree.

I agree.

And

I don't know what it is.

It is very similar to Outer Worlds.

Outer Worlds.

It plays way better, but it's less thematically interesting.

Like,

I just, just make, just make another top-down Baldur's Gate style game.

You know what I think happened?

I think I, because I realized something.

Every time I boot up Steam, I've been seeing that ad for avowed with the beautiful skull that's all

mossed over with mushroom shit.

And that has put the impression in my head that this is a super high-budget, massive release, high-profile game.

And I've seen it so much.

It's been the front page on every single time I've booted that that expectation of Polish was far from what I saw.

It's kind of a bummer.

We keep having a variation.

So

before we leave, we keep having a variation of two conversations back to back that need to be resolved, even though they don't seem like they're similar.

We keep having the discussion of this game is full price, but it doesn't look or sound or act or play as good as this other full price game, despite being in the same genre and from similar devs.

And then we also have

everything but the biggest game ever results in horrible layoffs.

And it's like, can we not just

downscale these games in general?

Like, does Avowed need to be as big as it is?

Couldn't it just be a smaller smaller-scale game that didn't mean it was directly compared to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, which is like this gigantic super game

that came out at the same fucking time?

I want smaller games with worse graphics and less devs who are paid more to make less,

and I want them to never come out like Silk Song.

Oh, you fucking bitch.

You fucking bitch.

Why do you do this?

You're mean.

You're mean, man.

Oop ball.

We're in a fucking massive glut of that game didn't come out right now.

Just a terrible, ridiculous glut of, oh yeah, I got canceled.

It didn't get canceled.

It didn't come out.

Oh, fucking.

Fucking skong.

All right, last one coming in from Dylan.

It says, hey, Pat Velden, Wool Dow.

Dylan here, and I wanted to share with you guys a tradition I've noticed that coincides with every release of a Monster Hunter game going back for quite a while.

Pat might know that's why.

Yeah, I know exactly what it's going to be.

But you might get a kick out of it, Woolly.

Every single time there's a Monster Hunter release about a week or so before the game comes out, a photo will begin circulating around the internet.

And every single time, this photo is of dog shit quality, blurry

Bigfoot S

photo, supposedly depicting

the final boss of a new game, which Capcom has shown no hide, no hair of in its promotional material, but everyone knows will be there.

It happens this way every single goddamn time.

Every time.

No matter the year.

It's unbelievable.

I find it truly fascinating, and honestly, I hope it never changes.

The endless speculation of here's my idea, how it looks, fan art, and is almost mystical.

Shout out to this year's edition, though, for receiving sexy monster girl variation fan art before anyone could figure out what the fuck they were actually looking at.

God, I love these games.

I see it every time.

I think my personal favorite was Monster Hunter World.

It was a Russian guy streaming the final boss at what I can only describe as 60p.

Like, like,

if people who saw that stream know what I'm talking about, it was, it was, it was soup.

It was absolute soup.

It was impossible to tell.

We live in a world of 8K images, resolutions that you can see the pores on the details of your characters, and still there's a little fucking JPEG that you got up.

So, dude,

this one around, it's like, it's, I can't even describe its shape, and people are trying to, like,

use red lines to denote where the fucking bot, like, the different parts of the body are.

It's so fucking funny.

Show me the glare of the fucking TV screen you captured this on.

Let's go.

Oh, man, that's great.

That's a great tradition.

It is.

It It is, in fact, every time.

It's really funny.

And it's an actual photo, or is it like

usually it is like a Nokia cell phone photo or some bullshit?

It's always a photo with like a really bad phone camera that is at like an off angle from the TV and the brightness or the saturation is so high that it fucks it up.

The real hero is the one who captures direct feed footage and then fucks it up on, deep fries it on purpose.

I still think, and we've said this before, so sorry if you all tried, but the all-time greatest leak ever was Halo 3 in a barn.

Halo in a barn.

Halo in a barn.

That was a fucking production.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And they never got caught on it.

No, you're going to need to send a forensic team down.

The Pinkertons are going to have to identify which barn.

Hell yeah.

That's great.

And what's funny is that I got to see what the Halo 3 palette looked like when it came into a game store, and it had anti-tamper shit all over the shipping palette.

Like, if it had

these colorful straps that were all over, that if you tried to finagle one out, it would be really obvious and they would snap open.

You could see it was tampered with.

I mean, if you, you're, he went through that person, that leaker went through the trouble of like plugging a CRT TV into a barn and setting it up.

Like, God bless.

Have fun.

yeah all right

um any have a good week everyone any what any does that

does does the sexy monster variation of the final boss clue you in at all as to what what to be expected here

Well, so there's there's there's variations on what goes on in Monster Hunter, and then there's, you know, there's like, are you looking at the photos?

But nowadays we have the data miners.

Pat, the correct answer was nightmare basil geese.

Nightmare.

Not not

yet.

But soon.

Nightmare Geese, Basil

Geese.

Yeah, Nightmare Basil Geese.

Come on.

I have a very bad headache.

I'm on my low game right now.

Goodbye.