CSB307: Kendrick's Triangle Strategy

Hello.

Hey.

Am I supposed to be able to see you?

You are supposed to be able to see me.

Yeah, there you are.

Hey, man, what's up?

Not too much.

Not too much.

Yeah.

So, hey,

are you familiar?

Let's get your terminology up to date.

Are you familiar with the term nasty work?

Yes, but probably not in the context you're describing.

Because it's like outside of its euphemism,

that's also a real understandable phrase.

Okay, because yeah, when I say the Super Bowl

was nasty work.

Oh, yeah, I can pick up on that.

You can pick up on what that means.

I think your context clues will do like 90% of that.

They'll do the heavy lifting on that.

Yeah.

When you're putting the story to bed,

when you're penning the final pages, and you decide

without generally acknowledging or mentioning

one Aubrey Graham out loud, if you wear a chain that has a lowercase A on it,

that's what we call nasty work.

You hate to see it.

It's an unpleasant sight to see, but it's secretly pleasant, but it's just, ooh,

there's a certain

definition.

There's almost a romantic back and forth with the viewer for Kendrick Lamar's halftime performance where multiple starts and stops.

Will he, won't they?

Yeah, yeah.

You know how they love to sue.

No, don't do it.

No, no, don't, don't, don't unleash.

I have to, but I must.

Like it's romantic.

No, no, don't do it.

Don't do it.

But I must.

Yeah, yeah, he kind of had to.

You kind of have to do it.

You know,

oof.

So the lawsuits definitely did not stop the performance of Not Like Us

at the Super Bowl.

If anything, we stoked the fire.

We, we, you know, we, we blew, we, we, you know, we poured oil on the on the flames.

And

yeah.

And you can see how guilty he felt by that absolute fucking that shit-eating grin.

Even the last time he looks at the camera in the entire set.

Mid-stride.

You can see the whole flash.

There's a pro-wrestler level

craft in consistently avoiding the handheld camera and the hard camera with your eyes for 10 and a half minutes during a massive show only to immediately snap and lock on

for one second and then also the music is all like everything is is playing at at its uh

right boosted volume but just for that one moment when the pans out for a minor you can hear the crowd because we all know we all know what to do yeah it's um

you know you just you gotta you gotta you gotta just pen the conclusion sometimes And I'm looking forward to never hearing Kedrick acknowledge Drake's existence ever again.

That would be the best part.

I,

I, when that halftime show was happening, I saw a lot of people

describing like, if I was Drake, suicide could never be enough.

I mean, shit like that.

Well, so I have to say that it's like, where, what's going on?

Everyone is posting the memes about him, like, throwing the TV and freaking out, or whatever.

It's like, but wait, what's going on?

Where is he actually?

And it's like, oh, he's sitting in his house, like, grimacing.

No, no,

Mr.

Graham is as far away as possible.

He went to the other side of the planet.

Oh, is that true?

He's in Australia on tour.

Oh,

he books a tour on the other

as far down under the ground as you can go.

Apparently, he's got a new album coming out, which makes this timing just hilarious impeccable really um and that's what i want yeah right before my new big thing i want a worldwide audience laughing at me and so while everybody universally while everyone is just like oh my god i can't believe this is happening exactly as we knew i can't watch as you peek through your hands

you know um

i have to say a little bit deep inside i got a little bit of a messy bitch inside me though right i got a i got a little bit of that like ooh i want to see what's going on over on the drizzy subreddit though oh do you i i want to go see what they're i want to see what they're cooking you know like let me just get in a whiff of the copium for a minute because i've caught them before in these moments and it's incredible it's always premium so i decided oh my god is it actually the drizzy subreddit oh my god yeah you don't go to you don't go to r slash drake you go to r slash drizzy and

I needed to know.

I'm like,

let me see the fucking mess.

What the fuck you all getting out of

to dad here?

And it is so much better than I hoped because effectively what you have is like the people,

the people that were brought in to the genre by Drake.

are the diehards that will never leave his side because to them, Drake is hip-hop and there's no difference between the two, right?

And these are the ones who to this end are are like, nah, ride or die no matter what.

And, you know, it's like there's a level, there's a level you hit at where you're just like, yeah, people are,

it takes a lot for anyone to truly acknowledge reality and walk away.

For example, Kanye still has fans.

It's a very desire.

Yeah.

It's insane, right?

It's all just photos of the new album.

It's like no one's talking about anything.

But no, if you go down to the moments, right?

Like anyway, whatever.

In the moments when it was going down, right?

There was a whole lot of anyways, whatever.

Like, immediately, like, the posts are coming in with passive-aggressive tone on them, you know?

And it's like, hey, look at him.

The boy's on stage.

He's still doing it.

They tried to kill him, but he's alive.

He's good.

Whatever.

And then my favorite.

Yeah, he's not going to combust, guys.

I mean, he might, but my favorite are the ones that are like

actively on the lawsuit side, going, oh shit, UMG just dropped a statement.

Oh yeah,

and you have these supposed fans of the genre.

They're like getting excited over the lawyers releasing a prepared statement about how embarrassing what's happening

at the Super Bowl is, and this is terrible, and it's unfair, and just getting hype over the lawsuit is where the Drizzy fans are at.

I fucking.

I so get excited for that statement, but it's excitement for the existence of nothing.

Does that make any sense?

Yeah.

Ooh, they released a statement.

What does it say?

Does it say nothing?

Awesome.

Yeah.

It is so much more fucking cucked than you could ever imagine.

It is insane.

Yeah, I kind of like it.

I had my favorite comment this whole weekend was in referencing that

Kendrick had to pull out a lot of the swears to have it air on the halftime show, of course.

Was the statement of, of course, he had to make it kid-friendly so that Drake would watch it.

Like, I am saying.

Yeah, you know, oh, he's he's preparing his response track.

It'll be debuting at the Kids' Choice Awards.

I think, you know, that just, I think I have seen the meanest slash funniest things I've ever seen in my entire life from

some guy on a TikTok or a Reddit comment over this past year.

Just genuine,

amazing work is being done out there.

Good bits.

Strong bits.

I think

I'm enjoying in particular a eighth, because the thing about the Super Bowl is that like you're hitting the you're hitting like the widest possible spread for like North America, right?

And

that's where any story or anything that has not been mainstream, like Kendrick being one of the most influential artists and like basically being on top of the game at this point, winning all the awards, you know,

just now, none of that actually means that like at large, America is going to notice.

Like you're yeah, but the Super Bowl is not just America, it's worldwide.

Everybody watch this.

A whole lot.

A whole lot.

Now,

but just like, but Midwestern dad is not going to catch wind of any of those things going on, you know, or know what's happening.

So when the response response afterwards was

some folks going, this was boring.

I didn't enjoy.

I didn't know any of these songs.

Here we go.

It's just another

five years old.

But what I'm seeing is they're like, that's what I said.

And then my kids explained to me what the lyrics were and what was happening.

And holy shit, this is nuts.

Right?

Like the update to the to the bored dad post being, oh, wait, what?

That's what that means?

I love that.

I'm particularly interested in that.

I think this news is one of the stranger things that you see for every year at the halftime show is older people going, I don't even know who this artist is.

And it's like, if

music was still following its correct trajectory, once you hit 50, none of the bands you like should have any living members anymore to perform anyway.

So why would you ever complain that they're not at your

show?

Yeah, I mean, I think, well, you know, the different artists over the years, there's been, there's been a,

well, I mean, there used to be just an old, like, Disney-ish halftime show legacy.

And then for a while, it was kind of like, hey, the general audience of people watching the game, these are the things you remember from your childhood.

And then you fast forward another 30 years and you're like, okay, what do people listen to?

What's current?

What's going on?

And in some cases, it'll be like, what are people that are not watching the game going to tune into?

Yeah.

You know?

Well, the biggest, hottest act of the current year.

Sure.

And so you can get that or you can get the weekend stuck in a labyrinth.

Yeah.

Man, next year, they should get Nirvana to fucking play for the Gen Xers.

Oh, let's go.

Yeah.

Fucking get them up there.

Bring the jeans back and everything.

No, but yeah,

it was a nice set list.

I particularly enjoyed starting on the GNX, you know, and then

what was tricky too, that like, just in terms of the music that he played, was like, he just performed with all the hip-hop goats the previous year.

So to do another set list and not cover any of the tracks that he already did, right?

So he had to kind of avoid everything he already played.

And so he did.

A pretty good job doing so.

And I'm super glad that, like, well, one, you get the fucking Uncle Sam bit, right?

You know, Sam Jackson leaning in, doing his doing, like, getting all that Django energy, you know.

And,

yeah, I think at first I was like, oh, it's like a game of tic-tac-toe.

And I was like, oh, no, wait,

we're doing PlayStation control.

No, that is a PlayStation button

begins.

Yeah, and the whole, and you set all of that up to go like, yep, this is like a, life is like a video game.

And also that on the on the closer, you can have game over, where it's like, he said in the preview, there's no retries.

You know, Uncle Sam said minus one life, and it's like, yeah, this is oh, this is done, done, done.

Like, any attempt, like, it's not like the whispers of an attempt were the saddest shit ever, but now

actually just hold it and yell at the judge.

There's there's no firing back in any respectable way here at all, Your Honor.

He was very mean to me.

Um, I really like

the hilariousness and just in the warmth in the, in the, your chest that you get from all this I do have to say that it is a lot but I started feeling like

I started feeling like just a sense of

it didn't have to be this way why did it turn out like this like it did I just I just started feeling like if you had a modicum of self-awareness

This all could have been avoided.

It was so avoidable.

It always had to be this way.

So, me and Paige were talking about this exact thing yesterday.

And

we landed on the fact where we were describing it because we, you know, we weren't big in any of these artists prior.

I wouldn't say I'm big in any of them now, but I've been following Kendrick like since.

And I pointed out that, you know, there was that other rapper that

backed out of the beef

very early.

Wait, don't say, don't say anything.

And like, he was really smart.

And then me and Paige sat there realizing we couldn't remember his name.

But we can't remember his name.

Right, right.

Like,

people that got in just like me just to hate.

Yeah.

I don't even remember his fight.

I'm seeing now as J.

Cole.

But, like,

the beef conversation entirely.

Mission accomplished.

He successfully got out of there.

And now that name is forgotten.

Yeah.

No longer a Drake accomplice in the beginning of the beef when you in the wikipedia the list of belligerents

no longer includes one j cole

oh man yeah um

and and you know

yeah very good very good just enjoying enjoying life um that feeling of like winning the lottery you know when you when you just like you're like oh i nailed it oh that was a good call

Yeah, and I'm really happy too that, like, you know, after so the teasing it, and then you finally get into not like us, and fucking Serena Williams gets up and starts seawalking, and you're like,

they got, so for the record,

you know,

tennis player, fucking extraordinaire of our lifetimes, Serena Williams is Drake's ex.

This is a situation in which someone like me saw, what's Serena Williams doing there?

And then I had to be like, all right, all right, Wikipedia hit me.

Oh,

wow.

Yeah.

And if you want to just throw a little bit of extra stank on it, Sizza, right, like, who also does the vocals on multiple choruses and, you know, the sound of Kendrick plus, like, the Black Panther kind of sound, the sound of

Siza on the chorus, Kendrick on the on the verse.

She's all the vocals in Luther.

Exactly.

Yes.

She's Greg then.

Yes.

Also had a brief stint dating Drake years ago.

So that was a trifecta.

That was a fucking team on a warpath

just performing the show of a lifetime on a man's grave.

And he's standing next to it like, I'm not dead.

If this continues,

is the only possible thing we can go for?

It's like, and meet the Grahams for real.

It's Mr.

Grip walking on the goddamn stage.

No, I just, this, the hyper team combo finish that was all three of them is, that's it.

We're done, right?

It's, we close the fucking book, man.

Um, triangle strategy was applied at the Super Bowl halftime show.

Yeah, yeah, that's, there's nothing else to say.

And as you, as you, you know,

like after the Cripwalking all over the grave,

I'm really happy that my favorite, my favorite was like the last bit because straight after that, after Not Like Us, you go right into fucking TV off, you know, because

that's the battle cry, right?

That's the mustard, like going right into it.

And again,

one more time as he's walking away, turning towards the camera to just be like, ah,

off,

bye, it's done.

I, um,

yeah, now we, now we get no notice

in the, in the post-Super Bowl confusion, which is, all right,

so stopping the performance with the lawsuit stuff didn't work.

What do you do with the lawsuit now?

If you drop it now,

it'll be so obvious that you just got bitched out even harder than

you got bitched out so hard you pulled your papers off the desk.

But if you go forward with it,

then you have to have the argument with the judge that Kendrick was really mean.

So I believe his his representation has prepared statements that they've released during the performance.

And they're essentially just saying, like, no,

we are doubling down.

We are continuing forward.

Definitely.

Yeah, and this will be settled.

This will be settled in the court.

That's it.

I have a question.

Was this filed in the U.S.

or Canada?

I'm pretty certain we're talking U.S.

That's great because Americans, it's a lot easier to watch what's going on inside their courtrooms.

And like, you know, there's a lot of content creators out there that just go through, like, there's a,

I think her name's Rebecca on TikTok.

This blonde lady, she's a lawyer who just goes over iconic court transcripts.

I would love to see people go over the court transcripts of this lawsuit when it hits a courtroom.

Oh, yeah.

That sounds like a fucking hilarious time.

It's just, it's all, it's just going to be fucking exactly just inner scope emails and whatever, whatever assault, whatever, like any, any, any feelings.

Ready for the the rebrand that's that's the lady she does good work any feelings that he's that he's catching right now are being redirected into legal

you know because that's the only outlet for them legal doesn't get you feelings man

like you're not gonna get closure from this from the court

there there's no like there's no one no human being has been in this place before like this is a new type of human being I think we, like, we need to establish that this is a new type of person, you know?

We don't know how this plays out.

Like, it's, it's the, the, you know, there's a lot of artists that self-destruct

and like pull themselves out of the equation.

Um,

this is a case of, like, the door being shut for you.

And, like, No one's re like you can still stand on stage and, like, sing into a microphone.

Yeah.

but like sure, who's gonna stop you?

No one's gonna, you know what I mean?

No one's stopping you from doing that, but just the

social contract has been signed.

You know, the energy is what it is.

And

for especially now that you're like a whole lot of people, the first thing they've ever heard about this dude is this, you and this, this whole context.

That's what that's step one.

Yeah, more people now know that Drake likes him Young than knew who Drake was on Saturday.

And it's crazy because Drake has been a thing for like just radio for decades.

You know, the biggest, the number one most.

Oh, yeah, but you hear people on the radio all the time and you never put the song to the face.

And

music is discovered now through internet and new generations of people playing shit off, you know, Spotify and TikTok and everything else.

So that's how it goes, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I really do.

I really hope we just, we, we fully get to enjoy

Kendrick never acknowledging his existence again.

That would be for the best.

That would be awesome.

He should just, he should have just a fucking big

like 10 by 12 photo of Drake on his mantle and just surround it with his Grammys.

Even that's too much.

You know, come on, that's classy.

Sometimes,

sometimes you got to John Wick part one, them.

You know, sometimes you got to just

pat and walk around and turn around, and that's, that's all there is to it.

And here's the,

and here's the thing, right?

I think

a genius move here is that the energy of this has been like successfully redirected into just screaming out mustard, right?

Anytime mustard shows up on the beat for anything Kendrick related, we all know what that means.

We all know what that, what that connotates.

I have breaking news to me that apparently, according to chat member, Kendrick and Siza will be performing in Toronto on Father's Day.

Correct.

Yes.

They're going to be here on Father's Day.

Yep.

Confirmed.

To those of you listening to the audio version, I am shaking my head, just going, mm.

Yeah, I this was announced.

I thought we touched on it before, but yep, yep, just in case anybody, you know, because yeah, the tour is coming to Canada, so that'll be the deal.

Oh, um, you know, that's that's it.

That's it, but yeah, that like it's just you put all that energy, put all that energy on on mustard on the beat, you know.

So, like,

at some point during this process, so you know, while you were talking, what you said slightly earlier about how it didn't have to be this way, and I said it did have to be this way.

It like, you reactivated a thought in my brain, which was like

Drake's ego is so out of control because this whole thing started with, I'm the best.

No, I'm the best.

Like the single most common

bragging disagreement possible.

If you were a normal human being, you would have processed that for the light-hearted jab that it is and taken it as a means to excite yourself, to work hard, and to make good music.

It's a challenge.

That's it.

It is a light-hearted challenge to say, yo, bring your best, bring your A game, because I'm going to bring my A game.

That's all.

And you can't process that because you're insane.

So here we are now.

Won't do it.

Oh, boy.

Yeah, good stuff.

Good times.

it feels it feels like good in my chest

because like kendrick's getting to be in one of those situations that everybody has at least one in their life in which some kerfuffle or disagreement or problem happens and you like lock in and you walk outside yourself and you're like oh no wait i'm completely right

i'm at i'm not even being arrogant like oh no i'm just completely 100 in the right on this situation Yeah.

I've been given the mandate of heaven to act how I will.

No, that feeling that folks like I have had about Drake for years is being

cemented.

It's like, yeah, you were correct to feel that way.

In fact, what you checked out years ago because of this shit, you were right to do so.

And then you just, it's like, oh, oh, it's so warm and the angels fluttering through my lungs.

So that's, that's, it's, it's nice, you know?

And did you know that a football game happened as well?

I do know that a football game happened, and I do know that sometimes a Super Bowl is fun, and sometimes it's a one-sided, complete fucking debacle, which is like god-awful to watch.

Go birds.

I think like getting to like, I don't know what, I don't know what the deal with the way the NFL, because I don't know shit about American football or Canadian football for that matter, but I don't know about football.

I don't know how the playoff situation

reaches the Super Bowl.

But I think it's fucking weird that I've heard a couple years of the past decade that it's a complete one-sided fucking mismatch.

Oh, stomp fests.

Yeah, how does that happen?

Well, AFC and NFC champ, like two, there's two divisions that eventually

the best teams in those

divisions kind of come together.

But I mean,

there's a whole intricate level of like

cyber of tech and knowledge and everything around the game at this point that I don't know or understand or recognize.

But

yeah, curb stomp victories are

basically becoming more and more common as data is becoming more and more exposed, is my understanding of these things.

So, what you're saying is that these football organizations are ruining the meta with their sweaty play.

There's matchups and there's hard counters.

There is a genuine argument to be made that

data-driven meta-analysis for competition

does make competition worse

as far as a spectator.

Individual competitors better, but for like the spirit of the game, it makes it like worse overall.

I just find it hilarious, though, to imagine the amount of tech analysis and meta and all that stuff being applied to fucking grimy ass Philadelphia.

Yeah, well, congratulations.

Fly, Eagles, fly.

They did it.

They won their Super Polls.

The city greased up the polls in preparation to stop this.

They said, don't get the mayor.

The mayor came out and said, hey, hey, everybody, listen.

I know I get excited too, but don't climb the poles.

Don't climb the streetlights.

In fact, don't climb anything.

What?

Is this the same thing?

And then, I swear to God, because they trashed their own city.

I mean,

they did tens of dollars of damage.

Listen, as a

Montrealer, I cannot judge when

sports fans wreck their own city.

Oh, oh, yeah.

No.

It is not within my capacity to judge.

We know a thing or two about that.

But yeah, they kicked over some posts.

They lit some shit on fire.

And some horses were ridden down the road.

Literally, fans jumped on horseback and were galloping as they were singing the fucking

Eagles song, you know?

You Americans are silly.

Philly goes hard.

hell.

Philly goes hard, man.

Philly, Philly goes hard to stop in all things.

They can't stop.

They won't stop.

They've never been able to stop.

That's why it's Philadelphia.

You know?

Oh, Philly, Philly's where that hitchhiking robot got killed.

Now that I remember it.

That's where the robot got killed.

That's where

Will had to leave because he got in one little fight and his mom got scared.

That's true.

Yeah.

That's where, you know, Rocky climbed up those steps.

And, you know, it was the whole thing.

That's it, right?

You know, there's, there's the,

I forget, I think it's in Rocky Balboa where someone's talking to Rocky and he's sad and he just goes, you mad about the statue?

And I then remembered that Philadelphia had a statue memorializing Rocky, not a real person.

Nope.

And then they took it down.

Never forget the Bilberr 13-minute rant.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah.

When he goes up on stage and gets booed right at the ONA virus tour.

And he goes, oh yeah, Philly, you're fucking shitting on me.

I will stand here, dig my heels in 10 toes down, and shit on your fucking excuse for a city for the entire time.

And I'm not leaving.

You're like, your fake, your hero is fake.

That statue statue isn't real.

Your shit is garbage.

Fuck all of y'all.

And he gets through like a giant list.

And he's like, we got eight minutes left.

Yeah, I remember.

I've seen it.

Yeah.

It was incredible.

It was legendary, you know?

And everyone, like, they loved it.

They complete, he won over Philly by shitting on them for fucking 13 minutes straight.

Never forget.

Stupid one bridge city.

Do Canadians have a Super Bowl for hockey?

Yeah, yeah, man.

It's the playoffs.

We got the cup.

Well, we don't.

Oh, no, no.

You know what?

That's a really good question, actually.

Because Canadians don't have a Super Bowl for hockey because we don't leave it up to one game.

We do a series.

Like

NBA.

Yeah.

And so the Super Bowl becomes like, you know, the final game of the series.

But everybody that gets to participate in the series in different cities gets the chance to like go nuts and enjoy a little bit and their own.

It is kind of funny though seeing like I saw like a like

there's like a like a TikTok or something where they're like oh yeah like what do you think is bigger at this point like the the Super Bowl or like the rugby finals World Finals

oh my god and they're just like oh yeah I don't know like a hundred and however 120 million viewers I mean it's insane I don't know at this point it's got to be the biggest game it's got to be the the Super Bowl.

And then two dudes in like soccer jerseys just hold up a paper with like the World Cup.

And it's like,

1 billion or 1.5 billion or some shit like that.

And the ball kicked the ball doesn't give you the brain damage.

You're like, a fraction, like a slice of planet Earth tunes in for the World Cup.

What the fuck are we talking about?

I mean, I don't watch the World Cup.

It's boring as fuck, but like, it's just, you know, everybody likes it.

Planet Earth has decided on the sport.

Yes, Planet Earth has decided on good old footy.

It's done.

You know,

and you know what?

As a kid, as a small child, I was once a small child.

You could always play soccer anywhere.

That's the whole point.

Under any circumstance.

No matter how rich or poor.

Yeah, you play street hockey?

All right, let's fucking go.

Let's find the only places available to play street hockey, which are in traffic.

First of all, even

there's your first problem.

You know, second, let's see, make sure our, let's, you know, play in a way where neighbors are cool with the idea of their car getting dented the fuck up every time a slapshot goes awry.

Yeah, you need sticks, you need all the it's it, yeah, um, obviously, you get a wall, you get two rocks, you get a ball call.

Come on, guys,

nearly dying playing street hockey, like every time I ever played street hockey,

it's a bad system,

but it's fucking terrible.

Never really, never really played it.

It sucks.

The experience of playing stick hockey in the street with the neighborhood kids fucking sucks.

It's terrible.

It is way better to just get a baseball bat and a baseball and just go fucking hit balls at the fucking, you know, your local park.

So I have a wholesome memory association with the concept of seeing kids in the streets playing and having fun in the summer.

And I'm like, oh, look at those kids doing their thing.

I don't want to be near any place where the fucking ball can come crashing through the window or fucking up the car or something.

The hockey ball isn't going to crash through anything.

But like, I was thinking about how.

Yeah, but that one shit kid is swinging at full speed and like letting him.

It's made out of fucking rubber.

Come on.

But or even the hockey stick itself hitting the car.

Now we're talking.

Now we're talking.

I think at the end of the day,

if you had to put a single defining thing,

you don't play street hockey with a puck, guys.

No.

You're playing.

Are you actually saying that shit?

Oh, no.

Come on.

For the love of Christ.

No.

Americans.

You play.

Come on.

Come on, America.

Guys.

All right.

All right.

But I think the defining thing about why street hockey sucks compared to just playing football is

literally every game of street hockey I ever saw, saw, not even participated in, in my entire life,

mandated that blood would be spilled by the end

because

the nature of what you're doing means that you are going to fall and you're on pavement and you're going to scratch your shit up and blood will occur.

Go look at old photos of goalies from like the 70s.

Yeah, when they were cool.

When they were cool as fuck.

When they weren't fucking pussies?

God damn, man.

Looking like you're coming off the assembly line.

Teeth, split face, eyes fucked.

Like it's good shit.

Cauliflower face is a pretty good way to put it.

Heroes.

What protection?

You mean this little strap of leather I like wrapped around the top of my head?

Yeah, that'll do It'll do it,

anyways.

Um, there you go.

That was good.

What's going on with you this week, man?

Oh, not much, not much.

I was going to say, um, you jump in.

Oh, I'm going to jump in.

Okay, so let's start with

something that's been a long time coming, and it is kind of embarrassed that it took me this long to do it, but I did it.

I got this sticker.

A

L

for the Using L.

Put it on the bottom.

That's the biggest L of all.

I'm almost 40.

There you go.

So now I will go start drive car.

Good for you.

Yes.

Thank you.

I have commenced the process.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Man, we did like a fucking, we're going to start driving podcast announcements simultaneously, like 18 months ago.

Yeah.

And when I actually sat down and was like, I'm going to read my book, it took like two weeks.

But I'm lazy.

You know what's sad is like that learner's permit sticker is like more unrecognizable to me than the Japanese green and yellow.

Give me a bro.

The fucking stupid.

Come on.

Oh my God.

It's bad.

It's bad out here.

That's funny.

It's very bad.

You need to go outside.

It's not good.

I'm not saying that it's good.

So, hey, Wolves, when you go and get your, when you do your L test,

I have a piece of information for you that you would probably appreciate, which is, if you pass, they're going to take your picture right then and there.

Oh, yeah.

Which I was not planning on.

Oh.

Oh, did you have that?

I had that like, because yeah, when you go to like, take your passport photo, for example, and then it's like, okay, let's go.

And you're like, oh, yeah, right.

Now, true.

I thought that I thought I was going to get like a fucking, oh, you passed in the mail.

Right.

No, it was like, all right, saddle.

I'm like, oh, I got to pat down this bald.

And you know what?

That photo is what they need to identify you as because that's how you look on a regular day.

Yeah.

You know, you wandering down to the, well, I mean, for

Americans, it's the DMV.

For us, we have, here it's the S-A-A-Q.

I don't know know what

they got out there.

It's the SAC, isn't it?

SAAQ.

Oh, my God.

It is the SAAQ.

God, that's so awful.

What?

Quebec.

Quebec, what the fuck?

You know.

Do you want to go down to the SAQ before going down to the SSAQ?

Don't do that.

Don't go to the SAQ where you can buy alcohol before you go down to the SAAQ where you can buy a buy.

No, you go down to the SAAQ first,

then you go down to the SAQ.

I see.

That way,

you're not tipsy.

Associé des Alcoul.

So, I tell you what, you know what?

One of the contributing factors, I don't know if I talked about this last time, but

I mean,

I have the baby.

I should probably know how to fucking drive.

You should, right?

But the other thing is that when I'm like, yeah, I can't drive, I've been hit with the look,

And I thought the look was shame.

I thought the look was like,

man, this guy can't even drive.

Like from, from, you know, people that we know kind of thing, right?

That's not what that look means.

That look is, oh,

he's got DUIs.

What?

Okay, that.

I can tell.

You know, when you can tell?

That's got to be people that don't know you very well.

Well, they don't know me that well.

No, okay, that's pretty nuts

No, because I would say that like I never like here's the weird part for me everyone that is from here Lives this experience, so we all get it the first time I got the weirdness you're describing was from talking to the internet here

because if you live in the city you realize how driving is how insane it can get owning a car here sometimes and like that with someone like reggie kind of existing where i'm just like hey what has your life experiences been like and you're like oh yeah no same kind of thing i'm like okay why would i ever need to drive a car Like it's just, it is a different thing here, you know, if you happen to be in the city as well.

Like if you're coming from the West Island or further out, then yeah, that makes more sense for sure.

Like, I remember we had a friend of ours that we'd be like, hey, man, we're going to go see the movies.

He's like, okay, hold on.

Let me go find a place to park.

Yeah, he'd be like an hour late.

I mean, poor Min, like I've said, like, he's had to leave the office while we were working to go home to fucking pay

for extra meter time to then come back to work.

You know, it was brutal.

But anyway, it's still a skill that's very useful to have, but it's just very common that when you live in a really walkable city, there's a lot of people like me and my friends that grew up that were like, we walk and or grab the metro or bus to go anywhere we want to.

We bike where we want to.

We grab the city bikes.

Like people just move around very quickly and easily.

It takes about 15 minutes to get far places, five to get close places.

So, you know, that's the pace of life.

But I tell you what, though, there is one thing about the L that I did not like.

I really did not like.

So you have to pass 40 of 50 questions.

But then the test just ends once you've answered 40 correctly.

Oh.

So like, I got to like 43 questions and I answered the 40th correctly.

And it was like, you have passed, it's over.

Like, no, I wanted to do all 50.

I wanted to see what my fucking score would have been.

Well, now you know, you got three wrong.

Yeah, but I could have gotten four wrong.

Yeah, hypothetically.

I couldn't, like, it's annoying.

Come on.

But, like, you, you know exactly how many you get wrong for each count after 40.

And the three that I got wrong were like

those ones that it's like all the answers read the same.

And they're like, which of these is a smart way to say this?

And like, fuck off.

These are all things you could say to somebody.

Okay.

Well,

yeah.

That's nice.

That's nice.

And I remember the thing I always learned was like, hey, even if you don't use it, by getting it early, you get your insurance to go down because the longer.

Oh, yeah, because I have to wait a year now.

Exactly.

Drive by myself.

But then the longer you have it,

once you get the full license, the longer you hold it without anything going wrong,

the better your insurance gets.

I wonder how it's going to work with my insurance because I'm not an 18-year-old child.

So I'll tell you exactly how that's going to go is by the thing, by the exact statistics, if you are in the 18 to 25 bracket, you are like 80% of the accidents that occur.

It's insane.

I'm well aware of that.

And then the moment you turn 26, you drop down to like where the rest of the population is, which is very, very squished at the bottom.

And then when you're in the 55 or 50 to 65 range, you're actually the safest.

And then the moment you turn 66, you're dangerous again.

Hey, man, listen.

Think of how much cooler we would have been if we were breaking the speed limit while driving when we were 20.

Sure.

Yeah.

Everybody would have been.

That would have been much

very cool.

Everyone would have thought you were the raddest.

That's right.

And the type of vehicle you have makes determines that attitude as well.

And the color of the vehicle determines that as well.

Like, it's so nuts that it's just like, yeah, insurance says we don't know why or care, but red cars mean we're going to charge you more because by the numbers, people in fast red cars crash more.

Well, because red cars go faster.

Yeah, sure.

You know, they do.

But just like that is the color of impulse.

Yeah.

I think there's something that we failed to mention earlier, which is like, yes, Montreal is an incredibly walkable city and subway-oriented city, but there's something else that really

contributes to not learning how to drive if you grow up or live in Montreal for a while, which is you walk down the street and see 10 minor accidents in a 30-minute walk, and

multiple pedestrian almost fatalities, and cyclists fighting people.

And you go, I don't want to enter into this

world.

You know,

so what if I can't turn right on a red light?

I can go right through it.

Yeah, that's the classic.

But yeah, no, like, you remember that place I used to live

where

next to the metro station, there was that red light that just had a cop parked next to it purple day every day because every single day people would just sail right through that fucking red light like they didn't give a fuck.

It also doesn't help that like potholes that you speed people are speeding past are like dropping so that the bottom of the suspension is hitting the paw pothole as it comes out.

Someone in the chat asks a fun question.

Oh, you guys can't turn right on red.

Oh, no, you can turn right on red.

You can turn right on red in Quebec.

You can only specifically not turn right on red on the island of Montreal.

Not on the island.

And Montrealers can't be trusted to turn right on red.

Too dangerous for pedestrians, man.

Too dangerous.

Can't be doing that shit.

Awful.

It's worse.

We got to save lives and just say, you know what?

Nah.

No, don't.

You can't do it.

Well, because if you allowed turning right on red in Montreal, I think the first thing that would happen is that people would be turning right at stop signs into one-way streets.

Yeah, well, it's just, it's one of those things where you're like, this is up to the driver's discretion, but a lot of discretion of drivers

on this island is dog shit and cannot be trusted.

It's not good.

So we will not be letting this be up to the driver's discretion.

You are not trusted.

That's it.

I can't do it.

Two-day job.

Not allowed.

And, you know, again,

and here's the thing, too.

Because we're also a pedestrian city, there's more pedestrians all over, right?

Like, imagine, I mean, like,

the risks are not just the crazy driving and stuff.

It's also there's a lot more people about not using

the roads to get around the channel.

Pedestrians in Montreal don't believe in crosswalks.

I mean, we have little versions of Shibuya

popping up all over downtown.

Those painted lines on the street mean nothing to me.

They're suggestions.

They're suggestions, Pat.

Anyway, I talked about the

video.

There's the channel, Not Just Bikes that did like

most of that.

It's quite interesting to see an outside perspective on it because it's like, yeah, as far as this city goes compared to North America, it's way more interesting.

And it's got a whole lot of friendly passages for pedestrians to move safely and not be, you know, crossing anything that dangerous.

But then you get out at fucking Namur.

Yeah, and you forget what it was called.

It was like traffic islands or some shit.

Yeah,

you get stranded in between, and you're now in a Death Star trench of cars going back and forth.

Areas that a pedestrian can be shuttled to or walked to, but cannot leave.

Oh, man.

Yeah,

it's crazy how, like, on one, in one fell swoop,

you get out at a door of a

station, and to the left is a park and a bunch of closed streets and amazing walking, and to the right is just absolute hell.

Yeah, crossing fucking like eight-lane strodes, as they're called, street roads.

So it's an urban planning fucking

disaster in some cases and miracle in others.

Now that I have the L, I've made the decision

for my family and marriage that I will be taking professional driving courses instead of just going, hey, wife, teach me how to drive.

Because that

might cause friction.

It's possible.

It's possible.

Yeah, I can see that.

That could cause a slight degree of friction.

I can see that.

Willie says he loves Montreal, but everything he says about it sounds like a shithole.

Listen, if you don't...

That's how you love things.

If you can't shit on the place you live a little bit accurately, then I don't trust you or believe you.

It means you don't really live there.

You probably don't actually live there.

Having been here, I can tell you top to bottom what the fuck is going on and it's real shit.

You know?

Yes, and there is absolutely a ton here that I am all about and love.

In fact,

well, actually, yeah,

there's some folks

that might be coming this way.

I'll not say just yet because I don't know if they've announced, but there's someone that we know that might be coming to Montreal

to live.

And because I've just been recently looking around and thinking about all that stuff, and it's like, yeah, you got to be able to tell me

where you like to go eat, what's a cool place to hang out, and also where the shit is happening in your city.

That's how I know I can fucking trust you.

That's how I know it's real.

Let's see.

What else is going on with me?

The

past

week,

I decided, so I saw that a lot of people are ranting and raving about Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

And I thought that was really strange because that is a peak Eurojank like RPG.

And then I realized that I had

kick-started the first game,

played it for four hours, went, yeah, this needs more time in the oven, and then just left it completely unplayed

for six and a half years.

So first of all, For open world RPGs, now something that you can be familiar with, Wooly, the best time to play them is when they are talking or releasing the sequel.

Because then it'll be done.

Ah, the original, that is.

Right.

So, like, Cyberpunk, is it done?

They patched it like a couple weeks ago.

After I started.

Yeah.

After my first.

You waited so long.

After my first session, there was a new patch with new content.

Yeah,

you waited so long and still.

So, Kingdom Come Deliverance 1

has been taking up my time lately and it is

such a fascinating fucking weird game that I am so in love with.

I love what it is doing.

It is

its jank has been overstated, I believe.

Like genuinely.

Like, yeah, there's a bug here.

There's a little mechanical interaction that's gone off here.

But overall, it's been pretty solid.

It is

the virtua fighter

of open-world RPGs.

How so?

What should Virtua Fighter be, Wooly, above all other things?

Boring.

That's right.

It should be fucking boring.

Okay.

So,

Kingdom Come Deliverance takes place in 15th century Bohemia, which would later become the Czech Republic, in 1403

in the

most mundane setting I have ever encountered

in any game.

You are playing Henry Dirt Farmer Fuckhead of Scallots,

and you are a uneducated,

bad-at-everything peasant.

This is not a fantasy medieval game.

No, this is 1403 Bohemia,

like North of

the

okay.

This is this is anti-fantasy.

This is like

this is like history channel core.

So Europe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is like the codex is just explaining to you the you know the massive massive X style codex that explains you know all these little details you might be unfamiliar with.

That is here's what the fuck a charcoal burner is as a profession.

I didn't know there was such a fucking thing as a charcoal burner.

What the fuck is that?

I've written it as a slur.

Here's the term women.

And then it's like two, 3,000 words about the rights and responsibilities and whatnot of

the society within this country, etc.

Okay.

So now that you're playing cyberpunk, and have you seen Oblivion in your life?

I've seen it.

Okay.

Think of that.

First-person perspective, melee combat, all that stuff.

You have your skills, which go up as you use them.

So, you know, sword fighting goes up as you use it.

Sneaking goes up as you use it.

Archery goes up as you use it, etc., right?

The difference here at the beginning is that since you are a dirt peasant, like 18-year-old, you start the game at a profound

mechanical disadvantage compared to, I would say, nearly every single game ever made.

Step one, can't read.

Nice.

Nice.

Yeah.

Okay.

Why would you be able to fucking read?

So, also, like, stats.

Like, magic is not going to be a stat.

No, you're.

No.

The skills are

hunting, archery, sword fighting, drinking, stealth,

lockpicking, pickpocketing, etc.

Okay.

Right.

Yeah, it is mundane.

It is mundane to the extreme.

And so, you know,

your first little tutorial interactions are, hey, dad wants you to go get some money from a guy who owes him.

Go get some beer from the tavern.

And that's it.

Oh, and get some charcoal.

That's it.

That's your starting point.

Like the most most mundane son of a blacksmith day possible.

Now, it wouldn't be a video game if there weren't a hint of nobility that you could aspire to.

That's right.

But that's later.

Okay.

So your start is, okay, the guy won't pay me money.

Do you want to try and convince him with your speech?

Failed because you're an idiot.

Do you want to fist fight him?

No.

He's a 35, 40-year-old man, and he beats your ass into the dirt.

The fight is bordering on totally unwinnable.

Okay, I'll go talk to my friend and I'll get a lock pick and then I will

go and try and sneak into his house and pick the lock to get some of his money, right?

You then encounter the most difficult lock picking mini-game I have ever played in any game

because the instant you touch anything outside like the fancy zone for lockpicking, the lockpick just breaks, which causes a noise, which causes the guy to come into his house and beat on you.

Okay.

And the reason why is that when you are below level five in anything, you are not just bad at it.

You are not just unskilled.

You are an active threat to yourself due to your incompetency.

Worst example.

The best example here is trying to shoot a bow and arrow in this game is misery because there's no reticle.

The bow is constantly moving around.

Even if there was a reticle, the arrow does not exactly go where you think it will.

And if you try and shoot a bow and arrow below level five in archery and you don't have gauntlets on, you're so bad at it that the bowstring will snap back and slash you.

Oh, and you'll do health damage to yourself.

Yeah, okay.

You have negative skill.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

So

it has an extremely in-depth and good pickpocketing mechanic.

It has great lock picking.

It has good realistic sneaking.

It has very, very weird

combat in which you are point, like there's a circle where you're aiming your attacks to five points.

with a lot of parrying and blocking and stuff.

But because you start out dog shit at everything, it forces you to engage in the game mechanically in a bunch of ways that you wouldn't normally have to.

So,

in order to actually get the stuff back from Tutorial Man,

I had to do another quest to enlist my friends to help me beat on him in a big group.

Okay.

So,

how long before you stop bumbling about and just dying and eating shit?

I would say the tutorial,

and your village gets destroyed by the Hungarians

because it has to, right?

I would say it's about five to ten hours before you acquire a certain level of generalized skill in enough things that you feel like you're a capable character.

There's a really interesting thing that happens with this game, and I think it really sums up the experience of how you would have to take it seriously.

So you can't fight for shit.

There's early combat in the game, and it is incredibly difficult to the point of being impossible.

So run.

Don't fight anybody.

You can't beat a soldier.

You're a peasant, right?

At some point, you are offered a man-at-arms will teach you how to fight.

So you go and do the fighting tutorial, right?

And a lot of people go, I now know how to fight.

I will now go and, you know, start adventuring in 1403 Bohemia.

That is not good enough.

You barely know how to fight, and bandits tear you up.

The thing that I did, which is apparently the smart thing, is keep practicing with that guy for like 90 minutes until you are actually really good at the combat and you raise your stats.

Practicing as in you yourself are learning how it works or your character is increasing numbers.

Okay.

Both.

Like with practice swords.

Okay.

Like you lab it out and how things work and how combos work and how

the different attacks, different parts of the body work and all that stuff.

Okay.

So for all of this, that sounds really interesting.

I'm curious then, is this a game where combat is important?

It's a weird question, but some RPG-ing you can do inside the

achievement for this game.

Okay.

And

running away is always viable.

Outside of like, I think, a single mandatory scripted fight in the entire game.

Awesome.

Because it sounds like, you know, it sounds realistic in that it's hard to be competent at anything.

So

can you just become a really good after-dinner raconteur that can talk your way out of trouble?

And, you know?

So

I've been playing, I play the game for about 43 hours, and I would say

I have fought like

18 times outside of like a tournament that I join.

Like Bandits on the Road.

Like it's, it is, there are, there are like five to 10 hour stretches of no combat at all.

Okay.

Depending on what you're doing,

which meant that I would be doing something like

breaking into people's houses at night,

doing

quests going here and there.

And the quests are a really good example of where this game shines because the quests are like hilariously mundane.

They are like laughably simple in context.

Hey man, the refugees are starving.

Can you get us some rabbit to eat?

Is one of the first quests I acquired, which is very simple, except for the part where

game in 1403 Bohemia is the property of the king, which means all hunting is poaching.

Oh.

So you go into the woods and wander around for like 15 goddamn minutes because I can't find rabbits for shit.

And then I, okay, you know what?

I'm going to shoot the rabbit with my arrow.

Fuck, it's really hard.

It's really fucking hard to shoot

the rabbit with my arrow.

Okay, I've killed the rabbit.

I now need two more.

Oh, okay.

I've done that.

Now I have to get back to town before this meat spoils.

Fuck.

Okay.

And while I'm doing that,

you have integrated hunger and sleep mechanics.

Yeah.

Where I'm now hungry enough that my stamina is shit.

Okay.

And when you get sleepy enough,

your camera starts to get away from you.

It starts to drift outside your control.

And when you are real low on sleep, the screen will intermittently, like eyelids will come down over the fucking screen and you will like kind of nod off and black out while you're walking around.

Okay.

So this is for like, give me a shitty middle-aged

simulator.

Yeah.

I want a simulator.

Dirt-face life, just horrible.

Everything sucks.

A bunch of quests are timed, and they don't tell you they're timed.

You're just an idiot if you didn't realize it was timed.

So like, hey, we got to take care of those sick and wounded here.

Well, I ignored that for a while because it wasn't on my priority.

And now one of those sick and wounded is dead.

Because of course they did.

Why would they not die?

They're dying of poison.

And I guess, like, what is the

pitch as to like where this goes?

Well, in the

far, I have moved from dirt peasant to squire.

Okay, okay.

And kind of working my way up.

Has the studio Warhorse, are they like a collection of X devs from something?

I have no idea.

I have absolutely no idea.

So I'll use a different quest as like a really good example of the kind of thing that this game does extremely well.

Your local executioner is really pissed off because they're bringing in a out-of-town executioner for high-profile criminals, which is money out of his pocket, but it's also like personally embarrassing to him.

So he goes, here's what we're gonna do: we are going to

sabotage the executions so that they, the, the, the guy they brought in from Cutenberg looks like a fucking fool, and then they'll never have anybody but me do the executions here, right?

So,

step one

is go to the local bailiff and find out what were these guys actually arrested for, which requires a speech check.

Okay, I've gotten their names and crimes.

Now, the next step is I have to go into the black book inside the bailiff's office and read the historical precedent of existing crimes and their punishments and if they were a nobleman or a lowborn.

So I broke in and I snuck in.

And luckily, I was able to read the book because I went on the side quest to learn how to read.

So then you read, and it's a historical document of what types of crimes people get killed for.

Okay, it's a hanging,

it's a chopping block, and it's a torture kill.

Okay,

back to

the executioner.

How are we going to sabotage this?

All right, we'll poison the torturing tongue so the guy dies right away.

We'll blunt the sword of the executioner so the chop takes multiple tries, and we'll replace his rope with rotten rope so that the guy, when he gets hung, it snaps and he gets away.

Yeah, okay.

So now I have to go in the dead of night.

It doesn't say go in the dead of night, but that's when people are asleep to the executioner's camp, sneak in, steal the sword out of the chest, go back to town, use the grinding wheel that you use to upgrade your weapons, manually draw it up.

Fuck it up on purpose.

Oh,

like fail the mini-game on purpose, Then take it back, put it back in the chest that you found.

Then go and poison the tongs.

Oh, wait, did you learn how to make poison?

Okay, before this, go to an alchemist, learn how to make poison, then go through the alchemy mini-game, which is literally manual.

It's run it at a boil, pick this, put it in, check the book, pick this, put it in, cool it to a certain thing, put it.

Okay, got poison.

Go poison the tongs, then replace the rope, and then he says, okay, great, it's done.

Meet me at, uh, meet me tomorrow for the fucking execution.

I go to the execution too early, and you can watch every single fucking peasant in town walk the like two kilometers to the execution site.

It took them like six hours, so I waited in place and got so hungry my character almost died.

Jesus Christ.

And then you get the cutscene of the execution.

Yeah, this game is for a certain kind of person.

And it is like, it is.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

Its mundanity

is like beling the fact that you have to engage with every single thing mechanically.

What would happen if you accepted it really solid?

What would happen if you accepted that quest but didn't know how to do any of those things?

Then I would fail it.

So the first point of failure is you get the executions wrong.

Yeah.

And then the execution goes off without a hitch because you sabotage the wrong instruments.

And then the guy who did the quest is like, oh, come on.

I ran into a quest that had me try to find a new house for somebody, but I didn't like them.

So I killed their extended family.

And when I went back, my character had a dialogue where it was, hey,

I found your extended family and they're happy to take you in, which I had convinced them.

But then I decided to kill them.

And then Henry adds, then, oh, but

they died.

Sorry.

And it altered the trajectory of the fucking quest accordingly.

Like, it is,

it is the most immersive sim open world RPG I have ever played.

And it is jank.

And there are mechanical problems.

And there are, like, all these little annoyances.

The number one of which is they want you to change your outfit constantly because you don't have

you don't just have like armor, you also have conspicuousness.

Okay.

It has a status for conspicuousness because the sneakiest clothes at night are all black.

But if you are in all black in the middle of the town square

next to somebody's door and you're covered in mud,

they're going to be like, what the fuck are you doing?

Get the fuck away from my house.

I guess.

So it sounds almost, when you're describing that level of complexity to a quest,

it sounds almost like either A, this is a like meta quest with multiple parts to it, or B, it's expected that a lot of people are going to fail this, and then you kind of just bumble.

Depending on what order you would do things, it is expected that you would make like big mistakes a lot.

Okay, and then once you fail, that's the state you're in, and then we move to the next step.

That's just how it is, right?

Yeah, okay, okay, got it.

Failure is expected in cases, yeah.

Yeah, and it's like that's just how it goes, and you don't get the good reward and all that.

This is the first one you're describing, right?

This is the first one.

The second one is a massive improvement.

And the second one is a massive improvement in the way that I am so glad I'm playing the first one because if I played the second one first, going back to the first one would be impossible.

A lot of, because I'm hearing about the second one just from, you know, it's current.

And,

you know, I mean, there's things about like, oh, Unreal Engine is shit.

And, you know, hearing about the director complaining about like that, which is on the docket somewhere there.

The improvements overall are like, well, or rather, this is, was the second one Kickstarter as well?

Or was it?

No, second one was made with money from sales of the first one.

Yeah, okay.

So it's bigger, better, et cetera.

There's something really funny about the way the second game works because the second game

looks way better,

but it also runs way better.

Like, it's not just like it is visually a lot prettier, it is so much better optimized that the second game runs better.

Okay.

Would I saw someone say that, like, you have to take showers and you have to, like,

you have to clean your clothes.

So, it's a service, there's a survival game

to that there, too.

Okay.

The smart thing that they did here is like, I don't know if you, okay, so you haven't played many open world RPGs, but there's a tendency for something like Skyrim or Oblivion is people mod in hunger mechanics because that's like a cool thing that a lot of people want to interact with, and they mod in sleep mechanics.

And what I have found in my time playing those types of mods is that they are horribly overtuned

and they are oppressive

constantly.

If you're modding in hunger, it's because you want to experience the mechanic and thus it'll happen frequently.

Whereas in Kingdom Come Deliverance, it's like, listen, every two hours of game time, three hours of game time, take a nap.

If you find food off a fucking bandit you killed and your character is starving, fucking eat something.

Yeah,

I don't like that.

I think I enjoy games where hunger is, or not hunger, but eating is for buffs.

But not like

mandatory.

The buff is that you have your full statue.

That you stay alive.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, you want the really big one?

If you're like, you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to keep tons of food in my inventory and I'm just going to eat as much food as I can so that the rolling food buff goes over.

Well, if your food goes over 100, you get the overeaten debuff and it's the same debuff as hunger in the other direction.

And it has a little piggy icon next to your stamina that ticks down because you're a little piggy.

Yeah.

you have to keep it in the magic spot.

God.

There's a character that has one of those mechanics where overeating is bad as well.

Is it Sin?

Did Sin have the overeat?

No, I'm thinking, eh,

somewhere else, maybe.

But yeah, it's: hey, go to a town.

Are you filthy?

Clean up.

Are your arms and armor covered in blood?

Clean up.

Is your shit damaged?

Repair it.

Are you hungry?

Eat.

Are you sleepy?

Sleep.

And it's all like mechanically intermingled in a really interesting way.

Probably the most interesting thing about all of that is that, hey, when you go to buy things or talk to quest givers, you will get a very negative reaction if you are covered in human viscera.

But if you try to intimidate someone covered in human viscera, you get a massive bonus.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Right.

Because you're, you're, you have guts on you.

Um, so I guess, yeah, like for all

of this, um,

is there a mechanical

because, like, I guess, is the RPG-ing kind of like on a Baldur's Gate level?

Where?

No, no, no, no.

The RPG-ing is perk-based.

Okay.

So, Cyberpunk, Oblivion, Skyrim.

Um, and the perks are excellent.

Like, the perks are fucking fantastic.

Um,

there are uh ones that jump off the top of my head:

you can pick locks better when you're drunk,

but it makes more noise,

um, which then led to me always keeping beer on my person.

So, when I wanted to break into a house, I would have a little sip

before I would drink something,

um, which then led to me getting a level in drinking, which I then option-selected for

prefers beer.

So beer gets me half drunk, but wine is now gets me drunk twice as fast.

Wow.

To that level.

Jesus.

And,

you know, the various combat stuff, but also like, hey, do you, are you, is your character a savage?

You get stat bonuses out in the wilderness.

You get stat decreases in cities.

What's going on with that?

Probably the best one I.

Sorry?

What's going on with the save system?

It's ink ribbons.

So,

consumable

that you must go find.

Or you can exit the game and save on exit.

Oh, fuck.

God damn.

Okay.

All right.

So I have now played enough of the game

that

I had modded the save system out and just given myself quick save.

I'm now deep enough into the game that I'm going to mod it out and go back to Ink Ribbons or Save Your Snaps for a couple of reasons.

One,

a lot of the crime systems only work on the assumption that you're just going to have to deal with the problem that you created.

And the second one is that the save system is built to encourage your character to learn how to read

and

learn to brew the save potion yourself

with alchemy.

Okay.

The other thing, and this is really important because the first game had some stops and starts on this.

Originally, when the first game came out, you did not have save on exit.

It was hope you have the fucking item or you're near a friendly bed.

Or you can't turn the fucking.

That is too far.

Yes, that is way too far.

As someone who's gone through fucking save and um, save and hunger, fear and hunger

that takes it from that's too this is challenging to this is not fun.

That's a that's insane.

Um, oh, yeah, okay.

The second thing is that the second game from people that I've spoken to, you just find a lot more of them around.

Like, it's still a limited resource, but it's not a precious resource.

And

to the game's credit, the reason I modded it out was because, well, open world games crash all the time.

It has crashed on me once in 43 hours.

So, you know what?

Okay, you know what?

I'm going to mod the

savior snaps back out.

It's fascinating.

I had a different mod, which was

when you pick flowers in that game, your character crouches down, picks the flower in third person, and pulls back up, and it takes forever.

It is like a five-second animation per flower for herbalism.

That's ridiculous.

But then, when I leveled it up to level five, six, seven,

all of a sudden, when you do that animation to pick a flower, you are scooping up every flower in like a 10-foot radius of your character.

Okay.

So, it's like all these little annoying mechanical foibles are there to make you appreciate

your level of skill increase.

Slow or like picking versus like,

I think

a big part of whether or not something like this could be a lot of fun for me would be, can you fail through the game and keep going?

Oh, totally.

So like, for example,

not pulling this off, but moving from quest to quest and advancing is a possibility.

As long as your skills go up and as long as you don't outright fail the main quests.

Yeah, absolutely.

Great.

Okay.

Like one of the things, like, I was, I robbed a lot of houses in that game.

I like to, I like to sneak into people's houses and take their shit.

I got caught a couple times, and the jail time penalty is pretty severe.

It is, they put you in jail, they take all your stolen shit back, and time advances while you're in jail.

So if you had any quests that were timed, say those goodbye.

Yikes.

And for every day that you are in jail, you will have a day of decreased stats coming out of jail.

So if I'm in jail for one day for pickpocketing, for one full 24-hour period after getting out of jail, my stats will be decreased by 20% across the board.

Because being in jail is hard.

Do you get like people or a group or followers or any sort of

thing?

You get a dog, a dog named Mutt.

Sad.

So then the dog is part of the hound master skill, which means you can teach the dog to hunt for you.

You can teach the dog to sick anybody that you want.

My dog has now been upgraded to have an increased chance of bleeding.

Sorry, like causing blood loss on enemies.

Okay, yeah.

Probably the ballsiest thing the game does is the combat is really difficult because it is a 1v1 combat system where tons of enemies attack you simultaneously.

So, like when somebody comes at you, like the camera like first person locks onto them and you have your radial window for like up to attack their head or attack their feet, but his friends are coming around to like attack you from the side.

So,

large group confrontations have you kind of unlocked, and you are always backing up, going, ah, ah, ah, ah, as different guys are trying to get outside your field of vision.

And it looks really,

it's really frantic and it works really well for like, this feels like I'm being jumped

by a bunch of goons.

So I have to focus on defense until I can, you know, bop one.

In Ferrara, when you're dueling somebody and like some shit comes from the left, you know, and you're like, ah, you have to unlock.

Yeah, yeah, you're like, oh, God,

just like that.

It is just like that.

Nice.

It is a fucking cool game that I would recommend to tons of people who like

an RPG with a lot of mechanical depth.

This is

way

more in-depth mechanically than CD Projekt's games and

Bethesda's games.

Like, all the systems intermingling with each other is fucking fascinating.

It is awesome.

Is it mainly about the mechanical elements of it, or is there like a story or possibly?

Oh, there's a, yeah, there's absolutely a story.

And the dialogue and the writing is absolutely like very interesting and very well done.

It's also like hilariously mundane.

Okay.

It is.

Yeah,

a lot of this is about the mechanical depth, but I'm curious if, like, if it's compelling.

Oh, yeah, no, Henry's story is very interesting.

The core premise of the game is that

you built a really nice sword for the local nobleman, and then a local army attacked and raised your village.

And in the ensuing chaos, you got your parents killed, and you saw the guy who did it, and you lost the sword that you forged to a bandit.

And the main quest is: I have to get that goddamn sword back from that bandit, but I don't know where he is.

Damn.

You even have like the guy you made the sword for going, dude, it's not important.

It's just a sword.

And your character's like, no,

I have to get it.

It's important.

My dad made it.

And then you have to do things by a certain timeline.

Otherwise, history happens.

Yeah, well, history is going to happen.

It's

in a conflict of powers and the Holy Roman Emperor in 1403.

The second game, I think, not the Holy Roman Empire.

God.

One of the first things that you find is a German guy arguing with some Czechs at the bar, and they're making fun of him because, like, so which pope do you follow?

How many popes do you guys even have right now?

They weren't holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Yeah, well,

fuck that.

I saw someone in the chat describe it as peasant Shenmue, and you know what?

That's a decent sell.

Good.

Good.

I like that.

I saw folks talking about how when I described it or played it, that it reminded them of Red Dead Redemption.

So it was a little strange that my complaints about Red Dead Redemption 2 are not being echoed here.

And that is for two really simple reasons.

In Red Dead, you don't actually have a lot of mechanical depth to any of the things you do.

A lot of the things that you would do in Red Dead are actually just cutscenes, skinning, building a house, you know, stuff like that.

When the game asks you to go through a quest in Kingdom Come Deliverance and say, brew a potion, brewing a potion is really hard in this game.

You have to set up the different

ingredients on the shelf correctly.

You have to learn how to read so you can read the recipe book.

And by the way,

until your reading is high enough, it's still littered with spelling errors because you're not reading it good.

Oh, God.

Then you have to pump the bellows to boil it.

You have to time with an hourglass how long you boil specific ingredients.

It's a whole fucking thing.

I'm describing crafting with extra steps, and I'm dying.

I'm dying.

I'm dying inside.

Oh, my God.

That sounds horrible.

One of the things that made me say

I'm not playing the second game game first is the second game has a crafting mechanic for blacksmithing.

And that crafting mechanic is

get a slab of iron, manually heat it and manually pump the bellows.

Now put it on the thing and then take your hammer and aim to even it out correctly along the hot spots

over the whole sword.

Yeah, okay, but forging a sword forging a blade is rad, though.

That's cool.

But

mixing concoctions, I'm dying, dude.

I can't.

I can't.

Well, if you don't learn to mix concoctions, you're not going to be able to learn how to get the respect potion, which is

just really strong alcohol.

The respect potion is

you are crafting like super moonshine, and it causes you to black out and forget forget all your perks.

But if you use it, you run a percentage chance of developing instantaneous alcoholism,

which will fuck your shit up unless you're drunk all the time.

Just go

blind.

Yeah.

It is, it is fucking fascinating.

So before you, before you drink the lithium potion, which is super booze, you can do one of two things.

You You can get a hair of the dog potion, which will cure your alcoholism, or you can dilute the lithium potion into drinking water, which gets you five potion-infused drinking waters, which don't have enough alcohol content to cause you to suffer from alcoholism.

What is the task time for, like, let's say, like, doing something like a concoction like that versus kind of like quest completion?

Are you spending more time on the mundane?

It is so

wildly variable.

There are a bunch of quests, bang out, four minutes.

It's this guy at the end of town, this other guy at the end of town.

Talk.

Could you speech check it?

Talk, talk, talk, right?

Because you can play

the

execution quest that I described, if you included the steps, which are learn to read and learn to brew potions, that thing was like three hours.

That thing was crazy.

It was ridiculous.

And also, none of the people involved have fast travel points anywhere near them.

So you have to just hoof it on your horse.

Is there any part of this that's like

home building or construction or like stuff like that?

Or like settlement.

There's a DLC that added a town that you rebuild.

Okay.

But it's not a main game mechanic, though.

No, no, it's not a main game.

You're mainly just like getting tavern tavern beds and

friends will let you stay with them.

Because part, you know, you can, like, if you like, like PAL World, you could spend all day just managing your shit or you can go out and do it.

No, it is very much like go out and do, not stay home and build.

It is so fucking fascinating.

It is so interesting.

It is like every single minute that I spend with the game, I am doing some interesting little piece of gameplay

that I'm crazy about it.

It's so goddamn interesting.

It is such a cool game.

It is also occasionally really mean.

Like I got out of safety.

I fucking fast-traveled somewhere, and

in the middle of the night, I got attacked by bandits, and they pulled me off my horse.

And before my character could stand up, I had lost 60, 70% of my health because they pull you off the horse, and then they start beating you during the you falling off the horse animation.

Because of course they would.

And I barely, and I mean bare, like within a sliver of health, survived that encounter.

And if I had not survived that, I would have lost like an hour of progress.

So I was going to say you go back to the last time you slept.

The last time you slept, the last time you got your clothes laundered, the last time you used a save your snaps, which is the usable thing.

So when I play the second game, I'm not going to.

I'm going to leave the save system alone.

I think the game probably plays better with it intact.

Okay.

What an incredibly cool game.

Now, now I know what type of people are getting excited when I hear about this game coming up.

Now, I would genuinely recommend that if this anything about this interests anyone to try it, because all the little pieces are interesting and fun

and they combine into a bunch of really, really cool and interesting ways.

I think the

bit about the executioner's

quest there sounds really complex, and that's probably the most interesting part.

Oh, absolutely.

But I mean, I couldn't imagine every quest has that level of

in depth, you know.

But it's this kind of thing where like very, very,

very simple requests

get like

very

turn out to be be much more mechanically difficult.

Right.

Like, I got a quest to weed a guy's garden, and it was actually really difficult to select the correct weeds.

And then I ended up in my inventory with like 300 flowers that I could sell.

Okay.

It is fucking great.

It is great.

I'm so glad I'm playing the first one first, and then I'm going to roll right into the second one.

Kingdom come, not deliverance one.

Not Alex Ross, Superman.

No, no, not that.

All right.

1403 Bohemia sucks, by the way.

Sucks to live there.

Yeah, I'm good on any year

that doesn't start with a...

Don't worry.

Don't worry.

I'm good.

You

don't have to worry about that at all because you are hilariously unrepresented in the game.

Well, there was actually a big kerfuffle because the head dev of the studio Warhorse is like a massive shithead.

There is not even a single person of color at all in the whole game.

Which is weird because like there's Turks in the story.

We're in that part of the world.

Yeah.

that's it.

That's all there is to it.

Yeah, okay.

I mean, you know,

I'm looking through these screenshots.

I see what's going on.

This is the type of game where I'd be like, oh, there's one, and there's a big quest about it.

You know,

which is what I would expect.

You just described which are one and which are three.

Oh, okay.

In which there is like literally one person of color in the entire game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Yeah, no,

I'm looking at this dude's haircut right here, and I'm like, oh, yeah, no.

I think.

Oh, you totally just spoiled something for me with that screenshot.

I'm sorry.

It was on the Steam page.

Shit!

Holy fuck!

Oh, it was on the Steam page.

It's a screenshot on the Steam page.

I'm sorry.

Second game?

Yeah.

Oh, shit.

That's so fucking funny.

Holy shit.

Oh,

damn.

Okay.

I'm sorry.

I literally just went to the screenshots on the Steam page.

No, hey, listen, to be fair.

To be fair,

I got spoiled on something in my stream, and it was maybe the funniest interaction I've ever had with a chat member in which I was making jokes about two characters becoming gay and kissing.

And then someone asked me in the chat, oh, did Pat, did Pat get spoiled on the second game?

And I went, what?

Oh, oh.

What, really?

Okay, okay.

Yeah.

Vacation in the second.

What?

Yeah, they picked our promo material and chose that for some reason.

Yeah.

Well,

that's so funny.

That's so fucking funny.

Oh,

I can imagine.

Well, that's cool.

Well, now I can imagine.

Yeah, I guess.

Well, that's cool, actually.

All right.

Well,

yeah, okay.

So, yeah, that's what I've been playing.

Like, exclusively, I can't get enough of it.

I can't, it's so goddamn amazing.

Okay.

And then I hear little bits and pieces of the second game, and I'm like, wow, that's awesome.

Like, hey, you know what?

In the second game, if you steal and murder enough, the town will brand you in the village square so that everyone knows to fucking

ignore you.

And the only way to wash the stink of the brand is to go to a priest and agree to go on a holy pilgrimage and

walk the length of the map to a holy site

to redeem yourself in the eyes of the Christian Lord.

Wow.

Okay.

Well then, Pat, what's going on on your schedule this week?

My schedule is not going to include Kingdom Come Deliverance.

My schedule is is going to include more Virtua Fighter with Wooly.

And it's also going to be including playing the Night Rain Beta on Saturday with Woolly because me and the family, including

this dog,

are going to be traveling to Montreal tomorrow.

How about that?

For a visit.

Mom and dad need to see their grandson.

And also this thing, this freaky dog.

which means that, you know what, Woolly?

We're going to bring this bag.

Oh, yeah.

You should wear this bag.

Okay.

With this thing in it.

Okay.

Let's see.

Catch the weight on that.

Yeah.

Montreal trip.

So obviously that's our schedule as well.

More details

on the what's and the whens in specific will be posted on the schedule.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll hash out the times and shit, and then we'll put up little pictures on our blue skies.

I promise not to have any side embarrassing ambush cameras set up.

I don't believe you.

You shouldn't.

Yeah, I'll see.

All right.

Quick break.

BRB.

Yeah.

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This week,

the podcast is sponsored by Hero Forged.

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let me see if I can

get this

let me see if I can get this set up here.

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I made a little miniature woolly.

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That looks really good.

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Show monk one more time.

Here, let me see if I can get the light and camera good for this.

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Focus.

There we go.

Yeah.

That is really cool.

At the bottom there.

I'm going to keep this right on my desk.

There you go.

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All right, so for me,

it's going to be pretty short.

I did jump back online in Marvel Rivals.

Yay!

I jumped online with the group, so Black Gift, we rode,

we got some games.

It's interesting.

So you can only queue up with a maximum of four going on ranked.

Unless you're in a tournament, then you can do six.

But like...

Really?

Yeah, or if you do casual, I think you can do six.

But if you're going in ranked, you can't go more than four stack.

because I guess they just don't want people, they don't want to have like full groups where people are unable to join matches, and they don't want to have to have you wait for another group of six.

So, interestingly, um,

you they just decided to put a cap on that.

I had no idea that was the case.

You can't, yeah, you can't do five.

You can do six, people are saying you can queue four or six, but not five.

Oh,

is that what it it is?

Okay, that's what I'm saying.

Oh, you know why?

Because if one person gets ranked, you're not bullied queuing with five, that means you can only get solo queuers into your thing.

But if you're ranked queuing with four, then you can get all the people doing duos in.

And I guess to stop one person from getting bullied, right?

Yeah.

I.

That's interesting.

Okay, I think we misunderstood that then.

Yeah, we thought it was only four unless you did casual or tournament.

Okay, so full stack, just not five.

Hmm.

All right, well, in any case,

yeah, obviously, you know, needless to say, that's a much funner experience, much funner way to play the game is, you know,

on comms with other people and minimizing toxicity.

And I also,

you know,

took the opportunity to just learn how to play better, how to improve and, you know, work on the characters that I'm focusing on.

So like Moon Knight, I was able to

learn some tricks and

get better at some simple things that I kind of feel like are

particular to that character,

learning the matchup, so to speak.

The way Moon Knight kind of throws out three blades at a time, there's these little things to it where it's like, oh, if you kind of like zigzag left and right to stay defensive,

sometimes if you're moving sideways while throwing the three

blades out,

they're going to land in linear fashion and not, and you're not going to hit all three on target.

So every time you have the rhythm of releasing the three, you should stop, aim, and then keep moving.

So there's like a rhythm to how to fire with that character.

Learning how to aim the Ankh behind them instead of in front of them so that they have to turn around for an extra second to deal with the Ankh.

Calling out his ult and throwing an Ankh down that pulls them into the middle of it.

And, you know, all these little, just little, little, little basic tips.

And there's even, there's combos where you cancel attack animations to improve.

Yeah, that's crazy.

I don't do that.

I can't.

I can't focus.

It sounds intense, but it's actually not as bad once you give it a shot.

But essentially, certain things you can, certain buttons you can kind of like plink from one into the other to begin the second one faster.

And, you know,

in a life or death situation where somebody's got two headshots on you, it'll make all the difference.

As somebody who's bad at aiming, I need

all the tech like that I can get because

when I find myself 1v1 in a room and we're both jumping around and you know, doing the dance type of thing, anyone with basic FPS aiming and a mouse is going to just take me out way faster.

You know, so

I need to have like tech like that to compensate.

And

I also, yeah, same thing for like Iron Fist.

You know, there's a lot of fun I learned about like playing melee in that game and, you know, learning how to like go in and go out and finding the right rhythm to it.

Like the

picking your picks like like like

with precision, you know, there's, there's, there's, there's.

Don't overextend.

Don't ever overextend.

Unless the situation calls for it a little bit, but even then, you know, sometimes you can go a little bit, get that last kill, but don't don't, yeah, don't, don't, don't jump off the point too hard or fuck up the rhythm by getting greedy.

And yeah, no, it's just there's there's there's obviously a lot to this.

It's interesting to see too.

So something, you know, that they announced was that there's going to be a half-season reset

where with the release of the next Fantastic Four characters, they're going to drop everybody down by four,

not full ranks, but

not full tiers, but like individual sub-ranks or so.

No.

And so that has caused enough of a backlash that they canceled it.

So, yeah.

People hated that.

People, when season zero went to season one and everybody dropped four ranks,

everyone was so miserable.

The idea of a, because like the idea of a half season leading to a content update update is like, oh, shit, more stuff.

That's great.

That's cool.

You know, we're getting more things more frequently.

But then, yeah,

losing progress because of that, it feels like a bummer because, you know, like in the case where I'm like, okay, I'm in silver.

And if I lose four divisions, that means I'm going right back to Bronze 3.

Yeah, no, most people playing the game would be kicked all the way.

Like, because as you increase the ranks, like, they become less populated.

So four out of seven ranks going down, that means most people are starting over.

Yeah, feels bad if you've been trying to keep up.

And furthermore, if there's rewards associated with the rank you get to, you know,

it sounds like now they're going to just keep you where you are.

And if you play 10 ranked matches, you'll get the reward.

So that's nice because,

yeah, like it's it's half rank reset is weird.

It is like for half season, you know.

Between full ones where there's a big balance change and other stuff, it's a more understandable.

But no, obviously, everyone just losing progress, you know,

sucks.

And in a lot of cases, too, that's a rather sudden thing to drop on people with it coming around the corner as well.

You know, sometimes people kind of wait till the last minute to go hard on whatever their

tier was at.

So

nice to see that 180 very quickly.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, no, just no surprise there.

Queuing up with

people is a better experience than queuing up with not.

Although it is still like,

you still get those like people that talk shit, you know, in the in the stack where you're like, like, like literally, it was like, I think we were a group of four and then two, and then like the two people just like rage, quit, and left in the middle of the match, you know, and you're like, what the fuck you gonna do?

There they win.

You know, just a win.

No, no, no.

Our team.

Oh, your team?

Yeah, we were four, and then there was another two.

You don't know who's together and who's not when you see

the names.

But when they one left, and then the other one left mid-match, and you're like,

all right, there they go.

Oops.

You know, so toddlers are out there doing their thing.

Um,

that was cool.

Um, jumped back on metaphor.

I'm still working on the

one, two, three,

fourth

location.

Hold on.

This capital, that one, that one.

Ooh, the fourth one.

That's a good one.

Yeah, yeah, where you travel, you go pretty far from

that's my favorite one.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

That is my favorite one.

Interesting.

Okay, yeah.

It's a cool location, you know, hitting the island up and seeing what's going on.

Not much to say about progression points and everything until.

Did you laugh when you met the party member there?

I saw them and I was like, that's cool.

It's funny that

that's the reveal of what you look like.

No, I mean their name.

No.

If you're John Metaphor, then they're

so I'm talking about

okay, you're talking about Virga Island, right?

Yeah.

Okay, what's the party member's name there?

I forget his name.

Oh, oh, well, never mind then.

Okay.

But we met the dude that's likely going to be jumping in the group.

But yeah, I don't know.

I popped back in.

I did like a couple little like there.

There's a pun going on there that I think is really funny.

Gotcha.

Okay.

I forget.

I don't remember.

Once I complete the area and do more of them,

I'll have more for you there.

But

it is fun hanging out with

fucking

Wonder Wall duo there.

Oh, the Blowjob Brothers?

Is that what we're going with?

I was just going to go with Oasis, but sure.

I feel like

we got Oasis chilling

while we're trying to get up to our game.

I can't believe.

I could not believe when the game took a turn and they're like, you're going to hang out with these shitheads.

I'm like, really?

I'm going to hang out with these shitheads?

For an extended period of time.

I'm going to hang out with 50% of Lewis's Gay Boy squad?

Are you serious?

The Gay Boy squad is in, like, that's the expansion team for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We'll see what's going on.

But you know what?

Anyone that's got good fashion, I'm down to chill with.

Anyone that's got the extra textures and layers going on with their outfit, I feel it.

I appreciate appreciate their presence.

So,

yeah, no, not much else to say, though.

Again, I didn't do the main miss, so

but I did, I did Buddha backup, and I did get hit with that.

Oh, God, how do you play this again?

What was happening?

Okay, wait, what's going on?

And then, like, after getting all my bearings around just

the world and the plot and the characters and where I left off, then I was like, oh, God.

And then there's the systems and what I wanted to do with my build and my jobs.

And

yeah, don't take breaks you can't that game is brutal for don't do that

because i had a bunch of short goals in mind for like synergy ideas on the um the archetypes and i forgot all of them don't don't do that you should you should you should focus on that game because it's gonna get really incredibly easy to forget both the plot as well as like the mechanics because it's only going to increase in complexity from where you're at.

So there is a detailed like, you know, memorandum to look through, and you can talk to your fairy buddy, but unfortunately, none of those things are really like giving you current summaries of what you just did.

Yeah, because it assumes that you were playing the game over the course of like, you know, six weeks, basically.

Well, sometimes people step away, you know, sometimes you take a break.

I would highly recommend

powering through and finishing that game.

It is excellent.

It is fantastic.

I'm doing my best.

I can't make any promises, you know.

But

we'll just make the promise and just fail later, maybe.

It's fine.

Use the threat of shame to motivate you.

What I am noticing that is a bummer is I used,

when I'm playing on PS5, I actually like the share feature for like remembering things and just quickly screen gabbing things to reference later.

It's really become handy for that.

And PC, I'm not really doing that.

I guess I could reach over and do the print screen, but I'm kind of not really set up with the keyboard next to me.

But I've come to rely on that share button in the weirdest way in this generation, not for sharing at all, but for recapping in LPs what I did off camera and for remembering things that I might forget later.

That is interesting.

Not at all what they wanted, that share button.

No, that's that was not, that's not even for you.

That's for you to go to other people.

Well, it says share on it.

Why didn't we learn from Metal Gear Solid 1 when you loaded up your save and it gave you a summary of what you're doing?

Oh, I hate that.

I recently played through that game.

I was so annoyed.

The summary, in case you walked away from the game, it's taking time away from me getting back into the game.

It's too long.

I heavily appreciate a nice little what's up right now?

What's been going on?

Just use your brain and remember sometimes you you know a game you walk away from it after for a while a couple weeks um a great refresher is super useful uh what was the other there's another game we played mgs one in an afternoon how long are you walking away from mgs1 yeah but when you're fucking 10 years old it might take longer than that man yeah and when you're 10 years old you have infinite time on the weekends so you blow through it by the end of sunday anyway this is stupid a game Having a reminder for the stories is a useful thing.

I forgot what the more recent LP we were playing was.

There's something else that had another, like

the story so far thing that was that was appreciated.

But in any case,

yeah,

a little bit of metaphor.

My came out, and that's cool.

Not much to say beyond just

that fan tech makes her a blanca-like character where you've got

you've got to go and um practice permutations, right?

Because the flat the fan uh there because first of all you have three types of regular fan, then you have the charged version of those, so there's six, and then you have the flame version uncharged, and then the flame version charged, So, you know, that's 12.

And then you have the OD regular and OD flame.

You know what I'm going to do, Wooly?

Yeah, that's another

scale kick.

Yeah, sure.

Scissor kick.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Scissor kick.

100%, right?

But if you really want to think about it, like...

No.

12, 14,

16 different kinds of fans could be coming your direction at any time.

Actually, 17, 18 if you add the follow-ups.

So

EX, Psycho Crush.

15 kinds of fans, right?

Now, between these fans, you also have the ability to

rush in and get a high or a low or a throw and get a mix-up going.

So

if you are prepared to

create complex, your opponent doesn't know what the fuck is coming at them setups, you can practice and make my like really good by like labbing out what each of those situations looks like.

Because when the fans bounce upwards and drop back down on your opponent,

the height they bounce at depends on the strength of the button you press.

So, boy, there's a whole lot of possibilities that you can't really fully ever predict is what they're going for.

You can see the height they're coming at, and if you want to go for a parry, you can.

But

they want her to be overwhelming.

And so

they made it that way with the fans.

That's a fun part of it.

And

I would say that it's also interesting that

her level two,

the elbow with the fire from full screen.

Super deadly ninja beads.

Works from full screen.

That thing is a bionic arm.

Yes.

I did not expect you to say that.

You can throw out

her fan,

like her OD fan, for example, and if they're getting hit full screen, just go right into the level two

with the fire charged stock on it, and you can hit them full screen all the way.

That's really funny.

And if you take him to the corner, you can even do a follow-up

dragon punch, right?

So,

yeah.

There's a really, there's something to like putting a technician character

into the game here where Mai was not this in the past at all.

No, Mai is I'm going to jump in the air and do stupid shit.

Throw the fan out.

Don't jump at me.

Eat shit.

Here we go.

And now it's, yeah, now it's Angie Mito with the butterfly setups combined with like Blanca for just confusion.

Yeah.

Pretty, pretty, pretty fun setup, though.

I like it.

It's definitely the funnest version.

of like my

with with that like level of complexity to it.

The the things that i enjoyed with her aerial game and stuff were not going to work on good players that have great reactions at the end of the day there is something to consider there you know um

like

for example like i'd say like there's a there's a level that a certain where a character's game plan it only works at a like layman sort of intermediate level and then when you get to a higher level you're like this entire character doesn't work so king in teken has a bunch of grabs where like to you or I as human beings, we're like, God fucking damn it, I can't escape.

It hurts.

That's 50%.

That's crazy.

That's too much.

But really good Tekken players know exactly what grab is coming at them, can react to the which hand is above which, if it's left or right, and they immediately just break the grab.

And it's like, if your whole game was built around landing this grab and good players can always react to what you're doing, you cannot hurt them.

Therefore, this character is pointless.

So they had to put in some stuff where it's like, oh, he can do an identical animation, but you don't know which of the two is going to come out of it, you know?

So similar thing here, where they kind of have some setups where you're like, okay, even if you're really, really good,

you're not going to memorize 18 fucking fans' worth of setups.

No.

So you, as Mai, get to learn five.

And it doesn't matter which five.

Just make sure they're different situations.

And then every once in a while, do one of the yolo ones, and who knows what will come out of it, right?

Yeah, 100%.

This is the Moon Knight random shit go.

Random bullshit go.

Yeah.

Yeah, there you go.

So that's pretty much it.

So yeah, we're still going to, I think, get a get a chance at a cyberpunk session this week.

So yeah, stay tuned for that.

And then as well as, of course,

VF5 and Night Rain.

The Night Rain beta test.

That'll be a night, night stream.

Yeah, the Night Rain beta test is Saturday night at 10 p.m.

Yeah, we had the choice of doing it from 6 a.m.

to 9 a.m.

or 10 p.m.

to 1 p.m.

And that was an easy decision.

This is my least favorite kind of beta test.

I totally agree.

Closed and time-limited

fucking sucks.

For a game that's super hot that you would be a fool to ignore.

Yeah.

I get not everything is going to be open and not everything is just going to be running for the whole weekend, but it really means that if you don't hammer those servers immediately, right?

You're probably going to have some error messages right away.

There probably is going to be an hour delay.

You know, so it's like, oh, fuck.

Okay.

Well, it's 11 p.m.

now and we still can't get it.

We're going to talk about what to do when we look at it.

That's what I'm saying.

Right.

And it just doesn't work.

And the server error message, and they're like, sorry, guys, we're working on it.

And then they eventually get it up at 11.30.

And you're like, okay, so now

how long does it take to get through one run?

45 minutes.

There's, yeah.

So there's contingencies that we need to consider for sure.

But yes, Saturday night ass stream is the only way to do it.

so yeah I'll be I'll be posting the schedule about that as well

and hey hopefully PSN won't go down exactly oh wouldn't that be wonderful yes

so yeah Woolly versus on Twitch Woolly versus on

YouTube and stay tuned for my schedule posting on

my socials

Okay, so right into that, actually,

PSN goes down.

It just went down for like a whole day.

It went down right when I was doing the my stream,

or rather, the day the day before.

No word, no updates on what was happening, but servers were gone for hours.

And it got to the point where apparently Krispy Kreme was like, hey, if you're bored because PSN's down, come on down and get a free donut.

Like, you know.

And

there was a weird, confusing point where

folks were trying to load up physical media with their PS5s to go online and discovered a weird setup issue.

But if you pop in a disk drive while PSN is down and you have all settings on the default, you get a message that says you cannot pair your game disk to your account if you're if it can't verify through your PSN.

which is pretty horseshit.

The error message says, can't use your disk drive, something went wrong, registering your disk drive to your PS5.

Yeah, if the problem persists, wait for a while and try and restart your PS5.

So, fuck, obviously, this digital-only future that we were approaching.

Fortunately,

I was like, does this mean that you cannot use offline games

in physical format?

And it's like, no, you can, um when you but when you have to go into the ps5 settings and look and turn on um console sharing and offline play is a setting that needs to be enabled because it's off and if you if you need to basically tell the console yes allow me to play my games without internet please yeah that's stupid as shit really don't know that they were pulling psn down on purpose to secretly add bloodborne remastered to our accounts oh that's what it was that's why why they're going to have the state of play tomorrow.

And that's why they were so aggressive about making Bundleth take down

the old carts.

Man, the level of cope on this is so unbelievable.

Oh, God.

So Nightmare Kart, by the way,

got its old hunters-style expansion with some new shit coming.

And Bundleth, aka Botster, put up a post, and then it got fucking hit by Sony saying, You get that shit down.

It's like, what?

Yeah, it's like this is legally McDonald's Bloodborne patch got taken down, I think, two weeks ago.

Yeah, but it's legally distinct Bloodborne.

What's the problem?

And it turns out the problem was the description of the video linked to Bloodborne PSX.

And that was the problem.

It wasn't the actual content of

Nightmare Cart, you know.

Yeah, speaking of which, Bloodborne PSX is down off of

the itch.io now.

Because same reason.

you'll never be able to play Bloodborne PSX.

There's just no way

to get there's no way to get it now.

Gone forever.

It's gone.

If anyone is this aggressive about their licensing, surely it must mean they care about that license and are actively doing something with it.

Yeah,

no.

Anyway.

Great.

Cool.

PSN came back.

No word, but

that's all it was.

You know, I think somebody in our chat really nailed it.

It was like, they're going to announce

Silk Song cart tomorrow.

I just, I just,

like, I don't even want to hear the word Silk Song anymore.

I didn't want to say it with my mouth, but here we are.

I just, I'm tired of the entire everything.

There's a bitterness on my tongue.

There was another confusing story as well that popped up and then was not real.

But

there,

or not, not real, but like required clarification.

So there was an update to

Valve's Steam terms of service,

and they highlighted a section.

that bans advertising business models

that are essentially like forced ads like mobile games.

So a number of articles came out reflecting that they had a section basically saying you cannot have

paid advertising business model

games where the game is free or whatever the case is, but then you force the user to watch ads.

And thank fucking God, because obviously that cancerous shit on

proper

consoles and or Steam would just populate it with absolute dog shit.

So that's cool.

However, this was already a guideline.

They simply carved it out into its own section, but

this was not new.

This was already the case.

And that stands to reason.

Yeah, and that makes sense because we would have seen a ton of these already if that were not already the policy, right?

You know,

I think I know that when you like on App Store and on

Android and stuff, like there's the in-app purchases or includes in-game ads kind of

stuff you see, but you just you never quite know like how nuts it's going to be because sometimes there's the games where it's like, oh, there's an there's a banner on the title screen or some shit, and then there's the full-on, like you get one game and then you must watch this video, and then you must, and yeah,

fuck all that.

Beyond that, we did get, so yes, the Night Rain beta does,

closed beta,

does start Friday until Sunday.

But it's actually only for nine hours, ha ha ha ha.

Because of three-hour increments at a time,

which to me, you know, that's the mark of like basically,

that's the mark of this is not a network test for you to enjoy yourself.

This is us testing, stress testing the network, right?

Yeah, I don't care.

They sent me the fucking beta Elden Ring, and I played that for a while, and I put a video out, and that was great.

They should have done that.

Yeah,

it's not.

It's just, you know, having been behind the scenes during one of these stress tests,

you know, for compliance purposes,

during the downtime is when all the debug is going on, all the regression is going on, everything from the live environment, you know, they're noticing bugs and trying to fix them in between.

But it just, but as a public-facing thing, this is a first opportunity to play the game, you you know?

So you kind of get these two

different interests clashing with each other, and it sucks because it gives you a much, as a user, it gives you a worse experience, you know?

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know that they've done anything like this because I think this is their first super online game, right?

Like

Fromsoft hasn't done anything this.

I mean, you can play online.

Well, it depends on what you describe as super online game because literally every game since Demon Souls has had multiplayer.

And when they add

Coliseum expansions, then those are much more

dedicated

online environments, but persistently,

unavoidably online, I guess.

It would be really nice if the matchmaking in this worked better than literally every game they have ever made.

I have never had a universally good matchmaking situation with every from software game.

That would be nice.

It is always like, like, the amount of times I go to invade someone and it just says failed is too high.

Well, I'm just remembering the room right before you go into the, in DS1, you know, right after Artorius, the room to the left and right where you're like, you just, you try to join these things and you're just getting error messages on all of the fucking, you know, online modes.

And you're like, Yeah, what, like, what is even happening here?

You know, the shit that I've got.

I think the irony is that the game that I had the easiest time playing multiplayer was Dark Souls 2, where it worked the most consistently.

It's like the only thing in that game that was like way better than all the games around it.

Um,

yeah, the uh,

the

stuff where you know, you had like the old monk and all that are always like little, little fun bits in the mirror knights and such, even though there's that big old like loading and connecting masked parts of the fights and stuff.

But

in any case, yeah, it would be nice if you could play offline during

the downtime or so.

Well, you can probably play solo during the downtime.

I bet you it's going to just say no connecting.

If it's like a true closed network test, you're just going to get kicked the fuck out when it's not online, when the server's not online.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

No, no, no, I mean, you'll probably be able to play during the stated hours solo.

Oh, yes, yes, but but when the hours shut down, yeah, that's it.

Like, there's no nothing you can do.

So we'll see.

They did announce as well that,

you know, despite the fact that this is not a Miyazaki-directed game, there will be swamps.

They will be procedurally appearing.

Get out of it.

Are you serious?

As well as volcano and forest-like environments.

They're going to swamp up random areas.

Procedurally generated,

are going to happen

because large-scale terrain changes happen between boss fights.

The swamp will come to you.

That's fucked up.

Yeah.

Junya Ishizaki is

taking notes.

He wants to get a pat on the head from Miyazaki.

We'll see.

I'm really excited for that game.

That is like, I was like, oh man, I'm so burnt out on Elden Ring.

And then Night Rain comes out

or gets shown off.

And people are like, didn't you say you were

burnt out on Elden Ring?

It's like, yeah, the parts I was burnt out on Elden Ring was starting up Elden Ring and having the invisible mental checklist of places you need to go to play the game, which this game is literally built to be the opposite of that.

And the fact that the characters are also set means a streamlined experience means you don't have to stress over all those things.

This is basically just from Software's Hades.

Yes.

The stress that we were anticipating is the openness of

Elden Ring.

And this is a much more digestible thing.

I would love, yeah, I'd like to see

what those character builds and stuff look like and what to expect of that.

It'd be cool if they put something out like that this week.

But it's much just less.

It's a less stressful thing to prepare for going in knowing that

you have a limited number of ways you can go about your character.

Yakuza, aka Like a Dragon

is getting its 20th anniversary celebration going.

Yay!

And what better way to celebrate 20 years

than to have fans voting for for random objects or items associated with the franchise to be turned into collectible things.

Merchandise.

So if you want to go

and get yourself,

let's say, Imagima body pillow or Namba's umbrella or the cup from that Odin shop,

you can go vote.

Yeah.

You can get an ugly sweater with an itchy band on it.

Can I get an Onomichio anything?

Didn't see that.

I did see a bag.

Can you link me to this?

Sure.

If you want to get a costume of the cult leader of the Munan Cho

Heptenas,

you can get that.

You can vote for that.

Or a big pylon.

Even.

So, yeah.

Go vote.

I want to see the dumbest shit here.

All right, let's see what we got.

Go vote

on what merch you would like.

Short pee-pee.

Oh, man, there's some dumb shit in here.

Let's see.

I can't believe it's that cup.

That's so weird.

So, what?

It's like the cup from the Odin.

That cup from the Odin shop is literally the name of it.

What the fuck?

What are they talking about?

Don't worry about it.

Okay, I'm on the list.

All right, here we go.

Oh, the pins.

That's good.

Akiyama's watch.

There's a lot of gold stuff: gold plate, gold statue, gold pants,

gold safe, fukufuku, gold pants.

I'm looking for anything to do with Odomichio.

Bottle of sack.

Man, you can get Zhao's rings.

That's fucking stupid.

That's so dumb.

Ichiban's fucking

black, featureless baseball cap.

A fountain pen, perfume, aromatherapy candles.

Mahjong tiles is pretty cool, actually.

I'm becoming increasingly disappointed by not seeing anything.

Oh, yeah, Odomichio statue.

There it is.

Yeah, that's the one right there.

Let's see.

Majima's leather gloves,

steering covers.

Okay.

Oh, and Onomichio Standee.

Ooh, that's a good one, too.

Majima's lingerie.

Oh, yeah, when he's Goroton.

There you go.

They, yeah, so you can vote on like, it feels like a hundred things here.

This is the stupidest shit.

I love it.

I love it.

Call you stupid decoy pants.

There's panties with a bear on them.

What is happening?

Nah, don't worry about it.

Okay.

It'll all make sense if you play enough games.

A bicycle.

Just a delivery bicycle.

That's really good.

That's really funny.

That's really funny.

Big pylon has got to be like...

That's a fucking...

That's a standout, though, right?

Like, I feel like that's stupid as shit.

I feel like Big Pylon is a clear front runner.

Yeah, this is a clear, like, natural natural follow-up to like

the infinite wealth thing where there's like the biggest side quest in that game is Kiryu walking up to locations and the game going, remember that time?

And then saying

like one of the stupidest things that's ever happened in the series.

Remember that time I was a pirate next year?

Yes.

Yes, I do remember that time, which is weird because you don't remember that time because you had amnesia.

Uncool apron.

Oh, hey, man, I got to take a quick break.

I got to turn this dog out.

I'll be right back.

Speaking of the PSN outages and such,

it seems like as a result of that, the Monster Hunter Wilds beta is going to get an additional day.

Mm-hmm.

That beta is so weird.

Because it didn't start yet, but they're putting an extra day on it, probably because they lost it on.

Oh, my mistake.

Okay, it's like because they, yeah, you lost.

They lost, you lost a day of work on that, so you extended it so that people can, you know, yeah, no, that beta is so weird.

I haven't even touched it because it's like

it's they're like, it's an online beta, but it's like a really, and I mean really old build that like runs really bad.

Oh, that's the one with the no hit stop, yeah.

I think that's been changed, but like, yeah, no, it still runs like shit.

Okay.

So,

yeah, this is an extension from the 14th to the 18th.

And it's super weird because, like, review copies of Monster Hunter are out with the new performance.

With the updated versions.

And the benchmark is out.

And the benchmark runs really well.

Well, Capcom did this with 6, right?

Like,

the early beta version was unupated.

It's super strange.

Yeah, so there was that.

And they also announced a state of play happening tomorrow, I believe.

That's great.

I'm so glad I'll be able to cover that while I'm in the sky.

You know, they're going to announce Skongborn tomorrow because of that.

Well, I'm not in the sky, and I don't feel like covering it.

I'm going to be wrestling a toddler and a disabled dog in my airplane seat while this state of play goes on.

So fucking pray for me.

What time is it even starting at?

5 p.m.

Eastern, 40 minutes.

Hmm.

Hmm.

If I feel like it,

I'll put it on.

I'll put it on if I feel like it.

I was going to just do some cyberpunking.

Just put it on in a picture and picture so that if something cool happens, you can just go, oh,

oh, yeah, okay.

Not on stream, but then.

Yeah, okay, okay.

So then people can sync it up themselves.

Yeah.

No, no, put, put, put that on your street.

Like, put it picture in picture.

I have play cyberpunk, but there's you, and then there's your head, but then next to it, have the state of play.

Like, it's like it's a tiny little thing.

We'll see what happens.

Skong Watch.

Skongborn.

That just sounds like shit.

I make no promises.

And yeah, not much, but hey, they released a post.

Have you seen the poster for Mortal Kombat 2?

So they released a poster for Mortal Kombat 2?

I can confidently say I have seen a poster for Mortal Kombat 2.

Yeah.

But I don't think that's what you're saying to me.

The official poster for Mortal Kombat 2

has been released.

Johnny.

Uncaged Fury.

Oh, okay.

Johnny Cage, Rubble Without a Cage.

It's just a Johnny Cage movie poster.

It's committing to Scott Pilgrim, fucking

whatever.

Hey, man, whatever you have to do to distract people from playing the game.

This is the movie.

I'm talking about Mortal Kombat 2, the film.

Wait, what?

The sequel to the movie Mortal Kombat that came out.

From the 90s?

No, the new movie.

There's a new Mortal Kombat movie from a couple years ago.

There is?

Did we talk about it?

Yes!

2021!

With the new kid, and it had

a new kid in it.

And yeah.

Was it good?

Yeah, Cole Young.

No, No, was it good?

No.

Okay, yeah.

But it did have the best depiction of

Scorpion human and Sub-Zero, you know.

Sup, whatever.

They did their thing, but then there was.

If I get the ability to watch this on the plane tomorrow, should I watch it?

I'll watch it, but should I fucking plug my headphones in or not?

That's my question for you.

I mean, if your brain deleted its existence, then yeah, you should plug.

You should watch it.

You should pop in and see what's going on over there.

Absolutely.

It was a pandemic movie.

Oh.

Right in the middle of it.

The adventures of Cole Young.

He's an MMA fighter with a hidden lineage.

Dude, I hate that shit so much.

How do we get new audiences in?

Let's make a like let's make a bland

pile of crackers, the fucking main character, and then no, don't put salt on on them.

That's too spicy.

But no, but then you can, but how else are they supposed to relate?

I don't

relating this shit is fucking stupid.

Relating this stuff is fucking dumb.

Isn't it the dumbest?

Isn't it the worst?

I fucking hate it.

It's so dumb.

So many genres are all baked around the idea of having you relate to shit.

Like, no, let me take control of a mess who's already like losing control of their life.

You know, jump into someone else's.

The are the things I've ever seen or things that, like, I like, wow, I don't understand that at all.

What's that like?

Taking, like, you want to, you want to get a character whose dialogue options are all things you would never say.

Don't, don't relate.

Absolutely.

Relating this shit is so fucking stupid.

And it, and

anyway, whatever.

I don't want to go on this ranting.

Why is this girl movie about periods not talking about 9-11?

I can't relate to this.

I can't relate to this.

How could you go through puberty without talking about 9-11?

What the fuck?

Like, again, you're

self-insert Mary Sue's and RPG protagonists and so on and so forth.

It's a whole spiel.

And you know what it, and like, the real deal is that it's actually an extension of like children's like TV, right?

Like,

when you create a kid that you, as a kid, can relate to in the thing, you like the thing more, and you just age that up as you grow up, and then you're like, well, now I'm in high school, so I need a high school kid I can relate to, so make the protagonist a 15-year-old, and then

that just continues for you.

It's now

in your late 30s, and you still want to relate to that 15-year-old high school protagonist.

You know,

he can pilot the robot,

he can go on all the dates.

Let me relate to that.

Like, hey, listen, I'm 38.

The cast of Like a Dragon is now my age, and they're all really tired about it.

Okay,

and I think that's really cool.

That I'm like, hey, I understand being tired.

But guess what?

I started playing those games in 2005

when I was 20-something.

And I was like, oh, that's cool.

They seem really old and tired.

Weird.

I love

inserting myself into the shoes of

a Nasuverse style visual novel main character, Shinji Japanese boy.

That's the most relatable experience for me.

Stop it.

Anyways,

let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send it a letter, send it to CastleSuperBeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

You know, one time I did actually have to wear a

white button-up shirt and uniform, like, school pants.

I actually had to wear, like, visual novel main character outfit for a couple years of my life, and I fucking hated it.

It was

awful.

I hate that.

Dog shit.

How am I supposed to empathize with this person unless they're just like me and also look just like me

and also have my same values.

How could I under what

if they don't have those things?

They might as well be a monster.

I don't get it.

So fucking snowball.

We've had this conversation for fucking two decades now.

I have to play every video game in the world almost as like a person who can reach every shelf they interact with, and that's unrealistic.

Yeah, no.

God bless Rust and people loading up into a character that was black and had a dick size that they were not happy with.

Oh, the deep rage that comes from being forced into

a body that you just don't want anything to do with.

Let's take one over here

from

let's see.

Hey, Wall Run Woolly and Pop Vault Pat.

Connie here.

Ever since it first came out

and others have proclaimed that they've loved the never fire a bullet achievement in Mirror's Edge.

That's awesome.

I feel it's obviously

or rather they proclaim it's obviously the superior way to play the game.

It's been a take I could never get behind.

The issue is that running fast and doing cool parkour is the only actual fun thing about Mirror's Edge, and the few times the game stops for you mandatory combat aren't fun, whether you use guns or not.

But at least solving them with guns is fast and easy.

Clearing them with only melee combat is a trial and error exercise of memorizing spawn locations and finding arbitrary magic routes that keep you from being exposed too long so you can get close to Performing Faith's jank limited moveset.

And when people talk about how satisfying it is to work that out, all I can think of is how while they were getting bogged down in that, I simply clicked on the cops' heads and got back to doing cool level traversal long before they did.

So,

ever hear of people glorifying a game with self-imposed limitations that make you think, why do that?

That's a worse game.

Cheers.

I think this is a great email because this is a forest in the trees thing in which I completely agree with this email.

100%.

But what's missing?

What's missing from the scenario?

Is that using the guns in Mirror's Edge feels and plays way worse than the entire thing they just described?

It is faster.

It is objectively faster, right?

But shooting guns in Mirror's Edge 1 is miserable.

You're super slow.

It feels bad.

It's not built for it.

So it's interesting because

as someone who likes the idea of the parkour person taking on the guns and fight and fighting in that way.

I love that idea.

That's a fun, immersive thing to get into and try to solve the problem with that limitation.

But

games that have come out since, like, you know, there's parkour in games like

the fucking

ninja Walrot.

Jam near everything, honestly.

Yeah,

there's a whole bunch of games that have come and have,

exactly, right?

That have had mirror's edge-like mechanics.

But the gunplay has, or swordplay or fighting has been way more advanced and feels good to do when when there's a whole system's built around it.

The entirety of Titanfall is practically like that.

The clunkiness of gunplay in Mirror's Edge clearly feels like you're not supposed to be doing this.

And like, whether or not supposed to be, like, we do know that there was like an argument internally as to whether or not to include guns at all.

And then they split the difference by having the ability to just not do it.

But like, yeah, no, guns in that game feel bad.

And to your

feeling that, like, yes, I got through it a lot faster.

And so I got rid of the bad part like more easily, and that it is annoying to like, you know, figure out the spawn locations and go through the magic path.

That's true.

But

you're not accommodating for scale.

And a lot of this is taste, right?

Because me slowing to a crawl in Mirror's Edge when I pick up a gun feels way worse than having to figure out the enemy locations and die 20 times, because at least when I'm doing that second one, I'm still getting to run fast, which is the reason I'm playing Mirror's Edge.

The momentum of picking up speed and avoiding getting hit because you're moving at max speed is a real fun system that works into the game loop, even if you have to like find a couple of like difficult routes to take to get up close to do a takedown, you know?

Yeah, and I don't know what to say besides like, if the immersion part of that means nothing to you, then you're just a different person from me and you don't like the same things and that's okay.

But I also am somebody who, you know, like I don't want to,

you can use a bunch of items in character action games and smooth over that experience and you can use a bottle rocket in Wonderful 101 and see what it does.

I don't know what I don't even know what it looks like when you use it, but it's there, you know, and that's like, that's a way to play the game.

But I think that when I'm thinking of like the

part of the part of the story with the character that is like not really a gun user and like the fact that they allow you to do that,

yeah, I enjoy that loop a lot more.

I just, I get more out of the fact that this is a parkouring game and it gives you a way to solve this.

I'm also somebody, of course, I've said this, going out of the

norm here, I've played Bioshock 2 going for the Big Daddy build the whole way through the game, right?

That's a really unusual way to go with it, but I enjoyed that too.

So I like, I'm down to, you know, approach a whole game in a very different way.

But yeah, I just feel like this is one of those cut cases of like, they made it feel bad.

And the part of the team that did not agree at the very least, whether or not they wanted it to, if they made gunplay feel really good and then part of the team was like, no, we don't want guns, that would have been weird, you know?

Yeah.

And like the character action thing that you mentioned is like probably my perfect example because the core of the email is like, do you think of anything anything else that people decide to

self-impose limitations and it's like the reason why you and I don't use items in character action games is not because they're not effective it's because using them is dull

you're like getting better at the combat is more interesting than using an item to mitigate damage or enemies um so something that i'm talking about i mentioned it last podcast what i was like the reason why i look around in cyberpunk is because while people are talking, it's not because I'm like ADHD HDing around the room, but it's because I'm trying to immerse myself and emulate a real conversation where I would look around while talking to somebody, right?

We are looking at a history of games where we see the cutscene version of characters and then we're like, can you live up to the promise of cutscene Dante?

Can you live up to the promise of cutscene faith?

You know, the cutscene version of the characters is like an ideal and then the gameplay is like can't is a challenge to I can only think of one game I've ever played in my entire life in which the in-game version of the character is in fact more impressive than the cutscene version of the character, and that is Vanquish.

Yeah, sure, right?

Vanquish is cutscene.

Yeah, yeah, Sam is fairly restrained, but like end-of-the-game gameplay, Sam, is out of control.

That's it.

That's it.

So, you know, it's ultimately like, I can't tell you to like pick up a habit and do something that feels annoying to you and say, like, that's the superior way to go.

But I can say that, like, a lot of the time when I'm playing a game and I see

a style of play or like a challenge or something inherently as a possibility that feels right with what the game is going for, I enjoy striving to

achieve that, you know, to match what the

to match the design, essentially.

So I've been playing MGS3 and somebody asked a question,

do you think that the

trank gun ruined Metal Gear?

And I said, no,

I don't think the Trank gun ruined Metal Gear.

Interesting.

That's ridiculous because in gameplay terms, it is like nearly, it's just a worse version of the pistol that you get.

for all those characters.

But

I thought about it more while we're having this conversation.

And like for a certain type of player, it totally does ruin Metal Gear because if you want to do a no-kill playthrough,

part of that with nearly exclusively lethal weapons in Metal Gear 1 means you have a really limited

option to do that.

In Metal Gear 2, Solid 2, they just go, no, here's a really effective gun that will actually, you can just shoot everybody and then it'll be fine.

So it's two things, right?

One,

it's going against the no-kill philosophy, because if you're playing the game and you have like a Batman rule in your head, you know, that's one experience that you're challenging, which, to be fair, a lot of games do.

I mean, you know, obviously like Deus Ex, right?

I beat Human Revolution with zero fatalities.

But then the second part of it is being sneaky is the other part of what a Metal Gear game is supposed to be.

And if you stand on a cliffside and eliminate all the threats, then you don't have to do any sneaking.

Did you have to sneak?

Like the most interesting interesting thing that I did in the last time I streamed Metal Gear is that I went to one of those little bases in Metal Gear 3 and I thought I had tranked all the guards, but I didn't.

I missed one.

And he found one of the guards I had tranked.

And then they spotted me.

And then I had a whole fucking interaction and a fun gameplay sequence in which I was hiding from people and shooting people, you know, et cetera.

And it's like, if I just perfectly tranked all those guys from a mile away, then that section would have been really dull by comparison.

Also, some games are about sneaking and eliminating as you go, and other games are about sneaking and not interrupting the flow of things.

You know, and yeah, it's the difference between pacifism and ghost, right?

Right.

People that are calling in for radio rounds and going, somebody's missing, go check it out.

It's like, okay, the game doesn't want you to remove people as you go, you know?

So, yeah, Hitman.

It's always interesting in a game that it's like, can you do this mission?

And it's like you didn't exist

outside of the main objective.

No hair is out of place except like the higher levels of difficulty on Hitman.

Yeah.

It's like the guy is dead, but nothing happened.

That's what, huh?

I'm always reminded of

the snow

mansion where you just shoot out the bottom of the hot tub from the glass from way below.

And like, if your mark is in the glass, there they go.

and we don't even walk into the house

we don't even walk into the house we don't even play the mission we just look up pop pop all right good job 47

yeah but there's a there's a lot of ways to to to limit uh yourself and get enjoyment like for example

Let's let's take a really long look at this.

Let's say I want to play Street Fighter, and Paige doesn't want to play Street Fighter.

Well, there's only one other person in my house right now that can fight me in local Street Fighter, and that is a human baby.

Now, if I just grabbed this controller and grabbed all these buttons and went, let's go, little man, that's not going to be very enjoyable because he's like a goo-goo gaga and I will whoop his ass.

But if I have the condition of I can't hold the controller, I can only press buttons with my index finger, I could at least have some level of enjoyment.

There you go.

I'll still win, though.

I'll still win, though.

Give the baby dynamic mode.

Then you'll see what's up.

He's got to learn.

Yeah, no,

there's use cases for those things, you know?

Has to mow the lawn every week until he can beat me in a fighting game of his choice.

That's

a good idea.

That might take a bit.

That might take a minute.

Yeah, that might take a minute.

That's a hell of a motivator, though.

All right, let's take one over here.

Matthew says, dear Lords of Castle Super Jump, a discussion a month back about Marvel Arrivals, Willie was asking about mobile characters and their movement options, and it got me thinking about movement options as a whole ecosystem, which leads me to a question.

What are the best options in general?

What are the most fun, stylish, expressive movement options?

What are the most practical, versatile, and overall?

And

so on and so forth.

What do you think of first when you're like, we're really moving now?

Speed is number one.

As a lifelong Dragoon mark, I'll always be a fan of super jumps.

Yeah.

So speed is number one.

The faster you are, the better you are.

But in going with Dragoon, in a multiplayer context, the ability to leave

the sight line of another player by going really high, really fast is really strong.

That's why in a lot of first-person games, you can run at somebody and you have a good jump, jump over them.

They got to spin their whole fucking bullshit around.

It's annoying.

So it's interesting because there's a lot of really specific examples you can give, like an air dash, a web swing, you know, a grapple, et cetera, a boost, a double jump.

But I think the common thread is the same.

It's not full-on flight defying gravity.

It's limited defying of gravity, right?

When you get to accelerate into the air in a certain way with a a certain trajectory for a limited period of time and then gravity kicks back in, it feels way better than just staying and, you know, we learned this long ago when tribes came out and skiing in tribes happened.

And it's like, wow, this is way better than jetpacking.

That's it.

This is way better.

You know, I think

a lot of people fucking love Spider-Man just for the traversal aspect of it, you know, and,

you know, wall running, anything that you can, you can throw on to like just

extra

extra wall running that increases your speed, you know, and you go into like those buddy hops where you start seating like no, I'm getting faster and faster.

This is the opposite of how it would really work, but fuck it, it's fun.

Absolutely.

People in chat mentioned bullet jumping and warframe, which completely transformed that game from a cool game to a pretty cool game.

You know, getting around with

Trick is really nice because one of the first problems presented by Devil May Cry when you didn't buy your Stinger yet is, How the fuck do I get over there?

It takes so long, you know, and then you start stinging up to people, but then it's like, ah, it still takes a while.

And so, like, yeah, finally getting the ability to really just instantly be where you want to be feels great after you feel like the shackles of your speed.

Yeah, the core of like a good

movement is it's complex,

like it has depth to it, but it's predictable.

So like

even though like like the Spider-Man swinging, right?

There's a lot of stuff there, but all of it boils down to do you understand how an arc works?

If yes, then you can understand swinging at an intuitive level.

If you do not understand a parabolic arc, then why did Spider-Man go straight forward when I released here, but he went straight up when I released here?

It might be tough.

The reason why dogs enjoy playing catch and catching frisbees is because they feel like they are the ball or the frisbee when they're looking at it.

And I feel like we can get some of that when you're swinging and then falling and then swinging and then falling.

You get a little bit of that woo-you know, the rush of a bungee jump into like a nice pull out of it, a dive.

I'm going to throw in there

that like Armored Core is phenomenal when it comes to

camera movement where the camera can barely keep up as your side dashes and dodges and assault boosts are like pushing the camera to the limit.

That's really good.

Because when you boost, the mech always goes much further off to the side than a camera would normally allow in most games.

I also say the camera

barely keeping up when you do when you Shine Spark, right?

In Metroid.

One of my favorite things as a kid was just like,

it cannot keep up.

Samus is too fast.

You're at the edge of the screen.

And that also introduces, I'd say, the after images effect as well.

K-Dash doing blackout, you know, is one of the coolest looking movement things I can think of.

I wish more things felt like you could do a blackout in any direction.

Someone in the chat mentions Gravity Rush, and I think that Gravity Rush deserves like a special like atta boy and like a thumbs up because

Gravity Rush is essentially point-to-point flight.

Like it is, it is

exactly what we are talking about, how not to do it.

But the level of animation work and perspective and camera work really quite sells that Gravity Rush, you do not fly anywhere, you fall everywhere, you fall to

destination

dramatically different feel.

Yes, a million percent.

Yeah, and and you know, well, just to just to elaborate a little bit more on the last point, camera is also like a fake trick, you know, like the camera feeling like you're sprinting in Mass Effect when you're actually moving the same speed, but it's just adding a little bit of a

hilarious.

So, camera can do a lot, but in the same way, after images can do a lot.

If you're fighting a boss in any game that's one-on-one and then they dodge to the side, but you see after images behind that dodge,

you're like, oh, oh, hold on a minute, wait a second,

Some real shit is going on, you know, like there's something noteworthy about that.

That, that, that, just, you feel the movement and the momentum a little bit more with things like that.

So, even if it's just an illusion as well, you can, you can make movement feel better.

I will say, though, uh, swinging is, is, feels better than point-to-point.

Movement along an arc feels better than movement along a straight line in games.

Always, always, yep, yep.

Um, that's why I remember when I was told about uh freedom Wars, and it was like, oh, it's got a grappling hook.

And I was like, yeah, but it's a point-to-point grappling hook.

And I saw that and I immediately went, oh, that's not

what I like, though.

I was like, oh, no,

that's not it.

No, it's not.

It's not.

Don't give me the zip line.

I don't want a zip line.

I want a because momentum is fun.

Momentum and inertia as physical concepts are fun.

That's it.

Yeah.

So there you go.

I think.

Oh,

Legend of Kage

and uh Otogi 2,

when you do a normal jump and you are just

soaring through the air like an old kung fu film, you just like

Hulk jumping, Hulk ultimate destruction jumping, you know, um, it feels great, and it feels great because you're just you're you're soaring for a minute and then you know you're gonna land somewhere.

So

that's it, that's it.

Um, cool.

All right, I will see you in a couple of days, Wolves.

Take it easy.