CSB302: MEINKRAFT

You know what?

Fuck it.

Let's get that

noise in there.

Yes.

Ah, ah, the crack and sip.

Is that an answer?

Yeah.

You look like you're ready and willing to be trapped in a maze.

I do look like I'm ready to be trapped in an infinite maze of which there is no escape.

Where the focus is on you.

On me.

Did AI generate me into the infinite maze?

Oh, how exciting.

It sure did.

Right after it generated all those booze that Hulk Hogan got when he walked.

Oh, is that what we're doing now?

Is that what we're doing?

AI generated the booze?

Oh.

Oh, that's

good.

That's real good.

Trapped in an infinite maze, though.

Oh, I don't want to be in the infinite maze.

Well, too late.

Facebook puts you there.

No,

I don't haven't used my Facebook in like 10 years.

Get out of there.

Man, my mom will just read things on Facebook and just

talk to me on the phone like they're real.

Yeah, man.

I don't get it.

I don't get it i mean you you shouldn't do though like it's there's just no escaping it we're locked in it's done

this is the woman that when i was like six or seven would say now patch you can't believe everything you see on tv and we were like watching the news

is now like looking at like

bees are stealing all your water headlines on facebook and going oh my god i should call patrick i had like this morning

you know, I had my

a new version.

It's not new, but it's like, it's cemented.

I watched, whatever, I scrolled past some dumb,

like basically person filming what is essentially a skit, but pretending that it's real type of shit.

And you'd say this.

Exactly, right?

And

then

in the discussion underneath was just the like

argument about, hey, was that, like, you guys know that, like, they're just,

that's not a real thing, right?

And then it was like, yeah,

but, like,

it was just, but it's emblematic of reality.

It made me smile, and that's all that kind of matters.

And it was like, speaks to truth.

Yeah, right.

I don't.

Can we just get Jonathan Franks to tell me that it didn't happen?

It was a fabrication.

We made it up.

Our writers.

He always looks so fucking smug.

Yeah.

You wouldn't hire him if he didn't.

Yeah.

Yeah, no.

A week did occur, though.

I don't know what you got up to, but

this week

I did finally crack into

Act Two of Cyberpunk.

I heard that

this is your first

Skyrim exiting the cave moment and then when you hit the map and saw the icons you were like boo.

So that's not exactly that's not the truth.

That's not it.

It's more just I played the session and then I did the heist and

I basically at the end of the session I was just kind of talking about how

I was still feeling kind of overwhelmed with systems and

overall information and stuff.

You know, if you've played,

we talked about the UBI style games of like, you know, seeing a bunch of icons on the map and, you know, and any open world game as well.

The icon vomit.

There's a lot of those things.

And, you know, I'm sure any

game where you have a large city to scale in a GTA kind of way is also like, you know, there's comparison points for all these things.

But

it's more just just kind of when I was like looking at the

like comparing, quickly comparing which items to which weapons to keep and which ones not to keep.

And

kind of

a couple of other things about just like getting used to what is

I don't know what the process is, but it's essentially like it's that thing where you put up walls in a video game and realize this is where the limitations are,

where initially you kind of think like, oh, it's just

an encyclopedia of information in all directions.

And then over time, you kind of quickly realize, oh, it's not actually.

It's much more.

Yeah, you would have skipped that part if you had like familiarity with like, you know, like playing Witcher 3 or something like that, where it's like, they, they build

their play set in a really specific way kind of every time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, you know, menus on menus connected to menus is certainly like one way to quickly get lost in things.

And

another thing too is kind of like, I guess when looking at, for example, like with the weapons in particular,

I was looking to, I was kind of going like, okay, what is the number for which weapon here is better when I'm comparing these two?

And it's like, well, it's not really like that.

It's more just like these are all different stats.

And

unless you're getting like the same gun, but slightly better.

Yeah.

So there's tiers, but either way, sometimes they're, but it's not universal, right?

Because there's still going to be like some are going to have more slots than others for customization, and some might be customized with the things you want, and some might not, you know?

And so

what I kind of, and what I now realize is from look just at a quick glance, you kind of have to just go, yeah, fuck it, I don't care.

Does that have kind of a thing I want?

And is it relatively in the range of what I'm looking for?

Yes, then good.

No, then ditch.

But like, more so when we're talking about like, you know, even let's say item clutter in Neo or

any of the other games where you're picking up a whole lot of them,

there's a very quick like, this is red, it's weaker than what I got, it's bad for the class, for the slot, or for the

type of weapon, or it's better, you know?

And as somebody who's like, I just want to have the best single version of each thing, if I get a better shotgun than my last shotgun, I can ditch that old shotgun, I don't care.

While I'm feeling it out at least, until I want to make a specific one, that part was hard to do quickly picking them up for the first time.

Cyberpunk has some of the issues that the Witcher series has with its itemization.

I think Witcher 3 has like one of the worst

sets of items I've ever seen in a game in my entire life.

Like genuinely.

Because you are picking up swords and pieces of armor.

off of almost every single human-ish enemy in the entire game.

And we're talking like tens of thousands of swords and shit, right?

Um, but there are quests to build Witcher gear, so like the armor of the manticore, which is multiple orders of magnitude better than literally anything you could ever find on the ground or in a chest.

Okay, so you go on the witcher gear quest and you go, oh man, I made the cat set,

and then every single piece of gear you pick up for like 60 more hours is dog shit.

And then you find the second tier of the cat set.

Guys.

And you're like, oh, yeah.

So thus you just use outfits to glamour yourself up.

No, there's no glam.

Yeah, you can outfit.

In Witcher 3.

Oh, Witcher 3.

Sorry, sorry.

Yeah, okay.

In this instance,

yeah, I kind of like, while we've talked and lamented about games with overlooting and overwhelming you with the weapons and stuff.

Overall, for me, I realized like while I was fine with Neos,

it's more like it was overwhelming, but there was a quick system for mentally discarding that which was not necessary.

So at a glance, you could go down your list and go, need it, don't need it, don't need it, drop, drop, drop, drop, sell, sell, sell, sell, scrap, merge, keep, right?

And that was because it had an overall, it had that overall number, and it had that, that, the, um, it had the overall number.

It kind of had the part of a set aspects and then the rarity.

And you could just quickly go like, all right, purple, better than what I have done.

And here,

it just doesn't do that.

It has the rarity, and it has the aspects, but it doesn't have that kind of like overall damage number, I suppose.

Or if it does, it's like, there's DP, yes, but that might have a, what about attack speed and reload, and it kind of just balances in a way where I'm like, I kind of like an overall.

grade of each weapon I pick up for a quick mental you know calculation of what's worth keeping and not.

Man,

you're explaining this, and I'm like, kind of laughing to myself because I'm remembering little bits and pieces of the way like CD Projects, like, interface stuff has, like, increased over time.

And there's one of the things that I turn, I personally didn't encounter in about 15 or 20 hours playing cyberpunk, but I encountered

every time I did a session of Witcher 3

and in some cases, Witcher 2,

where you'll pick up like you'll you'll max out your inventory of bullshit.

You'll be like, man, I'm carrying like 45 fucking swords and 10 armors.

I should go sell this.

And

every single merchant in the game can buy like 20% of that.

They just literally don't even have enough gold to pay you.

Oh, because the cash.

So you end up having to do this fucking nonsense circuit of the major areas to empty your inventory.

Oh, man.

So that number next to the seller is the limit of what they can buy.

Yeah.

I didn't realize that.

Okay.

Well, I didn't run into that in Cyberpunk.

Okay.

Well, I mean, admittedly,

you

dump stuff off in the drop boxes, and then you can discard for creating, you know,

for creating,

whatchamacallit, rarity, like,

iconic parts or whatever.

Mods, whatever.

Yeah.

So

it's,

it is it is kind of you know funny to just kind of have that part be there at a glance.

And I'm definitely kind of reminded to like, this would be, this would definitely be similar for like walking into weapon crafting and understanding equipment and armor in like a Souls game, right?

Just kind of staring at that screen and kind of trying to crack your way through that for the first time.

I was about to say something really stupid.

I almost said, well, Souls shit isn't that complicated.

And then I'm like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait.

No, I got used to it.

I got used to it.

No, it's quite, it's very complicated.

But

it's still absurd.

It's absurd how complicated.

But that was a semi-blind learning experience LP that I did.

So like, you know, you were there to explain how those parts stuff worked.

I was like, oh, okay.

And then German Spy was also around later to explain stuff.

And I was like, oh, okay.

You know, so you had there was the handhold.

And then I would even say, like, there was the part where then you have the help button, you know, which they added later.

And

that also came in handy for like Armored Core, where I was like, I don't quite know what I'm looking at.

And Armored Core, I did have a session of going, all right, stop the LP for a second.

What am I looking at?

Right?

How do I interpret how to use these weapons properly?

And then what am I searching for when I take them to the range?

Because a couple percentage increase in speed in something is very hard to feel.

Oh man, like percentile increases.

We've talked about this before.

Anything less than 10%,

you'll never feel it.

Yeah.

So that being said, because we've been talking about this for a couple of minutes now, I don't want this to skew the impression here.

I now get it because I've spent a bunch of time off camera feeling out

and in particular, I've been doing the

NCPD missions.

So I've done a bunch of those.

And

that has really, really helped me put the game up in its, like, put the borders up on what the game is and what the game isn't.

You know, what it is not is a first-person futuristic Baldur's Gate 3.

No,

no, no, no, no, it is, it is your, your, your physical location in space is up to you in any way, and how you interact along certain very specific lines is up to you in any way, but it is still a very crafted

straight-line narrative.

Yes.

And

it is an action game with a whole lot of narrative

available to you.

But as you walk about the streets and you see crimes or you go interact with those, you just go walk up and kill the grunts, pick up their shit, and walk away.

And that's it.

Get in a car.

They were criminals.

Drive to the next one.

And

while you drive around and get into fights, people will sometimes message you and ask you things.

And then occasionally, I guess you'll get locked into some some, you know, set pieces or so, but I haven't touched any of those.

I just did the NCPD stuff.

And that has been like, okay,

this helps.

You know, the roleplay aspect of this is super backseat.

I mean, I know that there's relationship stuff, but I don't know how to do it.

Yeah, but

it's like Mass Effect-ish in its complexity.

Yeah, okay.

So fairly minor.

And

then on top of that, too, walking over to like a Ripper dock and seeing the inventory also, at least for now, created a nice, like, all right, when people are talking about you're going to want to get your fists, your gorilla arms, and Sandevastans,

that's not like picking, I don't know,

a hex scythe.

or of you know where it's like that's a one of many think attributes on in one of many um weapon styles where here, at least initially, they're like, do you want to do hacking as a whole or throw that out for an OS?

Do you mean magic?

Yeah, do you want to do magic as a whole?

Or do you want time stop instead of magic as a whole?

Or do you want

Blood Rage instead of time stop or magic as a whole?

And you like, those are the three OS options you have initially.

And it's like, okay, you're not always hacking while choosing which types of buffs.

And you know what I mean?

Like, I, I, because I thought, like, hacking was a whole separate thing that every type of character would be able to

ignore that shit while doing other stuff, you know?

But it's, it's.

Yeah.

The amount of points you get is like you can max out like three stats and get halfway up on a fourth.

So it's like, well, what three stats do you want?

Well, you want reflex and you want cool and you want cybernetics.

Those are the cool ones.

So, you know, seeing that it's like, okay, there's three initial classes to basically be here.

And then if you decide to go melee, you can go with punches or you can go with blades or whips or the rocket arm thing.

And those are your four.

Or and, you know, and then like, what kind of jump you want?

You want a double jump?

You want a high jump?

You want a quick run?

You know, you want a stealth?

Yeah.

And those are your four.

And they're like, okay, okay, okay.

And so all these limitations have made it much like more comfortable and sort of sane, I guess.

Because I was like, oh, man, what's it going to be?

How are we getting thrown into deep end here?

And thankfully, I'm like, all right, I get it now.

Very comfortable.

Like, mechanically, it's like Witcher 4 or like Deus Ex had a little baby.

You know, like,

it's a CD project game through and through.

It's just that aesthetic is just so...

The aesthetic and the perspective.

Putting it in first person just changes the expectations of the type of game it is.

That does a lot for it.

And I would also say that that tech menu of unlocks, right?

The level up character stats and such.

Like, as you go into each of those stats and you see the full tree,

when you're not...

Now, like, okay, now that I'm a bit more familiar with each tree and what the major

points are on each one, like, I'm sure that's where everybody else that's watching is.

And they're like, yeah, you know, you kind of just know very vaguely what these skills are about.

But when you don't know, and it's like, it just feels like tabs and tabs, you're like, oh, man,

until I get familiar, I'm just going to not know how to do things like kind of, you know, quickly and not waste time, I guess.

Now, none of this and of

the learning process of what I'm describing here is really a problem at all if you're just kind of like taking your time and going through it.

But I'm very conscientious of like, if I have to stop for five minutes and just read, that's not what

an LP.

Yeah, you have different reading streams, sir.

I do.

So I'm very concerned about those about moments like that, you know, and I feel like

this has allowed me to get more comfortable.

So, yay, that's worked out.

And

in the process, of course, of doing a bunch of those NCPD missions, which are really no plot content, you know, very minimal.

You just walk up to the...

Ah, guy's going nuts.

Oh, he's got a back Dally thing.

Go kill him.

Okay.

Yeah.

Just go beat up a bunch of gang.

gang gangers.

In the process, of course, like I've leveled up a good bit, and I don't imagine it's much of an issue in this kind of game.

It seems as if the difficulty scales, and there's a couple of checks that also scale with you as you get stronger.

So,

and like the first

couple of missions you do, you get like tons of XP right off the bat and level up really quickly.

And then obviously, that tapers off.

But all this to say, yeah, when we boot up the next stream and I come back in and I'm, you know, much higher levels of stuff,

I imagine, you know,

it shouldn't affect too too much.

That being said, I also hear that like you eventually you power up to the point where the game gets trivialized almost no matter what.

And

CD Projekt is not good at that.

So I have played all of CD Projekt's releases.

They all have the same problem.

They have a 100% success rate on having an inverted difficulty curve.

All three Witcher games games have a difficulty curve in which the hardest part of the game is the first hour and the second hardest is the second hour and so on and so forth.

And then you just get the melting abilities.

Yeah.

Okay.

So if that's what I'm expecting here, then yeah,

it's not like it would have been too much of a struggle.

You know, outside of things where like

my dog should aim or whatever, you know.

But I also

want

to

feel what it's like to, like, you know, see what the builds are and stuff in a way.

So that's kind of why I wanted the respec ability.

I think as a result, so I know spreading yourself too thin in this kind of game comes back to bite you in the ass because

they kind of want you to like go all in on one style.

The top tier perks are really strong.

I

went, for example, like I was not planning to do like much spellcasting you know just based on the first session or so but then when messing around in in you know the

off-screen I was like oh it's pretty fun to like stack up a bunch of like quick hacks and then run in and slash somebody you know so I tried that out but to do that you've got to get your intelligence up to nine so you've got to you've got to spend those those points pushing it further than you would into body or reflexes or so um and then when I was like all right let me go try out Time Stop or let me go try out the Blood Rage.

You now have to pull those points out and put them elsewhere, but your intelligence stays where it was.

And to get the 9 or 15 to go higher in the next screen, you got to go get those levels higher as well.

So it feels like,

yeah, there's no real, it doesn't kind of, it doesn't want you to dip your water, your toes in too much in the like,

the cutoff point of each tree, but it does want you to play within what you have unlocked by letting you refund the yellow points, you know?

And let me ask you, did you have the threat detection eyeballs on during the heist?

I think I had default eyeballs on.

I didn't do any ripper dock stuff until after.

So the heist is cool.

The heist is great.

It is.

But when you're hiding behind the fish tank in the wall

and big boy Adam comes in,

if you have the, oh, that was removed?

Oh, no, that's a bummer.

It used to be if you had the eyeball and upgrade that would

show you who can perceive you in a room, Adam would glow.

Okay, well,

if that's a hard confirm, that's really cool because...

Apparently that was a bug.

I looked at him and I was like...

I looked at him.

It's like, he's looking at us.

He's staring in your direction while everything else is going on.

They should have left that shit in.

I 100% believe that he's looking at you and is just like, are you doing anything?

All right, whatever.

I'm out.

My job is.

They should have kept that shit.

It feels 1,000% like he knows you're there, but just doesn't give a shit until you try something.

You know?

The way he's positioned, it feels too obvious or too.

Dude, I love Adam Smasher.

That guy's great.

Yeah.

And

I guess.

Well, the heist felt much more on Rails than that initial vertical slice mission did.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it does.

Well, because a bunch of really important things have to happen in a row.

You

can't be messing it up too much.

But the,

I guess like the the the uh the um

the first first mission where you uh pull the girl out of the bathtub um where you can sneak behind the vents and then um

uh uh uh

shit

uh your your your boy

what's a jackie jackie tackles the guy against the wall as you come through like

I feel like that's a very

superscripted moment that you're probably not going to get a ton of in the future.

Anyway,

it was cool to kind of, you know, I saw that part on these.

Yeah, someone in the chat correctly answered.

It was Jake the dog.

Jackie the dog.

Nice.

I did find, I took the break in the lobby and I found the Hideyoshi Ojima.

Oh, yeah, you found the Kojambo.

I looked at him at first, though, and I was like,

because

we looked at him at first, and Reggie's like, wait, is that?

And I was like, I don't know, dude.

Not all Asian dudes are just going to be a Kojima mom.

Just because you see him.

And then, like, no, wait, that's actually him.

And then, like, he recorded his voice talking shit.

I was like, okay, and then did he announce that he was doing a cam?

Yeah, okay, that's him.

Right?

Yeah, he's there.

He's in control.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it could have just been some guy, right?

It could have just been some guy.

You knew.

You know.

Yeah.

So that was cool.

That was cool, though.

I did like the heist.

I didn't realize that

act one, quote unquote, was literally just the intro, you know, and act two is the game.

So

I'm not.

I'd never beat Cyberpunk, so I could probably ask somebody who's watching right now, and they'd answer me before the end of it.

Because

Witcher 3 had, it didn't have like super well-defined acts, but it did have geographic locations that made it extremely clear where and like this is the

tutorial.

This is the, you know, this is the first part of the game, the second part of the game.

And it had this setup that

you do like a hundred hours and you did all the regions, and you're like, I'm ready to go into the end of the game now.

And then the game kept going for like 55 more hours.

And I've never

seen anything do that ever.

I mean, is it because it makes the mission like go out and make a name for yourself?

And like, that's your main quest?

No, in Witcher,

you have an extremely clear goal for like the entirety of the game, which is find a certain person.

And then I guess I was thinking that finding them would be the end of it.

But then you run into them and they're like, cool, now that you have found me, we now have to solve a problem.

And that's the whole rest of the game.

Okay.

It's ridiculous.

Hmm.

I've the talk up leading into this game has led me to feel like I'm entering a fucking Elden-sized, all-encompassing beast.

I think the talk up around CP-77, which is, by the way, the worst, horrible, the worst acronym, which is why I say it because I just saw someone say it in the chat, and I wanted to bring this up.

Okay, because I was like, why?

Awful.

I think everyone kind of unconsciously agreed that we just don't use that acronym.

Awful.

God-awful.

You just say cyberpunk.

Terrible.

Jesus.

So bad I forgot what I was saying.

Just God, stop saying that.

I just got off of Yakuza Zero's completion points.

Oh, yeah?

That was a fun one to just run down the street and going, help.

I need more CP to make myself stronger.

I got to take it to that guy at the shrine.

I need to take it to that weird guy.

He gives me stuff for CP.

It's really valuable.

Collection points.

No, it's not even, it's completion points.

Completion points.

It's even worse.

It's even worse.

The guy that's dressed up like a clown in the shrine needs

my completion points.

Awful.

Yeah.

Awful.

No, the talking up of Cyberpunk is so weird

because now there are two different cyberpunks.

There is the 1.0 and the 2.0, which are like very significantly different games.

And I think it's really funny because I mentioned that I had not beaten the game.

And I looked over and saw like five chat messages in a row that were alternating of, you really should.

It's something special.

And don't bother.

Who even cares?

Wow.

Yeah.

I mean, okay, there was, I mean, there definitely was some of that with like the fixer gigs and the fixer gigs and the side quests and some of the stuff here where initially,

anyway, it seems like like some are worth checking out and some are not.

And people feel very differently between themselves about which are worth doing and which aren't.

And some people consider it to be like not worth watching at all if they're there or if they're not there and so on.

So what I kind of ended up deciding was I'm like, I'll check out some of them.

But NCPD stuff, for example,

nothing, you know?

And anything I do see off camera at the very least that's worth showing, I can at least do the

capture feature with PS5 and just be like, here's the playback on what that moment was.

Yeah.

With the exception being Phantom Liberty, where every part of Phantom Liberty is worth doing.

You got to get that part where Susie runs you over with her car.

I've heard mention, a lot of people have asked about whether I've gotten hit by Susie's car yet.

Well, that's far away.

That's expansion shit.

Exactly.

So, no, I just started the game.

I just did the heist.

I don't think I'm getting to the DLC just yet.

But I also didn't think I'd be in Act 2 so so soon either, whatever that meant, you know?

Um, but yeah, no, no, all this to say that um yeah, act one is like this, it's like this tiny little thing, and then act two is like the rest of it.

Act one and act two in cyberpunk are the equivalent of how to draw an owl, draw your outline, then draw the rest of the fucking owl.

And I would complain about like choosing to call it acts when it's so limited, but it is true that if you choose to not do the heist for a very long time, you could just wander those streets doing other shit, right?

I'm going to end up restarting playing cyberpunk at some point because I did tons and tons of shit before doing

the heist, and I now like really regret

not doing that shit after with a certain someone.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So that was another piece of important information that helped as well when

it was explained to me that there's more dialogue to doing some missions and side stuff and walking around the city after act two begins than if you do it before.

So, really, really chill the fuck out and you know, do that stuff later.

It'll be okay.

And yeah, I've already had one of those, you know, like

just walking down, seeing a dude playing the guitar, and then like, Johnny's got some shit to say and that was pretty cool and it wouldn't have been there if you just otherwise were exploring without it, you know?

So you know what's awesome about Johnny Silverhand?

Mm-hmm.

Is that he sucks and he's a stupid idiot.

It's it's that it rules.

Interesting.

It fucking rules.

Interesting.

Okay.

I'm watching and I did that flashback and I don't know where we're going because literally all I've had is that and then waking up and it's like he wants you, he wants to fucking kill you.

But I'm kind of waiting to see, like,

so where's the good idea in this mission?

Because I get the energy, and the whole time I'm watching, I'm like, I understand the energy, but where, where, what am I missing?

We're gonna fight the system, man.

What am I missing where you think that this is a good idea

to this degree?

And, you know, and I guess you've already put more thought into this.

And so that's the thing, right?

I kind of am like, okay, I need to know this character and I need to understand when it comes to, okay, but what about the casualties?

Do you go, fuck the casualties, this is war?

Or do you go...

You don't even ask the question.

Yeah, I guess so.

I guess so.

Bro, you might as well be rolling with Shadow the Hedgehog, which

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because that's what I'm holding out for that, you know?

Like,

I'm not going to sign this waiver until I find out what's fully going on in this dude's head.

But so far it appears to be

only music and only fuck the system and only nukes.

We'll find out, I suppose.

Cut of his jib, though.

Hell of a cut on that jib.

Oh, yeah.

Absolute badass.

A lot of the things he says first impression appeal to somebody who's not actually listening and just looking at him be cool.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, no.

Again, chiseled,

immaculate cut on that jib.

You cannot deny the appeal.

And then, furthermore, like he gets a special gun or implant or whatever it is that makes his melee.

It's cool as fuck.

His melee thing is rattish shit with the basically does a Kyokusanagi super

with his gun.

And that's a lot of fun.

That's very cool.

I enjoy Johnny Silverhand's

surface.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then I guess the other thing, too, as well, which to be, I think walking around the game, picking up the literature and also doing some of the missions,

I've heard and I've known going into this, especially having watched Edge Runners, that, like,

it is the darkest and most cynical setting

ever.

Terrible.

Knowing that,

is there a perspective

that

is like holding on to something?

Is there any candle, you know, and because because disco Elysium is

soul-crushingly oppressive, but there's a little bit of a candle and that little bit of a candle, even if it's happening inside your head, is what makes you get to the end credits and like tear up, you know?

And I'm like, oh

Let me just just give me a little spark to protect, you know?

Bro, you're the candle, brother.

I hope so.

I hope so.

But

I have not yet seen it, you know.

What I have seen is anyone who might be that is too pure for this world.

And you can feel it right off the bat.

I'm like, oh, are you a good person doing good things for people you care about?

Ah, fuck, you're cooked.

I think it's, you see this like really early.

So Co-Carnage plays a character you probably ran into.

When you go to VIX for the first time, there's a guy with

a beard and wearing trash bags screaming about how your eyes are poison.

And if you stand there and listen to him for like a minute, he's like, yeah, no, the corpse and the government are spying on everything you do through your synthetic eyes.

We should really stop implanting teenagers with cybernetics because they're losing all of their goddamn like free will and ability to not exist in the system.

And he's like portrayed as like a crazy homeless guy.

But he's completely right.

Yeah, okay.

I mean, I've seen enough of the emails, texts, and books that you're picking up as well where there's people that are kind of more or less, you know, keeping up the fight and rallying, so to speak.

You know, and then, of course, there's the, there's the immediate, the part where you immediately find out, too, that like the craziest shit that ever went down with Johnny Silverhand was also super corpo-backed.

And like, oh, yeah, he's a dumbass.

And you're just like, oh, yeah, no, they love that.

They love giving the world an excuse to be like, stay complacent, et cetera, you know?

But yeah, that's it.

That's it.

I kind of, I'm just, I'm looking to see what comes next in terms of the setting.

And, and I'm wondering as well if the tabletop

was similar energy, or was it just just like, nah, the settings, wild, jump in there, you know?

Because

I did catch from people explaining that, like, he existed, and like, these events all existed in the tabletop game as well.

Because there's different,

there's like 2020 and then 45, and then like 77, there's these different periods.

And

yeah,

it was pretty nuts to kind of be like, let's flash back to

2020 when the game was named for.

And

I kind of just auto-completed

the possibility that, oh, maybe the game was based on like, you know, the early years of this cyberpunk world, and now, rather, the tabletop game was based on the early years, and now the video game is jumping forward.

Well, when they were made in the 80s, it was the far future then.

It was, it was, yeah.

But it, but it seems like, but even back then, there was still going as far as, you know,

like past 2020 to like 45 and then to 77 and so.

Because it seemed like it would be,

you know, if you had to do like a

D D thing, same thing where you had this massive tabletop world where a ton of things could happen, you would have to then end that and then create a canonical point to jump forward if you made something like a video game that was like, you know, collecting all the stuff.

If I remember right, Adam Smasher in the tabletop was a fail state.

Like Like it was like either make too much noise or take too long and the corpse sends Adam Smasher at you and you just die.

Okay.

Like it is a it's like it's like

he's like the Taurasque of cyberpunk.

Okay.

If that reference means anything to you.

When you say Tarask, I think of StarCraft.

Oh,

I'm saying the Dungeons and Dragons monster, the Taurask.

Okay, yeah.

The thing that has a million HP and you have to kill it and then wish its heart to die.

Okay, it is a game over with more steps.

Yes.

Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah, Reaper in

Persona, et cetera.

Until you take it on, of course.

Yeah, so far,

pretty cool.

I...

Well, anyway, more to say when I actually

jump back into the game this week and stuff and explore.

But I

don't suppose the later game unlocks OSs that like allow you to have more than one major function.

I doubt it, but I don't know.

Okay.

Because

I'm like, I don't want no hacking.

It would be nice to have some little basic shit and then do something else, but nah, okay.

It's just classes, right?

So yeah, you can't really really do, you can't be a fighter mage.

I mean, you could.

You could max out your intelligence, you could max out your body.

But the OS doesn't allow you to hack and activate one of those melee abilities.

Yeah, so you would just be melee without

that thing plus your little spells.

But you can't cast the spells if you put on

the thing that I'm just.

Yeah, but that doesn't stop you from putting the arms on.

Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's just, it's just the overall you can be a punch mage, yes, without actually having the Sandy or the

Berserk mode.

Yes, yes, yes, right.

Yeah,

I was talking about like, you know, hybridizing your OSs or so.

No, no, that's too because they're too strong.

Like,

you can't have like fully stopped time on a whim and also hack everyone in your vicinity to kill themselves.

But you can swing a big greatsword around and give yourself just enough faith to toss a little lightning bolt for funsies.

You know?

So, yeah.

Anyway, beyond that,

also went back to A Thousand Times Resist.

And

that story is starting to shape up a little bit more.

I can say now, whereas last time I said I didn't know what it was about, and that's, I mean, besides kind of just getting introduced to the setting, it's kind of becoming a little bit more clear.

And

yeah, I guess since it's so narrative-heavy, like it's kind of,

you know, hard to really, I feel like, talk about because like the little, the, the little things you find out about the character relationships pretty much are the content of the game.

So almost every everything to be said there feels like a potential spoiler.

But,

But it does.

What I will say is that this is another entry in

the Criterion collection of movies and games about like, damn, my parents were wild and they don't understand across the world international edition, right?

So

there's a trilogy, I would say, of the

Asian mom needs to chill out, and you've got the turning red,

everything everywhere all at once, and then now a thousand times resist, you know, trilogy.

And then you can add, like, yeah, like Thirsty Suitors is a little bit of that, you know,

going in, well, I guess going into more

a little less East Asia, but still in that

kind of area.

And I feel like I'd love to see going around the world, catching different

countries and different cultures of just finding out how mom needs to chill and what that millennial pressure is like for somebody coming down from, I don't know, from South America, from somewhere.

I mean, you wouldn't need to chill if you just studied harder on your med school entrance exam.

Yes.

You would be relaxed because you were so confident that you would get 100%.

But I want to see

what that sounds like when mom's from Nunavut.

I want to catch

a full collection of these because

we're of that age where

the second generation that has grown up dealing with that is

able to make games now.

I've already created content around that concept in terms of just my mom's involvement with devil games.

So you already know, you already know my version of that from the West Indian side of things, you know, and that's why I'm just like, yeah, this is a fun lens, and I like seeing other versions of it.

And yeah, and then, of course, you know, we're starting to find out as well

some tie-ins to real world history while entering this at-a-glance near kind of inspired aesthetic.

So,

interesting so far, and more to to say once it wraps up.

But, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a relationship

drama

walking simulator type of

store

story.

But I thought it was about fucking aliens.

Yeah, there's that too.

But uh, very interesting.

If you're like able to lock in to like aliens as the background noise to like,

damn, why is she talking shit about me?

What's up with that?

You know?

Yeah.

Did she really mean it when she said that?

What the fuck?

We're talking about a thousand times resist.

I still don't know what that game is.

It's really funny.

No matter how much I hear you talk about it or how much I see clips of it, I'm still just like,

don't know what it is.

It's, it shows for information particularly poorly.

So, like, I, like, you know, you could watch like, you know, a five-minute thing of cyberpunk and ballpark it.

Yeah.

Right.

I have watched way more than five minutes of Thousand Times Resist, and I'm still sitting here going, like, I fucking know.

So essentially, it's a 3D visual novel,

you know, with that's not made in Ren P type of thing.

But the, in terms of just like what the actual video game like genre is in a way, but in terms of like the

like framing and what you're looking at in terms of content,

a super futuristic, crazy tech alien sci-fi setting

is analyzing the memories of

a kid from our day, modern day.

And so the relationships of the person who's living in the modern day are at the forefront, and this large crazy sci-fi framing device around it is,

well, actually, that's at the forefront.

And then the relationships that I'm describing are like, you know, behind that.

So,

yeah, you're, you're, you're kind of...

And, and, okay, okay, yeah, not, not modern day.

Anyway, you're, you're looking to the past that we we can relate to

through a crazy sci-fi future that we can't.

That's what's happening.

Okay.

Do I shoot a gun?

No, but you wonder why she talked shit about you.

Okay.

And

you may say some mean things in the process.

And so on and so forth.

You walk by a debate club.

She talked shit because she was a bitch.

That's why.

You walk by a debate club and you see debate club debating and then you find

two of your friends over there making out first base in it.

Not with a.

Out in public?

Jesus.

No, and they found a classroom away from everybody.

And it wasn't with a loose leaf.

Anyway, more on that.

As

we continue.

That also was like, yeah, Act Two, I guess.

Oh, yeah.

So got through Act Two Two of that.

And then,

yeah, we also took a look this week at

Marvel vs.

Capcom Infinite and Beyond.

Talked enough about that last time for sure, but super awesome project that

is bringing Infinite back into the spotlight.

The one thing I will say is, as we were going through it and

trying out some of the new modes and stuff, yeah, Max came through and was like, you guys got to try out that

uh uh

co-op mode and so reggie and i played uh

two-player locals versus the computer in arcade mode and the final boss ultron sigma is just an absolute nightmare bullshit um boss rage waiting to happen

content has been prepared for your content creation channel um

and you know i mean i i i have to say, I'm like, yeah, that checks out, actually.

This is what this should be for.

This is what this is.

I mean, those guys are pretty tough.

They are.

They should probably be really tough.

You know, and it's just in like, I'm, I'm, like, he comes through and is like, yeah, I want to see you guys try that.

That'd be cool.

All right.

Bye.

And, you know, quickly realizing, oh, thank you for

the content.

This is going to make the rest of the night go.

And it's fucking bullshit.

It's absolute horseshit nonsense.

Ultron Omega, Omega.

Wait, wait, um,

it's one of those, it's one of those like Marvel bosses where it's like, okay, you could hit him for a while, but now he's gone and there's grunts.

Um, but instead of oh, really, yeah, because that's what, like, um, because there was, there was things like, like, there's a couple bosses like in Marvel history where like, like, you know, a onslaught would, like, jump into the background and stuff like that.

Um,

but in this case, it's like you can't, if you defeat one of the grunts, um, they just respawn.

You have to kind of kill them simultaneously for

that phase to end.

And then when he comes back,

whatever.

Infinite armor, infinite bullshit, nonsense.

Just all the things you'd expect, you know.

I'm watching this.

This looks like a fucking stupid pile of shit.

Yeah.

It looks ridiculous.

It's crazy.

It's nonsense.

And I'm reminded, though, of like, I also, I remember when I sat there and I like fought Yami in Tatsunoko versus Capcom.

The last boss of TVC was the boss from

Okami.

And similarly, it's just a big, dumb damage sponge where not every character can do it because you're just some people just don't have a kit for it.

You know, if you do big combos, that's nice.

That's going to get you fucking killed.

You need armor, multiple hits, and the right angles and stuff.

But yeah, we kind of smashed our heads against that

until

one way or another

we found it triumphed.

We did.

We did.

Oh, good job.

It went from

pretty much completely impossible to being very possible.

And emotions ran high.

Oh, yeah.

So check that out.

I think the video is out.

Marvel is back.

Marvel versus Capcom, Infinite and Beyond.

And yeah, once again,

I said it in each one.

I'll say it again.

Full credit to that team, Maximilian and Lil V and Alex Mucala on the music and wistful hopes for the amazing mods and

everyone that was a part of

that gargantuan effort.

Super cool.

This week, there will be more of Cyberpunk and Thousand Times Resist

on the main schedule.

I've posted up on Wooly Wools on Twitter and on Blue Sky.

And then we're going to be doing some get into fighting games.

Got to catch up on some stuff.

There's been a whole build-up of things.

But

I think we're going to at least.

I'll confirm later.

But I know for sure we're going to take a look at perhaps two things this Saturday.

One of which is Corrupt, which is an Arc-Forged-helped fighting game that I've been keeping an eye on for a couple of years now.

That's finally dropped.

It's the one with the cool black people in armor doing air combos.

Okay.

So

I'm going to jump in

Do you want to be a cool black people in armor doing combos?

I mean, I'm only missing the armor, aren't I?

That's great.

Whatever you say, kid.

One day.

He says as he adjusts his seat to make sure that his back doesn't get injured.

Oh, man.

How's it going?

Back injuries are so lame.

They're so weak.

You're so weak.

When your back is injured, you are the weakest you've ever been.

And you can't.

You can't go in and look cool.

You can't pretend to be strong.

Why would you?

God.

I can go out at any time.

Just the thought that any stupid fucking seven-year-old could just run up and just kick you and go, yeah,

in the back.

And you're like, I'm defeated.

I am undone.

Lo, my lineage is ended.

Anyway, also, the Evo FGC channel just put out

a dubiously named

Ask a Pro video where I answer some fighting

questions.

I saw that come up.

And my first thought was like, man, I bet Wooly's really unhappy with the name of this second video.

I bet he's super mad because we're gonna go into the podcast and I'm gonna be like, Oh, so Mr.

Professional Fighting Game Player,

what is your advice as a winner of many tournaments and evolution events?

So, right up front, I said I don't like that, and they're like, Yeah, well, that's what it is.

That's the name of the and we're doing it, and we're doing other stuff

and that sucks.

And you will notice that frame one,

frame one, I disarm that shit, okay?

But, Lowen, but clearly, yes, roll through comments and see the people that are like green texting

pro, lol, you know, like, I know.

You're pro now.

I know.

Trust me.

You're a professional fighting game person.

The first five seconds of me calling that shit out is not enough for people to catch on, apparently, because they see the title and thumbnail and just immediately go, what the fuck does he think you do?

It sucks so bad.

It sucks so bad.

There's nothing I can do about it.

There's nothing I can do about it.

But hey, now you gotta, yeah, you got the professional feather in your cap.

You can hang on to that forever.

You put that on your social media.

I guess if you get so, just simply getting paid to do a thing makes you a professional of that thing.

You are

a

professional fighting game journalist.

Man.

You know, actually,

I have a deep pull for this because you said that

money is what makes a difference.

There is a home improvement joke that I remember from a child where Brad asks Tim Allen for help with his homework, and he goes, what is a pronoun?

And Tim goes, professional noun.

Well, he goes, what...

An amateur noun would do for free, a pronoun does for money.

Yeah, okay, okay, right.

Yeah.

Um, I mean, anyway, this,

okay, more than anything, I feel sorry for Reggie because Reggie has to put up with my stupid inferiority complex bullshit every time we go to anything and we're sitting like, I'm always just like, God, I'm not, this is not, uh,

you know, and he's just like,

yeah, dude, we get it.

All right, get over yourself.

Wooly, it would be probably easier for you to live your life if you were like loud and braggadocious and lost more.

Yes.

That would probably be easier.

Caring sucks.

Like, if you were just like straight garbage and you were like, I'm the best.

Because for so long.

Starting out just trying to make trying to get good at these games when you're like the absolute beginning.

It's like, okay, I expect no acknowledgement from anyone in any way, shape, or form.

But there's that worry about like, okay, well, when the time comes, what if you happen to be able to, like, I'm, oh, if I win this, I might get into top eight or something.

You have all those nerves and that feeling of like, shit, people are watching.

Oh, fuck, can I deliver?

Can I get it?

Can I do it?

You know, and that's bad enough on a local level.

And then, of course, there's the

years and years of like not doing that and being like, ah, fucking scrub, whatever.

Right.

But then I'm also just flashing back to years and years of like early on in when like fighterpedia episodes would come out or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

and that and shit would get posted on shoriukian.com or on event hubs or on other fighting game websites.

And like the FGC at large, a large group of people that I'm like, I'm actually trying to be relevant here and just be good.

Like, you know, I'm trying to make a name or do something.

And it'd be like, who the fuck is this scrub?

And why are we seeing him on our page?

Wow.

Right.

He's a scrub that has a little bit of the gift of gab which is why you're seeing him here you're being exactly and it's like yeah but that's not skills

it is

it's not it's not it's not uh it's not competitive skills and so i don't that was

the only currency that i lived in back then so that is what you're hearing expressed in me years later the only currency that matters is alex valley going if you're top eight then who the if you're not top eight who the fuck are you And that's the value system.

I don't remember the names, and that's great because I don't want to put anyone specific on blast, but I remember a really specific period of time where I saw professional Street Fighter players talking shit about Max

because he wasn't winning tournaments, but his channel is gigantic, and they were streaming to like nothing because they were doing

silent

silent online battles with nothing going well I'm way better than Max if I could beat Max's big channel

yeah exactly

it's like because he's an entertainer and people want to be entertained that's it and it's it's and it's relatable and it's good and it's content and it's good content and it's and it gets you in and if you're guess how guess what there's more people that are close that are like that than there are like you you know and that being said max is also pretty fucking good at

a number of games he's pretty good

But he's had that same kind of discussion.

And I remember talking to Kizi K about this, where

there's moments where you have to kind of like level with the audience in some cases,

where

people will kind of show up and ask that question and be like, hey, so are you entering?

Or like, oh, how'd you do?

Or just kind of like seeing you in a competitive environment and thinking that you're going to be able to kind of do super well there.

And it's like, if you see me streaming with you, that means I'm not training.

That means I'm not competing.

I'm not doing the things that you need to be good enough to make it that far, right?

You don't get to have your cake and eat it too.

The dedication to become as good as it takes to go as far as possible means you can't also be in the public eye to that full degree.

And like it's a kind of a catch-22 with a lot of signed players, really, because when you get signed, some sponsors are like, we want you to place really well, but we also want you to be a big channel and we want you to be a larger, consistent sponsor.

You want you

exactly.

And that because that is another way for you to like, you know, make money and for you to grow your brand and your name out there and stuff.

And so, like, people who struggle with the training regimen of staying on top of the game versus being more of a content creator,

you know, to kind of fulfill those obligations or to grow the stream and to make more stuff is like it pulls you away from like the drive it takes to fucking win sometimes.

And for some people, they can just stream labbing or they can stream, you know,

jumping online and stuff.

But like, unless you're basically streaming your sets where you get in touch with other players that are as good as you and your for and your long grinds, you know, like the birds, for example, do stuff like that.

It unfortunately becomes diametrically opposed at a point.

So if you see somebody more and you get into their content because they're entertaining, you also don't really get to go like, oh, but I also expect you to be the champ, you know?

And if you can, you're incredible.

Anyone who is doing that is just goaded.

But

it's a moment you often hit where you go, hey, I'm going to be focusing more on this or on that.

And, you know, I've described it where I was like, yeah, entering tournaments is a secondary thing for me these days, obviously.

I went to CEO Taku and I was there on doing stuff for Holiday Matsuri.

I'm not entering CEO Taku.

That's crazy.

I'm doing an event.

I'm doing multiple events every day.

You know, when the funk would I find the time to just show up, sit there, get washed, and then have the person sitting next to you be like, oh shit, I'm a big fan.

You got me into these games.

And be like, yeah, cool.

You destroyed me.

You know, because I'm not, I haven't touched this game in months and I'm signing up just to feel to be like, what?

For what?

You know?

So that's, that's, that's real.

Yeah, the, the combination makes no sense.

Like, there, I had a brief moment, a brief moment in the sun where I was the world's most popular Virtual Fighter streamer.

There you go.

For, for like a couple hours.

And then Fudo came on.

There you go.

Yes.

And Fudo, I think I got like a top of 1.6 and he got like 2.6.

And I'm like, does that mean I'm half as good as Fudo at Urgil Reider, the world champion?

No, it doesn't.

Holy shit.

No, it doesn't.

Yeah.

But like when you don't know at all,

when you're just like the difference between being kind of good and being God tier is all the same to you, it certainly can feel like it.

So it's like, so you're going to enter and you're going to at least get like top 16 then, right?

If not top 10, totally.

Wooly, I have to say, the way you talk about fighting games sometimes, you come off like a hustler.

You come off like a guy who is setting up the second set of money matches that you then also lose.

And then where's the hustle?

Wait, what?

I thought you were going to, I thought you were setting me up.

Rip me off.

What the fuck?

I said it in the video, man, but it's like, nah, it's just, I just want these games to not die.

They're really fun and I like them.

They're doing good.

Yeah.

They're doing good.

That's it.

And you are directly responsible for a small piece of that.

I mean, when we popped in like infinite, you know, and beyond, it was like, oh man, shit, I remember this game was so much fun back in the day.

Okay, how the fuck do I do a bread and butter?

Like, what did I used to do?

I don't remember.

LMH launch LMH.

What?

You know, like, it's, yeah, it takes a second.

Light punch.

Heavy punch.

And then, and then, you know, when Kizzy was like to his channel, like, hey, guys, I'm actually going to start competing for real again.

So you're going to see less videos and less content.

And it's like, yeah, it's not what you want if you're just a viewer, if you're a viewer, but like, it is the reality of it, you know?

So anyway, all, but like,

I think there's so much interest in that specific topic.

Just before we get on, because it applies to other games too.

Like, my expertise on this is like, I remember I was like, oh, I'm going to go raid with my friends in 14, and people would be like, you should stream that.

I'm like, that would be the most miserable fucking experience ever.

Like, the idea of streaming

your raid cycle.

And they're like, well, World First does it.

Well, World First is a race.

And also, every World First winner for like six World Firsts have gotten caught cheating.

Oh, man.

Because they're streaming it.

Yeah.

Nah, nah, nah.

It's just

no thank you to any of that.

I did stream some of the games when I was going hard on Balatro, like I did, you know, I did that once.

I did a bit of

Into the Breach and

those kind of relaxation games and stuff.

But it's not always going to be a great stream for things like that.

Anyway, anyway, this is all nothing to do with, of course, picking up these games and finding out why they're fun for the first time.

This is just shit from years of being here.

Me talking about 0.01%

of the people that play these games and the competitive bullshit there.

The mental stack grows by the day.

And this does not apply at all to fucking everybody who's listening to this.

I am so excited to see what happens with 2xKO on Twitch and YouTube because you're going to see league people

jump in onto it.

Like those two worlds

will intermingle.

And it's like adding piss to a swimming pool.

I think it'll be similar to like when Dragon Ball had a lot of Dragon Ball streamers show up that were not fighting game players, but primarily all Dragon Ball other content.

They roll in for a while and then they filter out, and then a couple linger that are like super into it after about two months' time.

Takes about two months, you know.

Um, it feels like, and then when a character or a big drop that's uh lower important happens, uh, it kind of picks back up again, you know?

So when Broly drops, holy shit, when uh

Vi

comes to 2xKO,

then that's going to be a big deal.

Whatever, man, this game sucks.

I'm going back to Xenoverse, a real video game.

That line, man.

Those sign-ups eclipsed the Dragon Ball Fighter sign-ups.

Anyways.

Speaking of, oh, boy.

What's going on?

I don't know if it's news, but did you see?

Mortal Kombat's going to be at Evo this year?

Did you see it?

I guess I missed that news.

Oh, yeah.

Here's the new.

Well, it happened while you were setting up.

So the lineup for this year: Street Fighter VI, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive, Grand Blue Fantasy vs.

Rising, Undernight In Birth 2, MK1, City of the Wolves, and MVC 2.

Yay, City of the Wolves.

Yeah.

I would like to quote one KZ Excellent friend of the show: quote, people will sign up to Mortal Kombat 1 and then immediately celebrate being put into the top 32.

End quote.

I mean,

the Combo Breaker sign-up numbers, I remember, were

there were twice,

there was like,

you know, Tekken was like, like, I think Broke a Thousand and, you know, Guilty Gear and Street Fighter were also around there.

Samurai Showdown had 70 entrants, and

MK1 had about double that.

Okay, so 140-ish?

Shy of 200, I believe, is where they were at.

I bet you could get more Virtua Fighter V Revo entrants than MK1.

This is a travesty.

Considering it's a big triumphant return, and considering the people playing it don't hate it, probably.

Yeah, I imagine so.

Because what doesn't get talked about as much is the state.

The state of the people that are playing it.

I feel

it's rough out there, man.

That is a real weird criteria.

That is a...

Oh.

There's always the percentage of people that are competing in a game that absolutely loathe it.

And they're crucial.

They're essential.

But here, they're all that's left.

Oh, man.

That's weird.

That's so weird.

All right.

What's been going on with Pat this week?

I have many things to discuss.

Let's start with the most important thing in my life, my human child, my baby boy, who has learned to lie.

Oh, no.

It is one of the developmental milestones.

It is

one of the nightmare milestones where you're like, this is a high-level brain concept.

It's good for the boy.

Okay.

It's the start.

It's the start of the nightmare.

The power of the deceit.

We gave the baby boy one of his baby crackers that he likes.

It's called Baby Num Num, and he's eaten it up.

Is it called officially baby num?

Yes.

The baby num nums that is in the old go-to-Walmart video from like 11 years ago is a product that I am feeding to my child.

Wow.

Because it's baby crackers.

Okay.

And he took it and he broke it in half and he ate half and we're like, that's good.

And then he looked at this dog, walked over to the dog, put the entire cracker inside the dog's mouth.

And then I went, hey, no.

And he looked at me, took a step back, and then pretended to eat the nothing in his hand and go,

it wasn't just verbal, it was a whole

somatic.

It was a whole act out.

That's it.

It was a pantomime.

Holy shit, that's advanced.

Oh, no.

And then, and here's the best part.

After he finished eating the nothing,

he did the taps and went more,

more, more.

And it's like, are you serious?

You didn't need anything.

The brazen.

Like, I'm looking right at you.

Deception.

Oh, shit.

Okay.

Tested.

We're also going through a sleep regression, which I don't know if you saw any of my skeets about it, but me and Paige were in bed at like midnight last night.

going, oh my God, I want to go to sleep.

And the baby is like literally running a circuit around the bed with his toys going ah

just

little do you know that's 4d chess where he's trying to tire you out

so that more lies can work effectively it's working man it's working he's also so the sleep regression is what causes the uh the the rapid mental advancement So babies don't progress normally, they progress in huge bursts.

It has also

come along with the ability to do tasks that we ask him.

Can you give me that?

Can you go get your milk?

Can you close that drawer?

All of a sudden, like that.

Understands all of it.

And

is repeating random words out of our sentences.

So

the lockdown

on language in the house is starting now.

Ah, okay.

The baby's walking around trying to say the word dicks right now.

Okay, okay, okay.

It matters.

Yep.

Got it.

It matters.

It's only a matter of time before he says fuck.

Ru-ro.

And then we have to pretend he saw it on TV.

Which he's not allowed to watch.

Like, like, the baby watches the podcast.

The baby watches my show when I'm doing, when it's just like big-headed me and I'm talking, not when the game is running.

That may have to stop because I can't stop swearing

on this program.

I don't have the ability to do that.

That's hard.

You will never fiscally recover from going PG.

Oh, no, I can't go PG.

No, it's the attitude forever.

We've already

taken the losses in awards and

invitations.

We can't go back now.

Yeah.

That's going on.

I hung out with one Ashley Roboto last week.

And was it last week?

I guess it was.

We played some classic World of Warcraft.

First of all, Ashley's a sweetheart.

What a wonderful lady.

Though it did show off, you know that first time you collaborate with somebody and you hit this line where you see the line in the sand on

your personality?

Oh, oh, yeah.

because you you love to test the waters so that's not what happened that's not what i'm talking about okay that's not what i'm talking about okay okay i do do that you do that it is fun let's just find the line right away but uh no i'm not talking about that so we're playing classic wow on a permadeath server and ashley is describing how um there's a chat channel that announces your death to the entire server when you die in classic wow perma and so she taught me how to turn it on and sure enough, within a couple of minutes, like, oh, this person died.

And it tells you their level.

And it tells you their character's name.

And it tells you what killed them.

Right.

And she's telling the story about how, like, it kind of sucks sometimes because

you'll die, but because the server blasts your name out there, people who are total dickheads will like whisper you and be like, get good idiot.

Or you suck ass.

And as she is in the process of saying, oh, it's so terrible, I'm like, oh, that sounds awesome.

I mean,

oh, no, that's mean and toxic.

Yeah, okay, okay.

So, like,

the reason why different people play MMOs is different.

If I'm going to play World of Warcraft, I want the absolute most dog shit experience possible.

Again, some people are having social RPs with their tunes.

Yeah.

So I was going to say that sounds like you had a fun time with this, despite the actual thing that you were playing.

Which is the least of what I'm saying.

Well,

here's where it gets complex.

So World of Warcraft is now in the strangest place it's ever been because they have their retail WoW, which I fuck it.

Let's just put that whole thing to the side.

And then they have Classic WoW.

And what they did with Classic WoW is they said, hey, here's World of Warcraft as it was in 2004.

And then here's Burning Crusade, which was the expansion to World of Warcraft.

And then we added it a year later.

And then here's Lich King, which is that expansion.

And this encompasses Classic World of Warcraft.

And then they said, hey, you know what?

We should roll into Classic?

Let's keep it going.

So they have Classic World of Warcraft Cataclysm.

The third one.

The thing that everyone

started saying we need World of Warcraft Classic because Cataclysm is the big change that tons of people hated.

Okay.

Okay.

That changed all the zones.

Yeah.

Did...

So when these changes come out, they're like server-wide changes to the classic game.

Yeah.

So your time to experience it being its old version is only

that initial release period.

Yeah, so instead of a two-year release window, they're on one-year release windows.

So you're like catching up a little faster.

But can you just play with it?

I'm like, can you play a server without it?

So here's where it gets complicated.

Because I'm like, I heard about Cataclysm being in Classic.

I'm like, why the fuck would anyone ever play Classic WoW?

It's not even fucking Classic WoW anymore.

So now there is a second batch of servers

that are

WoW, Classic, Classic.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you wanted to go back to that exact version, yeah.

And what is probably going to happen is it is probably going to end up in a situation that when the classic classic servers get to Cata,

the original classic servers will be like six expansions in, but not cut up to retail.

And then they will make a classic, classic, classic set of servers.

And then when the classic original servers catch up, those servers will roll back into the new classic, classic, classic, classic.

This is the dumbest shit ever.

The problem is that it's trying to appease to the nostalgia of a giant group of people that all feel differently about these things.

If there's a consensus that the third one was where it all went bad, then there's a whole lot of people that won't go past that point.

But for those that are,

there's those that want to go back to that specific time.

And how do you fucking do this without how what?

I don't know how you do this.

How do you make that where I'm at?

I don't like cataclysm, and I don't care about anything past cataclysm.

The only version of WoW that I want to play is the WoW that existed from 2004 to 2008 or 9-ish, right?

That's all I'm interested in.

So, yeah, I'll go.

I'll fuck around in the old version of it because that was fun.

I did not like Cataclysm.

It was not fun to me.

And now they are in this rotating, writhing mass of versions.

So, all I can think of, because you know, it's me,

you put out an anniversary collection and you're like, hey, did you like Hyper Fighting?

Is that the one you want to play?

Well, then that's one of the options you can pick here.

That is actually how it works.

Yeah, and that's the only way because you're like, I'm the one.

I'm the one that wants that one version of Blanca from that one version of the game.

That is how it works, because when you sub to World of Warcraft, you are subbing to all of them simultaneously.

And

you actually pick which one you want to load into on a drop-down bar.

And there's no other way to make people happy.

And if you understand that you're like, I want to experience that old thing more than I care about being on a populated server, then then so be it.

There you go.

You'll be by yourself.

Oh, don't worry.

All servers are populated.

Okay.

Well, great.

Forever.

Great.

But yeah, I see there's no other way than splitting this by, well, what the fuck do you want to play then?

So there's so much other weird shit happening.

So here's one of the problems with classic wow.

MMOs are designed to be completed and then you have your high-end rate and all that shit, but they're always designed to be added on to forever, right?

Classic WoW is solved.

Like,

where to go, what to get, what skills, what party layouts, what, where to stand, what but like it is, it is solved.

Like, there is a spreadsheet out there that is how to beat World of Warcraft Classic.

And it's complete.

And it's been complete for a really, really long time.

And that's why it's actually fun to play on the permadeath realms.

Because I know how to get to level cap in classic, but getting to level cap in classic without dying even a single time is actually really hard.

Right, okay.

Well, I was going to say, like, doesn't the fact that it's solved or not kind of irrelevant?

Because the only reason why you're going back is because nostalgia and you just want the volume

of like playing the way that you used to remember.

So

WoW was solved back in 2005 or 6, right?

But then when Classic came out, it was solved again but it was solved in a world with twitch and discord and

you know wikias and shit that were not there back in 2004

so the information existed and people knew it but now it has been it has been wrapped up into a tome so that period of classic was

like people re-solving it but like is anyone looking for a challenge or are they just looking to hang out with their friends in the old servers that they used to?

I mean, if you're playing, if you're playing on the hardcore server, yes, you are looking for a challenge.

Okay.

Because it is actually really, really, really hard to hit level cap without dying.

I kind of would think that most of it is kind of just like, yeah, we're trying to just go, you know.

The other thing that somebody points out is that a lot of WoW's like raid content back in 2005 and 6 was actually super easy.

It's just nobody knew how to play MMOs.

Like nobody was good at it at the time.

Back then.

Okay.

Overall, yeah, had fun.

Ashley had to go to dinner and within 10 minutes of Ashley going to dinner, I died and my character got deleted.

So she was totally carrying my ass for real.

Is the deletion process like, do you have to do it yourself?

It's so cruel.

It's so cruel.

You die and you get the ghost form that lets you do the corpse run, but the corpse won't let you interact with it.

Oh, it's set up to not work.

Okay, okay.

So, like,

so like, yeah, your character's there,

but they're fucking dead and they're ghosts.

And so you have to go out and delete it.

It's so mean.

Is that like a custom server setting that you can kind of do to mess with the game kind of thing?

Oh, I mean, WoW Classic is based off of people running private, like, WoW servers.

Okay, okay, okay.

And I remember saying, like, man, you know what they should do?

They should have a parallel development where they just have a new expansion to, like, instead of Cata and just have a complete separate game split off.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

A new

thing is coming out of Classic.

To which I was told that actually exists, and they're doing it right now.

They are doing something called Season of Discovery, which is the classic guts with a completely new set of mechanics and like custom server shit all over the place.

Well, I guess if they've already got your sub, then it doesn't matter what you're paying for.

Splitting the attention is not a big deal.

Because I was going to say, why would you, as a big company, be like, I'm going to spend time and shit on new effort

put towards this and not the main thing we're trying to push people to.

It's kind of like a Diablo season or like a Path of Exile season.

And you know what?

Having WoW Classic and WoW Retail and all this shit all in the same sub is so cost-effective.

And because it's so cost-effective that you're getting access to all these games, that's why the monthly rate can be 22.50 Canadian a month.

Because it's the full package.

Because it's everything.

Okay.

Okay.

That's a lot.

That's a lot.

It is a lot.

It is ridiculous.

But think of all the different versions of World of Warcraft you could play.

How popular is, like,

vanilla wow.

Well, WoW current.

It's popping.

Even when FF14 was, like, really coming up and doing crazy numbers and maybe passing it, WoW has always still been popping in the background.

Yes.

The people that are in are so in.

And like

there was like one of the things that came up when I was talking to Ashley, she's like, I started playing World of Warcraft when I was 12 years old.

And my body went,

like, because that changes the context of that relationship with that game so dramatically.

Because there was a moment some years ago where I

remember I thought that

14 had just fully swallowed WoW players and fully replaced it and took the spot, dethroned it.

And it turned out that it's like, well, sort of, but there's still a lot of people that were on it.

And admittedly, a lot of the people that I know were just way more interested in 14 than in WoW.

But

that's because you know weebs.

Exactly.

So my skew, you know, my algorithm is different.

It's it's skewed towards Final Fantasy Weeb shit, you know?

So that's it, but there's still a lot of people that, yeah, but

is Classic like comparing numerically to oh, I don't know.

You could look it up, I bet.

I know that I know that FF14 is dipped under a million because of people just bailing after Dawn Trail.

FF14 was on this like huge upward climb in quality, and Dawn Trail feels like kind of a misstep.

I'm definitely not the only person who is no longer playing it.

Looking for something,

so this kind of pops in.

Like, I can't see myself ever going back to WoW because it's like

evil.

But it was fun to play with Ashley.

And we might play it again

on Monday.

We haven't made super concrete plans.

The second

thing that I did is that I was like, you know what?

Did I talk about the Guild Wars thing last week with the controller thing?

You mentioned finding out that the solution existed the whole time.

So then what I did is that I went crazy and spent like an entire evening up until three in the morning building a Steam input controller profile for Guild Wars 2

so that I could play that game like a regular video game on a controller.

That's not really, that's not crazy.

That's completely reasonable.

And I put it out there.

I linked it to people, and it does work.

It works.

It actually totally works.

And

it's just like, yeah, no, I'm probably going to be playing a lot of Guild Wars 2 in the future.

Okay, so

MMO scratch-itch.

Well, the other thing is that Guild Wars 2 is like utilizing the shocking

buy-to-play system for its monthly sub.

That was the one that was free, but you would buy each new thing.

The way that it originally worked is that

you would buy the game and it just had no sub.

Right.

And then if you bought the expansion, it would also have no sub.

Right.

And the idea was that they could keep it going with a cosmetic shop and like yearly or by yearly expansions.

I remember when Min told me about that years ago, and I was like, that's really honest.

I respect that.

I don't know how profitable that makes it, but good on them for

not having the same setup, especially from way back when.

Hey, I'd like to, I'd like to,

somebody made a good point in one of the chat because every time I talk about Dawn Trail, people get kind of mad.

Someone says, Pat, you called Dawn Trail the third best expansion, said you loved it.

And then the next time you mentioned it here, said it was a complete falloff, and you felt that the whole time.

Yeah, that's post-nut clarity or recency bias.

That's you beat the game and you're like, wow, that was great.

And then you go back to play it and you're like, oh, I don't feel it.

That's that's all that is.

As soon as you pull your dick out, you're like, oh, no.

I should have faked it.

What I'm surprised by, though, is that if the latest expansion

miss steps, that the remaining 90%

is also kind of like done.

you know well the other thing is that uh for 14 i'm having a specific thing which happens to a lot of people, which is I've been redlining the

current content on that game for like eight years.

And it's always the same structure, and it's always the same layout, and it's always the same

rollout over and over and over and over and over.

And I was like grinding up a class that I didn't intend to play so that the number would look good on my character sheet.

And then I was like, What the fuck am I doing?

Yeah, yeah.

What the fuck?

That's a

yeah, that's that's there's a problem with that way of playing it and this kind of you know outcome, I guess.

But

like to those of you who have played FF14, I looked at my weekly tomes being 450, and I'm like, I've been getting weekly tomes at 450 for seven and a half, eight years.

I'm fucking so done with getting my weekly 450 tomes.

And there's no like

other content that's out there that's just like untouched.

I did a lot of shit in that game.

Yeah.

I did a lot of shit in that game.

Just a ton of shit.

Well, I mean,

I don't know.

Like, if you're paying for a monthly thing, there should be a feeling that within those four weeks, you're getting as much enjoyment as your pay, your sub has been worth.

So, you know,

yeah.

Okay.

In the process of going back to Guild Wars 2, though, I did find out that Arena Net is totally working on Guild Wars 3, which is exciting.

And the second thing is that I found out that Net Ease is working on a Warhammer MMO.

And it's a really good batch of of timing for me to have learned about it this week.

Because if I learned about that three months ago, I would have been like, oh, man,

Netties is making, oh, crap.

But now that we're playing Marvel Rivals, I don't know.

It's a coin flip.

Now,

there surely must have been failed attempts in the past, right?

There was.

It was called Warhammer Age of Reckoning.

Okay, because I'm like, there's zero chance Warhammer has not clearly taken the obvious step into MMO money.

Warhammer Age of Reckoning was fascinating because it was made by EA and it was not great, but it had some stuff going on that was cool.

And the main distinction, I think it was a public quest system or a queuing system.

I forget what it was.

But of note is that

it showed off all of its cool new features, and then Blizzard was able to develop them into the next WoW expansion and release before that.

Oh,

shit.

Hit him with the fucking Fortnite, baby.

Yeah.

And they killed it.

They just killed it outright.

Yep.

Yep.

That's because, like, the only, the only thing that this game had going for it was Warhammer, which Warcraft is incredibly similar to, and

its new features, which WoW just put in, and WoW is the biggest, best thing ever.

And this is 2008.

This is during the peak of the peak in War in WoW.

Yo,

Apex Launch.

It had no chance.

Apex launch or die, man.

Holy shit.

They just fucking took it.

Got his ass.

There is a really fun thing.

I don't know if you've encountered this, but like when I streamed a a little bit of Guild Wars 2 and gone over it and was like, wow, this game was so weird.

It had so much more voice acting.

It has Jen Hale, Steve Bloom, Matt Mercer, Nolan North as like all the main

as your character.

And

this thing that happens, you go, oh, I'm going to stream this somewhat obscure, older multiplayer game.

And it's like you Winter Soldier activate like 10 people in your chat

that like were absolute fucking fiends

about it the whole time.

Like it was, it's weird.

It's fucking weird.

Okay, okay.

Also, so

the Warhammer MMO was a victim of

getting their shit stolen by Blizzard.

That Warcraft.

Yeah, yeah.

Boy, damn.

All right.

It's

so I would not, so like we're, we're going it, like, I would not be shocked that, like, we would not see anything about this Warhammer MMO until it's, like, fucking six months away.

Like, just the Apex Legends.

Just like when the open beta happens, that's the announcement.

The Apex Legends, like, drop.

The fuck you were not saying shit drop.

It's the only way.

I respect it.

Speaking of which, you know, when we were talking about rivals and

how it's just like shameless in its overwatching and its other, every piece that it takes from every other active game, it's Fortnite

and stuff.

I was booting up and like that sound it makes when you queue up and

a game is found is the exact instrument sound from the Apex Legends theme song.

There's a little hollow echo synthy noise that goes...

Oh, oh, you're right.

And it's the same

sound you hear when you're loading up an Apex.

And like, fuck me if they didn't find a way to just activate that neuron too.

I was like, what is that?

Why do I...

It's a

super right.

That's so deliberate.

It's an exact hollow echoing ring noise that's deliberately chosen because if you played that game for a bit, you might feel for something.

You know?

I wow, wow, at that game.

Man, I would kill for a good Warhammer MMO, man.

That, like, that is a setting/slash property that just...

Well, I mean, Wow proved it.

You could do a good Warhammer MMO.

It could be done.

I would like it to do.

Let's see what's coming.

um

i i forgot to talk about it but uh yeah played some more rivals as well um it's good it's very good and uh i initially got comfortable with you know the beta characters like i was playing like magic and iron man um heavily but uh holy shit moon knight

is a very good dps hey listen is aiming for pussies if you think this moon knight is for you Can you strategically place your Ankh, though?

Don't fuck up.

You got to place the Ankh right.

And if they turn around to target it, make sure you punish them for that.

Moon Knight's really good.

Moon Knight's great.

I've made some crazy plays and saved entire matches by just taking him off the front lines to the side, confusing people from where they're being hit from, and or making them chase the Ankh around and then like hitting the point.

Yeah, it's

like,

you know, as somebody who's like, hey, look, I know my aiming is going to be compromised in all situations.

Can I find a way to.

Well, there's characters for that.

Yeah, compensate for that, you know, and it's, it's, it's funny because I'm like, you know, as in as much as I'm like, I know that you should be, if you're sniping, if you're playing anyone that snipes, you should be dropping people like X number per second or whatever.

But I like the melee characters besides enjoying that.

But because, yeah, it's a different different form of

what's useful to the team.

So they put out the patch notes today.

Oh, cool.

And I looked over them, and we're not going to go into them because they're hyper-specific.

But my

takeaway from them, and what I seem to see others, is that these are really good patch notes.

Nice.

They're like the changes are very minor.

But they're all in the right directions.

Like, there's no big, huge, hard swings of like, oh, that's too much.

Right?

It's like, maybe 25 extra health here or 10% less damage on this character just so they don't two tap someone.

Okay.

Soft stuff.

Like Hella

got a little bit of a nerf, so she can't two-tap you

instantly.

Yeah, okay.

Hella's incredible.

And she was Storm got buffed because she's the worst character in the entire game.

Ooh.

What about Captain America?

He got a little bit of buff, too.

Yeah, they're underutilized for sure.

I don't think I've played a single game with a black widow in it either.

I have played one.

We lost.

So there you go.

It does feel, though, like I don't have a balance problem with Hulk.

I just continue to have an identity problem with him.

I have a pro tip for you for Hulk.

Uh-huh.

I have a massive pro tip for you.

Uh-huh.

So I hated Hulk, and then I went into the options, and there's an option you can change that changes the way Hulk plays completely.

There is an option in his personal hero controls that is hold jump to charge your jump.

If you turn that off, when you tap jump, he will just start passively generating the leap, and you can just tap jump again to leap away.

Oh,

interesting.

So

you leap in, and as soon as you hit the ground, you hit spacebar or left trigger, do all your shit, and then when you want to leave, the jump has just been charged and auto charging in the background.

Wow,

that's like fucking fantasy strike, like yummy shit.

Okay,

because that's what that's how Hulk is supposed to work.

You're supposed to jump in, go buh, buh, buh, but and jump away over and over and over and over and over.

Okay,

nice.

Um,

the

what was I saying?

Yeah, Iron Fist is also a fucking awesome pick.

He's a fucking menace.

I love him, and I love the fact that it's like, okay, am I playing on a team with fucking whatever, like one healer and five DPSs or so?

And in a lot of cases, I'll be like, fine, I'll go heal, right?

But if I don't feel like it, I'll just be like, nah, I'll just pick a self-sustaining character.

And he's great for that.

It's like, okay, don't heal me.

I'll be fine.

Go in, menace, harass, jump away, heal.

I think they were so brave by making the most popular character that's ever existed, Spider-Man, the most technically complex character in the whole game.

And then didn't adjust it too much after the fact on release.

So like...

So like every Spider-Man you see is either dog shit or that's actually Peter Parker playing the game.

Oh my God.

I noticed as well

some stuff got

very drastically changed.

Like the team-up ability that Magic and Black Panther had, it was like a one-way portal.

Or no, it was a two-way portal that only they could use.

It was just not good enough.

It was not good enough for the sacrifice of having two of your DPSs be melee characters.

So they made it so that it's like, there's the passive damage buff and the like rewind heal kind of ability where you get HP back as well.

So,

yeah.

No, I'm not an Insta-lock DPS, by the way.

I'll play whatever role is needed, depending on how other people float.

I highlight my character.

I highlight my character, but I don't lock in until I see more commitments.

And then in a lot of cases, I'll be like, well, let me synergize with whoever is going.

So I see a cloak and dagger.

You bet your ass I'm going Moon Knight because we can play with it.

I've been playing a lot of Loki.

Yeah.

Because everyone locks in their deeps.

And then I go, you know, I'll play fucking Loki.

There's a hella on the team.

Fuck it.

If you can get a benefit going, 100%.

And so, yeah, the trailer for Fantastic Four dropped.

And I don't know.

I don't really know what I was expecting, but it's like, yeah, Mr.

Fantastic is going to fucking dalsim your ass.

And

Sue is going to shoot you.

Make people invisible.

That's it.

Which, depending on how that ult works for your team from the outside, might be the most completely insane thing in the game.

The trailer doesn't give you an impression for how long it's going to last exactly.

Well, you put it on the point and nobody can see it.

Nobody can see anything.

I think your team can see into it, maybe.

If it's true,

if it's your team can see the enemy, but they can't see you, and that lasts like 10 seconds or something, that's insane.

And if

it means anyone who walks in will just get vaporized by the entire team.

Versus if it's only outside the circle versus inside the circle vision, that's a different type, you know?

I would assume that you could blind people unless you're in the circle.

Okay, people are saying that it heals allies and slows enemies within the invisibility also.

And your team can see into it.

But can the enemy see

you while in the circle?

Yes.

If they're in the circle, they can see you.

Okay, only

you're being healed and they're being slowed.

Okay, because that like basically that's the important part.

Is it blind for everyone in the circle right away?

Yeah,

yeah, she's essentially throwing down like the Thunderdome with advantage.

Yeah, that's fucking that's a really good alt.

That's that's that's that's great.

Um,

and I guess, yeah, I mean, we'll, we'll, we'll see what thing and

uh

Johnny end up being.

I'm so fascinated by what Thing is going to be in that he will not be the Hulk.

Well, like, is he going to, like, is he going to just hit harder?

Is he going to be kind of what I thought Hulk would be for his kit?

Because he might be.

He might be the Hulk character that I thought I was going to get.

Yeah, because I mean, like, Hulk as a backline harasser or like, you know,

a Winston is kind of one thing.

The shielding ability ability is like, it makes sense.

It's just not what I thought he'd be.

Yeah, I didn't think when I was playing Hulk in my shooter video game that Hulk's primary use would be to make Iron Man's right click 10 times stronger.

Yeah, the passive buff on

it's such a big deal.

Yeah.

Anyway, it's like the main thing I was unhappy about was his damage, and it seems like that's better now.

But his role just is not what I would think a Hulk role would be.

Hulk almost feels like a...

Okay, the equivalent of ignoring your own team to go off and do your own thing here is to be that backline harasser.

which you can do with the melee characters or with your Venom style, you know, get in and get out.

But like, it almost feels as if like he should completely be like separate from the rest of the team in a way.

He should just be out of control.

And like, I'm just thinking, like, almost like lore-wise, like, the idea of like, even him even, like, protecting the team, it's probably not great balancing-wise, but no, it just, but it doesn't, it just doesn't gel with what we think of when we're like, yo, we're gonna, like, in Ultimate Talk, for example, it's just like, we're unleashing him over there, get the fuck away, right?

Let him do his thing.

You gotta make narrative sacrifices for uh

for gameplay balance and that's why all of these characters are from all different universes so they can be slightly different yeah and and you know i can see the pushback on it like willie woo he's clearly does and i and i i i i i get that like he fills that role it's just when you think about what hulk is you know it feels as if he's just out of control berserk doing his own shit all power nuts and like very little support ability coming out of that dude you know for for lore purposes or whatever.

That new season is Friday.

Cool.

I don't know if you saw the skins.

They're cool.

I did see that second Invisible Woman skin.

Yes, that one.

They know who they're selling to.

And the part where it's like, what the fuck is this guy?

Oh, it's real.

Oh, that's Canon.

That's actually from the 70s.

That's such a thing, yeah.

I'm like, you found, you found a fucking Gouder skin from the 70s, and you brought that shit out.

I found it.

I found it.

Of course you can.

There's always something.

There's always a skin.

Yeah.

Good stuff.

You do what you got to do.

You know?

I

also, man, I had a big week this week.

Also, this week lasted 10 days, technically, right?

Also played a game called Crypt Master.

What's that?

Have you seen Crypt Master?

No.

So Crypt Master,

they they put out a statement a little bit ago uh that they won a bunch of awards but they're having trouble getting eyeballs on the game so i was like oh i'll stream it i'll show that game off because it's incredible so crypt master is

entirely in black and white

uh old school tile based dungeon crawler in which your characters have lost their memory and you have to type to hit or zap or jab or trap or use their attacks.

Oh, this looks cool.

And when you go up to a chest in order to get the item or the attack out of the chest, you have to essentially play a game of Wordle with the Crypt Master.

And it is a full-scale

role-playing game alongside these rules

where the game is constantly talking to you and asking you to type back to it.

And there's a million lines of voice acting for every possible response.

It's incredible.

Okay.

It's fucking amazing.

Did your account get thrown on a list because of the first letters in this being crypt?

Because I feel as if the moment you if you talk about crypto the necker dancer or crypt anything and you no, no, crypto bots just show up and start fucking

no, it's it's great.

Cryptmaster is fantastic.

You should all check it out.

That is not a sponsored opinion.

I just think that game's really cool.

That's a very cool art style.

Yeah.

I also played Dungeons and Dragons this week with my Dungeons and Dragons group.

How is that going?

So

right off the bat, the DM

sat down and was like, hey, everybody,

everybody,

I'm going to be talking at certain points and people are going to have their moments and we're all

going to let everyone have their moment and talk and take their turns.

You know that very traditional, like, I can't point a finger because then we're going to have a fight.

So instead, we're going to

diffuse

this across the whole group, right?

Are we going to agree to like mute buttons?

No, no, no, no.

But basically, you know, and everyone went, yeah, absolutely.

No problem, DM.

And to Jimmy's extreme credit, Jimmy was a million times better

this session.

Good job.

Like way, way, way better.

Great.

I briefly mentioned, oh, I switched over to to a cleric because I didn't want to be a second warlock.

And he was like, oh, that's great.

That means that we can make bigger mistakes now that we have a cleric.

And I was like, that's right.

And then we later did.

Session was great.

There was one thing that was a little strange.

And that was when we arrived, there was an eight-year-old child sitting at the DD table.

Okay.

And I was like, oh, I wonder if this is like a relative of the DM or they're going to get picked up.

No.

So the DM is like walking in from outside having smoked his DM weed, which is, you know, and I'm starting to put drinks away because that's what I do.

Turns out this kid is one of the player's children and will be joining us.

Okay.

And to the kid's credit,

he was all right.

Yeah, I see no.

That doesn't.

I don't raise any eyebrows at that.

That's fine, as long as the kids are.

I would raise an eyebrow at

surprise children

at a late-night D ⁇ D session with weed and alcohol.

Okay, well, I guess if it's being consumed right out, like, yeah.

But

like, and I guess it's someone, it's a chick kid of someone who's there, who's playing.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because we were playing on a different day than we usually do.

So I assume that was like a, just a custody situation.

Yeah, the kid's all right.

Kid was cool.

He got a little bored at the end.

Like, if you're chill and you can keep up and have fun.

Well, wait a second.

I'm, I, okay.

In theory, providing you're a chill kid, I have no problem with that.

Well, wait just a second.

All right.

So when we were playing DD, and in general, the kid was actually very nice and chill.

He's like eight or nine or some shit.

He was, he was all right.

Yeah.

But I'm like, oh, hello.

I'm Pat.

Introduce myself to the child and hold my hand out as you do, right?

I was a little weirded out.

I didn't expect this situation, but okay.

And the kid walks past my hand

and full palm taps me on my bald spot and then walks past me and goes, hi.

Okay, this kid rules.

This kid's a fucking hero is what you're saying.

He's based as fuck.

And I'm just like standing there.

You didn't tell me the child was based, Pat.

You didn't tell me the child was based.

This kid's unstoppable.

All right.

Okay.

This is supposed to be my D ⁇ D thing.

Established he knows how to play.

I respect it.

I admire it.

Also, man, like, eight-year-olds and nine-year-olds are tall now, man.

That's not fair.

Damn.

Shouldn't be able to touch me on top of my head, but that's how God did me.

Man said you're maulding, and hey, nice to meet you in one fell swoop.

So, like, the only thing is, is like, if I was going to go to like a meetup of acquaintances or friends or whatever, I would expect someone to just tell me that there would be a child there.

I mean, do they kind of say, hey, there's a new person joining, like, before you show up?

No, not even that.

Not even that.

It was so weird.

Is this a casual drop-in, drop-out kind of group?

I don't know.

I don't think so.

Because sometimes that's a thing.

You know,

I remember one of the group I played with, there was friends that would be there less frequently, and they kind of had character sheets if they popped in.

Like, I have no idea.

I have no idea if that kid is going to be like another party member, or that was just like a one-off.

Also, back in the day, I don't know if this never came up.

Back in the day, the DM had, excuse me, you know how like there's like NPC character sheets?

He would have a simplified sheet for people that were rolling with us, and someone could take that over, you know, for like a,

okay, yeah, we did that back in the back in the day, I remember.

But yeah, can't express enough that the kid was cool, and especially for an eight-year-old, he did like a really good job.

So far, so good.

But like,

I don't know what's going on with me trying to play D ⁇ D that I'm running into like every possible conceivable like form of shenanigans,

like week in, week out.

I mean, you're meeting people.

This is the outside world.

What is there to say?

I've met people before.

You're meeting D ⁇ D players.

That's true.

That is true.

That is pretty much it for me this week.

The remainder of the week, tomorrow I'm going to do some backlog stuff.

and then Friday, I'm going to be playing Metal Gear Solid 2.

Oh, right.

I beat MGS1 last night.

Yeah.

For the first time in like a decade.

Which ending?

I went for Meryl because Meryl lives.

Yeah.

And man, that ending's way worse than the Otta-Con ending.

Like, it's just way worse.

Yeah, but because you know that it doesn't go anywhere.

No, but if you're a teenage boy, you're going to be like, oh, I saved my girlfriend, and now she's going to ride on the back of the

snowmobile, and her boobs are on my back.

So, um, like that's it.

There's two big things

coming off playing Metal Gear Solid 1 out now, or three things.

One, yeah, no, it's a direct remake of like Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2.

Sorry, Metal Gear 1 and 2.

Like, it's, it's, everything in there is like something from the old ones, all the way down to, like, there's a boss in

Metal Gear 2 called Ultra Box, which is just four guys attacking you in an elevator.

Right.

And the second thing is that

I'm a proper adult man now.

And when Liquid's going on and on and on and on and on about the recessive genes, I'm just like blown away at how like Liquid is actually like legitimately stupid.

Complete nonsense.

He's willing to nuke the world because he does not understand genetics.

But at the time, as your first ever monologue about DNA,

It was the coolest thing ever.

And you saw footage of real nukes going off a couple hours earlier, so you trust everything you're hearing.

But like every single thing he says about genes, like nearly everything is like completely incorrect.

Dominant and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like the whole thing is so, it's, he's, he's fucking completely full of shit.

Now, but I will, I will say, if, if not for that speech years ago though, we probably wouldn't know these things casually now because finding out about the real version of that was directly as from its usage you know you don't look into that part of it if it doesn't get used in the fiction in a way yeah so uh i reached out to tom shalk of the youtube channel tom shalk for permission to sneak in the big chungus cutscene instead of liquid's gene cutscene which happily threw a bunch of people for a loop which what does that replace

Oh, it replaces Liquid on top of Rex talking about jeans.

Instead, he's talking about big chungus.

Nice.

Okay.

Because Tom Schalk is a fantastic voice actor and perfectly emulated

Cam Clark and David Hayter's voices.

But the final thing is that, like,

every single thing that Ocelot says in Metal Gear Solid 1 is a lie.

Every single word out of his mouth is not true.

Oh, so you mean

it is beyond funny.

He wasn't told it was going to be a weapon.

He didn't think that Rex could possibly ever.

Rex is for peace.

Like everything he says to

Liquid, everything he says to you.

Like there are things in some of the flashbacks of him talking to other characters that he is like he is.

Wait, wait.

I said Ocelot, didn't I?

I thought you said Otacon.

No, I said Ocelot.

Didn't I say Ocelot?

Excuse me.

Did I?

Now I'm confused.

I thought you said Otacon.

Okay.

No, Ocelot.

Like, Revolver Ocelot.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Long-term antagonist.

Every single thing he says in this game is a lie.

Checks out.

Like him being about Mother Russia, his plans for Galukovich, the shit he's saying in the fucking outro to the president.

Like

liar, the biggest liar ever.

And it's really, really funny.

There's also things I didn't pick up on ever, despite many, many playthroughs.

When you're in the torture scene and Liquid and him and Sniper Wolf are standing there, and he goes, oh, what's up, Carrier Boy?

And no one reacts?

It's because he's talking about Foxtock.

Because he knows that you're infected already.

And, like, I never, I never picked it up.

Um,

did you do, did you do any of the like the

extra bits?

Like, did you get the piss on the box and stuff?

I did the piss on the box.

I also saw the parachute outside the snowfield.

Okay,

yeah, that's uh

that game's great, yeah,

absolutely.

And, and um,

I still

like

mourn for that soundtrack because that energy never really came back.

You know, the OST from Solid One is just a different beast from all the other games.

And the other games are more sophisticated with their music, but it scratches a different itch.

Kojima wanted everything else to be more movie-like and cinematic.

And

Metal Gear Solid One is a fucking video game, and its soundtrack reflects that.

It's not trying to...

It sounds a lot like Metal Gear 2.

I love that that soundtrack, and I kind of am sad we lost it forever, you know.

So, yeah, that's it for me this week.

Uh, if you want to go down and see more Pat's stuff, you can go onto twitch.tv/slash Pat Stairsat or follow me on Blue Sky at Pat Stairsat, where you can see my really good skeets about dumb bullshit.

Um,

and uh, tomorrow's backlog and Friday is MGS2.

Sick, and now I got to take a break to take this dog out, BRB.

Let's take a quick word from our sponsors.

Let's.

This week, Castle Super Beast is sponsored by Raycon.

And

hey, that is the

wires that you need to get out of your life.

We can't emphasize it enough.

Listen, man, I'm playing, I'm gaming, right?

And I'm chasing a dog, a cat, a baby around.

They're getting into trouble.

If I was wired up, the likelihood of me tripping over myself would be nearly 100%.

It's just a liability, and there's no reason for it.

Also, it's annoying, and it sucks.

You can do better than that.

Raycon's Everyday Airbuds,

that's your perfect gym, buddy.

That's your little

simple, easy solution, getting a 32-hour battery life, multi-point connectivity with a simple device that lets you pair two devices at once.

So yeah, you can switch between having your Raycons hooked up to, let's say, your computer and or your phone or multiple devices,

whatever you need.

Plus active noise cancellation.

So

that's a particularly useful feature, especially if you're like someone who's, you know, if you like to kind of listen to stuff before you go to bed, I know that Punch Doom does, and yes, as do I as well and uh the noise canceling is really great for kind of just drowning out the sound initially as you uh as you get ready for sleep so um getting that as well is usually pretty expensive but raycons are coming in starting at half the price of other premium audio brands half that's crazy but with the same with the same good quality so um you can check out the everyday earbuds Got a bunch of different colors.

I like the blue ones.

They're nice and sleek, and they also are good for when I'm boxing, and they don't slip out when my ears start sweating.

And yes, you wouldn't think so, but your ears can sweat.

Every part of your body can sweat.

Oh, boy.

Let me tell you something, brother.

There's some new sweats I didn't know that I could sweat

that I have discovered in working out hard.

Indeed, indeed.

So don't let your moisture affect your ability to listen to this podcast

no that's don't don't let a

um

get 15 off site-wide at buyraycon.com slash super beast that's 15 off at bu-u-y r-a-y-c-o-n dot com slash super beast buyraycon.com slash super beast and yeah next time you're working out give them a shot.

See if you can shake and go crazy.

You know, I feel like

I feel like I've been able to especially enjoy that feature.

And

work up enough of a moist sweat and marvel at the fact that they stay in place.

That's crazy.

Thank you, Raycon.

Thanks, Raycon.

This week,

don't boo me, brother.

This week, the podcast is also sponsored by Shopify.

Cha-Ching is the sound of a sale on Shopify when you make it.

And

that is a

very useful all-in-one commerce platform.

If you've got a business, if you've got something that you're getting off the ground, you're starting out with some,

I don't know, if you're starting out with a t-shirt, if you're starting out with some stickers, some pins, whatever, or something much bigger than that.

Everything these days that is

convenient online usually has a back end,

a cart, a checkout,

that whole suite.

And Shopify is the number one checkout on the internet.

And it is incredibly easy to use and tracks all of the info to help you grow your business from the smallest first couple of sales to the, holy crap, did we just hit a million?

Yeah.

It was particularly useful as well when we were getting set up and figuring out how to go from a dumb old podcast to a t-shirt sale or two and hooking that up as well with like the shop app, which I use on a regular basis for tracking what I have coming in and when to expect deliveries and stuff.

Sometimes, you know, you kind of just girl, like, ooh, I didn't see expect a package today.

But other times, I'm kind of listening out while I'm recording, like right now, to be like, do I have to run to the door or not?

But you can just quickly check on the

shop app and see, like, oh, yeah, we know what's coming and when it's arriving.

So that's particularly useful.

So,

by all means, be sure to get in on that.

We also are talking about the

powerful social media tools that help you connect all your channels and create

posts that help you reach everyone who's scrolling through and checking out your stuff as well.

So you can connect it to, yeah, like the YouTube channel, you can connect it to

the various places where your shop is hooked up.

And if you have other channels, if you have other social media, etc., it's powering a lot of those as well.

So, established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash Superbeast, all lowercase.

Go to shopify.com/slash superbeast to start selling with Shopify today.

That's shopify.com/slash superbeast.

Thanks, Shopify.

Thanks, Shopify.

I love you.

And last but not least, this week, the podcast is sponsored by Express VPN.

Oh, ExpressVPN.

Tell me your magical, wonderful copy, your ad copy that I love so much every time.

What is using the internet unsecured like,

guy who works at ExpressVPN?

Using the internet without ExpressVPN.

Well, you remember the good old days before Microsoft Word had autosave?

I did.

Yes,

I do.

You'd type type out an important report and then your computer would freeze and you'd lose hours of work because you forgot to hit the save button.

That's what it's like going online without Express VPN.

I lost at least two essays that I spent upwards of 60 minutes

frantically writing before their due date and had to use my remaining 60 minutes of time to redo them because of that exact problem.

And that isn't directly applicable, but I remember that like ooh in my stomach when that happened.

Yep.

I've lost work.

I've lost papers.

I've lost essays.

I've lost all kinds to not hitting the save button back in the day before we had autosave.

But I don't think I've lost anything that major ever since

the

day that changed me that I often refer to the day that my brother wiped out my Mugin files, my FF7 progress, and all of my Dragon Ball GIFs and my Raiden

high scores.

Ever since that day,

I've become paranoid about not losing my progress.

It changed me.

It got me to stop caring about all of the above

because I just didn't want to go back in and do it again.

But unlike that, you still care about internet security.

It's absolutely important.

And

to that end,

ExpressVPN is super secure and super easy.

It would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption.

Could you imagine sitting there at the heat death of the universe, finally going like, I did it!

I'm invincible.

And then you just get wiped out.

I can imagine that actually happened to me, yeah.

It's really easy to use.

You fire up the app, you click one button, and you get started, and it'll work on all your devices, phones, laptops, tablets, and more, so you can stay secure on the go.

Rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge.

Yeah, I know I regularly use it.

My use case, besides security, is just straight up being like, I want

what I want to watch, and I want to play what I want to play.

And just because I'm in a nation where there's currently no captain at the ship, Helm,

just because

we're currently rudderless, not that we had a rudder before now, anyways, but

I am not going to be told that being in Canada means that I can't watch me,

what I want to watch on YouTube or I can't get me a game on Steam that happens to be available now in New Zealand.

So,

yeah.

Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash superbeast.

That's exp r e s

v p n dot com slash superbeast.

And you can get an extra four months free.

Expressvpn.com slash superbeast.

Thanks, ExpressVPN.

Thanks, ExpressVPN.

Okay,

dope.

I'll tell you what, you know how much I actually really like using ExpressVPN?

I recently discovered I was actually signed up to multiple simultaneous instances of ExpressVPN because I would go, Man, I should get back on it.

I should get, I should, I should do that.

I love using that.

I should use it.

And then forgot that I actually kept it the whole time

and used a different email.

Well, damn, don't do that.

Um,

all right well hey um

i mean look we all need to be fiscally responsible right no

okay

well

if you would like to

might i suggest perhaps finding a way to uh

you know, launder some of that dirty money you're holding on to.

Oh, like TD?

Like maybe using Pokémon cards.

You know what?

Yeah, okay.

That sounds like, yeah, okay, because it's because it's all appreciation and value over actual worthless things.

Shoal, former Yakuza executive, explains how the Yakuza used Pokémon cards to launder money.

Of course.

It's the Pachinko racket, but with Pokemon cards.

100%.

I mean, there's nothing else to, it's obvious.

It's just like, yeah,

you take your cash and you put it into something that's

not as high risk.

And Pokemon cards are easy to hide.

You can take them overseas and store them there.

You can't get tracked down.

Basically, an interview was done with an anonymous Yakuza group executive who spoke to a Japanese news outlet and explained that a lot of business is covered using Pokemon cards.

And

yeah, the values are all, you know, of course, because they're all worth different amounts and such.

The highest value card was 5.2 million in 2021.

I'm guessing it was a Charizard.

And

yeah, it's basically been a stable enough means that

the Japanese underground

can use them as a way of

cleaning that money up and going back and forth.

That makes perfect sense.

Absolutely.

Okay, let's think.

Do you want to go on an international flight with a briefcase full of cocaine or Pokemon cards.

Yeah.

I mean, over here, exactly.

You put it into an art piece, right?

You buy a Banksy.

Same bit, right?

Just find something.

This art is just so good.

Wow.

This art.

Wow.

Ignore the conspicuous shredder placed beneath the piece.

That is Wi-Fi compatible that has been hooked up to the.

It was awesome seeing those those dudes get punked, though.

That was great.

But then you have to imagine like someone in the audience was standing there with the remote button, and then as soon as they pressed sold, they pressed it and did it.

And you just kind of look around the room, and like, you know, it's like if they really wanted to, they could figure out which one of these fuckers did that.

They could.

Yeah, but that's not art, bro.

Hmm.

Um,

yeah, anyway, so

uh, uh,

that is

that's just funny to me because like you would think this interview in this year would be like, oh yeah, we all put our money in crypto,

but it's not.

No.

It's in physical Pokemon.

The ultimate proof of crypto and NFTs and all that shit's transience in the long term is that if crypto was like super good and the new way future, you would see like the mafia and the triads and the yakuza and the russians just like

so in it you you would just know like tony lips every single fucking time okay you went to go trade well to be fair the russians are way in it and anytime they hack and take over your channel that's the first thing they're doing you know

oh is that russians oh bummer oh yeah all the ftc people that got their sites taken over uh or were just like it immediately turns into like a russian channel with like a live stream that's I'm glad that Rufflemonger got his channel back like really fast.

Yeah, yeah, I think like I heard that some people were having some bigger struggles with that.

Um,

however, uh, I'm glad that it was right on time for us to be at Holiday Matsuri.

And then while he was on stage, he was like, He's going, like, hey guys, what's up?

I'm Rufflemonger.

Uh, I make fighting game YouTube videos, and I just, and I can, I yelled out, you sell crypto.

He's like, I also sell crypto,

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was a good time.

And then Lord Knight was running over to like his, after he was running over to a casual station to play some games.

And I just, I ran, I walked up to him behind him.

I'm just like, hey, yo, man, I got some ETH for sale.

You know anyone who's buying?

And he's just like, yeah, all right, band.

All right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got you.

Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, real funny.

I don't know, man.

It just seems to me that if this thing was the future, then you wouldn't need to relentlessly, criminally advertise it.

That it would be something that people would seek out on their own.

Nah, dude, they just, we need to take over their channels and force them to be these giant dump spaces for you because it's just, you just don't know about the future yet.

We're helping you.

When we take over Obama's Twitter,

that's the first thing we do is just post a wallet.

Yeah, anyway.

Well, look,

maybe people have some extra money in their pockets now that Amazon has finally canceled the Mighty Number 9 3DS pre-orders.

Right?

Maybe you got a little bit of pocket change now that they've finally given you your money back.

So, is that what?

How many platforms did Mighty Number 9 just not come out on?

All but one?

No?

Okay, so the 3DS was the.

Was that not

the end state of affairs?

I'm shocked because I didn't know that this was still a thing they were holding.

Someone somewhere went, wait, what the fuck is this?

And killed the account, I'm sure.

So,

oh, they don't charge.

Amazon doesn't charge you until the actual order goes through.

Oh, okay, okay, all right.

But still, though,

it was just, it was just literally, it was a clerical bit.

It's living in our hearts.

Man.

Man, Inifune fucking sucks so bad.

Oh, I hate that guy.

I mean, if you did have one,

yeah, it's been nine years

until they.

Yo, if you don't support Mighty Number Nine, you're fucking stupid.

Is that me that said that?

I feel like it was.

Regardless, oops.

We don't need listen enough.

We've been reminded thoroughly about how the first episode of the friendcast is like yeah go support that that's awesome mega man's back

in a fune-san don't die followed by also talking about one or two other you know yeah

i mean look i will say this that if anything the timeline from the friendcast through uh uh castle super beast has been a

clear uh path of kickstarter in the games industry energy.

Oh, yeah.

That tracked the like, oh my god, we can fund the games ourselves and get what we want.

This will fix everything.

We'll just be able to do it ourselves from now on.

That's awesome.

And then every subsequent

into

the most recent, where nowadays, if a Kickstarter for anything pops up, which it rarely ever does, it's like, hey, this looks kind of cool.

Look at it and make your own decisions, maybe.

I don't know.

I'm not going to tell anybody to spend anything on a fucking Kickstarter that can't be trusted.

The hindsight that even the most like open and honest and straightforward Kickstarter was actually just funding a publisher pitch

is like the biggest bummer ever.

Right.

So, like, Pillars of Eternity is like a really good example.

I think both of those games came out great.

They're not perfect

and they succeeded in all their stated goals.

But those were just like funding campaigns to show, I think it was paradox, that there was enough interest in the game to fund it.

Yeah, Shen Mu, obviously, being the king of these like lie campaigns.

It's weird.

I mean, there's like the standout is like Shovel Knight, of course.

You know, like that's like the big, clear, honest winner of just like, if they said what they were going to do, they did that, and then they did more.

And great.

You know, nothing else to say about it.

I think Undertale, I think Cat and Time, but that's, but I'm like, it's almost like, so stuff like Undertale and yeah, and that, and like, and, and that

it almost like stops being thought about as a Kickstarter project

after the success reaches a certain point, you know?

Um, but it's nice that there's these, these, these examples that we've been given.

Okay, yeah, Star Citizen, uh, rather, Papers Please, ukulele, Spark the Electric Jester.

Oh, Baldur's Gate 3.

Somebody points out in chat.

It's, you know, this is nice.

This is, but, like, it just sucks that the failures and the

deceit and the non-accountability have just kind of made it a thing where you're like, yeah,

I don't really trust this as much anymore.

You know?

And to those of you who say,

like, basically, a lot of people hear, like, oh, man, I've been burned on Kickstarters.

And now I have trouble trusting them.

And they respond with a huge amount of games that were actually really high quality out of crowdfunding.

So I'm seeing people say both Hades games.

I'm seeing

Psychonauts.

The Psychonauts 2 is actually maybe the worst example possible because the Psychonauts 2 fig campaign literally ran out of money.

And the only reason that game got finished is because Microsoft bought Double Fine.

I don't think that we can, like, there's no shortage.

There's a list we can keep going down of good games that have come out as a result of successful crowdfunding.

Absolutely.

There's a huge amount of them, but the burns hurt.

The feeling of you robbed me of $80

and did nothing.

Bro, I fucking sucks.

I don't even know, but when's the last time I got a Project Phoenix update in my fucking email?

That's it.

It just, it just sucks.

Let me see if I can find that.

And a lot of those good releases don't ease that burn of the lying, crazy person that took your money and fucked off.

You know?

We are.

Hey, guess what?

Anyone who's been working, making content on the internet has had this discussion before.

But

the reason why you notice negative comments and they stand out more than positives do is because...

Because they feel twice as strong.

Because negativity negativity is reinforced twice as strong in your brain.

Because we, as human beings, are trained to like see positives and take them at face value.

But negatives are things to be reminded of because, in like, for evolutionary purposes, something threatening to you would be much more dangerous than something positive.

So, you register bad things and threats, and they imprint you, they imprint stronger, right?

So, like, it's called loss aversion.

It's a part of what being a human being is, and therefore, losing one Kickstarter that robbed you is not going to make the others, the successes, feel better, even though there's many more of those, you know?

It's part of what we are.

So, yeah.

Mighty number nine 3DS pre-orders released.

The saga is over.

Finally.

What do you think the timeline is for Inafune going to jail?

Not in relation to Mighty Number Nine.

just like he seems like the kind of guy who's allegedly doing crimes.

Maybe when, I don't know, is Yuji Naka going to name him a co-defendant?

Like, yeah, fuck it.

Let's go.

Let's go.

When he gets wrapped up, let's go.

Phoenix Wright style, they introduce a new witness.

Maybe

I don't know.

I imagine right around the time Shenmue 4 gets confirmed.

Man.

Speaking of lies, deceit, jail,

and chicanery, Dokupan's Sword of Fury has been announced, and I'll tell you what, as someone who is like, as soon as Dokopan news comes out in any way, shape, or form, of course, that immediately lands on the desk.

I'm going to say that I feel like, almost like the, you know, the original LPs were responsible responsible of uh for a Metal Wolf Chaos.

You know how that directly ties to the re-release of Metal Wolf and Yakuza being popularized in the West?

I'm gonna take a little bit of credit on Dokopon.

You should because I feel I feel as if it's it seems like between um, yeah, there's my LP, there was the original Runaway Guys one that was pretty big, um, and then now with with iPatch Wolf, I think like I'm taking credit for helping Dokopon get re-released out here and get localized.

They did put out a Japanese-only thing on the Switch, and this is kind of like the translation of it.

But I feel like if I didn't start pushing Dokopan,

we wouldn't be out here seeing these releases, you know?

So let me ask you a question.

You would know, what is the difference between Dokopan Kingdom and Dokopon Sword of Fury?

They're both board games.

So,

Dokopon has been an ongoing series that has different versions that have released over the years that you would think like Mario Party 2 and 3 and 4 would come to mind, but it's actually drastic in terms of like there's usually massive art style and game style gameplay elements that are different here.

The board itself is a completely different thing each time.

The rules and the sub-games you play,

sometimes the classes change, sometimes the missions and you know, it's like a just a different board game.

But the only things that are consistent is you can fuck over everyone you love,

you know in this game that is basically alternating between um rpging and mario party um but that's that's kind of the deal you know because dokopon journey for example the the 3ds one that we uh ended up doing was also

like similar enough to kingdom that um

you have your your your

your um

You have your basis, you know what I mean?

Like you're your same kind of

grounded rules and and classes and stuff, but

you know, it's like booting up, I don't know, FF9 versus FF10, right?

You're just the rules are vaguely similar, but overall it's it's it's it's got a whole bunch of different things.

So Sword of Fury is an older one.

People are saying it's from 98.

Exactly.

Sword of Fury is an older game that it got re-released on the Switch last year

in Japan and is now getting ported and translated to other things.

And Dokupon Kingdom

was an original connection to game that then got ported to the Wii and then from the Wii got updated and released on Steam.

So those are which is the new one?

The new, new, brand new is Dokupon

across

Uwatare Mono.

I keep getting that.

What's the English new one?

There is none.

Is it Kingdom?

But

that's a modern re-release.

Kingdom is a modern re-release.

But yes.

Utaware Rumono Cross Dokopon is.

Underwater Ray Romano.

Thanks, Paluxor.

Got it.

That's the only one that's

actually a new thing.

Anyway.

I should teach my child to play Dokupon.

Oh, that.

Oh, so lying is not enough, then

lying is not enough.

We need to take it from to get him ready for this

doggy dog world.

God, as he stands over your corpse, he looks down on you and goes, Father,

and then he puts his hands together, more,

father.

Um,

yes,

so uh

apparently alongside that

um

Transformers Reactivate has been officially cancelled.

What was that?

That was my next question.

Okay, because I was like

seeing, yeah, seeing lots of news today about Transformers Reactivate has been canceled.

And then I was like, uh-huh,

The fuck is Transformers Reactivate?

It is a one-to-four player online action game developed by Splash Damage coming to PC and consoles.

And then I see a trailer with some humans in it and some

pretty looking things.

And it was announced at the Game Awards.

And it's like, oh, man, in 2022, was I in a.

I remember looking at this trailer and being like, this is not real.

I'm like, was I in a drunken, like, Dorito stupor?

Yes, you were.

While that was happening

um

okay so uh yeah I I couldn't say much but um

I guess it was

um

anticipated well look okay that looks pretty looks pretty shiny

um

looks like a coffin now

I thought uh I saw that this was mobile, but no, this was PCN consoles as well.

Splash damage.

What studio is Splash Damage?

Oh, they used to do Return to Castle Wolfenstein, I think.

Oh,

okay, okay.

I don't think they ever put out a single game that was

bigger than.

Wait, were they the motherfuckers by both of them?

Oh, they were.

Oh, they did Brink.

They did Brink.

What a flop that piece of shit was.

Oh, man.

Halo MCC and Gears 5?

Oh.

I have not heard a single human being talk about Gears of War V in my entire life.

Oh, shit.

Brink.

That's the blue one, right?

And the red one.

Haze is the yellow one.

That's true.

Oh, man.

The colors, dude.

Like, remember them by their colors.

Yeah, Brink is the blue one.

That's the Kool-Aid one.

Yeah, okay.

Fuck.

That's crazy.

That's crazy.

Like, honestly, the entire game in my brain was just blue Kool-Aid.

All right, perfect.

Good.

Good, good.

All right.

Fucking Brink, man.

Didn't think I'd be talking about fucking Brink today.

So, yeah, this one, just as I was going live, I saw this pop up here.

Diablo 4 lead claims players don't actually want classic Diablo back as modern gamers are too consumptive.

I would, I, okay, let's not even go into this article at all because it's an overt lie.

Okay.

Like,

that is a crazy, stupid stupid lie because Path of Exile exists.

So

this is a story that I bring up for you to elaborate on here because I'm not in a position to speak on it.

But

yeah, the premise of the discussion was that

in an interview, Ferguson explained that Blizzard did attempt to go back to the classic formula of Diablo 4.

However, as players became used to the rapid progression of modern games, it became unfeasible.

And based on on describing

that Diablo formula doesn't work these days.

Complete fucking

outright lies, pretending they're the only people in their own space.

There's

a ton of games on Steam.

There's both Path of Exiles, but let's ignore that.

Let's ignore all the factual incorrectness here.

This is the same company that said

you think you want classic World of Warcraft, but but you don't.

For like eight years.

And now the only people I know playing WoW are playing classic WoW, including me.

Part of the quote here is also that the consumptive nature of a live service has made returning to

the classic series impossible while also being a sales success.

But

isn't the consumptive nature of live service directly what Blizzard has made popular?

Yeah.

It's their fault.

Isn't that part of what World of Warcraft's entire rise to power has been?

Also, like, Path of Exile is classic Diablo, and it's also a live service game, and it's been chucking along happily

for like, I don't know, like, fucking eight years.

Like, it's

every single thing in this statement is a lie.

Well, if this person is speaking on behalf of themselves and not Diablo, then they could say something that is

what the company that they're working for has done the opposite or the demonstrated the opposite, certainly.

But

it is a wildly lie.

It's a wildly lie, it is a wildly big lie, big, big untruths.

And people who've wanted the same just picked up, went elsewhere, and made their own version with blackjacket hookers.

Yeah, yeah, there's tons of Diablo-style games.

There's fucking, what's the one where you're time traveling, and there's dinosaurs.

I, um,

last epoch.

There's both Path of Exiles.

Um, there's Torchlight, like, sh fuck off.

Um,

there's Grim Dawn.

Yeah, Grim Dawn rules.

And, uh, speaking of

the old

still having appeal,

I didn't know this, but that Legacy of Kane Soul Reaver remaster,

so recently Noclip did a documentary about Legacy of Kane in general, and apparently the team behind that, the person who led it was Monica Arasova, who's basically someone that made their own fan remaster

and then officially got hired for the gig to do this and showed up and had their own,

besides extensive knowledge of the game,

she also had her own collection of 4,500 textures from Soul Reaver 1.

Awesome.

And thousands of textures from Soul Reaver 2 and just

showed up with the assets and went to work.

No one could ever be more qualified.

That is crazy.

Yeah.

Was already known as somebody in the community that, like, yeah, just was doing it themselves anyway.

And she just kind of,

yeah, she was the only person disqualified for the gig.

That would explain something that's going on with the Soul Reaver 1 and 2 Remaster because

one of the things that they put in there that I only found out about recently was that they have restored cut levels to those games.

Ah.

But

they are not integrated.

You go to a menu of like lost content

and you can load into like the human city, but

they are as they were.

So

there is no guarantee you won't walk forward and fall through the floor in one step.

Kodor 2, cut content.

Yeah.

Yeah, and this is like properly unfinished shit.

But they're like, do you want to roll around in the dev environment?

Fucking go for it.

If you really love the game, then you might, you know?

Yeah, okay.

So find that one person online with the hyper fixation

and give them the fucking job.

Like, I don't know what the gentleman that redid every single texture in Resident Evil 4 is up to, but...

That dude did seven years and traveled around the world to find new textures for RE4.

I'm sure he's doing something cool with that technical expertise.

One would hope, at the very least, that the people who make the decisions are paying attention.

Yeah.

That's pretty sick.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah, so like if you have a guy on your team and you're making your Kiryu game, and there's a guy over there getting all

sick in the head over Virtua Fighter,

let him do the Virtua Fighter shit.

Give it to that guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know?

Or if you don't, say why.

How about that?

You know?

I said, or.

Oh, yeah.

Or, or, you know, just give a heads up.

What's going on if you decide not to for any reason?

Oh, motherfuckers.

Son of a bitch.

You know, just let me know what's going on.

Absolute pieces of shit.

Just tell me what's up.

That's just god-awful.

I would just want to know what's going on.

You know, it's fine.

It's okay.

No worries.

Talk to me.

Let's talk.

Let's open up communication lines.

Yeah.

There's a blast from the past.

All right.

Every once in a while,

you know, there might be a time where, you know, one of us opens up our communication lines and sees, check your fucking email.

You know, but hey, anyways.

Every now and then.

Speaking of a blast from the past,

Notch has basically announced Minecraft 2?

Yeah.

He's sick of being bored, rich, and unliked, and would like to go back to the thing that he made that made people like him.

But, like, as Minecraft has basically just become a platform of sorts, can you even drop that in a way that would

take

the

same

level of attention and impact that the first person was?

Minecraft is about as lightning in a bottle as it's ever gotten.

Well, I was going to say that the second strike strike of that, from what I feel from talking to, again, nephews and stuff, is that Roblox is the thing that comes along and takes that thought.

Also, doesn't Microsoft own Minecraft?

Can you even do a Minecraft 2?

I mean.

No!

No!

No, Wooly!

There's a different way to spell the game, Pat.

No, we're not doing that.

I'm just changing the placement of the E and the I.

You're not doing it.

What's the problem with replacing the letter spelling?

I'm taking the E and I'm moving it a little bit earlier into the word.

What's the problem?

Playing Mein Kraft on the fucking bus and shaking my head the whole time.

So everyone's

disapproving.

Disapprovingly playing Minecraft.

Oh, there it is.

All right.

Okay, good.

Sometimes you don't even have to say the title for the title to arise.

It's kind of mad.

I'm a fan.

I still remember, like, fucking Notch bought a super mansion.

I think he bought the house next to Jay-Z.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

He bought the house that Jay-Z wanted.

Oh, yeah.

And Jay-Z.

And then he moved in.

And he's like, I don't know anyone in this neighborhood.

And all of Jay-Z's people hate my fucking guts.

And I don't have any friends.

And everyone's like, why did you move away from every person in your life to go have a rich mansion in a city you've never been to?

Idiot.

See, but I still love the idea of Jay-Z in the windows leaning in, being like, it's your boy, let me in.

Yeah, so, yeah.

All right.

Um,

well, anyway.

Um, speaking of shitty things,

hey,

so

last we heard there was the potential for a

international lawsuit involving Indonesia working with Ubisoft a couple years ago with everything revolving around

Skull and Bones.

We have since seen a new report come out from People Make Games

basically describing that the level of abuse towards employees at the Indonesian studio Brandoville.

So I want to point out that Singapore was the place that excuse me, my mistake.

I'm sorry.

You're right.

That was, yeah.

So this is specifically for Brandoville, a company that was used to support Age of Empires 4 and Ask Creed Shadows.

Oh, that game's just so full of good news all the time.

Was reporting on crunch culture and the industry's reliance on outsourcing for external developers to meet deadlines.

Well, I mean, we've heard crunch stories before.

How bad could this one be?

This one involves

literally people, like,

there's work crunch abuse, and then there's actual, like, physical abuse.

Yeah, there are deaths in this story.

People being crunched and then being forced to like film themselves and

they micromanaged how much time they were allowed to sleep.

Imposing.

Send me a video of yourself slapping yourself 100 times.

Imposing daily Christian worship,

making people write lines, daily check-ins over

in one case, someone's outfits as part of quality control and humiliating them in front of colleagues.

Literally, just apps, like fucking heinous level shit.

Another employee.

Where was that?

Sorry, I lost my page.

Yeah, someone literally

lost a pregnancy.

No,

it was her, she was overworked to the point of her baby being delivered prematurely.

Prematurely.

And then it later passed.

And then four months later, died in intensive care.

Yes.

And then when she was like, I'm kind of bummed out about my horrible tragedy, they're like, get into fucking work.

And

yeah, and it goes on.

It's

pretty fucking disgusting.

It's the worst I've ever heard.

Um

where it's like, this is

games?

Is this the same industry?

This is this is cult nightmare shit.

Um

yeah, and and effectively the uh

it seems as it seems this is all uh uh at the hands of Cherry Lai,

who uh was more or less the

large enabler and person in charge of

a lot of what happened here?

Ubisoft has published a statement which reads, like, oh man, that's crazy, bummer.

Didn't know about it, though.

Yeah,

essentially just outsourced

a literal abuse slave factory.

I don't even really know what

you could say there.

There is a

further look into it if you check out

where's the video?

100 slaps?

The breaking news.

Breaking the news game on the games industry.

Breaking news, the games industry ignored in 2024.

That I think goes into some of that.

Yeah.

Bringing my dog onto the show for better vibes.

Yeah, I mean,

we talk about like the state of UB,

you know, and how things have been

pretty, I guess, business-wise, fiscally dire, and the idea that like, you know, they're, they're disputing over what's going to trade hands and where the business and where the games are going to end up and shit like that.

This is.

This is.

People need to go to jail.

And if they don't, I don't know what the fuck to say.

This is going well beyond the realm of,

oh, stupid fucking video game.

Ha ha, look at the company, make a dumb release.

Yeah,

there's not much else to say there.

Just

literally lock people up.

Not much else to say, but

if you'd like to know more, you can look into what's going on there

with Brandoville was the name of the studio.

Yeah, and if you are outsourcing any of your work to any international studios anywhere,

do your fucking research.

Do some homework.

Find out who you're working with.

Is it not customary to send people down there every now and then?

Make sure they're not like a

fucking sweatshop or slavery ring or cult.

Make sure they don't come back with like scars and bleeding and stab wounds from just, you know, scouting out the area and seeing what's going on.

Or is it just how affordable would it be for the Mad Hours?

You know?

Hey, listen, that number's got to go up, bitch.

Yeah.

So, um.

You know what?

I'm actually going to fall back on that statement.

I don't, like, yes, the number has to go up, yada, yada, but like,

one of the things that's of note here is that despite the fact that this company was used by many developers, Ubisoft is the one in the tagline, probably because this studio also helped work on Assassin's Creed Shadows.

And I think it's because Ubisoft has a long history of like not giving a fuck what's going on in their satellite studios.

When you scrape it to a certain size, yes.

And like not even giving a shit if they do anything or ship anything or...

Like the fucking Skull and Bones studio was used as a vacation spot for French directors.

What I would say is that like even though the conclusion of this story is that Brandoville did shut down

some months ago, like, okay,

and what about what the fuck happened to all the people that are in this that described individually the shit they went through?

Like, a company shutting down and or someone getting fired is not the same as

people getting locked the fuck up for abusing people.

And

yeah, like that's in the same way that the UBI, like, I'm going to move someone from one studio to another and change their job after they

physically abuse somebody type shit.

It's like, why are we treating the corporate job punishment the same as as a legal ramification?

Well, I mean,

it's the fucking Catholic priest run,

which is what I've called it each time.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, it's the same gimmick.

Just move them far enough away and change their name just a little bit.

The punishment is that you no longer have that congregation that you grew so attached to, and that's punishment enough.

Anyway.

Yeah.

Ubisoft is strange in that they have actually let a lot of this go on for so long.

Like literally every person I've ever talked to who has worked or worked with Ubisoft has mentioned there being problems with the staff and how a bunch of them are really creepy and empowered to the point where it's like really actively harmful to their business.

Yep.

Yep.

All the time.

People that literally are working there all have the version of what happened in their department.

And that, you know.

The incident.

Or, you know, that guy that's no longer, or whatever.

it's constant.

Yeah.

I was trying to, while we were talking here, track down, like, whether this was all while working specifically on

their games or if it was from others.

But, like, yeah,

if it was outsourcing through

contracts with other companies as well.

They did some work on Last of Us.

Oh, that feels appropriate.

They did some work on

a number of AAA

projects as well.

Yeah, okay.

Age of Empires 4, Assassin's Creed Shadows, and Last of Us Part 1 Remake are the biggest things they've worked on.

Yeah.

They helped on FF7 Remake.

Oh, yeah.

So they were all over the place.

They were all over the place.

They worked with quite a few people.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's it.

Hopefully, follow-up stories with sentencings will occur.

And at some point, some bean counter at most of the places we've just described are going, oh, damn it,

super annoying that this hit the news.

Aww.

All right.

Well.

Back to doing numbers while being a functioning alcoholic.

Yeah.

You have to, of course, imagine that for the people that were willing to talk about this shit and contribute to these stories, there's always people that are not willing to, right?

So.

Or whom are dead?

At this,

like.

Who the fuck knows?

I'm hoping that we can follow and find out more as time goes on.

All right.

How about a letter or two?

Oh, before that,

there was Virtual Fighter stuff this week, actually.

Was anything announced at the NVIDIA thing?

Yes.

They showed off the pre-development teaser.

for Virtual Fighter.

They lied essentially the

what do you call it?

The

the sizzle reel for the for the company

And it's where

that leaked screenshot came from the one with the bar.

Oh

And it no longer has a bar

So the bar is gone

They also show like a big gigantic city area people that they say they made quite quickly people have probably gotten fired

And the the it is a concept reel.

It is not real gameplay, like it is all very highly choreographed, but it is definitely showing off that, like, yes,

like dedicated blocking and animations are like a big deal for it.

But the other thing is that there's a camera cut,

there's like a reversal, and Akira,

like in his reversal animation, kicks the other guy all the way across the screen, and it has a dedicated camera cut, like

dead or alive.

Okay,

um,

Kind of waiting for like a

content announcement, game, character system

thing.

You know, the NVIDIA tech demo stuff is not as.

I'm hoping that they get, you know, closer to talking about the actual game, but they might be really far away from that at this point.

It's possible.

The NVIDIA reiterates that they love Virtua Fighter, and they're super excited to be working with Sega to make really fancy-looking Virtua Fighter.

Yeah, show me the game.

I don't care about this shit.

Show me the fucking game.

That's probably months away.

Yeah, that's probably going to be at Evo.

Okay.

Or

Frosty Fastings, maybe.

Right?

Because they're going to have that at VFI Revo.

It's going to be at Fastings.

Yeah, that's happening in late January.

Yes.

Okay.

But now let's let's read an email.

Sorry, I had to talk about Virtual Fighter.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, by all means, you're only going to get one shot.

No, that's not true.

That's not true.

That's not true.

There will be dozens, if not hundreds, of opportunities to talk about Virtual Fighter over the ensuing years from now

at least once a year at every Evo until the day that we die

CastleSuperBeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com

from Addy says, Dear Pat Drake and Wooloman,

I've recently come into the knowledge that people lovingly refer to Silk Song as Skong.

What do you got on these semi-official abbreviations?

I mean, you know.

Yo, Shark!

Shark!

Kill the night song!

Sharks, Shart's top of the list.

Top of the list.

And yeah, Femme C is also pretty fucking good.

I've never heard it called Skong.

Never.

Not even once.

Never heard it.

But someone just wrote Scrim, and god damn it if I don't immediately know what that is.

Yeah.

It's a little too close to Scrum, though.

Femme Shep is someone who posted, and that feels like, oh, yeah, you know what?

Ex-Bone.

X-Bone's the all-time greatest.

X-Bone.

X-Bone.

Oh, and I've been playing Metal Gear.

So

people keep asking me why I keep calling Portable Ops poops

instead of Pops.

I saw because P-O-O-Portable.

Po-ops.

Yeah.

Po-ops.

Poops.

Yeah, no, but

my favorite is, of course,

my nomenclature from Devil May Cry.

I'm going to take that as my credit.

The Porbs Rorbs, the Blorb, Blorbs, and Gorbs.

Hey, okay.

We never talked about this.

I don't think we did.

Out of all the stupid names that we came up with for those orbs, which is your favorite?

I mean...

I mean, there's something just there's something just onomatopoeic about Porbs.

okay so i'm torn i think blorb is the funniest

blorb is yeah yeah but i think roarb is so dog shit dip like it doesn't work in rorb at all

and the fact that we forced it is so stupid rob does not roll off the tongue uh blorb sounds like something someone's already said when trying to say blob you know but porb that's i like i like porb because you like because that's what you know you can you can porb it up

you can we can get porby up in here like oh we got somebody saying that rob still lives strong i see it in every double man cry stream regardless of what game it is in the series or who the streamer is that's yeah we infected the world with this dumb shit good don guri does combo videos

We name the Roarbs.

We name the Orbs.

Damn straight.

That's good, Wooly.

That was really good work.

That's the legacy right there.

Professional.

All right, let's take one over here.

Link says, Dear Rotisserie Woolly and Tucked In Pat, Sleepy Edition.

Oh, you know it.

I had to stop tucking the sheets in.

Oh, yeah.

Because

the dog fell off the bed and got trapped in the sheets

because we were afraid he was going to suffocate.

Oh, because the tuck kept him in underneath.

Oh, that's a lethal tuck.

Yeah, you can't do that.

And Paige was like, oh, no,

he's suffocating.

And I'm like, no, he's not.

And then I picked him up and he was fine.

But so, yeah, we're not allowed to tuck in the sheets anymore.

I mean, it is kind of just like a really comfy hammock, but you need air.

so you gotta untuck.

I've seen and enjoyed Woolly's playthrough of Ace Attorney.

It reminded me, thank you, it reminded me of when I watched my cousin play, who ran into the same issue of getting ahead of the logic of the game and having to wait for it to get there, and I had already reached 10 dialogue.

I had already reached it 10 dialogue boxes ago.

Oh, yeah, no, that's universal.

You always get past Nick.

Oh, it's the way it works.

Have you played other games that have tripped you up because you were thinking further ahead than the game kept up with?

So, I mean, it's kind of the same thing, but yeah, I would say Dang and Rompa is also got the same issue.

Any game where the logic of the characters discovering things is meant to be like

the plot progression.

Yeah, no, there's always the part where there's the extra step that you view as obvious.

But the game treats it as a really big deal, and the character has to go, hmm, who could have done it?

Dang and Rampa, that happens a lot.

And it's like, I know what happened and I know how it happened, but the game cares about why or so.

And like, it cares about two objects that don't matter that much, but they're going to establish a train of thought, you know?

But what I will say is that what Dag and Rampa does do in its mini games while you're arguing, like Phoenix, right, you're just pointing out the contradictions.

But in Dag and Rampa, you're that's one of many different uh uh uh things you can do to argue, and there's one that's like a train of thought where you drive a car through some logical conclusions and then go, Okay, well, if A is B,

then C must D, you know, and like you drive into each letter to kind of follow where the game is supposed to lead your thought process to get them on in that specific way.

Um,

so yeah, that's the probably the biggest one I can

say.

I mean, I'd say Phoenix, right?

Like that's that's the one that I can remember just being like, god damn it.

Because it's always the part where the, where the judge is, you're like, I have conclusive evidence that this person is the killer.

And they're like, but do you also have conclusive evidence that your client is not the killer?

Right.

Also?

What is this?

No.

Civil suit?

What are we doing here?

I have a video of the guy committing the crime.

What do you fucking, what do I need?

Why do I have to prove a negative now?

This is stupid.

You are fiscally responsible for murder.

Dear Beast Lords,

throwing one out there for thought, but every passing day, especially with the NVIDIA CES conference, I find myself agreeing with the humans in the Matrix more and more.

We should discriminate against AI and robots.

Fuck them.

What's been your most recent encounter with the frustration of AI and their increasing invasion into the human experience?

My most recent example has been now every time you do a Google search, you have to scroll past the fucking horseshit that's.

Hey, do you want a wrong answer?

Up, top, front, and center.

Do you want a wrong answer right away?

That you can't trust?

But it's top, front, and center every time.

And

that's for your parents.

That's for, you know, and the convenience and such means that it's just like, yeah, that's the world now.

That's the default.

It's just, it's here.

It's unavoidable.

It's here, but it's what the default answer is.

And like, my mom can't tell the difference between the search result and a sponsored result and a question-answered down tab and the fucking AI-generated one.

Like, it's all like I asked into the box and I read the text that gave me the info.

I don't know.

She's still double-clicking on links and single-clicking on the desktop.

You know what I mean?

Like, fuck, man.

This reminds me.

I watched

a video in which somebody was talking.

They were a teacher in high school, and they ran into a student that

wrote in a paper they wrote that Greek is the combination of four pre-existing languages.

And the teacher's like, that is nonsense, that that's not true.

If anything, it's like derived from Aramaic.

And

he goes to the kid and he's like, where did you even look this up?

And he goes, here.

And he pulls up ChatGPT

and goes, is Greek is

a combination of four different languages.

And it goes, yes, it is.

And just a bunch of bullshit.

And

the teacher describes that he found it impossible to break through the inertia of the kid going, but I looked it up.

But it's right there.

But I look, I look.

That's what

I'm looking it up means.

I'm supposed to look it up.

You guys tell me to look things up.

So I looked it up.

And you're telling me that I'm supposed to believe you over the whole internet.

And guess what?

That kid is not wrong because they were trained to be like, I did the, I looked into it and this is what it said.

And now you're like, oh, but now we have to tell it, teach you how to parse the source.

that you're taking it from.

And

like, and I mean, at one point in time, even going and sourcing Wikipedia was questionable because it's like, well, it's Wikipedia.

Anyone can edit that.

We don't know for certain.

Turns out it's actually really reliable.

Turns out, right now, years later, but like those first couple years, it was like, yeah, fucking Wikipedia.

Get out of here.

That's crazy.

You know?

The world is, yeah, that's it now, man.

You're going to have to scroll past those words.

And, you know, kind of like how,

and it's the, the, what was it?

Like, we talked about the investor buzzwords, you know, and like, so AI is the current investor buzzword, but it's working and people are making tons of money by using that word.

And

are they?

Yes, right?

When Game Shark is like, no, we're shark AI or whatever.

Like it literally,

like everything, everything gets to just drop the words powered by AI into their pitch.

And that's enough for people who are invested to get happy.

Does it get, so here's, I have, I have a genuine question, and I don't know if either of us have the

economic background, which is, does that make money or does it get investment?

Because those are different.

It raises

confidence on part of shareholders.

Okay, so it drives investment.

That's it.

Yes, yes.

Okay, it does not make money.

No, no, no.

That is such a big distinction.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Because,

like, we've got AI centers like screwing up the American power grid and shit like that because they're super expensive.

But the only reason they get to keep running is because of, well, we have to keep investing in it because if it's the next big thing, you know, like crypto and NFTs and all the shit, then we need to be the top.

of the next big thing.

Yeah.

Look,

I've, you know, I feel like I've said a couple of times, like, I'm that person who says, reject all cookies.

And then, when you, like, you make a really annoying series of drop-down menus, where it's like, well, if you want to reject all these cookies, you're going to have to click these all off manually.

I'll be like, I got time.

And I will go down each one and be like, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.

Now let me read the website.

I don't expect other people to necessarily be willing to do that.

And I know that the convenience of like, at one point, it was opt-in, and now it's become opt-out,

right?

Yeah.

It's not opting in towards the AI answer.

You have to opt out of it.

You have to opt out of your YouTube channel being added to that search result.

You have to opt out of your fucking Facebook or whatever the shit is by going to find the obscure little click in the back button of your settings somewhere.

You know?

I do feel comfortable that like...

Everyone's like, AI is going to ruin everything forever.

No, it's going to ruin a ton of shit for a while.

And then the bubble will burst and tons of people will lose their jobs.

But once it becomes obvious that AI can't make any money, they'll move on to the next digital scam.

That's where I disagree.

I think it's going to do all of those things, but I think it's not going to burst and stop being used.

I think it's just going to be a part of life from here on out.

I don't know because it costs an exponential amount of money every second to even keep it on.

If it doesn't make any money, you're losing money every second.

Investor money only goes so far.

It only goes so far.

That is true.

And then, but when we learn about things about how, like, certain, when it comes to like large social media sites, it's more worth it to hold it while losing money because

you're denying a competitor the opportunity to step into that space.

So, like, loss leading in a completely different sense becomes a practical business strategy.

Then you're like, well, what are we even, what are we considering

a profit at this point?

You know?

All right.

All right.

Overworked parents parents of the world.

Not only do you have to not give your child the iPad and do all the normal parent stuff, you now have to teach your child how to suss out

fraudulent data from searches, something that most of you can't even do because it's hard.

It's really, really hard.

And it's like, it sucks, but it's kind of like little tricks like typing something in and then scrolling past everything that says sponsored, right?

And then the questions when it says, okay, it's going to like a, what is it linking to?

To a Quora, to a Reddit?

Okay, what Reddit is this?

Who are the people?

No, fuck that.

Okay, which of these results is actually a source that has, you know what I mean?

And like, it's like all these little extra things that you just like, oh, you just learned this by spending a lifetime on the internet, which

you can't expect.

Our lifetime on the internet is different from the kids' lifetime on the internet.

Of course, of course.

Starting summer is way different.

I'm on, now that I'm an adult man with a little baby, I'm on like parenting TikTok, which is all teachers talking about how the kids can't read.

And an anecdote from a teacher in the U.S.

that is the most nightmarish shit I've ever heard in my life is kids are so illiterate by grade 10, they don't even text message anymore.

They voice text,

yep.

And have the voice text and have Siri read the text back out.

Yep.

Yep, yep, yep.

I remember when my mom switched over to that because her words stopped being in all caps.

And

like it turns out, she stopped using 18 exclamation marks.

And it was because she switched over to voice texting.

Yeah, fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked.

Board games and

churning butter and bicycles for my child.

So, you know what, then?

That eight-year-old at the DD session is getting a chance to use their imagination and play an analog game with

real people in meets.

Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

Not a bad call.

Not a bad call.

Yep, you're completely right.

See you next week.

Bye, everybody.