CSB298: Pee is Stored in the Funkopop

There we go.

Hey, Woolly.

Good afternoon.

How you doing, man?

Okay.

Not too bad.

It's been a very busy week.

Being attacked by ghosts, I hear.

Yeah,

a lot's going on.

My

well, okay,

I am currently being

attacked in some ways.

I've been waiting to.

I'm going to probably talk about this much later because I'm in the process of.

I've said, like, I'm getting a bunch of tattoos, and my arms are.

I can't pretend that my arms is not raw as fuck right now because I had an entire forearm done across 8.5 hours, and it was very long and very, very, um,

it was a lot.

It was very intense.

So but you're a big boy and you're a big man.

Yes, this is what you sign up for, you know.

But uh and I've and I've yeah, I've I've I've done I've after the back, it's it's it's lighter work than than

uh uh

that.

But

I just can't pretend that my arm is not currently burning a little bit.

It's it's

that's what I mean.

the price you pay to feel cool.

Yeah.

Well, rather, cooler.

Yeah.

Hell yeah.

But no, I'm being attacked by ghosts that are

tightening up the skin on my arm.

And by ghosts, you mean a guy you went and hung out with and paid money to attack you?

Well, no, I mean, now at this point,

it's a wound, is what it is.

Oh, yeah, okay.

It's a wound.

It's your biology.

My biology, exactly.

The skin ghosts are,

you know, healing the flesh and doing.

They're mad at you.

Exactly.

And like, every time you kind of like twist or flex a little bit, you kind of...

You feel it.

You know, that seems like a specifically rough

tattoo recovery process for somebody who spends all of their waking hours typing buttons, hitting buttons, and tweaking cables.

Yeah.

It's not much you can do.

It's prime real estate.

The sleeves, the sleeves are going to be felt every time I move my arm into mouse position.

It's just, it's what it is.

But

I'm about halfway done the project.

I still got some more to go, but

it's taking a while, and I'm doing my full wrist to shoulder on both arms.

Oh, man.

That's both arms at the same time?

Yeah.

Why not do one and let it heal and then the other?

Because

the designs are synchronized with each other.

Okay.

So it makes more sense to do it procedurally

simultaneously.

So

it's a whole thing.

It's a whole thing.

And, you know, it's not done yet, so I don't want to

get into it too much.

Willie, are you becoming a pirate?

No, I'm just becoming...

No, no.

I'm just becoming that person that I've thought about for like 20 years now, where like I can wear like a t-shirt and have like some cool shit poking out.

When I wear a t-shirt, the cool thing that pokes out is my tits.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's still there.

But

that is still there.

Coming right out the arm sleeve if I dip a certain way.

But like the move is to Rick Rosset, right?

Not original Rick Ross, but like the rapper Rick Ross, like where you're so big and you've got your like flopping moves out, but you're so inked up that it distracts from your shape.

Yeah.

You go look at Rick Ross with his shirt off and it's look at that walking mural over there.

It's so cool.

Nobody gives a fuck because he's just, it's all ink.

You don't, the shape doesn't matter.

It's a secondary, you know.

Jellyroll does it a bit too.

Like, it works.

It works.

It's tech.

So, yeah.

Slowly but surely, you you know.

While, and then, hey, if you happen to lose some weight too, then that works as well.

Which I did say that this would be my reward for getting myself in shape.

And that's-fantastic.

Good job, buddy.

That's what I'm doing.

I said, hey, my reward is go get that ink you've been thinking about your whole life.

So,

yeah, yeah.

How about you?

Had a wonderful week.

I took most of the vast majority of the week off.

Me and

my family.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I had an involuntary week off.

Yeah, you had an involuntary week, which we'll get to, obviously.

Took a road trip, packed the baby in the car, got the wife.

We took a small trip down to Washington State, which is just a little bit across the line.

Yeah.

Through rural Washington and a little bit of Portland.

Oh, shit.

Which is a weird fucking town.

Shocker.

Hmm.

Did

any of it stick?

Stick how?

Did you properly

inoculate yourself against the Portlandia vibes?

So, like, we were in.

So, before we get there, driving down through rural Washington,

I've gone into the states at a number of different places.

Like, I've done it through Quebec, through the Ontario border, through Niagara Falls, and now through Washington State.

And we traveled to Vancouver Island so we could go on the left side.

We didn't want to go through Seattle, so we took a ferry across.

It was cool.

And

the way that Canadians travel into the U.S.

is like distinctly unfair to the perception of the United States.

And it's sad because when you do that, you're traveling through like the Monteré G, like beautiful farmland in like southern Quebec,

right?

Or Niagara Falls or Victoria, which is a gorgeous city and it's the capital of BC,

into the rural shithole outskirts of like Maine or New York State or Washington State, in which I had to turn to my wife and go, hey, what's the deal with Americans and rusted out piece of shit cars in their yard?

Like, what's up with that?

Why is that in every single yard we go past?

I mean, it is

the same forest region across a border, but I guess you're going from like...

You're going from

could have been the capital of a country

to

the furthest ranges away from Seattle in the state.

So like, but like, but basically across the border, even though it's the same trees, one side is like cabin country, and then the other side.

And the other side is haunted.

Okay.

Like, haunted.

Gotcha.

We traveled through one forks, Washington.

I think to answer your question,

I think I can hazard a guess.

I think it's because

don't worry about it.

Danny's going to come down when he's got some time, and he's going to fix her up, and she'll be good as new.

I actually assume it's so you have just a shit ton of random cars to pull replacement parts from.

There's parts that we, yeah, there's always that.

If it's on blocks, probably.

But there's like, there's something to tinker with, you know?

There's something we can get it going.

There was

a,

okay, I feel like I did that with a PC years ago when I got a new one and we had our old one.

And I had enough parts to just combine into another.

And you're like, yeah.

Woolly doesn't have rusted-out cars in his driveway, he just has that pile of dream casts right out of camera frame.

Exactly, exactly.

I mean, you never know when someone's gonna want to play some emergency Soul Caliber.

Um, we traveled through the scenic, wonderful Forks, Washington.

Of note, for one reason and one reason only: which Forks, Washington is the setting of your favorite book and mine, Twilight.

That's where it takes place.

It takes place along the west coast of Washington State.

And when you drive into town, it says, Welcome, Twilighters.

And let me tell you, let me tell you about Forks, Washington.

A bunch of Twilight actually makes way more sense if you have seen what Forks Washington looks like.

Oh, man.

Because

Bella going, I can't believe I had to move to this nothing town

with my dad, blah, blah, blah, from like Arizona.

So the blue filter, so out in the Pacific Northwest, this includes BC, the blue filter is real.

That is a, it just, it's blue out here.

It's just blue all the time because of the overcast.

Okay.

And then the second thing is that Forks, Washington is a single street town.

Like the highway that goes through it and like the residential offshoot streets.

It has a population of 3,000

and there's literally nothing there and everything's falling apart.

And Paige was like, oh, maybe we can go see the Twilight House only to discover that Forks, Washington is too ugly and shitty to film in.

So Twilight, the film,

actually

is filmed entirely east of Seattle in Olympia.

And not a single frame of film was shot in Forks, Washington, which sucks.

There you go.

I tell you now,

when you want to shoot New York, but you don't have New York money, you shoot Toronto or you shoot Montreal.

That's just the way it goes.

By any chance, was this area

also

particularly

Mormon?

Was there a

blood energy happening?

What it was was Bigfoot.

So, like, it's Bigfoot country, and everywhere you go, there's Bigfoot shit everywhere.

And on top of that, we passed by the Bigfoot gun store, which had a gigantic six-foot-tall, carved wooden Bigfoot holding like an assault rifle.

Fucking Americans are so crazy.

I fucking love

it.

You guys are so nuts.

That sounds super cool.

But yeah,

I assume that

Stephanie Meyer set her story to a backdrop of quiet Mormon town, you know?

Yeah, no, it's not particularly Mormon.

Okay.

But we get to Portland, right?

And we're in Portland for like 10 minutes.

And I'm like, why does Portland look so much like Montreal?

Portland looks just like Montreal.

It's hilly.

It has a mountainous region to the north of the city where there's a bunch of residential things.

It kind of looks like Westmount.

It's got one-way streets everywhere.

The buildings look it's super weird.

The, the, the, the urban planning itself is hipster.

It's too cool.

And then this area.

Yeah.

And then we were passing by the, the, the, the noble homeless, which also reminded me of Montreal.

And then I was like, hey, Paige, we've been in Portland for 10 minutes.

And look over there.

There's that lesbian wearing a head-to-toe lime green sweatpants track suit juggling on the street corner.

It's like, yes, okay, yes, we have correctly arrived in Portland.

That is correct.

Yeah.

No, when you roll past like a pack of Sarah squirms,

if you know her, like just that outfit and like just you're like, you have arrived.

You're here.

This is Portland.

Did you stop by a little bakery?

Did you get some coffee?

We did not.

We did not actually.

Did you ride a bicycle.

We did not ride a bicycle.

We did not actually spend all that much time in Portland.

Like, we were gone for four days.

And most of that was traveling, like staying at a cute little lakeside lodge, like just chilling the fuck out and enjoying the

drive.

It's super scenic.

Like

the scenery down there is gorgeous.

And also acquiring

this.

Ow!

This way, buddy, this way.

How did you hide that shit?

That's crazy.

So, I'm wearing, uh, so people who don't know, I am wearing a papoose, which is a baby holder.

Um, audio listeners,

audio listeners, a, a, a pooch has been lifted into the frame out of nowhere.

Yo.

So, some pug fucker.

fucker who's this pug fucker what's going on so first some background so first of all uh we've been thinking about getting another dog for months and months and months this was not a like oh no zange is gone we have to get a new dog like this was in the works like long before that okay um

this little gentleman is a rescue

um

He used to be homeless.

Wow.

He lived with a homeless lady, and then she died.

And then the family couldn't take care of him.

So he went down to a place called Pacific Pug Rescue, which Paige has been following for like a full year.

And then he got, let's see, he got all the mites and fleas cleaned off him.

He got dental surgery.

So

his mouth is missing a good deal of teeth.

And he also got fitted for a wheelchair because his legs are all fucked up.

Whoa.

So if I can, so sorry, audio listeners only.

So if I pull him up, you can see

that he's a sweet guy.

But you see these front legs?

Yeah.

They don't bend.

Oh.

He's permanently chicken winging.

So he hops around like a bunny rabbit with his butt up.

So we we got we we have where's it where's it from he's so we got him from we got him from pacific pug rescue and we are getting the wheelchair from eddie's wheels oh down in portland who makes wheelchairs for disabled animals

holy

he is currently nameless we have not locked in on the perfect name for him Okay,

but he's about to become a chariot.

Yes.

Is what you're saying.

He's about to become a little baby chariot.

Oh my God.

And as you can see, he's the sweetest guy.

He was just chilling on my lap in the papoose for the first 20 minutes of the podcast.

Now, now

there's the

chroming him up

seems to be the sentiment there.

And of course, I don't think sequel names are sensitive and sensible.

I think that's always not necessarily.

But it is kind kind of funny that there is a mecha zangief that exists.

Yes,

that is a funny concept.

But that's not going to be

his name because he's a totally different guy.

And we don't do sequel.

I'm not my mom naming dogs Stella and Stella 2.

We literally did that bit here.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So

he is,

let's see.

He's a rescue.

He's horribly disabled.

He is super sweet.

He's

just,

he just wants wants to hang out in laps and kiss all day.

That's all this dog wants.

Yeah, no, so far, it is nothing but chill vibes.

Him and the baby love each other.

They pet, and he runs up and kisses baby.

Him and the cat.

Okay.

He loves the cat.

The cat is

indifferent.

Okay, okay.

Okay.

Very, very indifferent.

Doesn't give a shit unless he's chasing chasing him, at which point he hisses and gives him a little bop.

Giving a shit takes effort.

So he's underweight, so we got to fatten him up.

How old?

He is two, two and a half.

Okay.

And when I took him outside the first time in Portland,

a gentleman who was rolling around in his garbage and getting high, checked out this

fucked up dog taking a piss.

Holy shit, look at that dog.

And I'm like, yeah, thanks, man.

Now,

you looking to fatten him up or are you trying to pork him up?

So we got to fatten him up because you can't tell, but he's like poking me with every bone in his body.

Okay.

Because

he was like formerly emaciated.

Okay.

Like he was doing bad.

So he's got to get chunked.

Yeah.

So he's our little rescue guy.

I'm trying to think if there's anything else that's important.

He has had airway surgery because he's a brachiocephalic pug,

dental surgery, and oh, he's had a talk with an orthopedic surgeon who says his elbows are fucked, that there's no hope.

He will always be,

you know, so the breathing chicken wings.

Like that, that's for like the like the wheezing and stuff, right?

Airway surgery is for because pugs and bulldogs and shit, their nose can be like, their nostrils can be really small.

So they just like round them out and open them up so they breathe gooder okay oh question from random internet surfer no he does not have his balls he also had a little he had his snip snip so he's he's done with his balls okay and just mood is just exactly what we see here just just chilling just laying just kissing okay um he barks at people who come to the door because he gets scared

um like he'll he'll like put his butt up well he actually he always has to put his butt up because he can't stand up yeah um and just back away and bark until he until you pet him and then he he jumps in their arms i mean to be fair like you know off life on the streets right like that's that's that's what you're adjusting from he's just he's just a little guy uh he is maybe the sweetest dog i've ever known in my life like every single night he we we go to bed and he just burrows under the covers and curls up next to somebody and goes to sleep and halfway through the night he decides he wants to cur bundle under the covers with the person on the other side and goes to sleep.

I mean, the only question is: are we riding on 22s with chrome?

Are we throwing spinners on that shit?

No, dog wheelchairs tend to look lame as shit because they all have to be custom fit to how fucked up your particular dog is.

If you're

a chest plate and shit,

get some fucking, get some rims,

put some lights on that, go nuts.

Yeah, okay.

But yeah, no, we got this, this, this tiny baby man,

and he is.

so we have two animals in the house that can't walk good though Elmo looks like a Olympic sprinter by comparison to this guy like since today is primarily an audio podcast I'm not gonna like put him down on the floor and have you guys all laugh at him while he flops around

does he shuffle around and

so he hops like a bunny and like like his his his arms don't bend so he's is his elbows to his wrists like flat are always on the floor um and his wrists

um are completely fucked up and ruined and they bend in like a hundred fucked up directions.

So they're just like his paws are like useless little nubs.

So he walk,

he runs by like pushing with his front legs and kind of hopping a little bit and like jamming his wrists and his hands go like fucked up in the bad direction.

It's horrible.

Okay.

It's horrible.

But he doesn't care.

He doesn't know any better.

Is he like farting straight into the hardwood?

So yeah, he doesn't really fart actually, weirdly enough.

Okay.

All right.

Fair enough.

So yeah, this is, this is, this is, we went down there to get this guy and we had this like great like feeling where like it's not like the stars told you, but like we had gone through the process far enough that we did like the phone interview and then we did the video chat interview with the charity.

Is it a charity?

Well, the rescue.

Where they have to look at your house.

They have to be like, okay, well, we're giving you a really fucked up dog.

Do you have a house that can support this fucked up dog?

Or are you living in a shack in the woods with no power?

Right.

And we did that.

And by the time we

finished that and we got the okay, we started doing the planning to actually go down to pick him up.

That's when Vito the Pug won the dog of the year at the dog show.

I don't know if you saw that.

No.

Big news

in white people dog news

is that a pug won the dog show.

Okay, gotcha.

And we're like, yes, yes, this is a sign that we have made the perfect best decision.

Gotcha.

Is there any

old name that he responds to at the moment?

Yeah, but it sucks.

Okay.

And we're not going to call him that.

Okay.

But also, he just responds to like camera boy and clapping

so but also i'm gonna be honest like the dog kind of lives under like under our arm on on top of our shoulder like most of the time

because uh he's a lap dog through and through which is why he's so chill to just sit here in my arms and not move

Okay, I'm getting permission from the wife to let you guys know about two of the possible names that we're thinking of.

We're not 100%.

We haven't changed his microchip data yet.

Okay.

Once this goes out, it's out there.

But number one and two right now are either elbows or knuckles.

Hey, nice moves there, elbows.

Good job.

Yeah.

And real sharp.

Real sharp elbows.

Nice.

Because that's what he's got, right?

Oh, that's great.

There's a bunch of other ones, but those like we, the lady who was fostering him

accidentally called him both of those things in some of the videos she sent us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just the idea.

Just call him.

Also,

also potential is,

Let's see.

You know what?

We're just going to hit him with it.

Also possibilities are Wabby, Beawey, Uncle Baby,

and one we floated this morning, which is Lemon.

Okay.

Okay.

I love the like, yeah, yeah, what up, haircut?

What up, Elbows?

Hey, good job, you know, good job, tiny.

You know, like, that shit, that style of, like, nickname is always real funny.

What if you just got up here?

El Mo and El Bose is also pretty fun.

That is like, so we really loved Elbows, but we were like, oh, is that

super close to the cat's name?

But that's what's fun.

That's what's fun, you know?

Now, the thing is, if you want to go, hey, Sonic reference, then like, yes, there's also Knuckles, you know, certainly.

There's also a bunch of them, like, because there's Knuckles, you could call them Sonic,

you could call him Turbo.

You could call, you know, like, there's a million.

I think Elbows is more unique than than knuckles is personally but like it is a reference if you want to throw the reference out yeah but uh yeah no they're we're we're not that's hard we're not 100 on anything just yet we have a bunch of time before we take him to the vet for his local checkup and update his chip and all that shit because he got that microchip

pug tempkin yeah also we had a really fun experience where they give you all the papers to get your dog across the border because he's from america and then on the ferry back, the lady next to us is like, well, you know, the CDC has new requirements for bringing animals across the Canada-U.S.

border that you have to have gotten permission and signed them up with a registry months in advance.

And it's like, I don't want to hear that.

I don't want to.

I'm sweating.

I'm sweating.

And I'm like, wait, CDC, isn't that from taking dogs into the U.S.?

She's like, oh, I guess it is.

Like, the guy didn't like,

help, help me.

Thanks.

Help me.

Awesome.

I'm 30 minutes away from a border guard telling me to put my dog in the ocean.

Like, please, please do not freak me the fuck out like this.

Jesus Christ, man.

Yeah, I don't need it.

That's cool.

So there you go.

No, that's awesome.

So now you got to just, you got to learn to have him balance on your shoulders so he can suppress your inner being.

So

what's been happening a lot is that

we're just juggling babies now.

Because we got the cat, and the cat wants to be in a lap, and then the baby wants to be in the same lap, and then the dog wants to be in the same lap,

and then the dog is trying to kiss the cat, and the cat doesn't like that, and the baby wants to have both.

You're just kind of covered in babies out here.

It's a good problem to have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's cool.

And

the vibe check passing across the board is also pretty important.

Yeah, so he, one of the things is, yeah, Paige is in the chat saying she has not peed by herself in days.

Because this guy just like sprints, well, he doesn't sprint, he hobbles after you into every bathroom.

And then the baby, now that he's walking good, also just follows you right into the bathroom.

And then I need something from the kitchen, so I'll follow her into the bathroom and be like, where's the scissors?

Okay.

Yeah, I'm picturing like a land shark sliding around the house, you know, almost.

Yeah, kinda.

It's uh tomorrow on my show,

I'll put him down on the ground.

I'll screw it.

All right, visual bit.

All right.

TBD, potentially elbows, is being

put down.

And, okay.

Okay.

Standing up.

All right.

And there we go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right.

So the hind legs are up and walking around, but the elbows are hobbling, and it's uh

ass is up in the air at all times.

That's damn it.

Oh, I got all these.

Oh, man.

It looks like a military crawl.

It looks like he's, yeah.

Absolutely.

That is hilarious.

Oh, man.

It's so cute.

It's like he's military crawling, you know?

Yeah, so he doesn't have...

That doesn't hurt him at all.

It's because he's got a bunch of super fucking huge calluses on his elbows.

Yeah, oh, by now it's normal for sure.

But he's, no, he's 100% like solid snaking around on the ground, getting through obstacles.

Yeah.

That's great.

As you can tell, he's a sweet and quiet boy.

So he's probably going to be on stream with me a lot in this pep boost.

Because one of the things is he does not like to be alone.

He really,

really does not like to be alone.

Because, like,

he's all, he's, you know, you never know, but he's probably all fucked up and traumatized and shit.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

From being homeless.

That comes with rescue, right?

And we believe his owner died, like, with him.

So, like,

okay.

Not the best scenario.

Though we did confirm that he did not eat her.

Okay.

That was confirmed.

But still, there certainly was probably an amount of time that passed afterwards.

Like, that's fucked.

Yeah, that sucks.

Can you feel when a piss might be coming from Papoose?

Okay, so

he is really easy for that.

He's a little guy

and

he's housebroken, but

just in case

we have a little dog diaper for him.

Yeah, you do.

That we got from the rescue.

Yeah, you do.

Okay.

So the main thing is that, like, so he got his balls chopped off.

So he still got that.

That wasn't too long ago.

So he's still got the testosterone, which means that

male dogs in there before like when they still have the testosterone can mark.

Right.

So they can be like, this is my house now.

I'm going to pee on it.

He hasn't done that.

And actually,

he has only asked to go outside once.

Instead, what I do is I wake up and I take him out at 8 o'clock and he pees.

And then I take him out at noon and then I take him out at 5 and then I take him out at 10 and he pees or does his business every single time.

Okay.

Man, just elbows down, diaper up, wheels spinning.

I got to say, though, this dog going to the bathroom is a farce.

Ordeal.

No, it's not an ordeal.

It's a farce.

Okay.

Because

he lifts his leg, but he's like crouched over and lifts his leg while hobbling around in the fucking grass.

It's pathetic.

It's the most pathetic, disabled shit I've ever seen in my fucking life.

Flopping.

Yeah.

All right.

But that's what's going on with this dude.

Can you hold on a second?

I need to scroll down on Discord, buddy.

Oh, no, no, no, don't do that.

No.

Mike is being chewed.

Hello.

No, he's snoofing it.

No, he doesn't chew anything.

Part of that is, I think he can't.

Like, you know, you do the test when, well, maybe not.

I don't know when the last time you got a brand new dog was, but you do the test where you're like, hey, what's his teeth like?

So I put my finger in there, and I'm like, ah, he's got, he has teeth.

Okay.

He does have teeth.

Well, I can see not all of them.

Well, he certainly is chewing on your heart there, Pat.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Well,

it's just like he just wants to hang out all the time on the

sweet hunt.

Hey, guess what?

So do you.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, but he's a lap guy.

So I'm like,

I'm like, you just tuck him into the, you know, when you sit on the couch and you have that spot between the armrest and butt?

Okay.

Just jam him in there.

He's happy as a clam.

So now what you got to take note of is like what what what what media or what particulars catch attention catch his attention you know yeah you know we he we were watching tv the other night and he didn't seem to give a shit about anything because once he's on the lap for a long enough period of time he just goes to sleep

right he just

i'm done i mean he goes to sleep he sleeps a lot

um so like for example Last night when we were cuddling up in bed and Paige was like,

you should watch a movie for the podcast.

I'm like, What movie do you want to watch for the podcast, sweetheart?

She said, We should watch Hot Frosty,

the story of a Netflix snowman that came to life, and he was a hot man.

What if about that?

And the dog didn't give a shit about Hot Frosty.

I'm glad that it's at the point where it's straight up like admitting for the podcast.

The podcast is tomorrow.

You should really watch a movie.

You should do something.

Yeah.

So watching the Hot Frosty.

Yeah, okay.

Starring a bunch of like B-listers that I'm fucking weirded out that they're wasting their time.

Like, okay, I don't know the name of this guy, but you might know the name of this guy.

He's in Hot Tub Time Machine, and he hangs out with Seth Rogan in a lot of his movies, and he's a tall, fat, black dude that talks with a soft voice.

Oh,

from the office as well.

The guy who took Patrice O'Neal's roles, basically.

That guy.

He's Craig Robinson.

Craig Robinson.

Craig Robinson.

That's it.

So he's the antagonist of the movie because Frosty hates cops.

And there's the guy who plays the weird little goblin that hangs out with Andy Sandberg on Brooklyn 99.

Like that, that tiny cop.

Okay.

And

it's just like

it's just a fucking piece of shit.

It's just like, what if Frosty the snowman was like a really ripped hot guy who was like like had the brain of a child and went to live with a lady whose husband died of cancer and she discovered love through this supermodel who can't read

sounds like someone had like a three script deal and they were two scripts done and they needed some shit

like there's a moment like there's there's a bunch of fucking stupid cringe shit in this movie, but the part where this guy, who's literally been alive for one day and, like, can barely function as a human being, goes into her basement and starts digging through her fucking husband's chemotherapy reports and then goes upstairs and goes, Kathy, what's cancer?

And then the music all drops out.

And it's like, what the fuck is this fucking bullshit?

Is this Netflix?

I knew it was going to be bad because Paige picked it out, but I didn't know that it would be this bad.

Is this Netflix?

It's Netflix original.

Okay, and is this what the fuck is?

And I get, and I, and is this like, is Paige catching this through like TikTok vibes?

No, no, we were scrolling through it, and she's like, oh, look at that.

That looks like shit.

Let's watch it.

Gotcha.

Okay.

This is Bird Demic Woman.

This is Neo-Breen Woman.

This is

Give Me Every Gar.

This is, can we have a pet that is fully functional?

No.

Right, right.

But yeah, no, when we saw this guy wobbling around, we were like, we have to save him and kiss on him and

pet him and hug him and put him.

We got him a little sweater.

Because it's cold outside, Wooly.

You got to put your dog in a little sweater.

So now the cat has a Christmas sweater and the dog has a Christmas.

I'm just thinking.

Again, the sweater up front, elbows crawling, and then just like a V8 engine in the back, just boosting.

Hitting well, no, because he's going to have front wheel wheelchairs.

Oh,

yeah, right.

Because his back legs are fine, right?

True, true, true.

Because, like, the dogs that need the back end wheelchairs, they

usually are incontinent.

They usually just, you know, they can't go to a bathroom.

So you have to express the dog.

And that's that's an ordeal.

Expressing the glands, I've heard.

No, no, not the glands, the dick.

You need to express the dick.

You push on their bladder through their stomach, so they pee.

Now, that's that's a lot.

That's a lot.

This guy just walks like shit

and is inbred and only can look at you with one eye because the other eye is definitely looking at something else.

Definitely.

I don't know which eye is the good eye.

I think it's his right eye, but I'm not sure.

But he's definitely looking at something else when I'm talking to him.

Someone says it's rocket science.

Thank you, wife, for texting me.

Oh my God, he has a lazy eye like you, babe.

That's amazing.

Thank you.

Thank you, sweetheart.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

But yeah,

this is what's going on with me.

I also played a bunch of games, actually.

The two main ones are Marvel Rivals, which I'm going to assume you and I are going to talk about in a little second.

So I'll leave that for your section.

And the other...

Oh, you didn't?

Your shit's been on fire.

Yeah, I've been busy.

I've been busy.

But I know it's very good.

And I have played it, you know, last demo.

Okay, so I've been playing.

It's still pretty good, I'm sure.

I've been playing Marvel Rivals late at night with this guy on my lap.

So that's awesome.

Things to discover.

Did you know that Jeff the Land Shark's healing beam makes a noise that terrifies dogs?

Oh, wow.

There is a really high-pitched, like ticking noise when Jeff the Land Shark heals you

that

terrifies

this thing.

So, yeah, I thought the second beta opened up pretty wide and that a lot of people got in there.

But I'm not sure what the final numbers were at the end or so.

But

in any case, it's not like a deadlock situation where it's just kind of like, oh, yeah, it's kind of had their chance or something.

It is proper out.

Right.

But like,

a lot of people are kind of real, are going through that thing we went through a while ago, going like, okay, let's see.

Oh, fuck.

this is really, really, really good.

Like, that, that, that specific late wave is like, you know, I'm seeing that hit people going, damn, I wasn't expecting or wanting even to be this into this.

I got, I got, like, people, like, literally, like, uh, Fox Cade literally was just like, he just sent me, oh no.

Oh, yeah.

You know, I was like, yeah, it's like that, you know.

So there's a lot going on with Marvel Rivals, even from the very short amount of time that I spent with it.

Number one,

I have seen the pornographers on my timeline

fucking shouting from the heavens that this game's release is a new golden era, according to over, like similar to Overwatch.

These characters have always been around, but now they're in the Overwatch style gate.

Yeah, the specific style that you can rip a 3D model out of, that one?

The style where most of the work is just done for you.

Cylock's been around forever, y'all.

That's true.

But did she have a high-quality, like, Chinese 3D asset?

No.

How long until they phase out all the Overwatch characters in those porn ads and phase in?

I bet that's yesterday.

Damn.

So, second of which is getting into the game of Marvel Rivals.

I saw people saying that it feels like a jankier Overwatch, and they're completely right.

It is a jankier Overwatch.

It doesn't have have Overwatch's polish.

But the reason why that is, is because Rivals allows the characters to do what you think the characters should do, which means, like, we talked about this when we played the beta, Spider-Man and Venom, and shit like that, and like characters like Iron Man and Storm just permanently flying.

Like, that's going to take a while to sand down

because, like, a lot of these characters can do all sorts of stupid nonsense.

It feels like this game can be referred to as Marvel

with all the context within.

Because there's some busted fucking shit in that game.

That's an interesting thought, and I'm going to let you finish.

But first, I need to confirm.

So,

you just take the analog, like, May model out.

And you drop Scrollgirl in.

Yeah, you're right.

And then everything works, right?

But

I bet all the rigging still works just fine.

Okay, all right.

Who else?

Who else goes where?

I think they'll watch casts like this me trash is what happens.

There's a whole lot,

there's a whole lot of diva that needs to be replaced.

Yeah.

So, which way are we going?

This is important.

The most interesting thing that happened when I started playing rivals

was

what I'm going to call like the Fortnite effect.

So Overwatch eventually Overwatch 2 is free to play, right?

Like eventually they did that?

Or is that buy-to-play?

I think they had enough free-to-play campaigns that any given moment might be going through a temporary.

Yeah, chat.

Is Overwatch 2 buy to play or free to play?

I don't even know.

It was free for a time.

It's free to play.

Okay.

But Overwatch 2 did not have the fucking push that Overwatch did.

Marvel Rivals is proper F2P, and all the characters are unlocked.

It's only costumes.

It's ridiculous.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I saw that they talked about what the cosmetics were going to be like and they had that full thing about the currency and everything.

They're good cosmetics too.

They look really

good.

They do look pretty fucking good.

And like, sure enough, you're like, hey, you want that Wolverine that you want?

Well, there he is.

The good Wolverine?

Yeah, they know.

And Psylocke as well, of course, with all that.

It is funny, though, because it's like now people are talking about, hey, yo, you want to go play Marvel?

Hey, yo, you want to go play Rivals?

And you're not talking about Marvel or Rivals of Aether?

No.

Like, fuck.

So what's going on?

It's like, this is a free-to-play game, and it's...

most popular characters in the world to some degree and all that.

And there's 10 million players,

right?

So I hit quick match.

And my very first quick match, and I double-checked to make sure that these were not bots.

I asked around and I checked on their profiles.

This was not bots.

The very first quick match I ever played in Marvel Rivals was the most one-sided shooter match I have ever played in my entire life.

Like I picked cap and went in and got and went 39 and 4

in quick quick match.

And I was like, oh,

you know what this is?

This is the children.

Because it's free and because it's got Iron Man on it,

the children are here in the quick match.

And you have some experience from last time.

And all of anyone who is learning their way is getting stomped immediately right now.

That will continue to be the case for a while, I imagine.

And like doing versus quick matches, and like, man,

there's some wild

power imbalances between,

like, there's a lot of stomps in both directions.

I imagine every single Spider-Man you encounter in Quick Match is terrible.

Is dog shit.

The worst player I've ever seen in my life.

Like, the youngest kid playing the hardest character.

It's got

awful.

I have seen a direct link,

less the the least famous and least popular characters that i see are going to kill me and the more popular the character is the better shot i have at at beating them like spider-man's are so free but nobody gives a fucking shit about iron fist so iron fist is terrifying as fuck because people playing iron fist are playing iron fist because they want to play they want to play as iron fist the character that iron fist is also like overwatch and other games where the game came at the same time as the characters, you don't have that attachment.

So people are probably a little more willing to move around the roles that you need to fulfill.

In this, the Iron Man main is there to be Iron Man and will only play.

I'm here to be Iron Man now, please.

Or I'm quitting, right?

So you're probably going to have an extremely rough time getting on your favorites if they happen to be one of the poster people.

Oh, crap.

But you can trap.

As long as we can.

As long as we can.

Can you hear me?

No?

Okay, hold on.

Headphone cable.

Sorry about that.

No worries.

There you go.

I thought I could just pop the headphone cable out in like a second and come back, and then I got trapped because I'm holding this dog.

I would like to propose that for the nomenclature that we have,

like you said, this is Marvel.

And that we just keep a distinguishing.

We have Marvel and then we have

Mavel.

I can do that.

That works.

All right.

Let's just keep the two separate and clear.

It's important to establish this nice and early.

You just had that?

Yeah, yeah.

Don't worry.

So, um.

Anyway.

You just happen to keep that right next to you?

You never know when you're going to need to.

So, did you, how'd you feel about the new characters?

You know what my feeling about the new characters is?

Christ, there's a lot of fucking characters in this.

Yeah.

I played like 10.

Like, I played for like two, three hours, and I played like 10.

And like,

I would do something where I'd play a match of Cap.

And then on the next match, I would see what his buttons actually fucking did.

And then I would play two, three more matches of cap.

And I'd be like, oh, I'll try somebody else.

And then I'll play a match as Hulk.

And then I'll be like,

okay, I should probably look up what their fucking buttons do.

Because they all have full MOBA kits.

They all have a full thing.

And some of their passives are vital to how their character works, but they're never surfaced.

Do MOBA characters have

different

movement options?

Because, for example, I know that's a really silly question, but I imagine a lot of characters are balanced around moving when you click from one space to the other at a set speed, right?

Or so.

And in this kind of game, like a team shooter of this nature, everyone has to move towards the payload at a set pace, and you have to be able to retreat at a set pace.

Oh, everybody has a different fucking movement speed and fucking movement option in arrivals.

But like when you have characters that can triple jump and wall run and all that stuff, you start adding a whole lot to it.

That,

yeah, the movement gets a lot more distinct without necessarily being like tracers like blink ability, for example.

Yeah, so

the basic movement becomes really dynamic.

Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of characters in MOBAs that have like, you know, one of their Q or WE is like a movement button.

So I

drag themselves forward or teleport forward or what have you.

So I guess another way of asking it is like, are there characters that have movement options that are not an ability, but it's just a movement thing?

I wouldn't know enough, but I'm going to say, yeah, probably.

Okay.

Okay.

Because like, yeah, like when you have characters that like in rivals that are, like,

the way they jump, double jump, or fly, or whatever can be.

Yeah, no, Iron Fist has a fucking quadruple jump and a wall run.

Exactly.

And it looks pretty cool when you see it.

And he locks on to people he's hitting so that he can keep meleeing people as they try and run away, including people like fucking Iron Man.

Yeah.

It's ridiculous.

Or like, yeah, Iron Man and Storm flying and stuff.

It's like, like, this game really has multiple.

It's not just Pharah you got to deal with, you know, or occasionally someone jumping up.

Like, you got to have your aim up a lot of the time, depending on the team composition.

There's quite a few characters that are like spinning.

Yeah, a ton of time.

The game is,

it is, it is a game that doesn't care how hard the counters can be.

Like, there are a, like, Black Panther versus anyone who can fly will just die.

He has absolutely no ability to get up to them at all in any way.

I mean, unless magic helps you, right?

But

if that's in one spot for one moment, yeah.

Yeah.

No, it does, but it does also feel like as a result of them being that liberal with the flyers, you also have a sky battle, you know, where you have a couple characters just in the air going at it, which is a nice fun dynamic as well, where you've got like a storm

chasing, you've got like an Iron Man taking out a storm and then a

Hella coming back for revenge you know, against the Iron Man.

And then it's the difference between like most of the characters and rivals don't have hit scan, so the ones that do have hit scan eat up people who fly because people who fly are in a gigantic, wide open space and don't actually move very fast.

Scarlet Witch just getting picked off, yeah.

Like, hey, how do I, how do I avoid Scarlet Witch's ult?

Shoot her.

It takes a couple seconds, so kill her before the ult hits you.

What is she?

Yo, she's the Empress.

It's like chaos overwhelming, I think.

Yeah, something.

Yeah.

Awesome.

But yeah, no, Rivals is fucking great.

It's dripping with money and the interface is going nuts.

That's it.

That's a quick box.

That's it.

It's awesome.

And

like it's a little jankier than Overwatch, but like they've already patched it a couple times and you can feel it just like slowly improving.

There's one really annoying thing where there's like the marvel rivals storyline which is like unlocked by like specific character challenges um

some of those challenges are miserable to even attempt in a match oh i haven't seen because there's there's one that's like um as as black panther or psyloc use uh the

team up ability uh that magic gives you five times in a match.

It's like, okay, well, that's actually super easy.

You just mash triangle, right?

But the other one is:

as cap or storm,

kill five enemies while underneath the buff you get from Thor.

And you're like, that can't be too hard, except

nobody ever wants to play as Thor.

Okay.

Thor is actually super unpopular in Quick Match.

Yeah, I mean, again, do it against the AI or just take out the stomp on the kids, you know.

Story-wise, as well, I mean, so I'm curious to see how this whole like doom-doom thing gets set up, but I heard that the lore pages are like really, really good.

They're super exhaustive and detailed.

So, I read a couple of them, not to completion, though.

Like, I remember checking them out a little bit in the demo, and it seemed pretty interesting.

But, like, I'm hearing that, like, all together, they're these fantastic short stories about the characters

that are great Codex backstory and stuff.

And kind of like explaining how these unique worlds that are not necessarily the same worlds from the comics that they come from are interesting for different reasons and stuff.

Also,

this is a unique reality.

The Battle Pass shit and

the weekly challenges and all that.

It's super easy.

Like, it's super easy and it's super lenient.

Like, you blow through them super fast,

and then they like

every when you go to the challenge screen, there's like 10 challenges that are all like unlocks in one hour, unlocks in three hours, unlocks in six hours.

So it's constantly like rolling forward.

But they're fucking trivial and they last forever.

Do you think when they're designing a bunch of sprays for games like this, they go to some of them and they go, hey, AAA, dial that one back.

It's looking too cool.

Make that one a a little more, make that one a little more lame.

It's got to be a basic, simple one.

You have to, you have to feel like only the ones you get later are cooler and you have to earn them and feel good about it.

I don't know.

I feel like some sprays are just nothings, and some of them are pretty interesting, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, but who gives a fuck about sprays?

Let's be honest.

Yeah,

it's about the MVP shit.

It's about the costumes.

Well,

you know.

yeah, it's great.

It's a slam dunk.

It is.

Like, even if it was like a full point worse than Overwatch, it not being Overwatch is a point in its favor because of how I feel about Overwatch after all of this nonsense.

Yeah.

But it still is tremendously embarrassing that

Marvel Rivals had the audacity to rip off

Widowmaker

with this brand new character, Black Widow.

You know, like,

where's your stressing?

Yeah, Mike Yabara's a fucking stupid bitch.

The funny part, the funny part is that, like, I feel like everyone's been saying for this entire time, oh my god, it's so blatant how much of a ripoff this is.

They're not pretending.

They're not.

The sound effects on the menus and the font are literally just Overwatch, right?

But throwing that one like little Widowmaker thing in there just like completely throws the whole thing off the scent.

And everyone's like, ah, what the fuck are you talking about?

And not, because one, obviously, April 1964, duh.

And then second, like,

yeah, but it's good.

So no one, so who cares?

Like, yeah, it's blatant.

It's super blatant, but you know what?

It's fucking good, and it's a lot of fun.

Also, no one gives a shit, dude.

I don't think anyone at

Blizzard has the right to ever, and I mean ever, roll their eyes at characters that are only technically different after building their entire company's history off of games that were not technically Warhammer.

Oh, shit.

Oh, shit.

Space Marines.

Oh.

Like,

fuck off.

Are you serious?

Like, come, get out of my face.

Cue the penny arcade comic.

Yeah.

Man.

Yeah, Marvel Rivals is great.

I'm going to keep at it and I'll come back on like how fucked or

totally fine the battle pass is because you know that's kind of make or break on a lot of these things.

I do know that you get like it doesn't give you all the currency back inside it.

I think it gives you, like,

like, it costs five bucks and you get like $4

back for the next one.

So, if you're a consistent player, the Battle Pass probably only costs like $1.50.

Okay.

Which, if you play this game a lot, yeah, a buck fifty a month is all right, definitely.

And the costumes in it are really fucking nice.

Yeah, I'm still, no, I'm honestly still kind of reeling at the like on-paper idea of this blatant rip-off game from NetEase that we would be aggressively mocking forever is just really fun to play, high quality, and also like they did the thing where we're like, oh, how cool would it be if you could take like, look about all these Marvel characters.

How, how could they look in this art style?

You know, and they're like, yeah, no, exactly.

They look great.

They're doing the thing that people imagined, oh, that would be pretty cool if you did that.

Executed, and so far, like, fucking flawlessly.

It's, it's, you play it and you, and you become a believer because it it just, yeah, it grabs you.

And again, you can see your fucking characters.

Not the same thing.

It's like, man,

also, like,

not only can you see your character, but the way that it's been built around the third person perspective and the shit ton of melee characters.

I'm playing on the personal computer and it's cross-play with everybody.

So like half or more of the population is using controllers.

I don't feel fucked by that at all.

Like I'm not going to grab and like start, you know, headshotting from across the map as Black Widow.

Yeah, yeah.

But general character movement and the way a lot of your abilities work, the controller, like presets, acceleration, et cetera, are excellent and it plays good.

And it's not just, that's the other thing.

It's not just that it's third person and that you, yeah, you can play with the controller and feel comfortable.

There's enough archetypes that are also like melee-based, that are getting in close or like doing a little bit of both.

So it's not just a shooter either, right?

Someone like me who loves action and, you know, getting up close and stuff.

A lot of these characters feel like action game characters to the point where I will say something really insane now.

Marvel Rivals is the closest we will ever get to a mass multiplayer versus action game after Anarchy Reigns.

It is the closest we will ever get to that ever again.

Hmm.

Hmm.

If.

Yeah,

okay.

Okay.

If they add a mode for shits and giggles that's just like deathmatch, you know, like just

you playing for yourself against everybody, you could get even closer.

Not that it's balanced for that, of course, but

yeah.

I see what you mean.

And I think that, yeah, you're looking at the roster of melee characters being, you know, like, yeah, you've got, you've got choices, flyers, you've got choices, or if you just want a position.

There is a deathmatch.

Is there?

I didn't know that.

I didn't even know that.

I didn't even know that.

Okay.

Well, that's a really different style of game, actually.

I don't think that was active in the beta.

Yeah, I don't think that was active in the beta.

If so, it was only teams.

That's interesting.

I'm big excited.

That's crazy.

Is it like team deathmatch or like solo deathmatch?

Because solo deathmatch is a fucking

that's just for psychos.

Wow.

Like

one

person

getting

team TDM?

Yeah, okay.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Okay, no, no, no.

Yes, that sorry.

You meant solid.

That's not what I meant.

I meant solo deathmatch.

Everybody's on their own team.

In Halo parlance.

Yeah.

Well, anarchy reigns, right?

Just fucking go.

I'm on my team, and we're all in this and we're going at it, you know?

Yeah, that's what I mean.

Free Free for all.

Cool.

Holy shit.

We got a breaking news about Marvel Rivals from Ehonton 83 when the battle pass doesn't expire when the season ends.

Yeah, yeah.

They announced that you don't.

Holy fucking shit.

They announced that once you get it, you can keep it and everything you get with it, you can still unlock, even if the whatever time passes.

Bro!

Yeah,

that's great.

No FOMO.

It's a really, really, really fucking

reasonable way to go about it.

The idea of buying the thing and then being like, ah, fuck, time sucks.

That's great.

Honestly, yeah, Marvel Rivals is fucking awesome.

It's fucking great.

Yeah.

These are my favorite visual designs on almost every character.

Like, not Bruce Banner.

Like, I think he looks like a fucking pussy, but I get that.

But, like, that Chinese anime tech superhero aesthetic is, oh, I fucking love it.

It's clean.

It's clean.

I love it.

And, and the, the, the sparks are sprites, um, um, hit sparks kind of coming off of their robot models as well.

That moment where I'm looking at Wolverine with the X-Men Evolution haircut, and then he goes, ah, and then it pops out.

And I was like, ah, fuck, there he is.

That's nice.

There he is.

Yeah.

Okay.

I got to use the bathroom.

So enjoy.

BRB.

I'm going to go to dog bed.

That's what I'm going to do.

As I was saying.

I fell in the toilet.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry about that break.

As I was saying,

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And that means the future is now.

Exactly.

And you can hear, like, you press the little play for two seconds, and in that moment of you were like, whoa, you could hear your uncle in the background going, Domino!

and slamming it down on the table.

You know, so you're like, ah, I remember that Christmas.

You know, lots of rum

was being being passed around there.

Yeah, no, no, I don't think people are going to get aura frames so that they can like

put the gallery of the worst Christmas ever.

Or maybe I will.

That's pretty funny.

I mean,

if you want the accurate memory, right?

So it's like whenever Uncle Jimmy comes by, just make sure to put all the ones of him passed out on the floor.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That's just how the picture frame is, man.

It's not just a regular picture frame, Jimmy.

And I can also say that, like, you know, if you kind of were thinking about like a particularly bright or annoying sort of like tablet sitting on a table somewhere,

coming over to my mom's and seeing like how she set it up in the living room, it actually adapts to the brightness of the room that it's in.

So

the screen is not bright and egregious and cutting through and becoming a massive light source.

It's actually very smartly lit to the level of light in the room.

If it's dim, if it's bright.

It's almost like these frames were made by really smart people.

It really is.

And they also have a resolution display that looks like really crisp as well.

So,

yeah, you can tap an emoji to say, I like this photo as well.

They can put a little heart on it, and you can get that update on your phone if you're the person that put it there.

It's like a super duper really good product.

It makes a lot of sense.

And my mom has raved about it ever since she's gotten it.

Like, that's just real.

So, when they're like, hey, do you want?

I'm like, absolutely.

Like, that's a slam dunk.

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Yeah, there you go.

Thanks, Aura Frame.

Thank you very much.

Just

if there's that age threshold, imagine a direct correlation between like gift hitting and age.

Can you get them to send me some aura frames?

Because they sound pretty nice and I want to look cool with like dog and baby photos.

Yep, yep, yep.

Let's do that.

Uh,

and your ISP.

Hey, thanks to your ISP for helping fix your shit

today.

For helping you out of the toilet?

Yeah, they helped me out of the toilet.

Yeah.

That's good when they do that.

This week the podcast is

also sponsored by

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Okay,

so,

you know, people have been clamoring forever for the

talking about the,

are we going to get the five-hour podcast?

Well, how about I mean, maybe, I don't know.

We were on track to do a pretty long podcast yesterday.

How about the 25-hour podcast?

Oh, yeah.

Yes, no.

There is a point where it does get obnoxious

that I do acknowledge and think about, mind you.

Some people are like, hey, I'm working out here.

I don't care how long it is.

This is perfect.

But other people literally have lives, and it's just like, you can't.

You have to strike.

Yeah, your life is to listen to this podcast.

So.

By the way, for audio listeners,

there's a full day break in between

the pre-sponsor and post-sponsored parts of this podcast.

You don't need to know what doesn't affect you.

You click play.

They know.

They need to know.

They don't need to know nothing.

All right, there was a blip, and now we're back, and here we are.

It's the episode, right?

Quality of life: what you don't know can't hurt you.

That's not true, that's never been true.

That's one of the most biggest lies that's ever been told to everyone, everywhere, all the time, ever.

And I tell it to myself all the time.

Ignorance is bliss.

Let's go.

Yeah, like, ah, I dropped that on the floor.

I didn't see it.

Ah, it's still good.

Num, nom, nom, nom.

Yes, but no, it seems that we are.

It seems that we're like we're good.

So,

what I was going to say, so yeah,

yesterday we got introduced to name pending.

Oh, yeah, he's here.

He's asleep, though.

Okay, chill in.

He's asleep.

I can't even get him out.

He's so in there.

You just pouched.

That is an accessory, by the way.

He is so in there that I can't even get him out.

You have equipped an accessory.

It is in the fourth slot of your inventory.

um

i took him out today and everybody on the street petted on him because he's so cute and sweet

um

yeah no it is a kangaroo pouch but with less mucus

i was describing uh to punch bomb i was like yeah and so like because he's like hobbling around they're gonna get wheels and she's like awhile and i'm like in the front and she's like in the front

it was the double.

I was like, oh, yeah, because he's going to have to have like a chest plate.

Yeah, yeah.

No, you can see the moment that, like, the fucking diabetes kicks saying the level of sugar.

Just wait, just, oh.

But yes.

I was going to take the opportunity to describe some of my adventures over the last year.

What's up, bro?

So there has been

lots of suggestions, lots of,

I suppose, confusion as well as to like what exactly happened with my setup and what exploded and why and where and how.

All of it.

Yeah.

All at once.

And a lot of misinformation.

Not that any of this matters, of course.

So I have to be, I have to, like, from somebody, I mean, I talked to you a little bit about it, right?

But you going like to me right before the podcast that everyone's exaggerating the tech problems only for the podcast to straight up die an hour later was really funny.

It was.

It was.

And to then have people go, oh my God, it extends to the internet.

And it's like, God damn it, that was just a completely unrelated, but random, unfortunately timed sequence of events, right?

And that's actually kind of what this is, this whole thing is, the sequence of events.

Because

most people, so I understand the jump to the conclusion.

in a lot of cases, though, because most of the time, if someone's talking about like, oh, a streaming setup or a PC or something, you go, oh, you're like, you assume it's all happening from the same thing.

So if something's going wrong, it's going wrong across the board, right?

But what I've learned over the, I mean, I'm going to, this is going to probably be repeated when I need to at some point in the future, but what I've learned over the course of recording from best friends was to compartmentalize everything as much as possible and have your fail state like have a limit to how far and how bad it can destroy everything.

I want to say, I think it's really funny funny that I took the complete opposite path on that.

Yeah.

Because my lesson from that is to actually have as few moving parts as possible.

I see.

Yes, yes.

That is so the only thing that

break here is this mixer and that computer.

I have two pieces.

That is one way to go about it, right?

I was always preferable, I was always, I always had a preference for the redundancies.

And I remember.

That's what this backup mixer over here is for sitting right next to it.

Yeah, I've got my backup mixer there too, but mind you, like, they do, like, you know, there's, there's some stuff with the potential meter that, like, the quality changes, and you can get some flickering.

You remember how we used to go through those, right?

Oh, yeah.

This one's lasted a while, but of course, these specific types that I like and that I think we both still use are

they got really hard to buy after the pandemic because everyone and their stupid idiot brother started a fucking podcast.

Yeah, I still have my good two, but then I did have to get different ones as well for the other setup.

But I remember when I was like, yo, guys, we need to start using these backup recorders for the audio.

And you guys were like, yeah, okay.

And I was like, test it out and it worked and it's good.

And I was like, yeah.

And then every time it'd be like...

Backup recorder and you guys would be like, nah, fuck that shit, right?

I'd be like, it's your funeral.

If the thing,

you know, because the feeling of losing a day of recording and having it go into the ether

is so abysmal.

It's so

one of the things that, like, I've one of my favorite things since we moved to streaming damn near everything on Twitch is that, like, there's a de facto backup recording

live.

Unless.

For unknown random reasons, there isn't.

So

it's all part of the lot

I have lost

one

thing

ever that's gone just gone and it is an hour and a half of FF7 remake okay

um that the logo recording died

and Twitch's VOD died.

Yeah, okay, that's crazy.

And then I replayed it and re-recorded it like a a solo thing, and I finished FF7 Remake before someone reached out to me to let me know that I didn't actually replay the whole section that was missing.

So

there's a gap in those YouTube archives where it just teleports forward.

Okay.

I don't think,

you know,

from my memory, I don't think I've lost anything since Best Friends.

I think I've had everything

caught in some way, shape, or form because you just never know, right?

Well, the important thing is that all of the stuff that we make is shit.

So if it does get lost, it's not the end of the world.

It is not the end of the world, no, I suppose.

But to this degree, it is, and I think there's an important distinction here, too, as well.

You primarily are Twitch focused.

I primarily am YouTube focused.

And that changes our goals and what we create create and how, right?

The secondary becomes deprioritized in that nature.

So all this to say that like, it's just it's wild how things just kind of lined up for like anti-Kismet,

you know, like, because it starts with

the day that I streamed Phoenix Wright last Monday, I went, okay.

I've been wanting to do a little refresh, right?

Do a little, Do a little 2025, right?

Ahead of time, the little update to things.

So got a little,

been working on, obviously, you've seen I've been improving the lighting setup over here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've been working on, you know, trying to just, you know, bunker down on the layouts and the stream and, you know, other things as well, and even just bitrate if possible, connection things, et cetera, looking at all of that stuff.

And

shout outs to Jimmy Bones, who a good friend, was able to help me out with some suggestions for improving the stream layout and reducing some load from the CPU in like kind of shifting some of the way that I display animations around and stuff.

You can do some things that are like browser-based to take away the load from the actual OBS.

But

it was interesting because so I did that stream and introduced a new frame which has a little bit of an animation to it and I introduced the new loading screen, which has the ability to play songs off of a much off of Spotify, which has a much,

I saw that the other day.

It was cool.

Yeah, and furthermore, it's not going to get copyright dinged because none of it hits the VOD, so it's isolated, right?

So that's that's tech that people have known about for a while.

Just using that so that we can just get better music out there and have more fun while not worrying about the impact.

Plus, I'd rather do that than play

the

MP3s off my desktop, which can lighten some of the OBS load, right?

So that all works out, except for,

well, basically,

even though that stream was totally fine, there was some hiccups we noticed on the next stream because

the difference between loading in some animations where originally there were static images, it turns out, was creating just enough extra CPU load that things started to stutter.

And a lot of the optimization that he was showing me and stuff that was good was good

if you had most of your tasks being handled by the GPU, which I did not have my OBS set to.

I was doing it all on the CPU because I didn't really.

Yeah, my stream setup did not have a particularly, like, it wasn't a strong one.

It was, it had, um,

so it was, it was set up.

It was a gaming PC, but it didn't have like a particular

card, exactly, right?

So everything was going on X264, which essentially just means that the CPU is what's handling it.

So, what happens

there is

you end up seeing the CPU go spike go up while streaming.

That leads to some stuttering, that leads to you know, the video getting choppy and/or the game and things like that, and all these you know, undesirable effects.

Um,

and

the solution after streaming,

well, yeah, just I'm jumping all over the place a little bit, but like I streamed Cyberpunk and then I streamed to stream a thousand times resist and saw some stuttering.

And we kind of went, like, okay, the stuttering is getting too bad.

Let's cancel and fix that.

The solution would have been to either revert to a very simple flat image only layout

or get a better system that actually has a proper GPU that can handle the load.

Because a newer NVIDIA card, I've been using those for a while, makes OBS like super simple because it's like a,

I want to say it's like a 1% performance loss on a GPU task.

So the magic comes from, and this is the first good thing I can say about fucking Windows 11.

Damn.

But Windows 11 has GPU scheduling.

Yes.

And that is a feature that was supposed to work in Windows 10, but did not work properly, but works properly in Windows 11.

And what that does is just completely offloads the stress to your graphics card and leaves your CPU clean.

Right.

So the irony is that since I moved to Windows 11, I've had some annoyances as a user.

Yep.

Right.

But as

doing like podcast and stream stuff, it's actually been way smoother.

Right?

Like the ability to like hold up like a window to the top of the screen and then it auto-sorts all of them into clean little boxes saves me like 10 minutes a day.

I kind of been, I was doing that with 10 anyways.

And over time, I do realize that I'm like, every time I get a Windows and whatever, there's all this bloat, and you have to spend a while deep bloating it, right?

But

anyway, so 10 had this feature, but the feature wasn't working properly.

So, you know what?

Let's go get a new system.

So, I bought a new laptop

for streaming, and,

you know, this one in particular has its

32 gigs of RAM, and it has its RTX 4080.

Oh, you mean the bare minimum amount of RAM to play Stalker 2?

Sure, sure.

But what's important to note here, and what I was kind of getting at earlier, is that when something's happening with the computer that the game is running on, that has nothing to do with what's happening with my stream.

They're completely separate computers from each other.

It's just a video feed going from one to the other.

So the thought that cyberpunk blew the stream up or so is like, no, no, no, none of these setups are touching each other.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The stream PC died by itself.

Yeah.

So that was the improvement, the improving the stream by putting the little extra doodads and doohickeys on it led to the, oh shit, the CPU problem.

Therefore, let's go get a better thing.

And now that I have the 4080 in place, when I look at the CPU load and I have the scheduling on, it's like 1%.

0.1%.

Yeah, it's nothing.

It is non-existent, right?

Excellent.

It's night and day difference.

It's ridiculous.

And that's all made so that you can run the game and stream from OBS without much worry on the same system.

But the idea that I was seeing load stress while not running a game on the system yeah that's not great that's bad you know that was a clear indicator that something's off there so um what i discovered in that process was that um something i had looked out for and made my my uh laptop pre my previous streaming laptop suggest uh um options limited was I always wanted one that had the ability to take a input in, line in, microphone and headset, right?

They don't do that anymore.

They just don't.

Even the best, even

your highest

are all just going, yeah, and obviously line in is, I don't want to go through USB if I can avoid it.

You want your line in quality.

And so, you know, using an optical or having the port be like turning a headphone port into a mic-in port.

It's like there's problems with that setup because sometimes if I have a Discord call in, we need to be able to listen to ourselves.

It's a sophisticated setup where basically I need to do a lot to make it sure so that a call from a Discord can

land on our mixer.

We can hear it.

The audience can hear it, but it doesn't get recorded with the game, which is also being recorded.

So all these hoops and nonsense to say that

thankfully the mixer that I, not the mixer, but

I have

a visualizing board that has a line in that I had to set up.

So it took a day to figure out a lot of this stuff, stuff and I repositioned all of that.

So yes, new laptop is in place.

Everything works with that.

That's great.

Shout out to the

streamline of

people that are all so annoyed at Windows 11's fresh installations that they just have like a bunch of like

command prompts, things you can run to delete.

Turn that shit off.

Yeah, just delete all this bullshit.

And Windows 11 pushing things like, here's the gallery, here's the home view, here's here's this or that, or here's the thing where we put the start menu in the middle and try to make I'm like, fuck all that, leave me alone.

Classic shell.

I'll put my start menu in the bottom left, please.

Put it in the bottom corner.

When I click it, put up, pull up a fucking start menu.

I don't want any of that shit.

And thankfully, yeah, everybody agrees as well and has like set it up so that you can get past most of that bullshit.

So that is where the stream was at.

Aside from that,

cyberpunk,

which I did start.

Well, I would like to raise my hand, and I would like to tell you that you have a genuine gift.

I have never seen it before, and I doubt I'll see it since.

That

you got to make your character, and then they're like, hey, shitheads, the first patch in, like, over a year.

Yep.

Coming at you now with more character creation.

2.2, man.

You made your character yesterday, you dumb bitch 2.2

unbelievable it's like over and over oh yeah over and over oh i i love it i wait and it just happens it's ridiculous yeah tons of new cosmetic options and i started early enough that you know what even though i didn't see some visual options or some character customization choices i can go and see what they are now because like just i ultimately every game for you is an owlcat game it's great I ultimately went with Femvi because I didn't like the hair options on Guy V, you know?

So,

but now we'll just go take a look.

Yeah, why not?

Fuck it.

Sidebar, by the way, I noticed you can look in your mirror and update yourself, but

you can't change your chrome, right?

Until you go to the Ripper Doctor, I guess.

It's been too long for Pat.

Pat doesn't remember.

Okay.

Because I noticed you can change all your features except your implants,

which were part of the character customization options, but then were not in the mirror, right?

So.

Okay.

So yeah, I guess go to a thing.

Or now you can.

Is it part of the update?

Is that what folks are saying?

Okay.

Well, I'll say that as of the not update, when you looked in the mirror, you could not change that aspect of you.

I guess you have to go to a ripper doctor.

So anyway,

oh, yes, and as far as the stream goes as well, because of all of that improved stuff, then yes, we can stream at 8,000

bitrate and be solid so

absolute maximum quality on on all of that output as well

took the opportunity to redo all the lighting as well so the lighting that you're seeing over here on the podcast I also have kind of going over there

and

we have a bit more to consider because there's a screen in front of us that new bitrate is killer yes it's very nice I do I do like that and also I know that like we do have a little bit of extra leeway as partners

because

if you go get that.

Are you part of the Twitch Enhanced Broadcaster Beta?

I don't think so.

Okay, because if you're in there and they flag your account,

I forget where you apply, but you could find it fairly easily.

You can run that shit at 18,000 KBBS,

like high, like high as fuck.

Okay.

And it will kick your shit out at 1440p.

God damn.

Um, and I tested that for a couple days, and it looks awesome with one very extreme problem, and that is that Firefox users

caps out at 720p instead.

Oh, okay.

Because Firefox doesn't support the codec that they're using.

So, does it just not show you, or does it downscale?

So, what it does is that if you're watching it on

you are able to watch 1440p 60 and it looks really, really good.

And if you're watching it on Firefox, it's at regular 720p downscale 60 and it looks fine.

And then, if you try to

export the Twitch VOD from Twitch to YouTube, it breaks and YouTube goes, I don't know what to do with this.

Okay.

Sorry, Flurion users.

That sucks.

That's unfortunate.

Why couldn't it be like Edge that it didn't work on?

It works on Edge.

Yeah, that sucks.

Because Firefox doesn't have some kind of codec support that is required.

Okay.

Well, in any case, I do know that regularly 6K is the cap, but

I think Partner Goat gets to go up to 8 without perhaps that beta.

I mean, we're talking about

quality that is

approaching mini-scule as we increase to that level, right?

Like, I don't know that outputting in 4K is going to be standard just yet, but

it's going to be far away.

Streaming in 4K, you know, like, yeah.

So most, most people still, the top resolution, I think, is 720p, actually.

Because people watch, like, most people watch our shit on their phone.

Of course.

And the other bit is, too, is that, like, all of these technology advances and stuff are built around the idea that like the landlines are not getting better.

Right.

You're finding more efficient ways to use garbage pipes.

Well, hey, man, it's like gas mileage.

Like gas mileage used to be like complete garbage until like federal regulations in a bunch of countries came down and said, hey,

you could fucking do better with the gas mileage on these cars.

And then as soon as that happened, all of a sudden, oh, hey, wow.

Hey, look at that.

Yeah.

Put a bunch of scientists on it.

And and wow, gas mileage doubled.

Unless you're in Asia, in which case your internet is just fucking blinding you with its.

Yeah, but Asia's like small and compact.

No, Asia's not small, but I mean, like, urban centers are like very compact in that.

Yeah, Japan and Korea for certain reasons.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So, anyway, so yeah, that's all Asia's big, actually.

That's all nice and improved.

So, cyberpunk, which then, yes, has just gotten this update.

Also improved.

It certainly did.

And starting that out,

you know, I did a bunch of,

so I did some like, you know, benchmark tests and set things up well in advance because when I announced that I was like, hey, I was going to get ready to do Cyberpunk at some point in the near future, I went and started looking into configuration options to see what would work best with the computer.

And

what I landed on seemed to be

good,

but

then

other opinions, you know, about what to try and

hate those.

What to try and what not to try came in, and of course, we're talking about tweaking PC settings on a game here, so that stuff can go heavy and go long and can end up taking up a whole lot of a stream.

You can turn that shit up

real fucking high on cyberpunk.

And some people are super down and love that, and some people hate that.

And I'm just like, right, okay.

So, like, how do we, how do we, you know, kind of split the difference here?

And once crash starts to occur, you go, oh, okay, this is time to turn this shit down.

Well, this is not a matter of

let's make it pretty.

This is a matter of, can we fucking make it work, right?

When I see

FPS,

you know, negative a billion or whatever.

Yeah, I'm like, that's a bigger threat than

ooh, should we have ray tracing on or not?

No, what you should do is if you have an NVIDIA card, you should put on DLSS and turn off frame generation.

That's my

backseat.

Everyone has said frame gen off, and that has pretty sound, sounded pretty convincing, etc.

However, DLSS, guess what?

Nope, hates it, doesn't like it, doesn't work, no good, bad.

Really?

Yep, off.

Nope, not wild.

That's crazy.

So, here, I can take a long time explaining this part, but I won't.

Let's just get to the nitty-gritty of it.

How's Cyberpunk?

So, I enjoyed that first stream.

I thought that was very cool.

I also,

you know, I was describing how, like,

yeah, there's

the mods and friends that have gotten together and talked about, like, hey, here's what you should probably take a look at.

And here's what you can avoid to not bloat the LP up too much.

And

that stuff is, yeah, pretty nice and useful to have.

But even kind of with that, there's an element of it where I'm like, ooh, I can feel here that like I'm looking at things and things are being said and like things are moving and happening in a game in a a way that I'm like, shit, I like have a lot of missable dialogue moments and flavor that are gonna just kind of come and go in this game for me.

I can feel that it's really dense, and instead of just pretending I don't see it and ignoring it, and then having people go, They just said that, dude.

What the fuck?

How did you miss it?

I'm saying in advance that I'm feeling like the information wall, right?

I also think I saw someone mention that this is my first open world RPG.

Is it?

And I'm like,

what

is that term then?

Because it might be.

Okay.

I didn't play Skyrim.

Did you play any Bethesda games?

No.

Any of those Oblivions.

Okay.

Did you play any Bethesda games?

Any Fallout games?

Did you play anything by CD Projekt Red?

Is Elden Ring?

No.

Is Elden Ring?

No, absolutely not.

That's not going to...

Okay.

No, okay.

I'm going to break it down for in the in the dumbest possible way.

Have you played a game in which you are in a first-person perspective nearly entirely, in which you are doing RPG quests in a gigantic open world and you have a skill tree?

Um

doing compliance on Deus Ex, but was not the same okay.

You played Deus Ex Human Revolution, but that's an immersive sim.

It's pretty close.

But I, I, I, I, I have a line.

I don't have the full game completion run.

Oh, you never beat?

No,

I have a specific test case run that I have of that.

Oh, weird.

Yeah, I didn't do the whole thing like that.

Oh, then, yeah, no, this is definitely your first of this genre then.

Okay, cool.

It's a good one.

Now.

All right.

Don't fucking scream at me for saying, don't call me crazy.

I don't know.

I'm legit asking.

Like, I don't know that I've played any of these types of games before.

Someone said, hey, it is, and I guess so it is then.

I think

that what I was about to say just left my brain, and now I look stupid.

Okay, so we wouldn't count

the FromSoft games because you are doing

not, like, when you say RPG-ing, I guess we're talking about the like

what?

The more, like, did you play Kingdoms of Omlore Reckoning?

Yes.

Okay.

A bunch of that guest as well.

Okay, that

is by far the closest thing to Cyberpunk 2077.

It's not that close, but it's the closest touchstone that you have.

But I just to finish the thought, the reason why

you're saying

that a Souls game doesn't count is because it's not as much character relationships.

Yeah, basically your interactions with character

are bordering on nil.

And

it's interaction with combat is

how do I put this?

I don't, it's, this is, this is like one of those vibe things.

So dialogue at a time.

So dialoguing.

Yeah, the amount of dialogue you have to deal with in an Elden Ring game is.

And going to shops and driving to stores and quest locations.

Okay.

All right.

Tsushima is an action game?

Tsushima is a.

Did you ever play Far Cry 3?

No.

Okay, so Far Cry 3 is the template for like every single open world game that came out after it.

Like more so, more than Assassin's Creed.

It's Far Cry 3, like specifically the way that you kill little animals in the environment to upgrade your fucking ammo quivers and shit like that.

Tsushima,

all the first-party Horizon, like Sony shits, those are all just Far Cry 3 games.

Okay.

Spider-Man is like Far Cry 3.

Okay.

Well,

then I guess this person's assessment is probably on point.

Cool.

So,

yeah,

this will be a new experience then.

You're also entering into the cyberpunk in a very strange way, similar to the way that you entered into Mass Effect.

By the time you got to Cyberpunk and Mass Effect 3, they are fundamentally completely different games than they were when they came out.

Okay.

Like the amount of massaging and extra development that those games had compared to their release is enormous.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Yeah, I played some Baldur's Gate 3.

Didn't finish it, but I do have that.

No one did.

I do have that.

Shut up, New Millennium.

Anyway,

yeah, so that's cool.

I like new things.

That's fun.

But yes, all I'm saying is that I can feel here that the pace at which characters and the world is happening and things are going on.

I'm like, ooh, very, very dense.

Definitely the type of thing that I would be fine with off-stream, but on stream, the attention divide makes it, it's going to be a lot.

So

I, and like, yeah, no, no ability to quickly check the log of dialogue or so is also, you know, perhaps.

No,

it's not like that.

It's like, hear it or don't, and that's it.

Yeah.

So why haven't I finished Baldur's Gate 3?

Well, with what time, my friend?

It's a bit tricky.

I would like to do it on stream if.

I was about to restart Baldur's Gate 3 again, and then the day that I did, they announced 12 new subclasses.

So, all this to say,

the,

yeah,

the parts where things were working were awesome, and I really like the...

I think I designed a cool character, and I like the setup, and I like going Corpo as an option there.

I also went Corpo.

It is definitely the best start.

It has the longest intro.

It's the most interesting.

That sounds like just of the three, that sounds like a fun, interesting perspective on the city to pick up if we're all going to land in the same place.

It just sounded the most interesting.

And I'm happy that people lost their bets on which I would pick.

And I'm happy that Reggie was like,

because I'm like, nah, of these three settings, starting in the fucking rat race in the tower absolutely sounds like a wild thing to then fall to the streets from, you know.

Um, yeah, it, it sounds, it just sounds like the most interesting, um, but we'll find out, I guess.

Um, I've also seen people making reference to the fact that it doesn't come back in nearly much of an impactful way.

No, what happens once you get into the main game is 99% of the game is written as if you pick the street kid storyline,

and then you'll get a quest that is like,

remember that you're a corpo?

And you're like, yeah.

Okay.

So that's all cool.

Bit of a,

so yeah, those crashes, rough.

Saw a couple of them.

Everyone saw them while they were on stream.

And it was like, okay, let's get into, you know, damage control mode and see what we can do here about this.

And again, fortunately, you know, the stream could keep going while the gaming PC figured out what was happening there.

so to that end some some initial uh kind of mass effect uh lp vibes in the sense that there is a a number of people that are just like like so

what what's with the the mods why even do that first time etc so i actually spoke to about that exact question and they they told me the mods and they were really minor they're extremely very very quality of life convenience pretty much and that's why i kind of wanted to show them up front because it was like if you're this is not that big of a thing, right?

It should not be, at the very least.

If you are just on the outside going, oh, something is exploding, that must be it.

If you don't know and you're just throwing a dart, then you're going to jump to that conclusion.

But it is fairly minor.

And here's the thing.

I can back that up because guess what?

Turned mods off, booted that shit up, still crashed.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, uninstalled mods, went back in, played with video settings, still crashed.

Nothing to do with them.

So throw that entire theory out.

That's founded in nothing.

I continued tweaking within the settings to see what I could figure out and

what would smooth it out.

And ran into, yeah, some really ugly ones.

In particular, for some reason, ray tracing off caused crashes sooner than being on.

That is dating back to the game's original release.

It is super weird.

I don't get it.

But yeah, I've had the game is like more stable with ray tracing on.

So then folks were like also talking about how they're like, oh, yeah, I remember in the less stable version of this game, those same crash points as well.

Like, these are some things that people have talked about, like, saying.

Yeah, the tutorial has a tendency in the VR sections to just fall apart.

Yep.

And so that's where I loaded my save-in for a lot of these tests, and that's where I was testing and seeing it fall apart the worst, right?

Okay, so in that, it's like, all right, well, to be fair now, I'm thinking about how like mouthwashing had that weird crash in it the other day.

Yeah, which was awesome as fuck.

It was awesome.

It was a pretty good value add.

But nonetheless, it's like, okay,

is it the computer?

Is there something going on here that I need to?

And it's like, you know, the game has been

notoriously launched in a shitty shape, but it should be fine now.

People have not seen issues on their end.

So let's look into it.

So

here's what I do.

I update, of course, all the NVIDIA settings and all the latest drivers and everything.

So just go full overhaul of that.

Setting NVIDIA to optimize creates the worst working version

ever, by the way.

So immediately just on test, I'm like, oh, let me click on the optimize and run.

Now, fuck that.

Doesn't even get to the goddamn title screen.

So unoptimize, let's go back to the settings I had to.

Okay.

Driver updates, et cetera, all that.

Fine.

We're good to go.

Let's see how the computer is doing.

So, benchmark.

I benchmark with Prime 95.

I use 3D mark and get a bunch of extended tests and get results from that.

Mem test86.

I run Furmark.

I run Crystal Disk Mark.

I do.

You're running fucking Furmark over here.

You are very serious.

Every single possible test on every component of my computer to see if there are any identifiable problems that would be creating consistent issues across me let's playing everything passes not a single issue to be found no problems i'm not overclocking my in my term my temperature is not flying off the handle into the 90s or even really 80s everything's showing up green under control no problems so i think overclocking might be the least worthwhile thing you can ever do to your computer and before you guys with your ice rigs freak out it's because so much over the past like it used to be super easy.

Like you want Half-Life 2 to run better and you have the cooling for it, fucking kick it up.

Just fucking go in there and tweak the voltage, right?

But now you've got these

DirectX and all that shit where it's like, hey, my game is crashing constantly.

Well, did you overclock it?

Yeah.

Don't overclock it.

Right.

The game is being built with the assumption that it's running on factory defaults and it will just go crazy if it's running at weird fucking numbers.

Now, you've watched me sit there and spite

fix like emulators that aren't working properly and games that don't work.

I'm just used to that.

I'm just used to sitting and tinkering with getting a thing working like that when it's not.

But because I don't PC game very often, I haven't really done this much.

And I'm just very used to being like, ah, just fucking load up the console, keep it simple, right?

But I do have that.

And I have done this for other things.

And like to turn a to turn a PC into a console, I will tinker aggressively.

He'll do it.

But not for the PC2 specific software, right?

Hilariously.

But anyway,

all these tests show that everything is actually quite fine and that there are no issues to be detected there.

So

that means it's Cyberpunk's fault.

I mean.

Or it's your QA field.

Well, look.

As a final bit, I went and I uploaded my cross-save

shit to the you know the account and I got Cyberpunk for PS5 anyways.

Yeah.

And I booted it up

and I loaded my save and guess what happened?

What happened?

The fucking console version of Cyberpunk crashed.

Well, that's okay.

Well, that's rock solid then.

That's that.

So I will not be gaslit.

I will not be told otherwise.

This game is built on Twix.

It's built on string and leaves.

And as far as I can tell,

that's just going to be the state of it.

It's like.

Wooly, could you just return the slab, please?

Could you just fucking

rebury those bones you dug up and fucking say the prayer and just the game is fixed.

Is it Idris?

Is it though?

Is it really though?

I mean, look, man, I gave you the thoroughest breakdown I could of this system, this game, and everything.

I have QA'd it.

You talk about the QA field, right?

I took a couple days here, and I ran QA.

The game is not fucking solid.

It is not reliable.

It has its problems, and there's nothing I can do about those.

That's Poland, brother.

All right.

Okay.

I hope everyone that hears this fucking gets it.

So with that said,

here

is where...

Here is where now

stability

is found when for some reason

motion blur turns off.

Okay.

I turn motion blur off and suddenly I'm able to make it further and smoother than any other time.

That's weird.

Not the more intense features, mind you.

Right?

No idea.

So

while I was playing it, some folks were like, I hate that shit.

Turn it off.

I'm like, I don't even know how I feel about it.

I have never seen anything more contentious than me saying, I think I'm going to leave the motion blur off.

And like a good like 30% of the chat just starts vomiting into their own fucking floors.

Yeah.

And I'm like, I don't understand what the problem is.

Yeah.

No, I'm not going to be like, I need to, I'm, okay, when it's not being responsible for fucking the game not moving or issues happening or so, I don't even know how I feel about it yet.

So I'm like, let me leave it on and see.

And then if I feel what people's hatred is and I agree with it, then I'll turn it off.

But I'm not just going to turn it off out of, for no reason, just if it's not doing anything.

But it turns out that for some reason now,

the game has been able to go smoothly with that.

Am I going to sit here and swear on that and say that that is the linchpin that's going to hold this whole fucking house of cards together?

No, I don't think so.

But for some reason, I have not had a crash ever since I've left it off.

Right?

Oh, I'm seeing people say that motion blur makes them sick.

Well, just get better stomachs, guys.

Come on.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Got them.

So

the plan is to run it with that off, proceed as I have managed to do so.

I'm also going to do a full...

I got a suggestion to completely uninstall video card drivers and completely reinstall in case there's some.

Yeah, driver cleaner is the one to go for for that.

In case there's some residue, right?

There is often actually some residue.

Okay, so we'll see about that.

And yeah, I'm just going to run it this way and see how that goes.

And at all times, I will have the PS5 version sitting there in the background.

Just ready.

Ready to go.

And that's an option as well.

And that's it.

That's the game plan.

That's the solution I came to.

And Cyberpunk is...

I mean, of all the games to fucking test it, right?

Like, the game where you're in a shitty fucking tech world and things are exploding regularly.

Like, it does feel appropriate.

Hey,

How about you go through this level of tech support with your arms and legs?

Wouldn't that be fun?

Right.

And yeah,

a lot of this then, you know,

goes on to

what happened to the VOD?

Well, it just so happens completely separate from the stream issues.

Yeah.

Completely separate from the game issues.

Twitch just didn't VOD the the game.

Oh, that's super funny.

It just didn't VOD the game when it was funny.

That's funny, right?

And I was like, oh, like, so, you know, I've heard, like, yeah, so a Paige apparently had her option get turned off automatically on things or something.

Yeah, Paige, so Paige was playing New Vegas with

a new radio station added, and like, her account's not in trouble or anything like that.

But, like, it's like, there are so many

DMCA

notices on these that we're going to just not publish your VODs at all.

Right.

Okay.

It's auto-publish off now.

So

that did not happen.

My publishing was still on.

Everything was still set to put out VODs.

And in fact, I recorded the next day and it was going fine.

The beginning of my Thousand Times Resist stream was being archived properly.

So I'm like, oh, it's not that setting.

Is it the copyright music thing?

And it's like, nope, because that was going to a different.

No, sometimes that just happens.

Yeah.

Right.

So I get in touch with Twitch support and I'm like, hey, can you help me?

What's going on here?

And then the person on the other line is just like, oh, make sure that your settings are set correctly.

Make sure that you've turned.

I'm like, fucking goddamn it.

No, no, that's gone.

They're not pulling that out of the fucking ether.

Shut that fuck done.

I contact

a more direct helpline and they

go, oh, like...

Yeah, it seems like it seems here that we can see that there was either an encoding or network issue.

That's why it didn't get archived.

And I was like, okay,

I'm currently with the same settings and setup with nothing changed because overnight I went, I'm not going to touch it.

I clicked the button again, and I'm currently successfully putting a VOD out.

So how do you explain that?

And then they went, oh shit, okay.

So it turns out that, yeah, there's a

feed issue that we are currently dealing with.

That's a known issue.

And that's why it didn't archive.

That's on our end.

And I was like, okay, but people did make clips.

So

something existed, right?

And can I, is there anything I can do?

And they kind of were just like, we can't recover a VOD that never existed to begin with.

Bold.

Yeah.

So that's a long way around to say they went, oopsie-whoopsie.

It went a fucky-wucky.

And then

fan that happens to work at Twitch sends me a DM and goes, hey, I work in the back here.

I found it.

Here it is.

Can I make friends with this person also?

Sure, please.

Sure.

That seems like a very helpful person to be able to talk to.

And so the plan was to just be like, okay,

well.

The initial thing, oh, I forgot to say, when the VOD didn't go up, I was like, well, I still recorded the entire thing in audio format, and I still separate from the stream, and I still recorded all the video directly.

So this has, even though the stream broke or whatever, I still have my own local shit.

The only thing I'm missing is our cameras.

So we'll just put it up old school style, no cameras, and that'll be fine.

And then someone got in touch and went, yo, actually, here you go.

I've got it.

I found it in the, you know, in the archives or whatever, behind the scenes.

So it's like, oh my God, it did exist.

It's just, yeah, we're not going to be bothered.

It's hard to get a single person.

Hey, let me tell you, as somebody who works somewhere, that there were items in the back, and people asked if it's in the back.

No, it's not.

And there's nothing in the back.

Yeah, you know what?

You know what, man?

Sometimes there is something in the back, but I'm going to go back there and

fucking piss and just take a non-sanctioned break and then come back and say I couldn't find it.

Yeah.

So,

anyways,

so thanks to Arasaka Corp,

I've managed to get, we got our hands on that.

And yeah, so we have the that's why the video exists in the episodes that are that are going up in its normal, you know, completely just on its own unrelated random issue.

You know, so then the day after, when I streamed A Thousand Times Resist and I saw the quality issue and stuff, we took it down.

And this is where I figured out all of the things I just told you.

And here we are today,

where, as far as I can tell everything is good to go quality is high wonder if it's ever been lighting is more dynamic than it's ever been and that game is set to fall apart at the gust of wind that comes from the east so hopefully uh it'll just remain westward when's your uh when's your next cyberpunk stream well uh so this is the problem because of yesterday's internet stuff uh we're streaming now

And then as soon as we're done here, I'm going to take a break, and then Reggie's going to come over late, and then we're going to start an LP for A Thousand Times Resist because I don't want to, I feel bad having to delay that shit twice.

So this is a big boy day for you.

Big Boy double day.

And then tomorrow is going to then be,

I think it was

Phoenix Wright

or was it Cyberpunk?

I forget.

But it was going to be one into, I think it was Phoenix Wright into

then Game Award shit.

So I'm

so I'm basically doing like quadruple shifts

for the next two days.

I would highly suggest to you.

So how far are you in Cyberpunk right now?

I got back to my apartment.

Okay, I would highly recommend.

So what's the version of that save you're running?

Does it have the mods on or off?

Oh, the mods don't affect the save.

Okay, they don't.

You can load the save.

Yes, with or without them.

Without them.

Oh, okay, great.

Yep.

Okay, then never mind.

I was about to say, like, you might want to make a clean file of this shit's just fucky wookie.

Oh, I'm going to go check out the 2.2 shit regardless, right?

And at this point, I've run that tutorial and that initial rescue mission enough in these testing.

Oh, you can go fast.

That I'm just going to roll through it.

So I'm going to go check out 2.2 and see what's going on.

And yeah, who knows, right?

We're where we'll land on it.

But

mods definitely do affect saves.

Okay,

if that's confirmed and locked and that's a fact and a sourced backing thing you can confirm.

Just assassinate

assassin.

But it's from

as far as I've been told and as far as I've seen, when you turn them off, you can still load and it seems to be okay.

The

minimal mods we're using that are not heavy mod of save affecting things don't do it.

So please back up what you're saying and confirm that you know what you're talking about.

I

don't, I don't fucking.

Anyways, all right, so that's what we're doing.

It's going to be a busy two days, and

I appreciate everyone's continued steadfast patience as I proceed to lose my fucking mind.

So

I do have fun.

Game's great.

Game's very cool.

I like the part where we pulled up and watched Max Tack, and it was like, oh, fuck, it's Max Tack.

And then you see

a Trauma team, and you're like, oh, fuck, it's Trauma Team.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, Edge Runners really did hit those bullet points right away.

It absolutely did, yeah.

I like the two things that fucking terrify you immediately, you see, like nice and early in that anime.

So like right away, you're like, oh, hey, this is cool.

Oh, no, this society sucks.

It's terrible.

It's like the worst thing ever oh fuck

and while i was doing this i also had the moment to read the lore books that you pick up the first two or so and fuck those are good lore drops that i don't know

if i can ever read them while we're on stream because it's gonna slow things down a lot but to a fucking crawl probably yeah they're really good you know um

i don't feel like outside of like walking around the initial Arasaka base, I kind of, I don't feel like I lingered too badly on anything, but it was still like, bro, fucking the tutorial with the guns and shit is supposed to take 10 minutes.

How did it become 40?

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

You saw me do them.

I don't know what you want me to say.

And I also hate sprinting and running past dialogue and shit, right?

I'd like to experience the video game.

So I will say one thing.

And I don't know how this will affect your particular LP, but when I was playing Cyberpunk, I played it for a while.

I didn't get that far, but it's the only game I have ever played in my entire life that I would get out of my car and just walk to my waypoint

because

they did a really incredible fucking job, like just making a realized urban location.

I feel like I want to, you know, and I feel like I feel like I'm going to have to do that off-stream, perhaps.

Yeah, no, the distances are enormous.

Yeah.

I don't want my

desire to.

There's okay.

I don't want things to take forever, but I don't want my desire to please people who are impatient, ruin my first experience with this game that I really enjoy and I think is cool so far.

So

there's a degree to which it's like, yeah, fucking too bad.

I want to enjoy myself for like a minute, guys.

I'm getting one here, right?

And that's kind of the idea behind, like, why put in more respects?

The game is only supposed to give you one.

And I'm like, yeah, but I'm only getting one run at this, and I really want to enjoy it.

So I'd like to be like,

right?

Like, one?

Like, really?

That's so strange that they would allow it, but only once.

Yeah, it is very weird.

Because if you balanced for no respeccing whatsoever, I'd understand.

But it's like you balanced to allow it, but you just don't want it to be more than one time.

Okay, I don't know.

What I can say is that,

fortunately, and Reggie and I have like kind of talked about this and stuff, but this is just one of those,

it's highly anticipated, and therefore it's one of these like lightning rod LPs, right?

Every once in a while, we'll start out playing a game that's very, very highly anticipated and very liked, and it'll bring around a lot of people who have a lot of very strong opinions.

And a lot of those people are folks that are also coming back that haven't been around in a very long time, slash, or tuning in for the first time.

Slash, don't give a fuck about what's regularly going on, except for this thing.

Because you're like starting it, you're like, hell yeah, my numbers are super good.

And then you're like, oh, no, it's filled with shitheads.

Detecting

those

is something that I was not able to do the first couple times I did this.

I feel like I've gotten a good bit better at that.

And that's where

something that is like in the background, I think you, I mean, we all have this.

I don't know how much the audience kind of knows this as well, but like, there's a lot of names we recognize.

We kind of know

the regular people.

We kind of know what's going on.

Look at a ton of names I recognize right now.

Yeah.

And so as I scroll and I see names and opinions coming in, memory weight attached to those names is going to carry a little bit here where I'm like, oh, I know you.

You're regularly around.

You're not an asshole.

Okay, yeah, I'll take your

nice guy.

Why are you talking shit?

I think I think my favorite is person who's polite persons who's nice and you're like oh hey so-and-so and then in the back of your head I'm like this person has the worst taste of any human being I've ever encountered in my entire life literally every single statement they ever make about I wish it was like this you're like what the who the fuck would ever want it like that what the hell are you a non-hidden what the what is going on this feels like the worst possible parasocial statement like enabling thing to to give out there.

But yes, I do actually recognize a lot of your names and

vibes.

To the point where I've said to people in person, why did you close with your tag instead of opening with it?

Of course I know who you are.

You know, I'm like, yeah, I've seen that name pop up.

I've read it aloud multiple times.

What's up?

How have you seen that?

Have you seen this name 93 months in a row in some cases?

Yes.

You know, and I like, as like, even right now, it's like there's like 30.

There's like, yeah, three, four, four of you guys.

I know you, I know you, I know you.

I don't know who the fuck y'all are, but you're cool.

Get in.

You're cool.

You're cool.

You're cool.

You're not.

You know?

So that comes into premium

when we start a game like this.

Because if you're somebody who's like,

if you just don't give a fuck otherwise, but you're tuning in here and you have a lot of strong negative opinions, I kind of don't care what you have to say because you're making things worse as an experience.

Just FYI.

I'm going to be putting that little filter up it's the only way to survive this level of unexpected tidal wave you know

um

but uh i'm i'm really really like impressed

sorry i i think my favorite part of that is that you just look at somebody and you're like i'm i don't i know not to listen to that yeah

oh i can know i can see the person who i don't know whose comment i don't give a fuck about right now going by i there you are.

You see it?

That one?

Oh, I see it.

I don't know who you are.

I don't know who you are.

You don't matter.

Right?

But you right underneath, right there?

Oh, you're a champion.

Right underneath it, you rule.

It was right there.

I saw it.

I saw it.

So, so

I love

the

little moment that the game took as well to roll back to the apartment while gang, gang, gang, gang, right, plays.

And I'm like, it's going to take moments to be like, you can fast forward this, but let the city build up as a character in your brain.

Awesome.

Fucking love that that's a thing.

And I hope that that continues to be a thing.

In an open world RPG type situation, I can also know that a lot of games will be front-loaded with their juice and then backloaded and mid-loaded now with Phantom Liberty, but you could have an empty middle.

I hope we don't have that here.

I don't think we do because a lot of people like it, but you know what I'm talking about, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's the hope.

That's the hope, you know.

But just chilling in the car, laying in the cut, watching Max Tac do their thing.

City of dreams, city of gang, gang, gang, gang.

Very cool.

Loving cyberpunk so far.

That's my adventure.

Aside from a multitude of technical nonsense, like separate technical nonsenses, unrelated and cyberpunk.

Anything else going on?

No, that's pretty much it.

So, you know, I'm going to pick back up with A Thousand Times Resist.

I'm going to do Cyberpunk.

I'm going to do the TGA, the TGA game awards.

I saw someone actually write the TGA awards yesterday.

How I laughed.

I mean, that's what I named the video.

Like, it was unironic, it was, it was real.

So good.

And, yeah, Phoenix Right, Phoenix Punk and Cyber Wright continue.

And so obviously that means

no Marvel Rivals time or time for anything else at the moment.

And

yeah, the only other thing is I'm going to be at Holiday Matsuri

end of next week.

So the 20th to the 22nd.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Oh, that's Christmas time.

In Florida.

Reggie and I will be down there, and we will be,

yeah, guests in the game room.

It's also CEO Taku at the same time.

So if you're in the area in Florida,

my apologies, but also come hang out.

Yeah, Wooly versus on Twitch and on YouTube.

Before we go into the news, there actually was

yesterday

one last thing I wanted to talk about before we went into the sponsors.

Which we are

cool that I talk about that now.

Well, we already did go into the sponsors.

No, you know what I mean, right?

Like, basically, I want to talk about Path of Exile 2 that came out.

Yeah.

Okay, so Path of Exile 2 came out.

Yet another game that is

not Diablo 2

saying, hey, man, do you remember Diablo 2?

And I say, yes, I do remember Diablo 2.

I like Diablo 2 quite a lot.

How is Path of Exile 2?

Path of Exile 2 has maybe my favorite community reaction of anything I've ever seen in my entire life, where they're going to keep going with Path of Exile 1.

Oh, yeah.

And Path of Exile 2 is also going to keep going forward.

Like, these games are not like, it is not replacing the first.

That is unsustainable.

That doesn't.

Like, how?

Skeleton Crew?

Well, I'll tell you how.

They're very different.

They're very different.

And they have confirmed that

all of your cosmetics and all of your account upgrades from Path of Exile 1 are going to apply to Path of Exile 2.

So, like, not all the cosmetics have been ported into Path of Exile 2.

Okay.

But, like, all of it.

Which is nuts.

That's a really cool commitment for anybody who plans to stick around the first game.

That's awesome.

Monetarily.

So you usually go like, now we're moving to the game.

Yeah, no, it's ridiculous.

So

the fan reaction to it is super nuts because

it depends on what subreddit you go to.

The Path of Exile 1 subreddit is like, oh, this new game is shit.

I'm going to stick with Path of Exile 1.

And the Path of Exile 2 subreddit is like, this is so amazing.

I bounced off Path of Exile 1 like a hundred times and I was never able to get into it.

But Path of Exile 2 is the fucking shit.

Oh, and it's like, it's because they're different.

They look like from a visual, like, if I showed you two screenshots, like, they look like bordering identical.

They are dramatically fucking different games.

You're describing the darkest dungeon community, by the way.

Yeah, I totally am.

And

the basic gist of it is that Path of Exile 1 is a very, very classic click-mouse to move

Diablo game.

And the way that it works is Diablo, but more.

The original devs that left, correct?

I believe so.

Yeah.

Okay.

And Path of Exile 2

is.

And I saw someone say this, and I think they might actually be dead on for once.

It is the Dark Souls of Path of Exile

because

you're so controller support is

saying it.

Unironically.

Controller support is out the gate, unlike Path of Exile 1, where it was added years, years, years later.

And your primary attack is R1, and your secondary attack is R2, and blocking with your shield is L1, and your tertiary attack is L2, and then you have your face buttons for things, except for circle, which is your dodge roll.

Because

instead of having Diablo-style enemies, it has action game/slash soul-style enemies

that have telegraphed attacks and combos and shit.

You're not cursoring.

No.

And even on keyboard, it's W-A-S-D to move.

It's not mouse-clicking.

And that

dramatically changes how the game works.

Because now it is not like they can expect you to dodge shit.

Is there a counter-argument for why games

are not just automatically better

with that?

Is it because, like, if there's other goals in mind, like

RTSing, for example, or so you're like, okay, we can't be bothered, you can't be getting into like action gaming every unit, obviously.

You need, you need to be more zoomed out, but it's just a design decision coming from like

Dune 2.

But when you're controlling one 90 something when you're controlling one character is it not just is it not easier is it not just better objectively it's just the way things used to work and that's how games got made and then games got made that way and that's that okay like I'm not saying it's worse or better I'm just saying like that's just the nature of that control scheme and then that control scheme expanded around it that sounds fucking phenomenal so you'd be like W E R T and Q and shit those would be your butt that that would be be your buttons, right?

So you have your hand on active abilities at all times.

I can feel the powering up stupid take fucking energy inside of me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

But I'm like, there are games, and this is just a matter of preferences, right?

But there are games where even if all assets and everything setting-wise and everything going on is the same, there are games where they land, and this one lands more like a card game with a couple extra steps, and this one lands more like a video game that you control moment to moment.

And I always,

always lean towards that second one.

It's just way more fun for me.

So

this one's slightly out of your wheelhouse, but less so because you played a bunch of Baldur's Gate 3.

So this was a huge back and forth for like decades over how computer RPGs should play.

Because classically, they played real time with pause, which is the characters will all auto-attack unless you paused it with space and then told them where to cast and who to attack and all that.

And it would be based off a six-second round, a la DD, right?

And Pillars and one and two were real-time with pause because Baldur's Gate one and two were real time with pause.

And then when Divinity Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 came out, hey, turns out turn-based is like the most accessible, easy-to-understand

system for an RPG ever for everyone.

Overwhelmingly so.

Oh, yeah.

People point out KOTOR was real-time with pause.

Right?

Everyone would do their shit unless you stop them.

True.

Yeah, okay.

And it's like originally real-time with pause was supposed to emulate DD because the characters are all acting along six-second rounds.

And you could just say that if a spell cast two rounds to cast, it would just shoot, you know, it would take 12 seconds, you know, what have you.

And just like, just the overwhelming popular consensus was turn-based, please.

And I feel like that's the case with like

click-to-move/slash WASD games.

Like, you please let me control my character with directional inputs.

Yeah, I mean, Baldur's Gate, like, when the fights get extremely complicated,

seeing that really long list of like who's acting when and sanely planning out your moves and stuff,

it helps a lot in that circumstance, as opposed to just, I don't fucking know, it's all going, do something, right?

One of the things that interrupts the timeline that is just playing.

One of the things that Josh Sawyer talked about during his Pillars of Eternity 2

post-mortem is that

real time with pause didn't work as well in the new games as they did in the old ones.

And the reason for that is really simple.

It's because the old games, you actually had really limited control of your characters.

If you were a melee fighter in Baldur's Gate 1, your options were move and hit, and that was it.

That was your whole kit.

The only characters you actually had to really control were like wizards and maybe a claret.

Side note, the only thing worse than deciding is the worst of both worlds, where during your turn, you have a limited amount of time.

AT being it is just abysmal.

Anyway, I think the best of both worlds is the way that Pathfinder Kingmaker does it and Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, where it's both.

It's the only game series I can think of that actually has turn-based and real-time with paws.

So basically, you roll real-time with paws over trash,

and then when you run up against something that's going to be super fucking for real, you switch to turn-based.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, to some light degree, metaphor is doing that too, right?

Like,

that's different.

It is.

It is.

It is.

But I was surprised that some enemies that were like trash enemies would still take hits and come back at you and make it like a, oh, you've got to roll past that swing and fight this little thing on the overworld for more than just one hit.

You know?

Yeah.

Anyway, okay.

Would you say that?

But yeah, so Path of Exile 2 is like a Diablo, the Dark Souls game.

It's fucking cool.

It feels really good to play.

It is so much more appealing to me than Path of Exile 1 was.

And number one on that list of things that makes it cool is you can pause the game.

Killer feature.

Previously, you were stuck in the game.

Well, yeah, because it was an online game and people could jump in and out.

So

you can pause.

Yes, yes.

But now, Path of Exile 2, you can pause the game, which means it's baby-proofed.

God, I remember when Souls was first being explained to me, and I remember the idea of like, well, it's online, so you don't pause it, but also it's because it's extra hard, there's no breaks.

Yeah, and then it's actually like, well, you can actually pause super fast in a Souls game if you get really good at exiting the game-domain menu in like one second.

Or you could always just pull out the camera mode in the PS5 version of DC.

Yeah, that's a goofy one.

That's a goofy one.

Like, oops,

bro.

Rutt Row.

Interesting.

Okay.

Would you say, I'm curious, would you say most people agree with the change?

I would say Path of Exile 2's new controls are definitely more palatable to a much wider variety of people overall.

But in the Path of Exile community, that is a bunch of mouse-click Freakazoids who love that shit and live and breathe it,

it's divided.

Okay.

Okay.

That's how it seems to be.

You're fighting tradition, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, but yeah, that's a good way to phrase that.

Okay, um,

well, that's it for this past week.

This coming week, uh, tomorrow, Thursday, the December 12th, that is going to be the Game Awards where I will be joined by my darling wife, Peach Saliva.

So come on in and watch that shit.

And then Friday, I'll do some Marvel Rivals, and then Saturday, I'm going to go back to the backlog and spin the wheel and all that, all that shit.

Okay.

Yeah, let me grab a guru.

Give me a second.

Yeah?

PRB.

I have one last piece of dog-based information.

Oh, yes.

There is a current battle in the household because Paige wants to call this dog the ghoul.

And I'm like, I don't think we should call him the ghoul.

I mean,

to his face

right in front of his meal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I think while you're re while name relearning is occurring, you probably want to get consistent.

Yeah, probably.

Yeah, she wants the first name to be the

and the last name to be ghoul.

You see, I don't like the implications because

we know what energy comes with that, and that doesn't need

so

all right.

You know what, Wooly?

I don't like the way you're talking about my dog's new name.

You know what I'm gonna do,

asshole?

I'm gonna call your mom and tell her that you were mean to me.

I mean,

wow.

So this is also, I'm super happy.

This story is particularly fun because itch.io is kind of just a person that just talks on.

I did not know that.

Yeah.

That's the fun part is that when something like this goes down, if it were between a particularly big site and then another big site, it's like, oh,

put a look.

Fuck that shit.

Itch.io literally just writes, I kid you not, itch.io has been taken down by original Funko because they use some trash AI-powered brand protection software called Brand Shield Limited that created some bogus phishing report to our registrar.

I want my name, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain.

So just awesome all the way around.

Just great.

Fantastic.

So, I mean, it's all the details are right there, but yes,

Funko uses a service called Brand Shield, and Brand Shield does automatic takedowns for people that try to do phishing attempts or fraudulent websites.

But another thing that they include is brand protection.

And so the AI detected that someone uploaded something to itch.io and that was

going after or infringing on Funko brand and just automatically

sent a takedown request to the registrar.

The stupid, obvious step here being skipped, which is using the regular method of contacting the domain themselves and telling itch.io, hey, can you take down

this thing that a user on this page is using?

Because there's many third parties involved in a site like that, but not when you have a fucking stupid automated process go through.

And so, yeah, that obviously leads to- That's fucking stupid bullshit.

So that obviously leads to them complaining about it, understandably so, because the domain registrar, the service provider, doesn't give a fuck.

They're like, okay, whatever, complaint, yeah, kill it.

And a ton of people that are using the site obviously

lose all their shit.

And

he then, or the itch.io then goes,

This is not a joke.

Funko just called my mom, and which we see a message coming from the itch.io person from mom going got a strange call from a company about accusatory statements from your social media account call me

guys

I tried to warn you I tried to warn you about fucking Funko pops did I not have I not been on this shit Was I not on this shit from day zero?

You were.

Stood on business.

And like, so,

Wooly, I don't, I don't know.

So you and Paige both have a long-standing violent hatred of Funko Pops.

Paige is in the chat right now telling everyone that every Funko Pop is filled with piss,

which,

Wooly, is based off a real story that I don't know if you've heard.

So I'll let her tell you that

to you at some point in the future.

Oh, this is so much

story

in the head of, quote, these Funko Pops are filled with piss.

There's so much room in the head to store piss.

Piss is stored in the head.

In the Funko head.

But yeah, no, so Funko Pops have gone from piss-filled annoyances to like actively harmful to a bunch of like really important devs.

Fuck them.

Please tell me that there's some sort of the factory is using ammonia in the plastics style.

No, Wooly, when I say that Paige's story about Funko Pops are filled with piss is literal and has no allegorical content,

I mean it.

Urine.

Stack them up, y'all.

Put them on your work desk.

Make sure everybody knows that you're into Tony Stark slash Doctor Strange slash

clerks Dante.

Yeah,

of all the things to take down itch.io,

which, by the way, if anyone happens to be listening to this and don't know, itch.io is a website that

developers register and put their indie games on.

Yeah, you want some fucking indie ass indie games.

It is an incredibly massive, useful place to

basically store all the indies

and um

that's that's basically it's the place um

yeah of all the things right like way to just be the most hateable

this is like you know this is like funko pop season desists the cans film festival

like

absolutely absurd

You're coming after the 80s, bro.

God damn it.

Funko Pop, like, Funko Pop burns down A24.

I mean, yeah.

No, it's what.

And then, and then, no, no, no, it's Funko Pops is here to

send a cease and desist over brand infringement to ICP champion shit wrestling.

Champion shit wrestling.

True.

True.

Big money wrestlers.

That's very important.

They're still wrestling.

Don't you think for a second that they stopped?

Yeah.

It's just, you kind of love that an extremely hateable brand did the stupid thing.

You know?

It's always fun.

And I love to play the mental gymnastic of saying, yeah, the same people that thought that they should make these things and that that would be a good idea also also thought that running this stupid thing would be a good idea too.

So that's why, right?

The reason why they look so shitty and stupid and ugly is the same reason why this dumb thing happened.

It's the same people who think those are good ideas.

Hey, can we just take a second?

We need to focus in on this.

A lot of people enjoy Funko Pops.

Is it wrong of us to judge people as stupid and not having any taste for liking Funko Pops?

Let's take a moment.

No, no, it's fine, actually.

Fuck those people.

Those people are stupid and they have terrible tastes.

Well, that god fucking shitty, stupid ass person dropping that take is also saying that while sitting on a throne of Funko Pops, right?

They're cheap and affordable.

Leave me alone, you say, as you have eight of them.

Just fuck off with that.

That bullshit disengage.

It's yeah, anyways, you know?

And I'm not even going, I'm not even

the alternative that's infinitely better.

We're not even going down that road, just for what it is.

This fucking piss-filled piece of shit.

Hey, let me ask you: you remember when Rose was being insane and irrational and was like crying about how Ryden didn't have anything in his room?

Yeah.

Would it be more or less disturbing if all he had in his room was Funko Pop?

Okay, it depended on who, though.

What character?

What character did Ryden have in that empty room?

the one Funko in the room that would shock her to her core it's very important

it depends on who

oh my god all right

um

the joker

it would have been it would have been infinitely more scary um because it's so it's not an absence of personality

it shows a decision right Yeah.

It shows that a decision was made.

You know,

fuck it.

I said I wouldn't, but it doesn't matter.

Would Nendoroids call your mom

and complain that you're being mean?

Would Nendo get on the phone with your fucking

call up your goddamn house, talk to your parents?

This reminds me of.

Find out your government?

The fuck are we talking about?

This whole story is,

think I brought this up like relatively recently.

I think we talked about it, maybe even last week, where it was like, you know, those guys that start a fight and lose, and they go, I'll never forgive you.

I'll get you for this.

And then they, they bring their guys to avenge their honor over the fight that they started.

This is, hey, we, a robot that we own fucked with you, and then you did, you, you didn't allow yourself to be fucked with, and now I have no more options, but how dare you?

I'm going to call your mommy and make you scared or whatever the fuck.

Like it's, it's a petty, like the robot was the first thing, but this is a petty individual go.

How dare they not

shut down their website when we told them just because of the law?

Why are you upset that my security bot shot you in the knee?

My ED209 shot you in the leg.

Why are you mad about that?

That's unfair.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

I'm calling your mom.

I'm calling your mother and she will know.

I mean, that's that.

Yeah.

So,

and you know what?

The same brain that thinks a Funko Pop is a good idea, also thinks the stupid AI brand service is a good idea, also thinks, you know what?

Let's call his mom, right?

Like, it's the same thing.

It's the same decision-making prowess at work here.

Every step of the way.

I bet the itch.io guy has, like, a legal remedy here because like unless the mom works for itch.io

like why would Funko call them as a personal citizen?

Well, because I'm guessing that the house was the registered domain like list.

I'm guessing that that was something where they found it as the person in charge or where the children.

And Funko Pop was totally Facebook snooping.

And they went in and then went like, we're going to call these people directly and go,

stop.

And it just leads to, like, why is my mom messaging me about this?

Yeah, a complete fucking buffoon of an idiot is making every one of these decisions.

And the best part is, is that every subsequent one will continue to be as hilarious because they've been great so far, right?

It's, it's, it's a Drake in action type shit.

It's just, it's like, yeah.

Yeah, this

is a wave from.

This story went from like tragic to hilarious in a couple hours because there was like Funko Pop killed itch.io.

Like, what?

Oh, oh, it's back.

Okay.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, you know, stupid fucking bullshit and annoying is that the registrar, obviously, is kind of just like, what's going on?

Not a good registrar.

Don't even look into it.

We don't care.

Shut it down.

Right?

You're like, it's a giant third-party service, man.

What the fuck are we talking about?

Yeah.

So, anyway, good, good times.

Shout outs to itch.io and the Canned Film Festival.

Oh, man.

Well, speaking of indie and amateur artists, on a related note,

Capcom announced a Capcom games competition.

This is cool.

Yeah, this is really unusual because you hear about things like this from time to time.

But

I have friends who are in education and they've all been, I mean, well, okay, one, you've talked about the collegiate Street Fighter that you're

doing streams with.

And then I have friends that are getting into

there's curriculum updates where like, hey, game development and broadcasting and all these things are becoming more and more a part of it and stuff.

So,

Capcom announced this, and I was like, oh shit, okay, what's going on here?

Now, the moment you hear a contest, of course, you raise an eyebrow because a lot of the times, like, specifically, you'll hear contest as another word for free labor from people that are desperate for a shot.

And they'll just be like, Thanks for working for free.

We own this now, and we're going to, you know, do whatever.

But it's important to note that that is not what this is.

This is a competition that will basically have a bunch of students being provided with the RE engine and a cloud environment and some other game dev tools.

They'll be able to form teams of up to 20 where they'll all work in different roles on a dev team.

And they'll have, yeah, six months to basically work on whatever type of project they want to and create a game.

And in that half year,

they'll get support from Capcom's game production, and they'll get support from

other resources and game dev people associated with the program.

And

the winners will have the opportunity to commercialize their product or sell or do whatever they want with it.

Each respective team retains ownership and copyright of everything they make.

So

this is super cool.

Forward thinking.

Yep.

And they literally.

Go ahead.

With only one rule, which is guys,

guys, you can make anything you want except for a new Darkstalkers game.

Don't do it.

Oh,

interesting.

Who's that older-looking student that doesn't seem to

familiar wearing a Groucho Marx mask.

Where'd you come from?

You're not part of this team.

He's stealing the game.

He's running for it.

Get him.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Stop him.

You know what my favorite thing?

You know what my favorite fucking thing about Darkstalkers is?

Is that every time Darkstalkers comes up, you and I laugh way too hard and then do nothing.

Because like just Darkstalkers being dead is not that funny by itself.

So it doesn't really, like,

like, why are they laughing so hard about Darkstalker?

Listen.

And the answer is there's no reason.

There's no reason.

There's no reason to laugh.

There's nothing funny about that.

There's nothing funny.

We're just really silly.

I mean, I don't know how.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Good stuff.

Yeah, it's just, it's just a silly, it's silly.

It's a silly.

It's a fun.

And it is forward-thinking, you know, because they said that they want to help raise a new generation of game developers and stuff.

So that's great.

Sometimes there are words that when you say them,

for no reason,

they're just kind of funny, right?

Yeah, they're just kind of funny by themselves, yeah.

Hey, Pat.

Yeah.

Hey, Pat.

Hey, hey.

Yeah, well,

Ubisoft.

Oh, shit.

Oh, shit.

Oh, boy.

Well,

um.

Oh, sorry, bud.

Oh, I woke up the dog with that.

Oh, sorry, dude.

Listen, you know,

um,

the

there's a bit of a dispute over

the buyout that is uh

underway,

and it's not much of a surprise that uh that's going on, but essentially Tencent and uh Tencent and the Guimo

brothers are uh

are disputing over the amount of leadership that will be maintained by zero

and so on.

And they can't quite work out

the dotted line on all the other.

Yeah, is that because Tencent wants the leadership to be zero?

And the leadership of Ubisoft that is about to be zero is like, it should be not be zero?

Well,

Tencent has the ability to increase its stake and has been doing so.

But it seems as if there is a discussion being had so that it's not a hostile takeover.

It's going to be a hostile takeover.

But the option to make it a hostile takeover is absolutely possible.

It is going to be a hostile takeover.

And it seems like

it is a discussion that is becoming a tense discussion, and it might become a hostile discussion

before anything else.

So we'll see.

I cannot possibly imagine a situation in which the discussion is anything other than, well, let's have this be amicable.

And Tencent's response is the amicable solution is that we want to fire your entire C-suite.

Okay.

All the way from middle management up.

Okay, now hold on.

Now, hold on there.

Now, why would you say, now why would we need that?

We have nothing but the most competent management here doing the best job on all of these working games.

In fact, let me show you right here how competent our management is.

Why would you want to get rid of them?

Behold,

Beyond Good and Evil 2.

It's an empty box?

It's an empty box.

There's nothing in there.

Michelle Ancel claims Beyond Good and Evil 2 development hindered by problems between managers.

SQL team didn't know who was in charge.

Management conflicts shed more light on development issues, etc., etc.

So,

alongside all of this, you have this interview with Super Pouvoir,

where Michel Ancel talked about what went wrong.

Yeah.

And

basically,

the quote is:

on some projects, we set ourselves with huge challenges and take on teams with passion, but without knowing how long and complex the road will be.

Passion's fabulous energy, but it can lead to clashes between enthusiasts.

On BG ⁇ E2, there were too many problems between managers.

The art director wanted to redo everything over and over again.

The game director wanted to make a generated dungeon game.

I was dreaming of a space adventure.

We simply couldn't agree.

The game director took the project in other directions.

The team gets thrown around in this type of situation, and

they don't know who's in charge and who's making decisions.

The producer is supposed to bring order to the situation, but that didn't happen.

Yves Guimaud had to go down to Montpellier to get things back on track, but it wasn't enough.

The game director continued in his stubbornness, and

so on.

And so this is embarrassing.

And it just goes on.

And it's like...

At the end of the day, it's a case of passionate managers not getting along.

I believe that some time ago, these people were dismissed at the project, and the project found a certain balance with new managers.

These management problems are very damaging to the teams.

All this goes to show it's not an easy deadline.

It literally, literally just spelling out

that they can't manage the

forever game.

And all of this is bookended with a final.

Yeah,

Ubi says that their commitment to the franchise continues and the game is still in development.

It's not a franchise.

It's still in development, guys.

It's not a franchise.

It's still in development.

Bossing Say,

the new location, Ubisoft Bossing Say,

will be opening up any day now.

Like, it,

you know, the economics of big companies are obtuse and invisible to a lot of average people.

But, like, the average person has been able to clearly see and hear Ubi run their own shit directly into the ground.

Like, over and over and over.

Like, a decade of releasing games fucked up and then shit like Skull and Bones and Beyond Good and Evil 2 that are just like, we're doing so good with Assassin's Creed, we could just waste as much money as we want.

We never have to fix any of these problems.

I appreciate the candid look at the obvious shit show that we all expected was happening behind the scenes.

It turns out it's exactly what you thought it was.

And like, word to word,

this is what development hell sounds like

when no one can agree on what the thing is, when there's too many cooks, etc., but also no structure for solving that or fixing that, and a team of people that are also confused between everybody involved on a project.

Like, that's

that's it.

So,

like, it's it's extra weird for Ubisoft like genuinely because like you know 10 cents looking to buy up steak and and get in there right and it's like hey what was Ubisoft's like biggest most successful quality and it was the ability to ship games ah oh qual okay as an overall yeah okay yeah like hey ubisoft what are you doing for the we launch we're shipping 12 games what do you what are you doing every holiday quarter five games every like ship ship ship ship and now we're in the process of

maybe if I maybe if the president of the company goes down to the team and yells at them, they can make a level.

No?

No?

No.

Okay.

I mean, we watched it go down from

the Prince of Persia

rebirth series to the

yeah, through the Ascreed franchise.

We watched the scale up to the point where they're like, oh, yeah, we've got a conveyor belt going going with our development.

But

yeah,

it, well, anyway, that's just one story of ongoing development

inside.

I'm sure there are many others.

Who knows what they might be?

But

I feel,

I don't know, you kind of have to wonder if Tencent just kind of like walks in, looks at the newspaper, and goes, actually, we're going to cancel the meeting today.

We'll talk to you guys next week.

We'll be back in about six days, and we'll see what's up.

Hey, um,

this is unrelated, but you know what's hit its

three-year anniversary this week?

The trailer for Star Wars Eclipse by Quantic Dream.

Oh, shit!

Wow.

I believe the last story I talked about was when

the head of the project left.

Yeah.

And the one before that was

them complaining after their court case that it was actually getting really hard to staff up because no one wanted to work for them.

All right.

Well,

I just recovered my back injury, so I don't need any more.

So

we don't need to linger too long on

Quanic Dream.

Let's talk about something cool.

Like

those secret level trailers.

Those look pretty cool.

I heard that the secret level's out now, right?

It's out as of yesterday.

Okay, so I've heard that there's a wide variety of qualities available.

So I saw the three previews from yesterday, which was Sifu.

And hey, guess what?

It's exactly.

It looks like a run.

Exactly what you thought it was going to be.

With cooler visuals and type, and like

what's awesome in that just in that preview at the very least is you kind of get to see

after

see the after he goes down before the breaking of the coin, there's that like ghost aging that occurs.

Yeah, but you see him like up and in fighting

the like over the experience over time in a way.

So the thought is like, oh, did you spend a lifetime in the void between each death fighting and then you come back up as soon as that time period is done?

Because that's fucking crazy if that's what's going on each time.

You know?

It looks really cool.

But yeah, that was just a trailer.

Then there was the

Armored Core locked in trailer, which looks fucking sick as well.

Is that the first human being ever shown in Armored Corporation?

I think Keanu Reeves may, in fact, be the first human being to ever be depicted in Armor Corps.

Okay.

No game ever showed a person, right?

I cannot remember one.

Awesome.

Very cool that it's also called Locked In.

I don't know if that was decided well ahead of time or if it's just Kismet or coincidence, you know, but they're on point.

He's the second or third.

Okay, so I guess if you

if you go dig in there, yeah, I don't know that I've ever seen a human being or heard of anything like that.

Cool.

Get to see the

cockpit and pilots and stuff.

Yeah, and then obviously just like the speed of an armored core battle and the way it moves is.

I love that, like...

I love that like certain types of mecha franchises, you can tell by the way the fight happens what it is.

You know what a Gundam fight looks like.

Absolutely.

It has a look to it and a speed to it.

And an Armored Core is a...

Is there a missile bloom?

That's Macross.

Right?

And then in the case of Armored Core, you've got the spinning roll-up on roller skates slash blast boost off type thing that like it's got a momentum to it.

Looks rat as shit.

And then, yeah,

a tanno circus can go actually for a lot of different ones, but usually starts with Macross, of course.

And then there's the Unreal Tournament one, which

seemed to be, it's Unreal.

You know, people shooting, a rocket jump occurs.

I don't know the story of Unreal Tournament.

Well, I don't know if it has one.

It looked like an audience was watching a floating

fortress of some kind and people were shooting each other.

I mean, that's what I remember of Unreal Tournament.

Yeah, I don't.

I didn't get much from the trailer for that.

I don't know what you like.

I guess I haven't.

We'd have to watch and see, but I feel like that's a kind of like, hey, look, it's the Rocket.

Hey, look, it's the announcer going headshot, you know, and

that's cool.

That's it.

I will say that Unreal Tournament 2004 is maybe one of the best games that's ever been released ever.

That's it.

That's all I want to say.

UT2K4 is incredible.

Yeah, and then you get that Pac-Man shit.

Where you're just.

Pac-Man's like, well, that's like what the fuck do you want us to fucking do?

Exactly.

No, no, no.

No, that's Namco going, literally, do whatever you want.

Right?

That's them going, like, like, DMC Dino.

Like, no, no, no, no, make it weirder.

Invent your own lore.

Like, we don't give a fuck.

Make it as weird as possible.

So there's that.

What the fuck is happening with Dauntless?

Ah, fucking Dauntless.

So, Dauntless is a game that got fucked over super hard by time.

So there was a period in which Monster Hunter games came out exclusively on the 3DS or the PSP or whatever the fuck, right?

And

the developers of Dauntless were like, you know what?

There's room for a Monster Hunter game on PC and consoles because Monster Hunter's never coming back.

So they started to make Dauntless and like early access and beta and shit like that.

And

as soon as that came out, Monster Hunter World got announced.

And their shit just got fucking eaten.

Just fucking eaten.

Just fucked.

That's ruthless.

And then I was like, well, you know what?

I'll try out Dauntless anyway.

It's a piece of shit.

It's fucking terrible.

Like, right off the bat, it's like bad.

It's like way worse than even the worst Monster Hunter.

Sidebar, so the Monster Hunter clones, besides that, there's like Wild Hearts, which dropped the other day.

Yeah.

And then there was, wasn't there like that Vita one?

There was Freedom Wars.

There was a God Eater.

There were three God Eaters.

Yes.

There was Tokedin, one and two.

Right.

They were all decent to some degree.

The Dauntless was like the worst one.

Okay.

It was the worst one.

Okay.

It had no weapon combos.

It had nothing.

And

while it's been trucking along, and I think it finally got a Steam release, and they're like, hey, look, it's the Awakening update.

We totally retrofit the game to be better.

And what they did was they're like, you know what?

Crafting for weapons in this game is stupid because they're all just stat sticks.

So they just made it so you can't craft weapons anymore.

Stat sticks.

At all.

But if you do want a new type of weapon or a new type of damage, you can buy it in the cash shop.

So, like, the game went from being like, why would I ever bother to play this?

to

abjectly ruined.

And

not just new things, but old things that were previously available.

They went from 220-something weapons down to 16.

I'm seeing

the story.

40% of the game's content has been locked behind a premium battle pass.

Yeah.

Apparently, I don't have a confirmation for this, but I was talking to somebody who told me that last year their company got bought by a bunch of crypto bros.

Oh, well, there you go.

All right.

Yeah.

One-to-one.

All right.

This is logical.

We follow through.

Also, because I was going to say, like, I was going to guess, ooh, things must be going downhill, like, financially, and it must be a rough, like, damn, cut and run and get all the money you can get.

No, man, it's my apes.

But it's actually much simpler than that.

My apes.

Cool.

All right.

Got it.

That'll, yeah,

that'll do her.

So it's like a bad game got super ruined further.

It's a weird story.

And that would explain why

the

developers on the Reddit are banning players who openly criticize the Awakening update.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Fuck off.

Oh, that's good stuff.

Apparently, anybody who was not happy with that was getting fucking hit.

Oh, this is awesome.

Good shit.

Good stuff.

Yeah.

There was,

yeah, that Overwatch bit, the community note, God bless.

Oh, well, so that over after that Overwatch bit, a little bit of an update because we talked about

Marvel Rivals.

So

while the bathroom break between yesterday and today,

the Marvel Rivals director gives his opinion on why he thinks Concorde flopped.

So I read that article this morning, and

I have two real strong feelings.

One is it's brutal for the people who worked on Concorde to have to read this from the director of the game that is blowing up super hard in the same exact genre right after your game died.

That is

like super vicious.

And it's not that he's being mean or anything like that.

He's being very candid.

Where is the fucking lie, dude?

That's the thing.

So Thaddeus Sasser,

cool name.

Yeah, was interviewed, and he basically said,

regarding Concorde, there's a switching cost.

I've already invested in Overwatch.

I've got 15 skins in Pharah.

I'm not going anywhere.

As a developer, you're always worried until the game audience has responded.

I don't think anyone can accurately predict this, or the game industry would be radically different today.

And

just the idea that you're like coming out to play a live service shooter, spending $40

or more, depending on where you live or whatever, to switch over from something that, yeah, not only is there the free bit, but there's the collection you already have.

Absolutely.

And you're not being floored by the look, design, aesthetic, appeal, like brand attraction, whatever the case is.

How the fuck could that possibly stand a chance, right?

Interestingly, it kind of goes on to talk.

He goes on to talk about how, like,

you know, the appeal and why Marvel Rivals

is doing really well is because it has the superhero and people are like, oh my God, I want to be Storm in the game, or I want to go be Doctor Strange or something.

And so that appeals to a lot of people.

And that's very true, right?

The fact that you're you're like what you're pulling away from Overwatch on is for these existing characters that you like and know and care about, and that's a huge part of it, especially the like, hey, look, you can actually swing a Spider-Man or his Venom and do all those things.

But I think that does a disservice to how fucking fun and the actual game is with its functions running around in a gray box, you know?

So I think, like, let's just take it.

Let's assume Concorde and Marvel Rivals were functionally identical.

Like they were appealing in all the same ways to everyone, right?

Marvel Rivals gets to leap over cost.

It's free.

It's free.

And then

let's assume that there's Farah, like, let's say a Farah equivalent that's cool and people like.

Do you want to play as this cool new character or do you want to play as fucking Iron Man?

Yeah.

Oh, shit.

No, no.

I'm like.

it's like,

even if Rivals was worse than Concorde, it being free and having Iron Man and Squirrel Girl and Thor and Moon Knight in it.

And fucking Green Weirdo is not going to pull you away at a premium price from being Soldier 76, but you know who fucking might?

The Punisher.

Yeah.

You know?

So yeah,

it is a hand in hand of like, it is the brand and it is a lot of that appeal and a lot of that we're talking about the art style and all those things carrying a lot, but the fucking game is good, man.

It really is.

It really just

those two things come together and do quite well.

And

yeah, I think

your

description of like how it might feel to hear this as someone working on Concorde, maybe,

unless you were one of the people whose opinions couldn't be shared because of the toxic positivity.

Oh, yeah.

So a lot of smart people worked on Concord because game development is hard.

And so there were probably a good amount of people on Concorde going, oh, we're so fucking fucked when Marvel Rivals comes out, dude.

We're so fucking boned.

Yeah,

a portion of that team is probably feeling what you're describing, and the other portion are just doing the fucking hitch.jpg like, I fucking told you the whole time, and you didn't want to hear it, and you actually made it so that you couldn't possibly possibly hear it.

You know, so anyway,

that is like, he's completely right.

That's exactly it.

Make the game good, and make it something that people care about, and it doesn't hurt that it's free.

So, one of the things that we didn't talk about yesterday is that Net Ease's track record is shit.

Like, they, by and large, don't make good games.

Well, I did say that I had zero expectations coming from them with this going in.

That's yeah, but I want to be more blunt.

Like, net shirts games tend to be bad.

There's no reason to expect that this would have been anything but a joke, especially that it's a rip-off in a ton of ways of Overwatch.

It's shocking that it just was like, oh, fuck, this is actually really fun and well done, and I'm enjoying it.

And so, like, okay, like, you know, like pick three,

you know, fast, cheap, uh, good quality.

Pick two.

Like, here we have, okay, it's a licensed property.

Okay, that's a win.

That's in the win column.

And it's a good license.

It's a hot license.

Okay, it's free.

That's in the win column.

So immediately I'm thinking of like Marvel Strike Force or some other piece of fucking shit, right?

Yeah, okay.

And it's like, oh, wait, it's actually a really good shooter.

Free.

Yeah, sure.

So, well.

Now,

the approach, though, that they're taking, clearly this is similar with

Snap, though, as well, right like yeah they're they're kind of approaching things and i i remember too

um back when infinite happened and there was that discussion about like how marvel games is going to think about things going forward and so um i guess this is kind of the long tail of that initial ooh we got to really think about what we're doing with our games discussion because obviously you've got the old reliables like hey spider-man 2 is going to be made because that company has been doing that for a while and they know what you're doing.

The Spider-Man.

Yeah, also.

But brand new shit, right?

That's riskier.

I think, yeah, Snap is another example of a free Marvel game that was very good and took everyone's attention, you know.

This is

overall, I would say, yeah, this would be the second.

I mean, you've talked about Midnight Suns, but I don't know that that's like

bombs super fucking hard.

Been anything that anyone's talking about.

Crazy bombs.

So I think Jake Solomon and his guys left the company.

Okay.

Like fucking bombed.

And I'm of the belief that

that is the publisher's fault.

Because that game got marketed like shit.

Like shit.

Like I was playing it.

I was playing it for an hour and I was like, oh my god, I didn't know any of this shit was here at all.

I didn't know.

I thought it was a fucking card game, like a pure card game.

It's not, it's like a whole fucking thing, it's weird.

Um,

well, either way, it also wasn't like hitting up the free space, right?

Like, no, no, it was a full price game, exactly.

Yeah, so there's that too.

You're trying to win over um kids without credit cards.

Um,

and yeah, I guess the only other bit is uh,

well, one, Nintendo now owns 100% of Model of Soft.

So

that's now officially just first party through and sick.

Um,

they used to do that.

That seems like a single sheet of paperwork

to like, oh yeah, because Modelistoft was out there making a bunch of hot non-Nintendo games.

I mean, well, it's weird, because this used to happen all the time back in the day, but I feel like they've slowed that shit down and they've been way more like, oh, you're still just permanently contracted, you know, but

you know,

fiscally for whatever, you know.

But yeah, so that's done, even though it kind of was spiritually there anyway.

But more hilariously so,

Satisfy is a company that sells

accessories for consoles, and the Zen Grip 2 trailer

released and it just straight up shows the Switch 2 in it.

Wait, what?

Really?

Yes.

It just shows the back of the Switch 2.

And the trailer was then deleted, but they have it in the shadows out there.

And.

Fucking whoops.

And we're kind of now just at the point where, you know, when something comes out and you're like, ah, they already kind of know, whatever, the surprise is ruined.

The next big thing to do as PR is just push it, just reveal it, right?

Take the momentum.

Not Nintendo.

That's happened so many times with the Switch 2.

The Thunder has been stolen.

We're past the sudden reveal point.

And now

they're going to announce it tomorrow.

At the game awards?

Yeah.

Well then, I guess.

Yeah, like, oh, because that means they had to send out the fucking bullshit to the third-party fucking

accessory people.

That would line up.

That would add up.

Because, yeah, like, it was just from the back and it was blurred a bit, but it was like, that's, you just, that's it.

You just, you did shit, you showed it.

And then they went, oh, shit, and they pulled it down, you know?

So it's like, what the fuck are they waiting on?

Anyway,

that's likely it.

What does it look like?

I didn't see it.

Did it look like a fucking electronic device?

It looks like a handheld electronic device.

It is black.

It's crazy.

It's black.

That's bananas.

There are shoulder buttons and.

Oh, my God.

Yep.

I can't believe it.

Can you believe it?

He's a dog.

He'll believe anything.

All right, let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send him a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Make your email short and also good.

Don't forget to make it good.

Oh, you see, 28 years later, got a trilogy.

Yeah, it looks awesome.

That's fucking crazy.

That's becoming a trilogy.

So they wanted to do 28 months and 28 years, but like due to like 10 years of scheduling conflicts, they were never able to do months.

Skip past months.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, because they're like, it's too long.

It's too long since.

But also, it wouldn't be exciting at this point.

That's it.

Like, you go from days to weeks, and you're like, okay, months would have had that timeframe.

But years, you're like, oh, fuck.

This is a complete giant step towards whatever, you know,

yeah, that world looks like.

Which

I guess is interesting in the sense that

of all these movie franchises, well, no, I don't know.

There's probably more out there, but like jumping that far forward into the future and having like

whatever functioning humanity exists exists and stuff, you know.

Interesting.

And also, like, how's stuff going?

Bad.

And the 28 franchise is always the one where it's like, god damn it, they sprint at full speed.

Yeah,

and they don't have to even hurt you.

Like, that's that, like, that movie did a lot to like increase terror.

Like, oh, are you afraid of being viciously eaten by a bunch of cannibals?

Like, a single drop of blood on your face and you're done.

That's so fucked.

It's AIDS.

Scary AIDS.

Is

Killian Murphy on the cast list?

I don't know.

I like Killian Murphy.

He's cool.

Is he too much of a peaky blinder now?

He's a big peaky blinder.

You know what's awesome about peaky blinder and Killian Murphy?

Scrolling through like social media, TikTok or Instagram and seeing a bunch of guys who think they can pull off that haircut and fucking can't.

Really can't.

I don't know

anything about it because I've never watched it, but all I know is people yelling, by order of the peaky blinders.

Yeah, it seems pretty cool.

Cool.

All right.

Oh, he is in the...

Oh, okay.

I missed.

Okay, I didn't catch that.

He was in the trailer there.

I didn't realize what I was looking at.

That's cool.

That's cool.

All right.

We got one coming in from

Matt, who says, dear Zank Effenjoyer and Marissa Apostle.

Thanks to the both of you, mostly Wooly, I have gotten into fighting games, specifically Tekken 8.

Congrats.

Awesome.

Tech N8, gonna win tomorrow.

I have no lifed the game since the weekend it launched, and I've gotten pretty good, so I've started going to locals to compete in money matches.

Cool.

Doing it.

At our last monthly during...

Wow!

Oh, there he goes!

Don't look at it.

No, look at his picture.

You can't stop me.

Don't do it.

You can't stop me.

It's an X.

There he goes.

At our last month's meetup.

During the whole, no, you're hiding the animation.

How dare you?

There you go.

Yeah, all right.

Shuffle.

Oh, my God.

Did he actually just lie down on the dog?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, my God, dude.

Emailer, wait.

He lied down.

He's in the bed.

I can't believe it.

He never did.

He never did.

I didn't think he would ever want to lie down on the dog bed behind me because it's too far away from me.

It's happening.

Oh, man.

No, my stream just got way better.

Yo, get in there.

Get the fuck in there.

You getting in?

He's in.

You comfy?

Yeah.

I think he's going to suck on his blanket.

Okay.

Oh, he's sucking.

Okay.

Okay.

I thought he was.

Yeah, he sucks on a blanket.

I thought he was off.

A little baby stress response.

Okay.

What the fuck do you want, dude?

Huh?

What?

Tekken?

What?

You're playing Tekken?

Okay.

Okay.

So at the monthly,

during stage select, between matches in a set, I was up 1-0.

Got it.

My My opponent asked me if a setup I was using was guaranteed.

I said something like, that's classified.

Before we loaded in, he gave me kind of a dirty look.

After the set, I walked him through the setup I was using and how to counter it, but the vibe he was giving off still made me feel like a bit of a dick in the moment.

So my question is, see, for y'all, am I the asshole?

I know it's just a local.

But we all came to compete, and I feel like it's in your best interest

to not help your opponent beat you.

That is some fucking embarrassing behavior.

Tell me how to beat that.

Okay.

No.

Okay.

You are not wrong at all.

You are completely in the right.

You did what you ought to, which is you're in the middle of the set.

That's crazy.

That's insane.

Asking for advice in the middle of the set is ridiculous and silly.

And like,

it was you and me and we're doing like a huge string of matches and like is that yeah yeah, you're you'd be like, nah, it's not safe.

You're playing, you're whatever, it's all casual, you're improving, et cetera.

You know, but if you're doing a set or a tournament or a money match or something otherwise like ridiculous.

Yeah, that's insane.

That's super dumb.

And the person who asked should feel ashamed for that.

That's not the time.

It's afterwards when you're more than like, yo, welcome to talk and exchange and all that stuff.

But like, that's think about any other.

Imagine at halftime, fucking on the court, going up to the other team and going, like, yo, are you guys running?

Like, what kind of pick is that?

You know,

you're not obligated, even by the most tenuous or kind social contract, to speak to your opponent.

And so, you deciding to, in the moment, be like, nah, and then afterwards do it is the normal good thing to do.

You are completely in the right there.

And furthermore,

the perceived perceived like

fucking shit you were getting is just salt because he lost.

Yeah, it's just bitch.

It's just bitch salt.

Right?

Person lost and is upset about that.

And so you're getting that salt and they're now being told about whatever the counter is to that.

And

you're experiencing residual sodium, but you have nothing to feel bad about.

You did nothing wrong.

That person should not have asked at that point in time.

That's insane.

That's super sad.

You should piss on that, dude.

Like, anyone who does

throw that out, throw out advice or shit like that in the middle of a set or something is being magnanimous or

is trolling.

Or,

so there's the three.

There's magnanimous, there's trolling, or they're like, it's disrespect.

Okay.

So

I...

Remember at Evo, one of my, or I was going through my pool, and I was otherwise having a normal time.

And then I had to fight DR Ray.

And DR Ray is a very strong DR player.

And

I remember when,

yeah, so he, like,

I picked Blanca, and I was looking at the two ultras because I wasn't sure which was the best for the matchup, but he played Fey Long.

And I picked Ultra 2.

I went to Ultra 2, and this is Evo, and we sit, and we're playing the first set, and I go to Ultra 2, and he goes, hey, because he didn't speak English too well.

But he goes, no, no, no.

Yeah.

One.

And I was like, what?

He's like, one, one, ultra one, ultra one.

And I was like, you're telling me the.

I was like,

I'm like, that's wild.

I'm like, all right.

I am serious.

I appreciate it.

And I said, no, I appreciate it, but I'm going to pick Ultra 2 because that's what I've been playing with and training on.

And yeah, he's like, he did it.

He got, okay.

And he fucking washed my ass.

You know?

But he was like, all right, I tried to tell you for this matchup,

this is not the one you want, you know?

And it was like, damn, dude.

in advance, in pools, the man was like, hey, hey, hey, let me help you out, dude.

So,

you know, the worst thing about this story that Matt wrote in with is like

the version of this story that would be

less awkward is if he, if the, the person he was playing said, hey, is that setup guaranteed?

And he went, yeah, absolutely.

Totally guaranteed.

And one and then left.

Yeah.

Because it would take like weeks for that to come back on them.

If ever.

I mean, there's also that part where whatever you there's sometimes you learn something, but you don't have it internalized or whatever the case is.

Or you go, no, it's not actually.

And then they hit a button again and then they get blown up.

Yeah, it's like, actually, it is guaranteed set up.

That's what you get for asking in the middle of the set, idiot.

And let me show you how to do it.

But just lie.

You have no obligation to tell your opponent the truth.

So, yeah.

All right.

Fuck it.

Next time, just start lying without prompting.

Hey, did you know this setup's actually totally fine?

That's plus.

That's plus.

That's plus.

Yeah, yeah, that's plus.

Yeah, you can't do anything about this because it's so plus.

It's crazy.

What the fuck?

Yeah.

All right, you know, you hit like a big knee.

So, like, you know, it's weird, weird, but like, even though it looks plus, it's actually minus.

You can counter that.

Okay.

Okay.

So, so, like, you're saying that, but there is that tech, but it exists not in the player, but, like, in the homies behind talking shit.

Right?

Yeah.

So, while you're the set's going and they're talking shit and you're like ignoring because you're playing, and they'll be like, oh, they don't know.

They don't know about that setup.

And they're like, all he's got to do is backdash.

He doesn't know.

And it's like, no, don't backdash.

Don't listen to what they're saying.

Don't backdash.

But they're talking shit out loud and seeing if you fall for it, you know?

That's a really good specific poll because, like, there's a wide variety of situations in tons of fighting games that if someone told me just backdash and I did it, I've died.

I've died because I've decided to backdash.

Oh, my God, man.

Yeah.

No, the homies cannot be trusted.

Make no mistake.

They're out for your worst interests.

All right.

Here's one coming in from Soge Snake who says, Dear Dreadlock Woolly and the angry Pat.

What's up, man?

Every podcast for the last few months, Pat at some point makes reference to One Piece in some way or form, but it's been so long

since we've gotten an update, so I'm going to be blunt.

Hey, Pat, how's One Piece going?

I'm stuck at Skypia.

It's a question that people ask me every two streams

for like the past six months, and every single time I answer, I'm stuck at Skypia because I fucking hate the Skypia arc.

Stuck on it.

That's

That sucks.

Okay.

I don't like it.

And I think Enel sucks.

And I think Enel's stupid shithead losers are awful.

Okay.

That's it.

All right.

And lastly, let's take one from Joe, who says, Hello, survivor of Mariah Carey and the guy who missed out on a few holidays.

I think Mariah Carey posting like photos of herself encased in ice with the ice cracking might be the funniest thing in the world.

It's coming soon.

I mean, she knows the damage inflicted on retail workers and is powered up by it.

What genres are the fucking worst when it comes to preview footage with no UI?

My vote is strategy games because a lot of gameplay comes from interacting with the UI.

So when a game like Menace has gameplay revealed in a trailer, but shows no user interface, it tells me fucking nothing about how the game plays, just that it has animations for things like infantry squads and shooting at things.

That's a really good question.

I think anything that's menu heavy.

Yeah.

Like

there's a Baldur's Gate 3 tone trailer that came out a while ago that was

It had like a bunch of different characters in different scenes pulling a weapon out from behind their head and it was very dramatic And it showed a bunch of environments from behind the back.

And it's like, it's a cool trailer.

It shows literally nothing in the game because you never ever interact with that game from behind your character's back.

And there was not a single menu or piece of text on the screen at all, and not a single line of dialogue.

And it's like, this is a wildly unrepresentative trailer.

Like when it's in-game engine, but the camera is in all the fakest places in the world, and you're baking it, basically, trying to make it look like a movie in your engine.

Fuck off with that.

Like, please, please be real.

I'm going to go ahead and say rhythm games.

Could you fucking imagine the audacity of just playing a music video with no arrows or HUD or lines anywhere?

It's the whole game.

The whole game is user interface.

What are we doing?

I really think that Netflix's

15-episode League of Legends trailer series is super weird because it doesn't show any lane.

It never shows the UI.

It's really so weird.

It just keeps showing all these characters kiss and whatnot.

And I don't understand why there's no scoreboard at any point.

Arcane is just an expensive bullshot.

You know, enough with the pre-rendered FMVs, guys.

We're looking for gameplay.