CSB295: You Can’t Hand a Beast Frame Data

Hello?

Hello.

So, this is the

am I okay?

You are okay.

You are here.

You are here.

You're alive.

The preemption.

Man, fuck Jimmy, though.

Okay, so

man, fuck Jimmy.

It's clear that the audience energy has decided how this is opening.

The energy is clear.

People have walked in with their signs and they're holding them up loud and clear.

Fuck you, Jimmy.

Okay, so we're opening

straight first salvo hot into a mouthwashing spoiler cast.

Can you turn me up so my fuck Jimmy's can match the volume a little bit more closely?

Sure thing, Sure thing.

We can always do that.

There you go.

You're up.

Everybody hates Jimmy.

I hate Jimmy.

So, so,

yeah, if you have not played mouthwashing, do that.

Do that.

The following conversation is going to not hold back on any of the spoilers.

It's a short game.

It's playable in three hours, maybe four.

And it's very, very spoilable because it's very much.

It's like a movie almost, you know?

You just kind of play through it

so um

all right spoilers are commencing man fuck Jimmy yeah yeah sure sure right I mean people are gonna walk in hearing that unavoidably and be like what but uh uh uh here here here's here's what what I'm walking away with because I I like I sat down afterwards with with this and you know what here let me even put the thing on because people are gonna wander in here a little late and be like what are you guys talking about?

They're going to wander in here a little late and not know.

So, yeah, let me put the sign on.

We're not talking about Jimmy Metaphor.

And we're not talking about the concept of mouthwashing.

No, you should do it.

We're not talking about just whether or not you should use mouthwash at all.

My mouth tastes minty after I do it.

Shout outs to Wayland Utani

Colgate.

That's pretty cool.

I'm a fan of that setting.

Okay.

So

after a little bit of digestion,

I'm saying

all time list.

All time list.

Griffith.

Yeah, no one's, it's going to be a while.

Joffrey?

Okay, yeah, pretty good.

Jimmy.

Jimmy's pretty bad.

You know, I actually, you know, I have something to talk about.

Unbelievable.

I have something to talk about this week that will add to that.

I would add

between

Joffrey and Jimmy, I would add fuck Ted Farrow.

Ted Farrow, okay.

Okay.

Man, fuck Ted Farrow.

Eric Sparrow is beneath Jimmy.

Yeah, no.

Eric

Tarrane.

Eric Sparrow is beneath Jimmy.

Make no mistake.

His crimes are on par with Griffith.

However,

he falls beneath.

The scope is small.

He falls beneath.

That is absolutely.

Yeah.

Griffith, Joffrey, Jimmy, Eric Sparrow, and Ted Farrow?

Ted Farrow, T-E-D, Space, F-A-R-O.

Okay.

How could a man named Ted be so hatable?

Man.

Man, dude.

What's that from?

That is a Horizon Zero Dawn thing.

Okay.

Okay.

That is like, I always wondered why everyone who beat that game came off with like a single phrase, which is just fuck Ted Pharaoh.

And I'm now pretty deep into it.

And man, fuck Ted Pharaoh.

There's some, so that it takes a particular level of disdain, though, because for example, one can say out to the ether, fuck Luca Blight, and that's like, well,

you don't feel that.

Everybody's like, ah, I love Luca.

But that's like, well, yeah, whatever.

You know, sure.

That's it.

Luca Blight's the shit.

You know, that's my toxic husband.

As intended, you know, but there's these little, these little, these little things.

And so, with mouthwashing, with Jimmy in particular,

that is such a successful

little space horror story

that makes you loathe a person with an intensity that I, yeah, I have not felt in a long time since the aforementioned previous two characters.

And I think the reason why is because

in the same way that, you know, remember Scream

90s, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the villain in that, it's like, oh, yeah, you're just like a 90s douchebag, right?

You're prime for the time.

oh yeah the villains in scream are fucking losers absolutely and your college campus fucking do we

right right on point for the era you're born from

jimmy is of our time and place

in and he is horrible in a way that is way too recognizable I have known people like Jimmy.

I currently am.

Like, you know that I know Jimmy.

I'm related to Jimmy.

Yeah, okay, okay.

So,

but

my Jimmy, the one that you know I know,

is capable of the things that this Jimmy does.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Jimmy that stalked me.

That Jimmy?

The Jimmy you

the subway station?

The Jimmy

from my past.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I remember that Jimmy.

Yeah.

You, like, like,

A lot of why that chapter is closed is because that Jimmy Jimmy is capable of the things in this story.

So when you see it unfold in this way and

then

agonizingly have to spend time in their perspective,

it's just

a deep soul hatred that I have not felt in anything in a long time.

I was thinking about like, what about it is so intolerable?

Like what is occurring and why is playing through the Jimmy, the Jimmy verse so like repugnant?

And I believe I like zeroed in, at least for me, like why I find it so awful.

I got two things.

Everyone has known that person in their life.

Every single person knows this person.

It's not my fault though.

And then they offer like nothing.

Like they offer you nothing.

as explanation that it's not their fault.

And because they're a narcissist, but they're stupid, right?

Like a dumb narcissist.

They're not even smart enough to come up with like the explanation.

And we are being forced to play through,

but it's not my fault.

But it's not my fault, though, right?

And then, and then, and then, so then what is it?

And there's nothing there.

So you're just,

you're too stupid, does not compute processing.

Echo back the last thing someone said to you.

So someone said, take responsibility.

Yeah, that's.

You take responsibility.

Yeah, like for sure.

No, total.

And like, then facing the consequences of your own actions, seeing them and running the fuck away, like, high tailing it out of every single decision that you have committed to that has now ruined everything for everyone.

And you cannot possibly for a moment sit and think, how did the first domino get knocked over?

Was it me?

Could it have been?

No, you know what?

You know what?

Now that I think about this and I really look at myself and you keep telling me to take responsibility,

it's really Curly's fault, really.

Like, at the end of the day, I mean, Curly's the captain, so it's his fault.

Like, when you talk about just again, echoing bullshit back that you don't even fully get, because again, you're too dumb, and also, like, taking sentiments that, depending on their context, can have a significant and actually like relevant, like, understandable meaning.

Like,

you're not defined by your worst moment, you don't get to say that.

Like,

like that, that coming out of someone like him is like.

I think it's so great.

I think it's so great because you have a story in which many people in this story are actively being, everyone in that story is being defined by their worst moment.

Like Anya is like consistently defined by her inability to get into med school.

Like everybody throws it in her face constantly and it has like a knock-on effect with the treatment.

Of course, all this shit.

Swansea's alcoholism

is his fatal flaw to the end.

All the way through.

And

of course, though, and well, I mean, he plays an interesting role because he owns the fact that he was a piece of shit.

and what he was and is actually the example of stepping up to it without his personality necessarily changing.

Oh, he's still a complete asshole, right?

But like,

he still stepped up to try to do the right thing.

Exactly.

Despite your tendencies.

Fucking.

So, okay, so you mentioned that's what it is for you, right?

For me, there was a moment that comes,

and it's in that denue motion.

It's as the ride is coming to a close, where the worst has already happened, right?

Everyone's already pretty much fucking cooked.

And all we're doing right now is just like riding out the conclusion.

And

you, from the, from the imp the internet, the moment that it's implied, what happened to Anya, and

how the whole like narrative shifts in that, like, in that initial moment, you kind of are waiting for that, like,

okay, so we're going to spend some time with everybody to learn a little bit more about them.

And you're kind of waiting for that with her, right?

You're like, After being fucking raped, you would imagine that there's a

really clear narrative moment coming to like examine all of this and especially the fucking insane way that Curly reacted right at that point.

And instead, you just

fucking breeze past it.

You spend no time with the victim whatsoever, right?

Her tragedy is just

in the room at that point.

And now, after like not getting that moment, and I'm like, aren't you?

I'm like, game, where's the, aren't we going to, and not only go.

Because we're Jimmy now.

And you don't even think about her.

She's not a person.

She is not like, she doesn't register.

as like a thought or a blip in his mind.

The only thing that she is, is a consequence in that there is a womb attached that has

that has a fucking, god damn it, there's a baby.

Oh, God, a baby.

Oh, God damn it.

Somewhere deep in the back of the recesses of my mind, I don't even acknowledge a person there.

And like, and like, this is while flowers daisuke, you know, is being thought about and the admiration for everything curly is.

And you're just like,

the most absolute, supremely hateable type of person that does exist, that is someone you know in this world, and uses things like things that come from therapy, things that come from...

Oh, yeah.

If you send narcissists to therapy, they get empowered and they get way worse, Right.

They get way, way worse.

You don't understand what I've been through.

I'm like, here's my prescriptions.

And you just, you know, you just, you need, you need to show patience to me and the things that I.

I'm setting up a boundary to not talk about the crimes I committed.

Of course.

And then, and then classic fucking, what is it?

Darvo?

Right?

Deny,

attack, reverse victim and offender.

Right?

Classic, super

old, reliable, right?

The moment you are guilty of doing anything, no, you didn't do it.

Fuck you, you did it.

And you're doing it right now.

The fact that you're doing it to me, how dare you?

What a piece of shit.

I can't believe you do this to me.

How do you think I feel about what you've just done?

Right?

Like, all of that, you get to watch it play out and you get to watch the moment that his like cognitive pathways ignore every chance he has to own up to what he's done.

It goes so far as to when Anya eventually kills herself, Jimmy is like, I don't even see this.

I literally can't see it.

It deletes the entire scene.

Yeah.

I don't acknowledge the existence, the pain, the trauma, or anything.

I had nothing to do with it.

It's not my fault.

Cartoon horses.

I think the part that is like specifically designed to push you over the edge is, and what set me over the edge is him like looking at a room of corpses, going, I can fix it, guys.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, guys, I can fix it.

It's not too late, bro.

These people are dead.

What are you going to fix?

You can still be a hero, right?

I mean, when you get to that ultrasound moment with the fucking

poly horse mascot womb thing, and you're, I'm like, oh,

what are we doing here?

Come on.

There's no reason for a like Sonic Generation, not Sonic Generations, Sonic Dream collection moment after

yeah yes it is i was like we don't need to what and then it's like oh no this is what he sees and this is what he reduces his entire fucking sexual assault to you know um it it is a phenomenally disgusting fucking piece of shit character that can't die fast enough and while you're agonizingly stuck inside of his slow trapes through the flowers ending, you know, as someone like that narcissistic has to come to terms with the fact that they're actually can imagine the weight of like thinking you are the center of the universe, but then having to pull the trigger on yourself, right?

Oh, yeah.

Right.

What I'm doing right now is really noble.

I'm saving Curly.

I'm the hero.

I save the ship.

And so what fucking made me double take in a second was when Anya reveals her pregnancy and she and like, you know,

Curly is like well at first at first she says it and you're like oh you're like oh wait is there a different relationship between her and curly that we didn't know about it's like no wait he's surprised too he goes that doesn't make sense how could that have and then it dawns on him right

and

what the captain does responsible fucking buck rogers over here says

okay

oh this is bad uh i can fix it we can fix it i'm gonna take care of this it's okay We can take care of this.

And it's like, what the fuck?

What the fuck are you doing?

Like, Curly is like half responsible.

Curly is absolutely.

So, like, I joke when Jimmy's like, Curly, this is your fault.

Yeah, no, Curly is also at fault.

Curly is an enabler.

What an the most enabling insane does not take a moment at all to respond in the right way to any of that shit and basically looks at Jimmy as like

I mean, like the fact like he, Jimmy scored this gig because he felt bad for him, right?

Like the whole thing was Curly and like giving Jimmy this opportunity.

And then when you're supposed to step the fucking, and step the fucking and protect everyone from someone that needs to be fucking quarantined at best, right?

And his reaction is just like, okay, no, let's play this out.

It's not that bad.

We can still salvage.

Fuck you, dude.

That's it.

Also, Jimmy.

Not Jimmy, sorry.

Curly, you're standing there as your shitbag rapist friend is crying and muttering to himself, I can fix it, I can fix it, I can fix it, I can fix it.

And you're like,

I wonder what he's going to do in the cockpit.

Right, right?

I wonder how he's going to fix it.

Oh, hmm.

You know, who would have thought that your shining moment, right, of axing through your here's Johnny, but like Swansea is the most justified ever for axing through that fucking door?

Like, get the fuck over here, you little shit.

You know?

So there's

there's a fun little detail that I think that I was thinking about the whole game that's relatively minor.

It's in the very first scene when Jimmy's crashing the ship.

Uh, and it says, I might have the numbers a little off, but I remember it's saying that there is a obstruction 23 point something AU away to the right,

yeah.

And so, Jimmy steers towards it, and in the in-game time period that you are spending,

in between that, it says it's now 9 AU away, right?

So that really jumped out to me because I'm a fucking massive nerd for spaceship.

An AU is 93 million miles.

It's the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Okay.

So in like a minute,

they traversed 1.4 billion miles.

Okay.

Just and then they hit the rock and the rock kept going for eight months.

They are like trillions of miles off course.

No one is ever going to find them.

Oh.

Ever.

Just in terms of...

Ever going to find them?

Okay.

Okay.

They're like 50

solar systems over from where they're supposed to be.

So traveling at light speed,

you know, or whatever beyond, if we're talking about solar distances here,

we're on a metric that is impossible to ever salvage.

Oh, ever.

And the instant they changed course, they would never be found, and then they got hit by the rock, and then the rock kept going.

Okay.

And then...

Because I was kind of wondering if we were...

Yeah, I didn't think about the distance or any of that, but I was kind of wondering if we were being set up for a...

Yeah, this, like,

evil future space Amazon is going to continue sending packaged and parcel deliveries and not bother to look at this lost package over here until we lost one.

Until convenient, you know, maybe we'll get to it in a couple of years' time, you know?

Like, Curly is going to wake up 20 years from now in the pod and then suffocate and die.

Sure.

Um,

yeah,

so all of that, uh, um, just phenomenal use, of course, of you know, on the technical side, the the transitions, the, the, uh, fake crashes, which sometimes lead to real crashes.

Lead into real crashes.

Oh, man.

What an insane moment that happened.

Yeah.

And

what was I going to say?

Oh, and just, yeah, the entire character of Swansea being this real interesting, just like, dude is barely holding it together when things are going right.

You know, and so they start to go wrong.

And he's still...

You're like, what a, at first you're like, yeah, what an asshole.

And it's like, no, he's still barely holding on to try to do what he thinks is the right thing based on his information, you know.

And there's that interesting moment too, where like he finds out and he's like, he's like, he spoke to Anya because like that conversation happened, and he's just kind of like, I know what you are,

but you're in this situation.

You're, there's almost like, what, what can you do?

And he's like, I'm gonna just sit here by the fucking pod and keep your ass away from it.

And that's it.

You know, that's it.

Um,

every bar he drops,

especially towards in that finale, unbelievable.

Fire.

Swansea is killing it.

And he actually, like, by telling you his story in that final moment, like,

he,

like, disassembles Jimmy as a character by just telling you what he himself went through and what it meant.

And what's Jimmy's fucking response?

Right over.

Does not,

not a single word lands.

No, I can fix it, Swansea.

And he just gives the deepest, purest, it will haunt you forever.

Fuck you.

From the heart.

Like, that Swansea, fuck you, is the realest it's ever been.

Because, yeah, like, what's the point?

What's the, any, if there was any humanity inside you left that could acknowledge this, it might have been in that moment for a second, you know?

You could, like, you could just speed up that process by just having the gun turn a little quicker.

Um, the, the, um, um,

whatchamacallit,

fucking Mass Effect 1 finale moment, you know?

But no, no, no, none of it means anything because it's coming from an outside source and it's not validating, you know?

And then you get the wildness of like his relationship with Curly as well, where like

he's so envious.

He's so jealous.

He wants to be the captain.

He wants all that fucking, you know, all the air, all the glitz of doing darkness.

Being a captain sucks.

Everyone just asks me for shit all day.

Just help with the fucking pills of the problem you created.

God, damn it, leave me alone.

Get off my dick.

Fuck.

You know?

And then the fact that like that same person that he's admiring so much, but he hates so much because of that jealousy, you know, he can't get over the fact that it's like, yeah,

I want what you have, but I don't really want it.

I just want to feel the good parts.

And

he has that admiration.

so it's enough for him to still kind of put him on a pedestal and see him in a divine way, you know.

But also, I loathe you and I'm torturing you, and I want to fucking hurt you at the same time.

You know, it's there's when you look back at the beginning of the game and you're like giving Curly his pills the first time, and like he's so resentful.

He's like, How could you do this to us, Curly?

Like, you look back at that now, and you're like, Oh my fucking God, dude, you're off your shit.

Incredible, incredible.

No No connection to reality at all.

Yeah.

I mean, I shout this movie out often enough, but I really like Shutter Island because of how

it deals with

just mentally avoiding the problem and doing everything you can to pretend it's not.

Not a lot, right?

But here you get to see the cockpit as like the literal, like, reality is coming up, and Jimmy just swerves that shit off the exit at at every single point possible.

Phenomenal, phenomenal short little story.

Artistically fun as well with the, you know, the low parley art style and

walking around mixing the ingredients, charming, you know,

until it's horrifying, of course.

But I just can't...

I'm going to be thinking about that for a while, man.

A character like Jimmy, who just, it's all your fault and you accept none of it in the most

2024 way possible.

Just fucking shit, kid.

No, it's not my fault though.

No, it's no, you know whose fault it is?

The guy who can't talk.

Actually, it's his fault.

He'd tell you, but

got no lips.

Yeah, and also, like, fuck these horrors, am I right?

Yeah, man.

Oh,

they're trying to steal my captain's salary at the same time while we're at it.

I think it's really incredible for, I always love when any piece of media does this, when they sit you down and two characters look directly at you and go, this is a metaphor for the entire game.

So when Curly's hanging out with Anya, and they're talking about the view screen and she's talking about the dead pixel.

There's a fucking dead pixel up there.

And she's like, it's all I can see.

And Curly's like, I can't even see that shit.

I'm too focused on the big picture.

And then that pixel grows and grows and grows and destroys everything.

Remember your PSP?

Remember that dead pixel that you could never unsee every time you fucking turn that thing off?

I do.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

Super great.

And then, you know, Daisuke for what it's worth.

It's like people were saying himbo, and I'm like, nah, because himbo implies like some kind of like burly charm or to the dumbness.

He's just a dumbo.

He's just an airhead, you know.

And

yeah, and at the end.

A layabout.

But enough for

Swansea to just be like, okay, yeah, he deserves to get out of here, I suppose.

But what I didn't get from that conversation, and I suppose it was off-screen, is the implication

is that, like, Anya and Swansea talked, and Anya decided she did not want saving.

I'm thinking that's probably what I'm saying.

Maybe.

I don't know.

It's impossible to know.

Yeah.

Fuck Jimmy, though.

It's also, like, I gotta say, I mean, going in that direction, because going in that direction after the intro, which starts with a classic little PT moment where I'm just like oh yeah PT hallways okay right yeah the effects of PT have been

forever they forever changed the genre

and I'm like okay that's cool but I hope we're not just gonna be five nights at Freddying a cartoon horse being scary in these hallways no and thankfully it does not do that at all you know it's really interesting because

The Walking Sim was essentially created with Dear Esther a million years ago by Chinese Room.

And I played that, and it's fine.

It's a sad story about a guy whose wife passed away.

And

they made a bunch of those,

and

Walking Simulator became very

decried.

But now we have a horror type of sub-genre of walking sim, like mouthwashing here.

And PT was the turning point.

And the turning point was don't show people a big fucking wide open area only to seal them down to a single fucking walking path.

If you're going to give them a single fucking walking path, make it like a narrow hallway.

How about a submarine or a spaceship?

Yeah, just make it so that you can't.

You don't feel constrained by the logic of the game.

You feel constrained by the environment.

And when it does open up, like when you go into the mouthwashing fucking shipping area, it's awful.

It's terrifying.

Yeah.

It's super scary.

You're dropping into the pits of hell.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Phenomenal.

Really, really, really good.

There's a subreddit thread where people were talking about the possibility that Jimmy fucked up shooting himself

and like botched it and is just like rolling around on the ground going, ah!

Fight club.

That's just like a little fantasy.

Oh man, that could, that would be, that would be phenomenal.

I mean, I have never, like, I've, I, the moment he walked off camera, I'm like,

oh,

listen up for it.

Hey,

where's that bang, baby?

Fucking you see walk all over that fucking grave.

It's incredible.

Um, he could have, he certainly could have, and you would, you would hope, because there's no better sound than like, yeah, the slow, agonizing, continued existence into nothingness that you would get for old Yimby.

You saw Yimby on the wall?

A little drawing

on the board of

Yimby.

I don't like it.

I don't like Yimby.

Yimby is the cause of all evil in the world.

Yimb is the source of the problems.

We would be

life would be great.

Mouthwashing is Yimby.

Mouthwashing is like A.

Play on that mouthwashing.

Also, probably the best

CRT

PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2 aesthetic yet.

Fantastic.

Absolutely.

Extra props for how up close the models are.

Because, for example, Signalis, which is also excellent, is you're very far away most of the time.

Quite at a distance, exactly.

And that does a lot of heavy lifting.

But these are characters you're talking to in your face point blank the whole time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Excellent.

all right.

Mouthwashing over.

Go get on that mouthwashing.

If you had to skip that part, it's good.

You ever really good.

You ever swallow scope?

Yes.

Not pleasant.

It's awful.

Not pleasant.

It's terrible.

However bad it burns in your mouth, it's that much worse on the soft, soft esophagal tissues.

Gross.

So aside from the mouthwashing wolves, what have you been up to?

So yeah, we had a little bit of mouthwashing and then we had a little bit of fucking karma coming back around.

Got to the end of case four in Phoenix right one.

Wait, are you telling me that if it was almost Christmas, that means it wasn't Christmas yet?

Almost Christmas is not Christmas.

Yeah.

Like that was one of those bits where like the everyone erupted and it was like, oh, that's a moment, isn't it?

And then I kind of vaguely

vaguely recall seeing that maybe once or twice in the past.

It's the climax of the film we went to see.

Right, right.

Man,

that Von Karma freak out

is such a satisfying justice to the Vanes moment.

It's

after tease.

The Phoenix Wright formula, I'm like, okay, I see what it is now.

I get it.

But there's the special case where you have a fucking impregnable fortress, you know, and you just string it along and there's no cracks anywhere in the armor until finally there is and then the water comes gushing out.

It's incredibly satisfying.

Not to mention like just sinister and awesome, because there's one moment where like you make the accusation and he's still smiling at you.

It happens once, you know, but you straight up go like, you call him a fucking murderer And he's like,

he just takes it.

I think karma is.

So you were asking a lot about like Edgeworth as like the long-term villain.

And the first game deals with that.

You're like, well, what's the natural end result of a guy like Edgeworth?

It's this.

I'm going to find them guilty if I have to shoot and tase people as much as I need to to make this guilty.

On like the most, like the worst version of what a prosecutor can possibly be.

and you did not none of it like the pettiest motivation too like the motive behind the crime was just

I went oh and two I went two and oh but it wasn't perfect right the slightest blemish on my record means this child's entire upbringing is a sacrifice I I love my favorite part is that you're like, hey, we got the evidence.

And he's like, I'm going to just tase your ass and steal it off you.

Nah, though.

Fuck you.

That feels like...

it feels.

I like it when a character like that in a mystery breaks the rules of the mystery.

Like, you're not supposed to be able to come to me and beat me up and take the shit.

And now Phoenix still has to work within the grounds of what is allowed and what isn't and prove it anyways, right?

It's insanely unfair, mind you.

And the judge is the most incompetent ever.

But

yeah, but that's all the more reason why you're that much more of a hero because you have to make the comeback from even further back from the starting line than you're supposed to be, given all the evidence.

But yeah, very satisfying original finale minus the fifth case, which you know, I haven't started yet.

And yeah, the fifth case is awesome.

And I'm sure you've heard, but like Reggie just absolutely crushing it on that fucking von Karma growl, you know,

doing the getting in the freakouts.

It's been

a bit of an extra tax to to

not just go through all the dialogue, but go through it with effort.

But the payoff is super fucking worth it, you know?

So, yeah,

it is,

I think I get the Phoenix right thing now, you know?

That justice moment.

And then you get to go, like, hey, man, how many more are there?

Like, 10?

Great.

How many do I want to play?

My only thing is, there was a moment though, and I guess this is like important to set up, but there's a moment where when Phoenix is

getting,

when Von Karma is chewing out Phoenix in the last moments, right, as the whole case is crumbling around him, and like he makes reference to the bullet, you know, the missing one, and

it cuts over to Phoenix.

And usually, there's moments where Phoenix always, they say they make some accusation and it's a lie or it's unfounded or whatever, and Phoenix goes, ah, shit fuck and he starts sweating right but there's one moment where he does it to him and then Phoenix just doesn't respond he just straight faces it I'm like oh fuck oh he's sharp he's doing the thing he knows exactly what the answer is and he's already ahead and he's gonna do the protagonist thing and god damning he absolutely doesn't and is like i'm gonna start talking now and hopefully by the end of the sentence i will find a reason to make you guilty

and i'm like no

damn it, you know, the turnabout is so satisfying, but I thought Phoenix had that little spark in him, but now he's a goof, he's a goober, you know.

Because even the goofiest JoJos will, you know, have that moment in the fight where they're like, ah, but I got you, though, you know, and here you get to watch him string it along, trip over his fucking dick, and barely make it across the finish line.

Yeah, no, Nick, Nick doesn't get to be like a confident non-bumbler until you lose control of him.

I imagine.

When you lose control of him, he becomes like a fucking super genius.

Oh,

we know the rules.

Snake, Pliskin, Dante, every other protagonist that, you know, you bring the new guy in and the old one goes off and does whatever.

Yeah, then they become unstoppable because you can't stop the Pro Tag, right?

Pokemon Red.

Whatever you want.

Of course.

I'm fully expecting that.

But yeah, really, really cool to just have.

It's simple, actually.

It's just a GIF of Von Karma with his back turned, hands on the wall, just going

and slamming his head on the fucking,

you know, on the court.

And that, that's the payoff for hours of work.

It's just a gif of him losing his fucking mind.

Oh.

wonderful.

You get it in small pieces when you get to watch, of course, you know, the shifty-eyed salesman in the beginning crack, you know, or you get to watch the whoever goes on the stand have that moment of like,

how dare you, you know?

But

coming from the other side of the bench is a big one.

Yeah,

so that's cool.

Phoenix Wright continues.

Little check-in with Metaphor,

which I have continued to play.

You know, I was kind of curious.

I'm like, hmm, I wonder if there's some other kind of wild name for this game in Japanese.

Turns out it's Metaphor.

Refantasio.

Shocking.

It's not.

It's all the same.

Something interesting

about how the virtues of archetypes and heroes past coming forward is

being reflected in

the writing that is now, I guess,

when you talked about facing your inner self and your demons and your shadows from P4,

right?

Like,

that's a

point that resonates that you can imagine as a kid when

you're thinking about the things in your life that you don't like about yourself and being like, no, that's not a part of me.

And then it's like, no, you have to acknowledge that and own your shit.

Yeah, no, that series is like, nah, man, that's not me.

That shit's cringe.

And a magic voice says, but you are cringe.

Listen, aren't you going to say that it was based?

No.

No, use the power of cringe.

Embrace that you are cringe.

And then you will get, yeah, you'll power up and you'll be super cringe.

But

something interesting that it comes up a lot in not just the

struggles of the characters, but also the status effect inside the game is the use of the word anxiety.

Dude, anxiety might be the most vicious status effect I've ever encountered.

Have you noticed that the game has basically gone, oh, people nowadays are really, really dealing with anxiety.

It's become a major point.

And it was not discussed as much in the past, so it was not used as a status effect, you know?

There's something really awesome about the anxiety effect, meaning that they can beat you up so easily that it doesn't even take them any time.

It uses no turns.

It's free.

Stomping you out.

Oh, it's real.

Oh, I can shit on this dude with anxiety.

No problem.

Take me two seconds.

All day.

You know?

And if I'm not mistaken, I thought I saw a message pop up that says, like, someone who attacks and gets their attack blocked completely starts to feel a bit anxious.

Yeah, if you you get repelled or blocked or absorbed, your character gains anxiety by default.

Right, right, right.

There you go.

So, yeah, you have that.

You know, you get blasted back with a fire spell and you're just going, oh, fuck.

God.

Oh, shit.

Oh, God, damn it.

Fuck.

Oh, I'm so stupid.

I suck.

What did I do?

Why did I do that?

Why didn't I pick something better?

It's like, of all the question marks, I picked the wrong one.

Idiot.

And then, yeah, in the actual inner voice that's talking, you know, and narrating about like, you know, rising up to power and such, They talk about facing the fears and anxieties and overcoming them, you know.

So I'm just like, yeah, yeah, okay.

This is, this is aukurant.

I mean, shit, panic as a status might as well just become panic attack at this point.

That is

something else, too, that I've noticed.

So I'm currently in the middle of the second village.

The fourth party member just joined.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Really, really cool.

Kind of hilarious, though, in that, like,

you're we can talk about Heisme, by the way.

Heisme is known.

Okay, so everybody knows about Heisme.

Heisme is the best.

Awesome.

I, uh, I, yeah, that was a surprise to me.

I didn't see him in any art anywhere, so I was like, what the fuck?

Oh, shit.

Yeah, let's go.

Little, little, uh, mascot character that's a badass and not a mascot at all.

Um,

wild that this, like, the strongest, noblest, like, tragic, incredible samurai, knight, shadow guard, his class unlocks, thief.

Yeah.

And he's a tiny little Batman.

He's the furthest thing from a thief ever in terms of just his energy and his actual story.

No, listen, he's an agility fighter.

That means he's the thief's archetype.

And he has a steel ability, so therefore you, yeah.

I'm like, what the fuck?

This is the first.

He is a samurai.

He literally pulls out the fucking long katana.

Yeah.

Anyway,

Heisme is great.

Very, very cool.

Happy to see him introduced.

And, of course.

He's also really strong.

Of course, yeah.

And sprinkling, you know, a little bit in there with like, hey, look, it's Katarina.

And she's gone.

All right, cool.

And then you get the point where you're like, oh, oh, she's.

She's not a party member.

She's going to be like a fucking

back and forth thing.

Oh, really?

Yeah, didn't you notice that?

No, I didn't.

But don't say anymore.

I assumed that she was going to jump in eventually because we got

the style, you know.

Okay, well.

No, I was at that point in the game with you that I noticed that, like, oh, no, wait, she doesn't have the right skills on her Bond thing.

Hmm.

Okay.

Well,

that aside, something I noticed in playing with these builds now that I've gotten a bunch of different archetypes

is that you can create a

synergy that you either steamroll or you get rolled.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

Some of the harder dungeons now and stuff that like the bigger challenges at this point, it's clear that it's like if you don't have the right three

going on with enough like double techs and covering for each other's weaknesses and stuff, you're gonna get fucking stomped on.

It's quite interesting.

A couple of bad things that don't work together are like two bad turns can be the end of you.

Yeah, yeah.

And like, so I was running brawler and knight for a while, you know, to have the because brawler, knight, and warrior have great triple

with each other.

But then I pulled Brawler out to put a mage up front for more like elemental spell variety, and then the whole thing fell apart.

And then, like, Knight could no longer do the

insanely strong 18 MP, you know, create a weakness type of dual tech and shit.

And then you're like, oh, when you have no dual techs except for like these like passive buffs and you're fighting something particularly strong, and you also just don't happen to have a decent weakness spell on you, you're fucked in that fight, you know.

Some of the dual techs are so strong that they're worth putting in the raw, the wrong archetype in just so you can do the dual tech i i like

every boss fight i've had so far has been deleted with the brawler knight um piercing dual tech like it yeah that one's incredible it's yeah it it feels unbalanced as when you watch the numbers like just fucking drop so that's a type of dual tech like there are a lot of them like that there are ones that are like does a massive ice attack gives an ice weakness yeah and so once you can get that rolling you're like well i'm gonna do this hit for free.

Yeah.

And then get two more.

But there's a lot going on with that system.

Yeah, and I'm still trying to explore and find a bit more between the classes I have, but like nothing has beat that combination so far.

That one's been absolutely stellar.

Plus, if you have Warrior on the side, you can do kills net a free press turn icon.

So

that's great.

Unlock the Merchant, of course.

Yes.

What am I missing?

So what you're missing is that if you beeline Merchant right away before you leave for Brielhaven, you can get three inheritance slots before you leave,

which means you can put Merchant,

you can have like half of another class's skills on Merchant right away.

And the other thing is that the gold attack crits all the time, especially if you have high luck, is non-elemental.

And every single fight that you win will get you more than that gold attack costs.

Okay.

Only when you're having merchant in the party.

You have to be merchant.

So the other thing is that

that would explain it because I had merchant in the party, and I was like, this is nothing.

No, no, no, no.

So here's the thing.

When you play as merchant, when Will Metaphor is merchant man

and you kill anyone, you get like double the gold from that fight.

And so what happens is, that you get to a dungeon in which you're like, oh, I just leveled up past the grunt enemies.

Now, these are money trees.

You know, the MP thing with Wizard?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or Mage, rather?

Cash for merchant trees.

It's 10 times as strong with merchant because you can just make as much money as you fucking want

right away.

Okay.

Because, yeah,

I didn't put it on the pro tag, and I just couldn't see what the benefit was.

Yeah, no, the pro tag is the merchant of choice.

And

three slots

on merchant, but like, aren't slots available?

You increase slots on all archetypes by putting.

Oh, yeah, but I'm saying it's like if you, if you so, I got merchant the first day possible in that game.

Okay, so I had like 14 days left,

and I took merchant in to fight Zorbo.

Huh.

Um, and what that meant was that when I got out, I got to like rank rank five or six with Brigitta before leaving and had three inheritance slots for that.

It actually takes a weirdly long time to get a lot of inheritance slots outside of this one specific situation.

And the reason for that is because Brigitta is the only person you can hang out with at night for a really long part of the game.

Okay, okay.

Leveling up the actual archetype isn't what's giving you the slots, though.

It's increasing the

bonds.

Yeah, okay, okay.

The other thing is that, like,

there's a rule that it took me a while to figure out.

You can never hang out with someone two days in a row.

Like, the bonds are guaranteed, but you can never ever hang out with anybody two days in a row.

Okay.

Yeah.

So, if you have two people at night, you're going to end up ping-ponging between them.

If there's three people available during the day, you're going to be rotating around them.

And this basically stops you from just beelining to like eight on one person.

And then the game will just stop you and say, You're not smart enough, you're not tolerant enough, or you need to talk to them on the runner, or you know, any other like progression blocker.

Okay, and those merchant farming situations, you're describing only using them in the like story dungeons.

Oh, I used it all the time.

I ran merchant for like 60% of the game.

Wow, huh, it's it's incredibly strong because what happens is you cap merchant, and then you just use Merchant's

extra XP to build up something else.

And then when you build up, like, say, the healer archetype, you just take the healer spell you want and just put on merchant.

But that may not work for what you got going on.

That's how I built it.

Because I'm trying to think about it.

I'm like, okay, well, three spells is a lot to customize, but

you're losing out on a bunch of other things that I like.

The main thing is that Merchant is kind to be assumed used sometimes with the way the game's economy works.

I use Merchant all the time and I was able to buy every single item I ever came across ever.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, I've definitely been running short on money.

So, yeah.

And I've done one mag conversion, and it was fine.

And they know that Merchant's really strong because Tycoon, which is the upgraded Merchant, is only available in the last month of the game.

I still don't even have it.

Wow.

Okay.

Interesting.

Because the game, there's a bunch of like the bonds that just go, you can't continue this bond until,

and apparently, until is like the last 30 days.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Yeah, so you know, that's going in.

I'll examine that a little bit more.

Beyond that.

So, what else this week?

Yeah.

While continuing to just play some one-offs and check shit out, yesterday I popped in Hylix.

You've heard of Hylix.

Hylix.

I have heard of Hylix.

Hylix is weird as fuck.

Oh, yeah.

So take your Undertale or

Earthbound style RPG and make it one day.

Make it like three hours long, maybe,

and

make it even more of a mushroom trip.

What if

you invented a new drug in a lab and took it before you designed this game?

Hylix is incomprehensible

on purpose.

And it's great.

Yeah.

It's really fun.

The whole time you're just sitting there going, um,

absolutely.

It is, you are, you are tripping, right?

You have taken some shrooms, you've taken some edibles, you're waiting to see if the edibles got hands.

And on the way, you know, you're playing as Wayne.

And like, like, it's like you're meeting these.

You're playing as a Wayne.

Sure.

But, like, the.

I don't get it.

Don't worry about it.

I've also played Hylix 2.

Okay.

Well,

you're playing as Wayne, and then there's...

Oh, and like, and that's the only normal name in the entire game.

Everything else is full of nonsense.

Yeah, everything else is fucking nonsense.

And,

yeah, but despite the nonsense,

the thing that is extremely recognizable and understandable is just RPG mechanics.

So you understand the other, like, without telling you what, because like your stats are fucking.

Oh, it doesn't tell you shit.

I mean, there's mightiness, and then there's like, what is it?

Like, like a fucking like pluckiness or whatever it is, you know, like it doesn't, it's nothing, but it doesn't matter because you're just like, oh, yeah, I put this on, and then that number went up, and now I can take more damage.

So it's fine.

You know?

And so you just understand the basics of, all right, go shop, put better things on your character, learn a spell, fight enemies, learn to defend if you've done any of this and you kind of know how it works.

And then experience is

post-death only.

Do you get to cash it in?

You know, and it's, yeah, and it's just like

the mechanics are self-evident despite the fact that no words make any sense, which which is a really interesting, like, fucking thing.

It kind of feels like you're playing a game in the wrong language.

Sure.

But it's in English.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I love how, like, you can,

it's almost like playing games back in the day in Japanese, you know, when you're just like, I just want to fucking play it and there's no translation out there.

Fuck it.

I'm doing it.

You know, and you're waiting for a fan translation and

just mashing through text and hoping that you're selecting the right option because usually yes goes on top and no goes on the bottom, right?

Usually, hopefully, you know.

And yeah, no, it's hilarious as well, you know.

And then, yeah, you just kind of you get all the way, you get you get through this nice little brief adventure.

You get your airship, you get your part, your party, the whole thing goes through the it goes through all the steps.

It speedruns a full RPG, and like you go from, you know, I can go from continent to continent by boat until you get your ability to fly around.

And then you go to your final area, and fucking Gibby awaits you

you know and Gibby is sorry for the things he's done you know and and you just have like like what the fuck is context who cares you just have a short and sweet beautiful RPG experience um Hylix is great I yeah I I'm extremely pleased with the one-day RPG adventure that almost feels like I was on an 80-hour journey with these characters, you know?

You fought bosses, you learned skills, you struggled along the way you came back to enemies that once one-shotted you and and you stomped all over them

um and it's just yeah it's and it's clearly rpg maker as fuck as well but uh

fucking yeah i know uh

i know that's that's got recommended and highlix 2 as well has gotten recommended so you know we're starting here just checking out one for a nice little one-off um If you haven't, I highly recommend checking out Hylix.

And yeah, one afternoon is all it

One thing that really sucks, however, is when you tap right on the d-pad while you're selecting your

RP, your battle option, it passes your turn, and that's a terrible device.

That should not be.

And I hate that.

That's fucked up.

I've accidentally caused a pass.

I don't think Hylix 2 does that.

I didn't think Calais.

It sucks.

That's really not fun.

That was pretty much it.

uh beyond that played uh two little fighting games.

One, knockoff

is the uh Kickstarter that I talked about a couple weeks ago, Fight for the Imagination, or Battle for the Imagination.

Um I think the Kickstarter is ending this week.

I think it it's looking shy of its goal, but the concept is uh rad.

Um it is your childhood toys fighting against right right right the fake action figures

on your desk in your room in your backyard, and they all look and are like they have joints of articulation and everything.

Fake He-Man versus Fake Skeletor, Fake Ninja Turtle, fake Bite Street Shark, etc.

And yeah, and it's just a lot of fun.

But yeah,

it seems like it might not make it on the Kickstarter goal.

Hopefully, they can find something to do and find a way to release it anyway, because it is a

mostly functional game with like eight characters already and going, you know?

And something notable as well in terms of attention to detail is it's not just that it's like throwing back its aesthetic to that style with the characters' names and sound effects, but even the types of supers and moves that the characters do look like early

hyper-fighting game moves.

You know, newer moves.

They're old-fashioned.

Yeah, like newer special moves tend to be like someone gets hit and then you go into like a cutscene.

That's a fancy animation.

Exactly.

You know, you go into into a domain expansion and then shit's all crazy and nuts and then KO, you know?

But this is harkening back to a day of like

one elbow knocks you up into the air, a bunch of spinning slashes and then a bah, big one, or like a kick and then beam.

You know, and it's like just one or two simple things, but it's like over the top.

Real fun.

Yeah, simple and goofy.

Do they have blue energy lines coming off them like shadows uh absolutely absolutely you gotta have that yep and you know shit's busted as fuck huge combo potential possibility clearly not meant to be balanced or sane in any way shape or form but had some fun with it

um and then there was uh blazing strike

which uh feels like a game i've played a million times before

it was a so that sprite-based fighting game that looked really cool and here's how it's notable.

Here's a picture of the characters in the cast.

It popped up on Twitter a couple times over the years.

Those look like those look like Last Blade 2 edits.

They're some original fighting game fucking characters.

I'll tell you what.

You've got your karate man with his ripped shirt.

Those look like sprite edits.

They're not.

They're beautiful.

I know, I know, but I'm just like, they are like the late SNK style to a T.

So, the style of these characters, absolutely.

No, I would know, not even SNK, because they're too flat-shaded for SNK style.

They're closer to Capcom, Circa CVS, you know.

Oh, yeah, this does look like a CVS.

Yeah, the years of Mugen edits of people editing Mugen characters to look like different styles of games, I can fucking pin the exact era and time these would come from.

But

all this to say that, like, this is a really strong roster of like, winners across the board, right?

Like, there's no overt freak picks.

Gotta note that.

Everyone's a cool character,

but you're like, I could main every one of these.

They're all

cool.

They're all radish shit.

Yeah.

So character design is

fantastic.

And then the portrait art for them as well is goes even harder for all the characters in the game.

So yeah, art style and it embraces as well.

The title screen has the character has the announcer going blazing strike.

You know, it knows what it is.

It wants to sound and feel like Street Fighter Alpha 2.

And it has

the soundtrack as well is pretty sick.

It was struggling for a while to come out, I remember, and I was like, what's the deal with it?

I think it had a crowdfunding that failed and then it got a publisher or something like that.

Game-wise, it's not, it's got some rough edges, I have to say.

Like,

it unfortunately, like, it's fun, it's got some cool ideas, there's a lot that still feels a bit janky.

There's a particular thing that would happen when, I'm thinking of Mugen as well, actually, when you would animate characters and

you have to position them on the move after they go, like, after they, like, complete an animation, and characters would slide around a little too far past where they're supposed to be in moments you know you'd find like like um imagine a buster wolf but like terry flat like shoots forward way too quickly and kind of snaps in the wrong place you know there'd be a couple of moments of that where it just feels like it's it's not quite smoothed out um there'd be some issues with like navigating menus as well it felt like the controlling was just there's like a weird lag to it um there's a really interesting concept it has though where it's a four button fighter but there's a rush button that you hold and it basically works like holding run in Mortal Kombat

but it acts as a simultaneous it's a Mortal Kombat run button but it's also a drive rush

and it's also a like cancel whatever you're doing button as well that's a lot yeah so but essentially you hold it and then every action you do gets shadows behind you And you just go further, faster, harder.

Alright, that's okay.

And if you press another button after the last last one, you cancel and do another one, and then you do like a full string of, you know, of attacks, but it drains a rush resource.

You know?

So, yeah, you get access to that, and because of that, you get like the ability to like jump and kind of like directionally influence yourself a little bit forward or backwards.

It's interesting to add that much

movement variety and utility to a 2D sprite-based fighter because usually they kind of lock in with like, okay, you got short hops, you got super jumps, you're kind of locked in place, and here you have much more freedom of movement.

But yeah, it's interesting.

I hope that though, they can continue working on it and kind of patch it.

And, you know, I think like a second version, like a second impact of this game could go really hard.

Because the moves and the characters and the designs and everything aesthetically is killing it.

And the concept of the moves are and the concept of

the characters' actual

move lists and shit are great too, but overall the system is just not quite fully there yet.

Also, like, the most busted-feeling characters in the game feel like they come from, like, Marvel, and the worst characters in the game feel like they're from Street Fighter 1.

Oh!

So, there's these really just

like the discrepancy between the character that has a fly button and a full screen beam versus the guy who takes a full second to do and recover from his three specials, you you know is like you two don't that is a wider gap than I was expecting you to say you don't belong in the same game you know

yeah there's a feeling of a there's a bit of a canyon between

the characters in some cases but yeah I want to see that like you know

with a little bit more polish hopefully that's possible but I don't know anyway

Yeah, this is a bit of an odd one because since we since I haven't done like a Monday recording until like yesterday, but uh, rest of the week, gonna do some more Phoenix Wright, and uh, we're gonna check out Dizzy and Guilty Gear Strive on Saturday.

So, um, yeah, tune into the schedule on Wooly vs on Twitch and on YouTube for more.

What's going on?

All right, so uh,

in the, I don't know if I've mentioned it, but I've been playing Horizon Zero Dawn's remaster over the past couple of weeks, um, and I am at the 99% mark.

I'm two missions from beating the game

and have done literally every single collectible side quest, etc.

I haven't done the DLC yet, but you know, did you enjoy?

I did.

And I'm starting to understand

parts about

what's going on with the way people talk about Horizon.

And this is a game that I like crashed out on three times.

This is the fourth time I've tried to play Horizon Zero Dawn.

And I would crash out at the same point every single time.

Wait, do you out of like crash out as in your game would crash, or are you talking about?

No, no.

I mean, like, I would, I would, it's something else.

Modern lingo.

Modern lingo.

We're using crash out.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

Something would come out, and I'd be like, oh, that looks so good.

I'll get back to Horizon later.

And then by the time I would get back to Horizon, it had been so long that I'd be like, I could just do the starter area again.

Um,

and

um, yeah, Horizon has like a direction problem,

uh, so the game's like pretty focused, it's giving you like a big hallway for the first like 10 hours of the game where like there's a very clear drive to move your character north, and then there's side quests on the side of that, right?

And then you get to the big, proper, wide-open world, and it says, hey, you're in the southeast.

Your next mission objective is in the farthest northwest point in the game.

It is the absolute other end of the planet.

And

what they seem to want you to do

is

ping-pong between all the story quests, which hit every quadrant, and do side stuff on your way there, there, right?

There's a problem.

The problem is

that the fucking third merchant or second merchant of the game just gives you a map of every single collectible activity in the entire game.

Every single one.

And so you, and it's cheap.

You just buy it and you're like there.

And it just shows every single,

every single fucking

like pickup every single feather every single you know one of those items that you get it and so on the way to these side quests on to the way to the main quests it is just

well I'm like a hundred I'm 180 meters from one of these collectibles so I should go get that

and I'm actually I'm actually 250 meters from the next collectible

sire there's some fruits nearby that I've heard whereas the um

story thing is the story thing is like 10 miles away.

And so the way that I ended up playing it is that I would follow these collectibles around and then do the side quests that were near them and ended up having this massive gap

of

like five to ten hours of story content plus side quests, then

30 plus hours of open world playing.

And now that's all completely finished.

And I've just been story mission, story mission, story mission, story mission, story mission.

Oh, see, you just did it all nuts in one moment.

And they have, like, they have this weird problem with the way, like, every side quest and main quest has like a level range that it suggests.

Um,

and the level ranges are all liars.

Every single one is wrong.

I've never seen a game like that where the recommended level for every single quest in the entire game is wrong.

Below or above?

It doesn't matter

because the old, like you gain levels and it unlocks new abilities, but you don't need any of those abilities.

You just need to be able to be decent at the combat and you can beat anything in any way.

So, like, I get a side quest that's like level 35, and the main quest is level 15.

So, I guess they're telling me to go do the main quest, but I'm having no trouble with any quest at any level

because I've quote-unquote solved the combat and figured out the elemental weaknesses for every enemy in the game.

So, I'm immediately reminded of when you were talking about rebirth, though, and the fact that that was just overstaying its welcome by dragging.

Yeah, so the open world content in Horizon is pretty good.

I liked it quite a bit, but the thing is, is that I would have been much more hooked on that game if I had gotten like literally one more main mission further.

So, like, the the the they they give you the gigantic open world and the main mission that is the biggest hook in the game as to like what's going on is the one that is the furthest geographically from the place you start it is literally the two furthest points on the entire map from one to the other that is the is the trip to the story getting really interesting okay

so it's not so much a case of like overdoing it with self-regulation in this case and like just you committed to way too many side things.

Imagine if Ghost of Tsushima's map was one contiguous map and didn't split into the three pieces.

And the next objective is at the end of the day.

It was at the top.

Yeah, okay.

How long would it take even a normal person to get all the way to the top?

It would take them a fucking while.

And I would say the design design is encouraging you at that point to bumble around until you get there.

Oh, absolutely.

And so, like, I explore to the south of the world and it's like, oh, level 12?

Dude, I was level 12 before I even got here.

And level 12 is underneath the implied level 15 of the next story.

So I guess they want me to hang out in the southern jungle area.

So I did everything in the southern jungle area and I'm level 30.

And so now that I'm level 30, well, I can do all the hard desert areas.

So I did all the hard desert areas.

Is fast traveling and stuff like decent?

Oh, it's easy.

There's no problem with fast traveling.

Okay, so nothing's particularly like tedious about that.

Yeah, so like, yeah, no, the game should have like directed me a lot, a lot more strongly than it did.

And the map could probably stand to be half the size.

I was asking around, and apparently, the Horizon Forbidden West map is sectioned.

Because I was like, I would have probably gotten to these story beats a hell of a lot faster if this map, which is

mountains

in order, is mountains, jungle, desert,

different mountains.

If those were, instead of being completely non-separated in any way,

if those were in fact divided into smaller open segments like Ghost of Tsushima and

Ferizon

West,

the sequel

is in fact divided that way.

Yeah, well, so

hopefully, yeah, what you're describing is just like, yeah, it's the first one in the franchise, and then they get the chance to refine that shit going forward.

Like, a fucking, like, but yeah, once you get to, once you get to the emotion in your chest of fuck Ted Pharaoh, that story flies.

Like, it's great, and it's very interesting to

uncover the bits and pieces of the the mystery.

Okay.

But until you have that, like, that chest

fucked Ted Pharaoh, it's you're just like, where's Aloy gonna find out about her mommy?

I don't care.

No.

I don't care.

I need spite.

Now, how does the Lego Horizon storyline fit into this trilogy?

I don't think it does, Wooly.

I don't think it does.

Oh, I thought it was crucial linking information.

I don't think it is.

Also, i would like to take sony to task for gaslighting me

so uh i don't know where you played ghost of tsushima or if you've played any of the playstation games that have the overlay yeah but

um i've been playing horizon remastered and as i've been playing it uh i've been encountering catastrophic hitching and stuttering every time it autosaves.

And I couldn't find anyone online that had the same problem.

And then after I would close the game, I would have Firefox crashing all the time.

And I'm like, well, it's Firefox crashes sometimes.

But like, my PC would be like notably slower.

And because I have an i9 processor, I was like, oh no, is my computer fucking dying?

Is it the rust?

Did the Intel Rust get my computer?

And I reached out to a computer place asking about like upgrades and was going through that process until until I realized, you know what?

What if I just figured out how to turn the overlay off?

And so I went into my program data and I renamed PS5 SDK to PS5 SDK backup.

And now when I load up Horizon, it says can't start the PlayStation 5 SDK.

And

that problem is gone.

And my computer runs great.

And the game never stutters ever again.

And it's like, oh, it's sending some kind of fucking telemetry over every autosave to Sony.

Like, for trophy shit.

It's like, it doesn't even matter what the dev team does or how they optimize it.

Once these stupid fucking middleware things get dropped in at the last second over everything, I hate that shit.

It's so,

well, it's nice that you can actually fucking

rename and

bullshit it out of there.

But yeah, incredible.

So stupid.

Stupid as fuck.

Yeah, games like that, I would just go straight to the console with a movie.

Well, I mean, I can play real shiny on my computer.

Fair enough.

I can real shiny.

What else?

Paige and I watched that them there boxing match that happened this last week.

Oh, yeah, that did occur.

Where everyone who doesn't watch boxing gets reminded why they don't watch boxing because it's always fucking rigged and fake and stupid.

I mean,

like...

You know,

we can unpack.

There's not much to it.

I think rigged.

That's it.

That's my whole thoughts on it.

Yeah, I think rigged and fake

is not so much the case, but I think it's just...

Going in, knowing there's always an asterisk.

There's always

a qualifier or a thing about whoever Jake Paul's going to fight.

And in this case, the outcome is pretty much, we know what this looks like.

He went in also knowing that he had, you know,

he mentioned he almost died four months ago.

He had like a bunch, a bunch of blood transfusions.

He was in really rough shape health-wise.

So it's a paycheck.

You're going to go in and you know what the deal is.

And I think it was quite clear that all the clips of Tyson kind of training and getting back into that form and all the hype and stuff over time, over the buildup was like, essentially, you've got one round to get any of that done.

He's got one round in him to

get that hard.

Yes.

And, you know, as Roy Jones pointed out on commentary, like, he was much, he was a much better, he was moving around much better four years ago when they had their match.

And even then, he was pretty old.

So, you know, what a difference that same amount of time makes going forward.

Here, with the recovery and everything else, you're like, it's not that there's no path to victory there, but it's just it's limited to that first round and then beyond.

Oh, yeah, and then beyond that, there is always the random lucky one, right?

There's always that, oh, you fucked up hard and took a swing you shouldn't have.

You got downloaded, and then you get, but that's not that, but that's such a, it's, it's a Hail Mary.

Oh, yeah, but I'm not even talking about that.

I'm not even talking about that.

Yeah, he's an old man.

I'm talking about how this is the plot to Rocky III.

okay i don't know how well you remember the plot to rocky 3 i've only seen the first rocky so yeah in rocky 3 he's the champ and he's like why is everybody saying i'm a bum i only fight bums because i'm making you fight bums rock you lose okay you'll lose if you fight a real contender because you're a bum right and it's like it's just jake paul standing on a fucking victory platform going i'm the fucking best i can beat up a 60 year old man look at me i'm in the peak of my fucking life.

What a fucking pussy.

I think that it's pretty, I mean, at this point, based on the record, what you have is quite clearly,

he's a very competent, good boxer that knows what he's doing, that could get

matches and potentially even prize fights

that would be not

the peak, not the top of the card, not the highest.

He would get a number of undercard matches and he would not be able to get him.

He would become a ranked boxer.

Absolutely.

100%.

You do not do and fight the way he does and have no skill whatsoever.

And anyone who says that just doesn't know what the fuck you're talking about.

No, he could absolutely become a ranked boxer for a little while.

But it's knowing where that is, where you would land.

Can you get to top eight at Evo?

No.

Can you get top 64 consistently?

Yeah, you're pretty fucking good, right?

But then in order to appear to be like on top or to at least, you know, create that trajectory, you side skirt like what is, and here's the thing too, as well.

It's a very, it's a brilliant move marketing wise because you're side skirting real challenge and direct peers to always fight somebody with an asterisk next to their name, which is like, but this person, but they're not a full boxer, or this person, but they're

primarily MMA or from a different sport, or they're old, or you know,

he's taking on Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Carter next, right?

Whatever the fuck, you know, people are saying that.

Jimmy Carter could take him.

I don't know if you saw him watching those airplanes, but

all of that is like it works extra well because boxing is fucking corrupt and has been forever.

And what's up?

Boxing is maybe the most corrupt sport that has ever existed.

And so the idea of side-skirting all the corruption is not even something that doesn't make sense, you know?

Um,

and just kind of making like YouTube fights and just forcing it, forcing yourself into the relevant spot because, yeah, you've got the financial capital to do so is it's it's a it's a marketing like brilliant move, you know, you create relevance and then you don't go through that thing and you don't get matched up in a way where, so, you know, whenever there's leagues and you're like UFC and things like that, you have someone who's in charge and sets up the fights and then two people challenge and if it's a good card, you know, it makes sense and they're within the same range, or someone comes up or goes down, you have the fight, and you go, you know.

But in a world where Don Kings are setting up these bullshit, you know, matches over the years and fucking everybody over, or when Mayweather has, you know, like he has an impeccable record, but as long as you are in my ring with my ref, with my rules on a Tuesday,

you know, like, and it better be kind of foggy outside, like, then it's like, oh, yeah, well, then everything is perfect.

Like, it's, it's been so corrupt for so long that, like, to come in and and side skirt that doesn't even, like, it, it, it makes sense marketing-wise, you know?

Rocky and Hajime no Ippo, fictional narratives are more honest than real bots.

And the worst thing is that, like, um, the match that happened immediately before,

the woman's fight that happened right before that is a perfect example of how bullshit and corrupt and nonsense judgments can be when it goes to the, when the judgment goes to the wrong person anyway.

And you kind of, they're going going back and forth about the headbutting and whether it's because of her south par or what you know and you're like here's a perfect example the outcome of the serrano match is is why jake paul is able to sidestep and get into the the the the title card you know or the get into the main event um by just youtube sidestepping bullshit it's it's like it shows you the problem and that's the that's a fucking crazy ass match that happened that leads right into exactly this type of outcome, you know?

But in terms of, yeah, like I said, in terms of like the actual fight, it's like there was that one round and then everything else was just staying in, don't get, don't, don't get embarrassingly knocked out or so.

And then for Jake, it's quite clear that it's like, hey, I'm a just, I know the game plan.

I've studied the, Jake is probably like, you can imagine him in a, in a, in like a, uh, a fucking float tank with like computers and algorithms processing, you know, like you could just going through all the tapes, studying everything to be like, here's the algorithm, here's the outcome, here's what you need to do.

I need every piece of training and technology in the world and to beat up an old man a little bit.

And so, you know, that it was just a data, it was a data fight.

And for him, it's like, we're going to, we're going to fight differently from the way he usually does.

We're going to hang on the outside.

We're going to use the range.

And we're just going to literally not even take any risks, not go in.

Because, because why would you, right?

And that's the thing.

It doesn't make any sense to if you know you can win on points and you're like but do a hail marriage well yeah when you pick the judges it's pretty easy to win on points so so like like that's the that's the thing too about it like where um

like the the idea the if things are legitimately just a because it's a sanctioned match and it's a it's a real thing it was like some of the kind of youtube fights and stuff that have happened before are like not not a some of them are just like oh we found a ref that would call it you can get a legally you can get a legally a legally sanctioned match that's not considered like part of the that's not like official or doesn't have doesn't affect your record or it's not part of the association and in this case it is and was so like if there is like actual untoward shit going on there's grounds for lawsuits right so it is a real fight um and the other thing too is like you know if you know like it's if someone is is in grand finals at like uh fucking evo or something and like they're

fighting in a way that is like clearly fake and or like creating open like and they're not one and when it's like a rigged thing like it's extremely difficult to do so in a manner that is like uh

convincing to anybody else that kind of knows what they're looking at in a way you know wow um but all but like what was clear here was that like yeah he knew exactly what to do and it's just stand there hit the points don't do much and run the clock out and then you get the the and then the the the clout victory means as he said afterwards i can do whatever i want i can fight whatever i want you know

I don't know.

Like, everyone, everyone, we can all argue forever because no one's ever going to know for sure as to if this was rigged or how much it was rigged or how much it was age or whatever.

But I feel like we can come away with like a conclusion that either it was intentionally dragged out to eight rounds and

this is just an overt scam, or

a

boxer in the peak of his life

could not knock down a 58-year-old man

who has leg problems and almost died.

So like you could pick one or the other.

Sure.

Either

he took it easy to run out the clock so that he could make the most money, which is like immoral, or he's a pathetic pussy.

Yeah, I know it's not a particularly exciting or fun answer, but hey, that's me.

You know how this goes.

Yeah.

But like the idea of like a choreographed dance in the ring and then someone takes a dive in round four or whatever is just, that's not what's occurring there.

I think what is occurring is this weird kind of understanding and an in-between where it's essentially like he's fucking old and they're not even in the same like like height wise and then weight class wise.

They're not they wouldn't they wouldn't be matched up at all regardless, right?

He literally was told the ref was telling him, yo, stop measuring at one point during the fight.

What you have is an understanding between both parties in the agreement that it's an exhibition yeah you know that's kind of what's happening you know there's a there's a we're not gonna call it that we're not gonna say that and it's certainly and it's not stage you can't like stay like faking a thing is crazy but but it's it's an exhibition and we kind of know totally that that's the deal yeah and but but like

that it's a that's an important distinction to make but it's but it's a distinction nonetheless

Yeah, you just, you can't quite go like, and now with the left and up or turbo, but yeah, they know what the deal is.

And it was a fucking insane paycheck for Mike.

You know, he did say at the end of his, like, there's the footage is coming back out over the years of him talking about like, I don't have it anymore, you know, like it kind of done.

He kind of started to feel it a little bit more with the, with the Roy Jones bit.

And he also knew that like financially, he's got fucking obligations and he's been very transparent about that shit.

It's also like he's podcasting and going nuts and whatever.

He's, you know, he's got his hot boxing show and everything that he's doing now.

He's also just like, yeah, he's got, he's got money.

He's got debts.

He's got fucking shit to take care of.

So this is a humongous

financial alleviation for him.

And the and him being even being like, oh yeah, Logan, I'll take you on.

It's like, yeah, I'll take another paycheck.

What the fuck?

Who cares?

Yeah, why not?

Right.

He just established with that child, what the fuck is legacy?

I think.

What does the word legacy mean?

Who cares?

He traumatized the child in an interview to be like, you're fucking dead and you're gone.

Who cares?

I think there's something awesome about boxing, like genuinely, that every, like, this has happened twice now with the Pacquiao Mayweather fight and

this one, in which every time there's like a really big fight that pulls in non-boxing people into watching it and getting excited, we end up in the situation where after the end of it, the average person goes, so why why didn't they actually fight, though?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why didn't they actually fight?

Why are they just dancing around like a bunch of pussies?

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

Right, yes.

You know, and there's, and there's things too, like, and you know, like, like, the reason why, like, Logan can go and do like that exhibition against Floyd, especially, is because it's like, Floyd has been, Floyd's not knocking anyone out, and he's not that, he's going to sit there, and he's never been that.

He's going to sit there and he's going to make points on you.

He's going to fill his shell and call it a day, right?

That's what this is.

But yes, there is that kind of like, but make an event though.

Where's the cool thing?

You know how?

Hey,

here's a suggestion.

And I make this suggestion with the full knowledge that this suggestion has already been implemented.

How about we make it in the boxing

by

just letting the fucking fight go until one of them actually wins.

Right, right, right.

UFC1 rules.

Yeah.

No,

it's just that, right?

And I'm also reminded of like that exhibition for

in Street Fighter where Daigo and Justin fought

after all this time.

And then the first game was a draw game, right?

And everyone was like, rigged.

It's fucking rigged.

What a crazy outcome.

It's like, no, that shit's wild and nuts.

And it just, it does happen sometimes.

But it's just

the, the, yeah.

Anyway, whatever.

I don't need to spend a I'm not watching boxing to watch two guys dance.

I want to see them punch each other in the gut and throw up on the mat.

And I'm not trying to sit here on the, on the fucking

Jake Paul.

I'm not trying to defend any of that nonsense, but I'm saying what you saw there is a, there's an understanding, unspoken, perhaps, between both camps that it's like, let's go out there.

Let's do a little exhibition.

Let's make some money.

It is what it is, right?

And then the, and then, of course, the clout outcome versus the paycheck, you know, is extremely worth it for all parties involved.

Step on the toe, make a headline.

And yeah, you know, he gets his 22 million.

Jake gets his 40.

I got to say, I really genuinely mean this.

I'm not making any exaggeration.

This is not some kind of goof.

I'm of the belief that professional wrestling is a legitimately more honest spectacle than professional boxing.

Because it is not

trying to pull the wool over your eyes and pretend that it is real anymore.

Yeah.

So the sad part is that if you just take it between the competitors and you watch amateur boxers just fight, and there's nothing about the outside, there's no extrinsic value, it's all intrinsic.

You get a real awesome sport where two people are putting their all into it and they're matched up in weight and size and height and all these factors that creates a really interesting paired off dynamic.

But because of the way it's been from the jump, where it's been the dirtiest, most fucking sleazy mafia ass corrupt shit, you know,

and like nobody, like you can have an overseeing organization, but that basically needs to be a list of like, you know, greased palms and

not an actual

league, you know, or like

overseeing body that like can actually determine like matchups as well and things like that.

Um, it's just what promoters can get the most hype going for things.

Then it's like, yeah, it's, it's never, ever, ever been honest.

And if to get honest, you have to leave the organization,

you know?

You know, who's the, you know, what the greatest boxing match of all time is?

People say it's Muhammad Ali and Foreman and whatnot.

No, it's when Kimbo fucking punched that guy's eye out.

Oh, shit.

Kimbo slice it.

Yeah.

That's how a nigga is.

This is how it is.

That's the most honest boxing match I've ever seen in my fucking life.

Out of the car, through the bushes, into the backyard.

Let's go.

And then they hugged afterwards, even though that guy's eye was hanging out.

It was like, there was no bad blood.

Nope.

We fought.

That was it.

That was great.

Yep, yep, yep.

Oh, Kimbo Slice.

What an era.

What an era.

Yeah, and then when she...

I remember people getting excited about him going to MMA.

I'm like, are you stupid?

This is a guy who fights

punks in the backyard of his buddy's house.

The moment it gets real, it's not going to work.

And you're like, you can't, you can't, yeah, you can't like refine the beast and then give it the technical, like, you can't give a beast frame data, man.

Nah, man.

You just got to pit him against other beasts.

It doesn't work.

Other lesser beasts.

It's like, okay, listen, unknowable, insane, like, jaws of death.

You're plus on block here.

So you should, hey, hey, are you listening?

Stop swiping at me.

You know, it's just, it doesn't fucking work.

Yeah.

Anyway.

No, it truly is.

It truly is just this goofy thing.

And again, you just, for all the legitimacy, you have the sarano, you have the fight right before it to just be like, yep.

And that's what happens when two fucking warriors give it their all and

you just, you get...

And they get robbed.

You get absolutely robbed for it.

You know?

Incredible.

Well, anyways, yeah, there's that.

All right, moving on.

I did two sponsored streams this.

Oh, no, I did three sponsored streams since the last time we spoke.

I played the Dragon Quest III HD 2D remake.

Hey, did you know that people like that Dragon Quest?

Dragon Quest is cozy as fuck.

Nice.

And that they did.

So apparently the Octopath HD 2D style is just going to become a fucking thing going forward.

And that rules, they do a really clean job of Dragon Quest III.

Like, you know, Octopath had all the shit ton of particle effects and like fancy modern lighting, like lighting engine effects.

Yeah.

No, none of that.

Oh, it's, it's, it's,

you got death of field and sometimes lighting, but like it's kept super, super clean

and

non-like fancy.

It doesn't overdo it.

So that's exactly what they did with the pixel remasters of

FF6 and the FF games as well, right?

Like they had the sprites redone and they had everything sharpened up, but like when it came to these moments where you can go over the top and with it, they kept it tame.

And it was just the opera scene, if you remember in FF6, yeah, just the opera scene

where they went for it with the 3D, and they everything else was fairly tame.

And that's what

it's solid.

It's updated.

It's Dragon Quest III.

That's the good one.

I like it.

However, that's a sponsored opinion.

So be aware that I'm biased.

I also took a look at something called Rue Valley,

which I'm not sure.

I think the alpha is just available right now for people to to try.

I'm typing in the word alpha.

Jesus Christ, Pat.

But Rue Valley is you're stuck at a motel doing therapy for some reason, and you are stuck in a time loop, and it is basically disco Elysium.

It is a disco Elysium-like.

Yay.

It's good.

Okay.

It's very interesting.

It looks really cool.

It has a really cool comic art style with like the little dots that you would see on paper.

It has like a mind palace instead of stats where you're connecting your different thoughts.

Yeah, it's a disco-like.

And it looks very interesting and very good.

I hope that this world we're in now where disco stands out as a shining star that burnt out, where we're soon going to have

the five trails of comets that come from that.

Some of whom are suing the other comets.

Some comets which are trying to smash into others.

Yeah.

Anyway, I hope that

we don't end up just feeling like rolling our eyes and going, ugh, another disco-like at some point in the film.

I cannot possibly imagine that.

I don't want that.

Also, that's a great situation to have.

I don't even care.

Oh, too much cake.

Well, here's the thing.

Imagine a game that has the

aesthetic and control system, but the writing is not that great and everything else is kind of terrible in the story.

Oh, I really like the writing in Ruvalley.

It was very different.

It's also, judging by the temporary voice actors in the game, it is also Eastern European, though I'm not exactly sure where.

Okay.

Yeah, no, I like it quite a bit.

Okay.

I don't know when that's coming out.

It's coming out later.

Because just all this to say that, like, the hallmark, number one, step one, needs to be impeccable writing that's carrying the show and then all the other fun flavor.

I also did a sponsored co-stream of the uh of college street fighter players okay for uh pagoda snack pagoda snack champion series so yeah what is that exactly uh apparently it's an egg roll

uh i don't know what a pagoda snack is but apparently it's an egg roll okay um but basically

it's

the league is qualifying matches for uh college street fighter esports Okay, so esports, I've been here, because yeah, I have friends that are in education that have been letting me know about like how like esports class, like programming classes, game development, and esports,

like, yeah,

intramurals and things like that are becoming more and more of a regular thing in school.

And in a couple cases, they're like opening up, like, hey, if you know anything about this end or if you're a professional gamer or whatever, come in and help us design the program or create the curriculum, you know?

So this is a league between schools at the college.

Yeah, between colleges in the U.S.

Okay.

It's primarily hosted by a gentleman that people said he was a pro, so you might know him, St.

Cola.

Oh, yeah, St.

Cola.

I know St.

Cola.

Yeah, he's

hosted by St.

Cola.

Oh, sick.

Yeah, he's the one.

And the production is rock solid.

Okay.

Like, it's very well produced.

Matches come out super fast.

Right on.

It was really, really good.

The only problem

that I had

with this Pagoda Snack Champion series for College Street Fighter is that I'm sitting there, and these are these are online matches being played between different schools.

Like, you know, it's like Texas AM versus so-and-so.

Is that I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm actually in a place for the first time in my life watching a Street Fighter tournament.

And we're like,

Yeah, I could beat these guys.

Well, like 1,300 master.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah,

yeah.

Yeah, I could beat that guy.

What was your role in the event?

Co-stream.

Okay, you were streaming.

I was watching them watch it.

And were you providing commentary over the.

Yeah.

I was like, I could take that guy.

Was that the?

I don't know.

I don't know if that was the intended dialogue they wanted.

Everybody loves the commentator that's like, man, yeah, I could beat his ass.

I could beat him.

what I would have done that's that the that's the bout that's the best right I don't know why he dropped that combo I wouldn't have dropped that yeah though the classic the like I mean Sage Evans talked about this it's so funny where it's just like yeah the commentary where it's like oh you all you just go like oh yeah this is what I would have done this is what he doesn't know this is where he fucked up and then you know what I would have done I would have I would have just done better I would have not taken that throw I would have I would have done a reversal and won or like or when you uh when you kind of like the will it kill moments right you deflate those immediately because you're like, as soon as he gets touched, the first time, you just go, Oh, yeah, he's dead, he's dead, he's dead, he's dead, all right, all right, it's over, and there's it's still happening, and everyone's still engaged, but you're like, Yeah, yeah, he's dead, moving on.

Now you just fucking pop the balloon

like, like, um, like there was a match between a Manal player and a Rasheed player, and I don't even play Rashid, and I'm like, the Rasheed should be going in more.

Uh, he lost because he didn't go in enough.

Uh, if I, if I was playing that Rashid, I would have simply won the match, that's but Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's great.

Yeah.

Man.

That was fun.

I would have not gotten hit.

Yeah, I would have.

You know what?

You know what?

You shouldn't have jumped there.

I would have just not jumped.

Let's see.

What else I have going on this week?

Yeah, so what I did, so

I threw what I would describe as a child's tantrum over Dragon Age the Vailguard when it got shown off because I was like, I don't want it to be like whatever the fuck this is.

I want it to be like Dragon Age Origins.

And then upon going through

all three games and messing around with them, I discovered that all of these games are completely different and they're all catering to a subset of the fans of the last game, which isn't me.

So, like, Dragon Age 2 was catering to like console Dragon Age Origins players.

Oh, and then

Inquisition was catering

to the people who loved Dragon Age 2's narrative.

And then this game is catering towards the people that liked Dragon Age Inquisition's

character dialogue

in between each other.

It's Devil May Cry 2, except it never learned its lesson.

Yeah, well, no,

it's Dark Souls 2, but every game is Dark Souls 2.

They're all

weird and different, and for a different group of people.

But you just

keep adjusting according to the comments instead of creating a vision and then

seeing it through.

And then

I watched the Skillup review, which was scathing.

And I got confirmation biased to hell.

I was like, man.

It felt good to hear

so smart smart to hear this review tell me the things I already thought.

The things I felt.

So smart, dude.

Yeah.

And that, like, let's ignore the fact that I'm listening to Skill Up, who's a very talented reviewer and apparently a very nice guy, but I'm listening to a guy who doesn't like the Like a Dragon games

and going, oh, I'm so smart for having been confirmed.

And so,

so the turning point here was that friend of the show, Gene Park,

started to play it and started to turn on it and started to be like, wow, I actually love this game.

And I'm like, well, shit.

And you know, I know and respect Gene's good opinions more than other people's bad opinions.

And if I could just pause to insert for a second that like you're also on this growth kick after coming into Silent Hill 2 with the predisposed, like, I'm so ready.

The hate is fuck.

And it's like, unload the the gun.

It's actually pretty good.

Right.

And like, that was an, oh, shit.

Oh, shit.

Okay, we're growing.

You know what I did?

I had, when I sat down for Silent Hill, I had the metaphorical gun.

And what I, I kept it next to me, but I took the bullet out

so that I would have to load it back up again.

So Gene Park, known good opinion haver and friend of the show, was like, actually, this rules.

And I'm like, well, now I'm in a, now I'm in a, in an issue.

The issue is, is that I don't know anymore.

I had all this certainty.

What if

Gene has ever said is bad?

Yeah.

What if he's now

wrong?

What if he's been wrong?

Because Gene's also a guy who came onto this podcast and was like, I love Resident Evil 6.

Resident Evil 6 is a good game.

So I don't know who to believe anymore.

And

this leads to a very specific emotion, which I know you have felt.

And I'm sure most people listening to this has felt about a piece of media, which is, well, now I have to know.

Now I have to see for myself.

I have to know.

That's the correct response.

Yes.

And what I discovered, I've been playing it for about 15 hours.

I streamed it a couple times.

What I discovered is that I actually think that most of the stuff in Skillup's review is actually accurate.

Is that it does feel like human resources is in the room for every conversation?

It does have

some dialogue quimbles that are modern-y and Marvel-y and shit like that.

And a lot of the little environmental puzzles are for babies.

So, here's the part that fucked me: is that those environmental puzzles for babies, I actually had like a slight, like I was, I felt like so stupid.

You know, when the modern game gives you like the big glowing arrow to the solution, and you somehow miss it because you're a dumb fucking idiot.

That was me somehow.

Okay.

It happens.

It happens.

As a dumb fucking idiot myself who spins the camera past solutions sometimes.

I don't fault you too much for that one.

And

I did maybe 15 different character conversations.

And you know what?

Those conversations,

I felt like I lasered in on like what's happening so like balders gate and mass effect and um

dragon age origins and dragon age 2 and maybe even inquisition uh were made by

uh dudes who lived in alberta right yeah and you can you can if people who are not in canada

don't really taste that

but you know exactly what i mean when i say that you you can feel Alberta coming through Mass Effect 1, especially

the West Canadian,

yeah, you can feel like the fucking paragon points for like telling a space child not to get vaccinated

and now it feels like

like a different group of guiltier whiter Albertans making this game

in that they've sanded off all of the edges and everything is very nice and kind.

Okay.

So I'll take an example that stood out to me during my playtime, which was you get an assassin on the gang and the assassin is possessed by a demon.

And you know what?

They actually do a really interesting thing where the player can see the demon talking shit constantly, but other characters can't.

So they're just like unaware and you have like this this director eye that you can't see.

And the demon gets mad and punches their possessor, right?

And he gets like a bloody lip, right?

And I wanted my character to say, yo, it is not okay that you have a demon controlling your actions.

And the line of dialogue was, that's not okay.

Right?

Because he's like, it's fine.

I'm like, oh, it's, it's definitely not fine.

You seem insane.

But what my character said

was,

that's not okay.

It wouldn't be okay if one of us hits you, would you?

And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

I did not mean that's not okay because you're in an abusive married relationship with your possessed demon.

What I meant was, it's not okay because you seem like a crazy person.

Okay,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right.

You see what I'm talking about?

Yes, 100%.

Yes.

Like, I'm not validating you.

I'm telling you you're an insane person.

And you got, and like, the, the truncated preview for the line just goes off in a completely different direction.

Um,

so, like,

you, you can, like, I let a guy die horribly, and I've been a complete dick to some of the characters I've run into with the, you know, dick-headed dialogue options.

But with your party,

you kind of have to, we're like, you know what?

You know what, Wooly, this party, this feels like a family.

And

your particular tolerance for that it's gonna like wildly vary, right?

When you're playing Baldur's Gate, and the girls in the party are like stabbing each other over there, and Astarion is like taking bets,

right?

That is more my speed of like a bunch of toxic, shitheaded, angry RPG members in Wrath of the Righteous or Pathfinder Kingmaker.

When you have party members that just actively hate each each other all the time for the whole stretch of the game.

That's my speed.

But here, man,

we're gonna, hey, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna do our best and we're gonna, we're gonna stop those elven gods that went crazy, and we're gonna do it as a team.

And it just has a lot of the teeth filed off of it.

Okay.

Like, do I think that the writing is particularly bad?

No.

Do I think it's a little cringe?

Yes.

Okay.

But, like, it is going for like a very specific tone and watching these, like the easiest thing to do is to like grab one of these scenes and like throw it at you on social media and you go, oh, that's pretty bad.

It's a lot more tolerable in context.

Okay.

With the tone of the game.

Because I guess that's the big question ultimately.

Because like I just, as someone who's only seen the, you know, like, yeah, I've barely just seen random clips or whatever.

I'm reminded of like the similar energy when like Andromeda was around and you're just kind of like, is there a case here?

Oh, there's just nothing going on in that fucking thing.

Is there a case here where it's like people are not really talking like human beings?

You know?

No, no.

These people are talking.

People in your party talk like they're from Portland.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

They see you and they hear you.

Okay.

And like,

and you're just, and like, depending on whether or not that fucking dialogue makes you go fucking crazy like I expect them to fight and for my character to walk out and go gentle hands gentle hands everyone gentle hands

Would the conversations end with me yelling just call me pointy eared?

Yeah, it would just call me knife

So like and it's really interesting because like I'm a piece of shit from the East Coast and now I live on the west coast and that's how people are people are like very, like, it's like, I'm not going to sit here and say that I don't appreciate people validating me if I get a little pissy, pissy thing.

But at the same time, it can feel fake.

It can feel disingenuous.

It can feel insincere.

100%.

And like, yeah, no, it feels, it's a very West Coast video game.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

However,

did you ever play Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning?

Boy, did I.

I spent quite a few

many a day testing that game.

So when you play this game, I called it out very early and I reiterated it.

And maybe the 10 people in my chat who did play Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning piped up and went, yeah, this feels like a sequel to Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning when you're playing it.

I'm playing it on the hard difficulty, the hardest difficulty you can start on.

And it is a competent action game with a really good skill tree and a lot of good RPG systems.

Okay,

it feels good.

Does it have the Amalur unexpected juggle combo system going as well?

No, it has the Amalur.

You know what?

You have this massive skill tree that branches into all these different things, and you can just respec for free whenever you want.

If you want to just completely change the way your character works, go nuts.

Yeah, here you go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, freedom on the tree.

That's nice.

Yeah, it plays very well.

So,

on top of that,

occasionally I cringe at the dialogue, but overall, it's fairly charming.

It's nice.

You know what helps out a lot?

It is the most mechanically and technically solid game BioWare has ever put out by an order of magnitude.

It runs like a dream.

Everything is super slick.

Everything controls really well.

I have encountered no bugs.

Everything is polished to a mirror shine.

And now, granted, as somebody points out, that's not exactly a high bar because BioWare games have never really come out super solid except for Mass Effect 2.

It is a so far, it is a very solid and enjoyable 8 out of 10 with some docking to some of the character writing, but like some serious pluses in the way that it plays.

It is easily the best game they have made since Mass Effect 2.

And you can take that in one of two ways.

Either that's really easy, or thank God.

It's interesting because I was just thinking about Mass Effect 2, right?

And I was thinking about how when you talk, when you're mentioning

you're cringing at some of the sincerity, right?

And it's like, well, I'm thinking about how the relationship you have across these games is where you have a

Kaiden or a Jacob, right?

Where these are the sincere characters.

And basically, what's his name in Baldur's Gate as well?

The fucking item eater.

Gail.

Right?

Where you're like, oh, the sincere characters are the ones we shit on because we're like, well, fuck that guy, right?

Well, oh, hey, hold on.

I'm going to hold on my hand here for a second.

Like, Gail is the most toxic person.

Okay, okay.

yeah,

admittedly, I'm just going on for the first time.

Gail is actually the worst out of all of them.

Okay.

Because he's like, he's just a big nerd.

Maybe he's got a little bit of autism, but he's got this magic hyperfixation.

And then you're like, oh, his hyperfixation is also his ex-girlfriend.

Right.

That's...

And every time you're like, Gail, I think you're being an asshole.

He's like, what if I killed myself right now?

Would you like it if I just killed myself?

Would that make you happy?

And you're like, can you fucking calm it down for a second, Gail?

Okay, so, so, yeah, not that, but I'm talking about more like the Karth energy that you kind of get off of some of these characters, where you're like, I don't read that as sincere.

That feels fake.

And what I do feel is sincere is my relationship with Rex, who's like, ah, you fucker, get over here.

Yeah.

Right?

And you shit on each other and you fucking.

Yeah, no, that's because we're pieces of shit.

But that's fun.

That's because we're pieces of shit.

Say

I want other people who are also pieces of shit, and we happen to save the world.

There's a whole type of person out there.

Think about this.

There are entire groups of people out there that are just nice to each other all the time.

And

I'm not friends with those people, and I didn't marry that person, and I'm not related to even one of them.

But apparently they're out there, and that works for them punch bomb used to be that person until i got involved yeah he ruined everything

uh

god damn it keep those keep those keep those dukes up yo but no that's the deal is just that that feeling of just like oh i don't want to be friends with you what is that's not the vibe i want i don't want that kind of relationship talk shit throw fucking throw it out there you know i i just, yeah.

And so if that's what you're talking about.

Like, when your party banters in, in, if you're, when your party banters in Valegarde, it's, it's like, it's pretty positive.

Yeah.

Like, like, like, traditionally, when your party banters, you expect them to be talking shit.

Yeah.

That's that, you know, so that's it.

That's it.

I'm like, okay,

it's just not people I'd be friends with then.

So like, I think back to like Kell Dorn and Viconia and Baldur's Gate 2, in which every interaction those two have in your party is, I'm going to kill you.

Like

the dark elf, sorry, a drow cleric

and a lawful good paladin.

Every interaction they have in that game is, I'm going to kill you.

And eventually, one of them does because those two cannot live in the party together under any circumstances.

You hit a point and one of them kills the other.

It's unavoidable.

Right?

And I think, wow, that's so cool.

But that was also 25 years ago.

Sure.

Sure.

And it doesn't have to be that extreme even, but it's just like, if I didn't detect, if I didn't get a, if you were not at least a little bit toxic when I met you, I don't think we'd be friends.

So it's one of those things.

That's real.

And it's one of those things.

It's like, maybe like, so there's a, the, one of the things that, um, that Velgarde's gotten flack or praise for, whatever, is that it does, it deals with a lot of, like, there's like a suite of trans options, and there's like a non-binary storyline in it.

And

one of the things that I find is like a really big missed opportunity is that, like,

not

even one member of your party is an abject piece of shit about it.

And I feel like actually dealing with somebody who's like a massive asshole about literally any given topic is like a really good way to deal with that topic.

So I think back to Pillars of Eternity.

and one of the members of your party is a guy named Durance and he's a priest and he is a dirty homeless man

and every single thing that comes out of his fucking mouth is awful.

Like every he is just every single conversation is how much you suck and every other member of the party sucks by name.

And how you're all garbage and how your morals are trash.

And if you were just cool like me and murdered kids, you would be cool.

Like, he is, he's the fucking worst.

And he has the most dialogue of any companion in that game.

And he is by far the most interesting person to talk to because you argue with him constantly about what a piece of shit he is.

Right, right, right.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, man.

Yeah, you know, I just, I'm not looking for a party of affirmations.

You know, I'm just.

Well, some people are.

Yeah, I guess, I guess.

And that's fine, but it ain't me.

All right.

Like, you know,

instead of hanging out with HK-47 and Mandalore in Dragon Age Velgard, you're hanging out with Mission and Zalbar.

Yeah, like,

I didn't want to say Kreia, but I was thinking of Kreia, like, throughout this conversation.

Like, I was really just thinking of the...

You old fucking bat.

Just, why can't anything be good enough?

Why is every choice shitty?

And then I reload and I look at the other version, and no matter what, you can't get happy with what I say.

But we're still, we're doing this on the way to the ship going to defeat the big evil to save the universe right and that's the thing like that all all that all that toxicity and nonsense and bullshit is happening as this group is going to mount doom to fucking toss the ring in

so yeah um

as its own thing

If this was not named Dragon Age and this was a standalone RPG from hit RPG Maker Bioware, I think it would

I think it would be a lot more liked, but it's kind of drowning in the expectations of the games that came before it.

Because the tone between the past three games are pretty solid.

They were pretty,

they were pretty consistent.

Whereas this one is a lot more modern.

That being said, yeah, no, it's the kind of thing that I'm actually really enjoying it, and I'll cringe every now and then, but like your tolerance will vary wildly,

wildly on that stuff.

So, if this did not play very well, I would not go through it.

I would not be like, ah, well, I really wanted to get to the story because the gameplay,

whatever.

But it does play really well.

So,

I noticed you didn't point out that it's like, oh, there's some characters that are great and you can just hang with them or anything like that.

So far, I've actually liked all the characters I've run into.

Okay.

Just despite their

kindness,

I'm actually like, oh, yeah, no, there's something here.

Okay.

I also

played a real game of Dungeons and Dragons last week.

And that was

interesting.

So,

the long and short of it, Dungeons and Dragons is fun.

It is fun.

Unfortunately,

you have to play Dungeons and Dragons with people.

This is one of those things

that is part and parcel.

Yes, we've got to be able to do that.

And unfortunately, other people are not me and/or also not my wife.

And so they can be different.

And sometimes that's annoying.

So

sometimes you encounter and you discover that one of the players in your party is a rules lawyer.

What did you do?

I didn't do anything.

I did great.

I did fantastic.

I did my role play.

I used my spells correctly.

I managed good.

Great.

I did fantastic.

Some people like to explain mechanics to you that you already understand like you're stupid.

And that could be really annoying.

Other characters don't understand party synergy and want to split the party to do their character's own thing because it's what my character would do and butt heads with the DM for over an hour.

Are they under the impression that this is your first time playing in a long time?

Oh, yeah, yeah, no, no, no.

it's it's uh

uh

you know, you know, once, you know, when

someone starts to explain something to you, and you're like, No, I understand,

and they're like, No, you don't, I'm gonna explain it anyway, okay, okay, gotcha.

And you're like, No, I understand, right, right, right, and they're like, No, no, no, shut up, listen, and I'm like, You fucking

um, and then they talk over the DM,

you're like, Man,

uh,

you know, people people things,

dealing with humans.

But all in all, despite a couple rough patches, Claire explaining.

Did you get Claire explained?

A little bit.

A little bit.

Yeah, but overall, I had fun.

I'll go back.

Unfortunately,

it doesn't look like it'll be for a bit because I believe we're not going to be able to make it in the next couple of sessions, so it won't be many updates for a while.

But

yeah, no,

D ⁇ D is fun, even with other people, but also there's other people.

Yeah.

So

this is the trap

of doing things with other people, is that other people are there.

I don't know what can be done about it.

Not much, as you've committed, but I'm curious if...

Because different games have different flavors to them.

Like, if you have a party of people that are all kind of funny, then your game is going to be kind of goofy and funny the whole time through.

I'm going to be blunt.

Willie, Paige and I are in this group.

We're the funny ones.

Okay.

Okay.

It's not fair.

Not to us, I mean, but it's not fair to expect.

But we are professional, funny people.

But it's not clown shoes all the way around the table.

No.

Okay.

Okay.

Because sometimes it is, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm a professional.

Anyway, that's what's been going going on with me this week.

What's going on with me this coming week is, God, I have to look at a fucking schedule.

I don't know what's going on in my life.

What's going on is more metaphor and

more metaphor.

And

Paige is going to be streaming the Golden Joysticks on Thursday morning.

And I'm going to be doing a sponsored stream of something called Inaya

Life After Gods on Thursday afternoon.

Cool.

People are saying I should play Stalker.

I'm not going to know.

I don't know.

Will he ever play a Stalker game within the month of its release?

Didn't play a Stalker game.

Yeah, you know what?

I wouldn't recommend playing those games within the year of their release.

You look for that year two patch?

I'm looking for that.

It's on sale on Steam patch.

Okay.

Did an eval on one stalker game that came into the office once,

but that was pretty much it.

Otherwise, yeah,

okay.

But yeah, you can check me out over at twitch.tv slash pat stairs at.

And Thursday morning, you'll be able to check out Paige over at twitch.tv slash Beach the Liva.

Okay.

Also, for Stalker 2, they increased the system requirements like a week from launch to having 30 gigs of RAM in your computer.

That game's recommended.

Yes.

Okay.

That game's going to be on fire.

Hmm, it's gonna be on fire.

You know, it's funny all this is coming up because I'm like, I haven't wanted to, I just haven't wanted to open up my computer and do anything to it for a long time.

The whole point of going nuts a couple years ago was to not have to.

I'm like, do I, is it that time?

I don't want it to be that time, probably not.

Yeah, you don't have to go in there and do anything, you got to clean it,

you know.

We'll see.

All right, let's take a quick break.

BRB, let's do it.

I'm gonna pee.

Alright, let's take a quick word from our sponsors.

I love you, sponsors.

I just want you guys to know that.

This week, the podcast is sponsored by Uncommon Goods.

I'm going to sneeze.

Oh, no.

Oh.

What is it?

Was that a yarn sneeze?

I kind of aborted a sneeze.

I got out of it.

It was a snarn.

Oh.

Okay.

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Couldn't be me.

I'm fucking great at it.

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All right.

All right, let's talk about multi-versus win and fighting game of the year again.

Woo!

I don't, I don't.

Every year, every year.

I know it's pretty much the story.

I just, I just don't like TGA anything because it's so meaningless.

But it, so it's all it does discussion like four times.

All it does is once a year, it's a reminder to that some stupid shit that that is meant to

some stupid shit that doesn't matter, that's not real, pops up, makes no sense, gets everything wrong, makes everyone everyone upset, and then it goes away for another 12 months, and then you don't think about it till it comes around again.

Okay, so here's, here's the fun thing, right?

You

are an expert in your field, this subdivision of pop culture, right?

I would call you an expert.

I would also say that I am an expert.

I would say that most of the people listening to this podcast are experts.

And it's very easy as people who are just as intelligent and well-informed on all of these games and all of these prizes and all of these

to go, this shit is stupid.

This doesn't matter.

Wooly

to the average normie man who's thinking of an RPG to buy after he's done with Madden this year,

the game awards absolutely, totally fucking matter.

Like the Oscars.

Yeah.

Hey, are you into movies?

Are we doing a movie podcast?

No.

But if we did do a movie podcast, it'd be very similar to this.

And we'd be like, man, the Oscars get it wrong every year, every single year.

But you know what most of the movie going public sees?

This thing won 12 Oscars.

Holy shit, that must be the best movie ever.

And all I really want.

I got to watch the Revenant.

Well, all I really want is for

something like Balatro to get its accolade so that the people who made it are the devs are like, hey, yo, you did a fucking awesome job.

Hey, look.

And then it can get that spotlight.

Maybe even have there be a storefront page that's like, hey, winners of the awards.

Hey, look, you get a little bit of extra boost because you deserve it because you did a super good job.

And that's the type of shit that it should amount to.

But

it never just, it's never that simple, is it?

It's never just simply like the creators of this did a good job and deserve some praise for that.

It's always this other shit, this nonsense fucking.

All right,

so I want to go into it because this is so fascinating to me because

the reason why Multiverses is up is because they needed a certain amount of fighting games to fit into it.

And

everyone there forgot the rivals of A for their even exists, right?

Well, they didn't forget.

They just, you know,

they got what they got the list that they were told to get.

And, or, you know, they played the games for an hour or two and

wrote their impressions.

So actually, the way that this works,

I remember Jeff Gerstmann talking about this back in like 2015, like a long time ago.

And the way that it works is the same as it always is.

And there's a problem with the judging process because they're attempting to make it too fair.

Like I actually genuinely mean

the attempt to make the voting process for the TGAs or the VGAs or whatever the fuck version we're talking about is, fair

makes it a certain way.

So the way that it works is really simple.

Keely says, hey, these newspapers, these websites, these things, so this newspaper and GameSpot and IGN and GameRank and all these people, right?

I want you to send us one judge.

I want you to ship out one judge down to San Francisco, which is where all of you are anyway.

And I want you to send one guy down here and then we'll argue about it and we'll put together the thing of nominations.

So what ends up happening is they send down usually either the EIC with the editor-in-chief or like the second-tier guy, which are the people who tended to review the biggest budget and largest games of that year for business purposes, which means when they walk in,

already Elden Ring is a front runner because everyone in that room played Elden Ring.

Of course.

They may not agree that it's the game of the year, but they all actually played it.

And I use the example of Castle Super Beast.

If there was a Castle Super Beast game of the year right now, it would be between mouthwashing and metaphor.

The only two games we both played that came out this year.

But I also, you know, this historically, hate the top 10 ideas stuff, and I don't like listing because I also know how many things I didn't play.

And I'm like, I know you can, you can definitely always qualify and go like, yeah, it doesn't matter.

And Bellatro,

et cetera.

Right.

Yeah.

So that's, that's going hard top of my list in many cases, just based on sheer hours played.

Although Shogun Showdown is catching up, I'm not going to lie.

So what would happen?

You would, let's say you, you say Shogun Shodown is like your game of the year.

It's the best.

And I go, well, I didn't play that shit.

But I played Bellatro.

Do you think Bellatro is pretty good?

And you'd be like, yeah, I played Bellatro is pretty good.

And we end up at the consensus that Bellatro is the game of the year, even though that's not how you really feel, right?

Um, when Bellatro gets nominated in a situation like this, what I believe it to be is that they sat around talking about these things,

and one, Shadow of the Earth Tree kept coming up, despite the fact that it was disqualified from the rules, so they changed the rules.

And second, of a group of about 30 people, there must have been at least two people that would not shut the fuck up until Bellatro got a nomination.

Right.

Like, disruptive.

I'm going to kill myself if you guys don't put Bellatro on this list.

I will scream to the heavens.

Bellatro deserves at least a nomination.

Giant bomb style.

Like we're locking the door and the knives come out.

I mean, you know, that game's fucking incredible.

So, you know, it is what it is.

I get it.

But when it comes to, like, for example, this whole DLC discussion with Shadows of the Earth Tree and shit.

Oh, that's so unfair.

But it's that.

That's my, the thing is, like, i don't care in the sense that i'm actually super fine with dlc counting i don't care like i don't find that's that's not what oh really i don't find i don't find that to be an issue shadows of the earth tree is a giant significant piece of gaming content that absolutely was released and it should win the dlc category so my oh the only thing with this is i'm just like be consistent don't be a hypocrite if that counts then um phantom limit you know, Liberty.

Phantom Liberty counts.

But then it didn't count.

But no, no, no, Wooly.

Phantom Liberty counts as best ongoing game, even though it's also not an ongoing game.

That's for games that are, that's for gas games.

Yeah, so that's it.

Like, I don't, I don't give a fuck whether you make it count or not, but be consistent.

Don't be a hypocrite and don't make certain things count just because it's nearer and dearer to you and

it gets a special place versus other things.

Like, yeah, no, that's not that.

As long as you're fair, then go either way with it.

The reason why Erdree gets to be in there, so the Elden Ring, can you win two years Game of the Game of Year?

And it's fucking Elden Ring, and you want to talk about casually.

It's like, yeah, that's the biggest thing in the fucking world.

So, you know,

yeah, that's a spotlight on a very known, giant, immersive video game industry shaping experience.

I can't wait.

I can't wait till the TGAs, because everyone's going to be mad and

Elden Ring is going to win it.

Like, I would think it's really funny.

I would think it's like the funniest fucking thing in the world if Elden Rings DLC did not win game of the year despite the rules being changed to get it in.

That'd be really funny.

But then there's the other bit, right?

And here's the aspect of it where this is like in the same way that it's like, oh man, the fucking Logan Paul Tyson bullshit, where it's like, yeah, and then you, you put out, you have tweets and you have like, hey, who's going to get biggest snub?

Who do you, you know, or whatever.

You have these like things where there's a bit of, there's a part of this nomination time of year where we're supposed to be doing this in advance of the

thing happening in a couple weeks, right?

Everybody has to start talking and going off and getting mad and there has to be a big negative discussion around it because it's a huge, like...

a fucking whatever, you know, it's a big storm of attention before anything actually drops.

So like, it's actually best if there is some type of controversy or some type of stupid thing or some type of Sifu in the fighting game category.

You know, like, it's good, actually,

to get everyone.

I've got to second that Sifu got in that category because of controversy, I thought it got in that category because the people doing the fighting game category don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

Of course, of course, but you know what, man?

If you can be a shit on Twitter and get paid for it, then why the fuck wouldn't you?

Well,

hey.

Like,

you know, like, I just, that's the thing.

So I'm like, yeah, and then also, this is what it's supposed to be.

I'm being a shit on Blue Sky, by the way, now.

I deleted all my tweets.

Okay.

Yeah.

No, I mean I'm actually being way less of a blue shit on Blue Sky.

It's very weird how the tone of a place changes your opinions.

No, that's nice.

No algorithm.

But yeah.

I think it is really unfair to people who

put out games this year to have to compete with Elden Ring again.

I think that's like...

I think that's like just

bringing out the greatest champ that ever lived to fucking beat down the new Challengers.

It sucks.

Yeah,

I guess.

And I mean, I'm like, should Marvel Collection be on that list?

Is that

hit a point where remakes and re-releases should really live in their own category because there's so many of them in every category.

Well, yeah, and we're in a time where we're going back to a lot of old shit and

preserving it for future sake in this current gen.

But it's like, you know, it's like you want to throw on collections and stuff like that.

Then it's like, okay, you can do that.

But yeah, we have then Undernight and

all these other things that just get like you said rivals of Aether.

Fucking Undernight 2 came out.

There's a million things you just go like, yeah, no, we just completely, no one who came in to make a decision here took a look at that.

And so because there is a perpetual problem with the choices here not having their ear to the ground, I guess, you know, then it's just going to be a fucking manufactured outrage machine.

You know, and I just, I bums me out.

I don't know.

I'm like, all right, well,

you know, but yeah, Shadows.

But also, there's going to be trailers for Xbox games there.

Yeah.

I mean, I feel, I think Shadows of the Earth Tree was incredible, and I think it deserves some kind of something.

I think it absolutely clears this.

I don't care what

you call it or give it, but it deserves something.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

It deserves the same thing that Brood Wars would have got.

Fine.

You know, make categories if you need to, I suppose.

But,

and then, yes, a whole lot of trailers, and especially looking forward to the

mobile game trailers and tie-ins for things that you can do.

Shik Hydrobot.

Do you remember Shik Hydrobot?

I think about him every year.

No, No,

I don't.

I think about him.

I mean,

I love this fucking stupid bullshit.

I love it.

I eat it up.

Yeah.

It's my favorite.

It's my favorite meal.

I realized.

I realized

forever.

Oh, man.

Well, because

by being blase and smug about it, that just shows how much smarter I am than everybody else.

Right.

Because I'm not being affected.

Right.

Look how fucking smart I am.

Oh, my God.

But also, it's fun to do that shit with the Oscars, too.

If only there was a way to get these game creators their accolades without the bullshit.

Well, the golden joysticks is like this Thursday.

Oh, hey.

And that's voted on by other developers.

Nice.

Like last year, other developers said that Baldur's Gate 3 was the best game that's ever happened in the history of the fucking industry because it won every single award it was up for.

I look forward to seeing how Matan will figure out how to crash this year despite probably having his face on the security wall.

Is that the Bill Clinton kid?

Yeah, he's actually an internet person who has a podcast and is a known person with a huge following and does that as a professional thing.

I will admit, I will admit, I did see a clip of that kid that was actually really funny

in which he asked someone, so do you read at all?

And they said yes.

And he's like, name 10 books.

Okay.

And like, he didn't say name 10 books that you have read.

Yeah, just

name the books.

Just name 10 books.

And they fucking stalled out.

And I'm like,

that is a conversation ender.

There you go.

Perpetually 17 years old

and so on.

But I imagine one of the things we'll probably get to see

at the Game Awards, the TGAs, copyright

trade.

I think, by the way,

the TGAs.

Sorry,

TGA is the acronym that's ever been.

100%.

Yeah, Chi-Tea.

The Game Awards.

Chai-T, you know.

The Game Awards featuring hit fighting game 2X.

Short for 2XKO.

Quite frankly, I i say why stop there it should be the tga awards like

i think we're like we're like right there we're like right there the tga awards the tga awards for games

uh the annual tga game awards

Absolute perfection.

I imagine that one of the things we will probably get to see there will be a new trailer for Secret Level.

But one did come out this week, and I don't know if you saw it.

It looked cool as fuck.

Yeah.

In particular, I'd like to call attention to

the Pac-Man

shot, of which there is a Pac-Man logo and a nightmarish shadow teeth demon creature behind that logo.

I have a screenshot of it.

Yeah, hit me with that screenshot, man.

Here you go.

I love Pac-Man.

Pac-Man's my friend.

We're all friends of Pac-Man.

It is.

Waka-Waka.

Oh, here, I think I can drag it into frame, actually.

Oh, yeah?

You're doing it like this then?

Yeah, I'm going to look at this.

Yeah, that's Pac-Man.

That's my friend Pac-Man.

Yeah.

It is a shadow beast

Pac-Man.

You can see it at one minute and 14 seconds into the track.

That is the Pac-Man from

Pixels.

That is the Pac-Man from the

backstage

pre-Viz music video of that Bloodhound Gang song.

Which one?

Relax, Don't Do It.

Okay.

Yeah.

Where Pac-Man shows up and gets high.

That's what he looked like right before he got high.

I mean, it looks like something Samus should be hunting.

It's

fucking what the shit are they going for?

And then, yeah, you get to see Mega Man putting on some armor and then some other of that stuff.

I like that the emotional core of that whole trailer is like, do you remember the love in your heart that you felt for Mega Man?

He's going to run, jump, and shoot, though.

Also,

they confirmed what?

Arnold Schwarzenegger.

They confirmed a lot.

Teato Reeves,

Kevin Hart.

So they dropped some names.

I didn't notice

the Concord

in there.

You didn't.

Which was weird.

I didn't see any of the Concord.

I'm pretty sure there was a couple of Concorde cuts.

Maybe I'm just not familiar with the Concorde.

Maybe your brain just filtered it out.

Auto-deleted the Concorde.

Like

possible.

Like Yimby.

No, my brain did not auto-delete the Yimby.

What I particularly enjoy is Sifu is getting a whole lot of play in the trailer, and that looks like it's going to be rat as fuck.

Yeah, there's a couple of these that look like they're going to be bigger winners than the others.

So the Sifu short is is just going to be a run of Sifu.

Yeah, but it's like the coloring and the animation looks like exemplary.

The camera, the HUD will be off, and the camera will be slightly placed in other angles, but we're just going to watch a run.

Like, I'm yeah, and like, I look at the there's the other one that really stands out.

It's like, hey, do you want to watch the opening cutscene to a new Warhammer 40K game that hasn't come out and doesn't exist.

Those Space Marines are going to fuck up the boys.

And then Dungeons and Dragons, just like

normal, raw.

Look, Tiamat's there.

She got five heads, bro.

When they say Dungeons and Dragons, but they don't specify like a realm.

Could be God.

No, it's Forgotten Realms.

It's Forgotten Realms by default, right?

Yeah, that's about it.

We're not doing fucking Planescape or any of that nonsense.

It's Forgotten Realms.

That's the rule if they never specify.

Yeah.

Okay.

And, you know, it just happens to be on the Sword Coast.

It just happens to be on the Sword Coast every single time.

It's crazy.

Yeah, so that looks cool.

Like, there's the Call of Duty thing, and the Call of Duty thing is going to be the first mission of Call of Duty 4 back when Call of Duty started.

And Price is going to be there, and he's going to have a big mustache.

Was that no Russian?

No, man, that was Call of Duty 6.

Oh.

I remember 3

we actually tested, and I had on my computer as well.

And that was just straight up World War.

Yeah.

But

I was getting into the Modern Warfare.

Yeah.

Anyway.

So there was that.

This is a story that kind of like it was brewing a little bit earlier, but it seems like it's officially going down.

Yeah, the Ubisoft is being sued over the shutdown of the crew.

A class action lawsuit has been filed because it turns out that when you buy a game,

people believe that you should be able to play it.

I love that out of all the companies that have ever done this, Ubisoft gets to lost it.

I love it.

So, I think part of the reason is also because, let's say you boot up,

I don't know, fucking

Metal Gear Solid 3 online, and you're like, oh, the servers are down, it's over, I can't play.

Well, I still have Metal Gear Solid 3 in my fucking PlayStation to play, right?

Or you, or I boot up

PSO for the Dreamcast original, and it's like, yeah, what the fuck are you gonna, you know, it's like, all right, well, you hit offline mode, I guess.

But in many, in many instances, if it's a game that is like, literally, this is online only, what the fuck are you doing?

Um, there's a bit of an understanding there, but if you could offer some kind of offline thing, that's it, that's fine.

Here, to just say you cannot drive your cars, fuck yeah, fuck your cars, fuck you, fuck everything you've ever done in this game, buy skull and bones, dipshit, you know, and then your, your, your legal defense is, well,

you never knew it, but you never actually purchased a game, you purchased a license to access the game.

I think this situation was incredibly well summarized by Ubisoft

putting out a real statement by real people saying gamers should get used to not really owning their games,

to which the universal response was, I guess you should get used to us not buying them.

And that has happened.

Ubisoft is in dire

straits.

Oh, yeah.

No,

they're currently

putting price tags on it.

I was speaking to somebody

a couple weeks ago who told me

that they are seeing a bunch of CVs coming in from people in different Ubisoft departments

because

people are who work there seem to be convinced that if Shadows does bad, it's time to go.

Man, as somebody who, like, and I know a number of people who have been like careerists at UBI, um,

it's gonna be pretty rough when, well, I get, I mean, if you're good enough, you can figure, you can figure it out.

But Ubi has a very particular workflow, and if you're in their system for like a decade, it's like it's kind of like they say the same thing about like being at like Pixar or so.

Like, you're kind of you're out of the rest of the world and like the compatibility issues with jumping.

Yeah, it turns out you're not allowed to touch the girls at all other offices like you can at the UBI office.

It turns out.

It turns out.

It's not like assumed.

Not all studios, though.

Unless you go to Riot or Bliss.

There are some studios where you can just continue that.

The policy rolls over, baby.

Yeah.

The shittiest part was probably that after that statement, Steam updated its terms to then reflect that you don't own shit

to preemptively be like, hey, man, it's not on us.

Yeah, and then GOG came out and said, all these dudes are pussies.

You own whatever, bro.

Which was nice.

You know,

as someone that held on to the,

I pretty much was like,

not against digital, but I was like, I would rather have my cartridge or my disc physically please for a long time.

And then I gave in because space mattered and it just became more practical.

It was always the way things were going to work out.

But these streaming services that these, these, these fucking stadians and these lunatics, you know, that rose up to be like, hey, you get your metadata and that's it.

But buy us, buy games and give us money for a DLC that you'll never fucking actually own, though.

And once the service shuts down, thank you.

Goodbye.

Get the fuck out.

Yeah, Obisoft's been the worst of it by far.

They've killed the most games the fastest.

They've apparently responded by making it so that the crew sequels have an offline mode now that will be accessible once the servers for those eventually shut down.

Oh, that's great, as long as they give those games out for free

to people who bought the first one.

But they're not going to do that.

So we'll see where this lawsuit goes.

But yeah, generally speaking, I think, Your Honor, I bought it and it's gone.

And

they're saying that I bought a license, but nobody was under that impression.

And, or that was not a thing.

That's not really a thing.

I'm hoping that for the same reason that NDAs can be fucking thrown the fuck out, that a judge can look at that and go, yeah, that's bullshit.

You buy your games.

You own that.

What are we talking about?

But I know a lot of that also tends to depend on where the case is filed.

There's a a really interesting.

This is a minor aside, but California.

Did we talk about Prince of Persia, the Lost

Crown?

That was next on the list.

I was going to say, also, speaking of Ubisoft,

and how that bombed, and

how

Ubisoft just

split the team up and just sent them to various other teams and said, oh, just didn't perform very well.

Oh, wait, Lost Crown.

Sorry, I was going to talk about the rogue.

Never mind.

And I don't know if you played Lost Crown.

It's like easily the best game Usoft has made in like 10 years.

It's incredible.

It's a fantastic game.

Not yet, but like, yeah, I could absolutely.

It's amazing.

And

it's like, it's really good.

Like, why didn't it do well?

Well, the publishing guy over at Larian, Crom Welp, actually made this massive thread explaining that

because that game did not come out on Steam, it died.

And if it had come out on Steam, it would have done really well.

Wait, didn't it come out on Steam, but you had to get a fucking

play thing to get to do it?

No, it came out a year later on Steam.

Okay, because I definitely saw and added it to my list, I remember doing,

but that was not online.

It came out in like January of last year.

It came to Steam like two months ago.

Okay.

And Cromwell went on in this big long tweet thread that was basically like, well, it's an old franchise, so it's going to skew older because you have to know what Prince of Persia is to care, right?

It's a Metroidvania, which also skews older, and the primary skew is PC,

which

also skews older and skews for Steam.

So older people who own Steam are going to be like most of this game's market, and that's the only place it didn't come out.

Yeah, so it bombed.

You know,

when we have a bunch of, when we're a giant game company, we can sacrifice some lambs to force you to use our

launcher.

Like,

you know, we can take a few couple franchises and bleed them out to force your hand over here.

Like, what's the, what are we trying to, are we trying to actually make sales here?

Like, fuck that.

Take a couple.

It's really interesting with Vailguard because EA just gave up.

EA has been fighting the

EA has been fighting the origin slash EA app battle for like, God, how long?

Fucking a decade more?

And they finally just gave up and like, we will sell more copies than the 30% fee will lose.

Like every over and over and over and over and over.

I mean, I don't appreciate that like, you know, when I click play on cyberpunk, it launches the CD Proyect launcher first, and then you got to go again.

But

whatever.

It's there, it'll do.

We're just we're in a like, we're never gonna

live in a world without this bullshit, you know?

It's just I'll tell you what, if if Valgard had asked me to install the EA, whatever, I would, I would have returned it.

That would have been, that would have been like the final straw on me going, I gots to know.

Um,

just removing that little piece of friction like made all the difference.

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

streaming services, though, right?

The prospect of getting people over, though, to browsing and playing on your platform.

And then we can make all the money.

It's all there.

One per each person we bring over is millions of dollars in sales.

Okay, so Wooly,

we've been running the Epic Game Store for years now, and we have successfully brought over 10 guys.

How much money did we make?

That's an easy, that's a quick 10 mil in the pocket.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And those 10 guys are upset because when they open up the store, nothing shows up, actually.

It's just a big black box on the desktop.

They can't launch their games.

But

if you navigate invisibly, you can eventually find which button will launch it.

I don't think anything is funnier than Square Square Enix pretending that Kingdom Hearts is finally available on PC

when it came up.

Like that might be the most disrespectful shit now available on Space.

Oh my god.

Yeah, yep.

Well, so no, I was actually going to say the rogue Prince of Persia was the other one that came out.

Yeah, they made it look less interesting.

Why isn't he purple anymore?

He's not pink anymore.

So they've changed the art style and they've...

Well, so they've released its

incoming is a big overhaul patch,

doubles the size of the game, adds a lot to the backgrounds, and just fleshes everything out.

And then, yeah, also

changes him from pink to flesh-colored.

And I guess somewhere in there, the Dead Cells guys were like having a battle over that art.

And then they were like, Please make him

normal Prince color.

And they're like, No, let's have a dress, a fun extreme art style.

It'll stand out.

And then they're like, Well, the sales show you what they show you.

So, fuck that shit.

Switch it up.

Pink, purple?

Yeah, it's kind of in the middle there.

Something.

Anyway, it's like a lavender.

Anyway, it's Play-Doh colored.

But yeah,

I feel like an internal art battle was lost

with the decision.

But yeah, let me tell you, Wooly, that lost crown game, that Prince of Persia game, that is incredible.

Yeah, I

oh, I from each each the from the first trailers, from each trailer I saw, I could tell.

I'm like, this the combat in this looks fucking sick with the time-based shit.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I just, I'm waiting for a chance to, to, uh, an opportunity to, to jump on stream.

And also, using the UBI shit launcher.

So I got that game for free, and using the Uber's UBI fuck shit launcher is so annoying and infuriating that i ended up not finishing the game

sounds because i had to fucking route it through steam and i had to deal and sometimes it would log me out and it was like a whole fuck and i got so fucking pissed off you play that i just gave up on it uplay was the number one most annoying third-party launcher um oh yeah always origin second

um didn't we do this already i think we've ranked them and yeah we ranked them before and we we can all agree that you play was like the worst.

No, Games for Windows Live.

GFW.

Games for Windows.

Come on.

It's by far the fucking worst.

And I'll give a special shout out to the Microsoft store for stealing parts of your hard drive.

I also like, I feel like Battlenet is immune because it existed before Steam.

You know?

Not in its current form, it didn't.

No, it was not the same, but I feel like Battlenet is like, it's been such a legacy fucking PC.

I've never had trouble with Battlenet.

No, I don't have issues with it either.

Never gave me grief.

But yeah.

Anyway, so

yeah, not a ton.

You know, there's that stuff.

And then there's an interesting game that just came out that

is fucking with my brain.

It looks cool, but...

But here, follow

my logic here.

It's called Ved, V-E-D.

It is a hand-painted RPG, and it looks

super real, not super realistic, super detailed and painterly.

And it's layers of a scene on this.

Yeah, it's interesting because it's like, it's basically like taking a lot of like layered paintings and putting them in parallax with each other.

So as you move through and battle, everything is just scrolling layers and

beautifully animated

or rather beautifully painted.

And it feels like it's animated with the

smart animation tools that they would use to take a quick digital painting and make your character look like they're breathing on the title screen of a mobile game, right?

So when you log into your favorite gacha and you see a piece of art that's actually kind of blinking and bouncing up and down, it's that sort of thing.

But it looks gorgeous.

Yeah, this is one of those games that even if every single thing about the game was complete fucking awful shit.

Live 2D.

You'd still be like, but I want to look at it, though.

Now, looking at the trailer and looking at some of the assets and screenshots as well,

it's gorgeous.

And there's also, there's a particular thing to the way it's lit and the way some assets look where you're like, motherfucker,

AI-generated art has ruined this.

shading style and this color and this this this kind of look where there's things where you're like that's not ai generated, but I've filtered so much of that shit.

So much of the particular kind of art that is like taking art germ style character

lighting and

composition that you look at this and go, this is hand-painted shit, but it gives you that vibe and

my brain's fucked

from filtering out AI.

This is incredibly unlike me because I'm a highly suspicious and incredibly cynical person.

But this has been a topic that has come up because with the backlog and stuff like that, I play a lot of like out there stuff that's like unknown or I don't know anything about.

And people in the chat will go, this looks AI generated.

And I'm like, unless you fucking show me a direct amount of proof

that this thing is using AI shit, I don't want to hear it.

I don't want to sit here and fucking wonder or pretend.

I think everything about generative AI art is terrible, but I think the worst part is looking at things that people actually

really made and doubting it

because other people are shitheads.

It's so unfair to the artists that working on this that because of the way shit has worked out now, I get that initial pullback, whereas a game like this from a couple years back, I would like torment them.

Remember that?

I'd be like, yo, you remember that very well.

Let's play this fucking incredible game.

Everything is beautiful, and it's just, and you just accept it for what it is, which is an incredible labor of love.

And here you have that extra fucking,

you know, but and you have to kind of be like, no, that's not what this is.

So that's it.

Like, I'm getting that vibe off of this gorgeous game.

And it's not their fault.

It's just the fucking shitty world we find ourselves in where...

It just, this exact type of high contrast lighting

looks like it was fed into a prompt in some cases, and some of these layers are just hitting that exact same kind of fucking bullshit, you know?

Anything, too, that kind of goes into,

I mean, I would say

fuck, what's the other thing called?

That really gorgeous 2D platformer.

Man, Orient the Blind Forest

is like another World of the Wisps, also.

Yeah, another type of game where like magical green-blue forests with little fireflies dancing around them.

And, you know, that kind of like that type of imagery is just like the

that's the first thing to go into a prompt for these fucking hacks, you know.

So anytime you're going to be like, no, I'm actually sincerely painting that kind of environment for like the home of the elves or whatever.

It's just.

I hate that I have that in my brain and I have to fucking turn that off on instinct now.

Anyway.

oh, I have a small piece of news that is of note to only a couple people.

So, you've probably heard me talk about the Owlcat games like Pathfinder and Rogue Trader and shit like that.

Yep.

Well, three and a half years after

Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous came out, they have finally patched it the last time and said it is done now.

They have

rebuilt that game from scratch like twice and gone back and like, so there's mythic paths that you choose and expanded on like all of them and put out fucking two season passes with six DLCs.

So serious.

It is now

done.

For real this time.

Yes, there will be bug fixes, but no more changes or contents.

Okay.

Owlcat is like, I think I mentioned to you at some point, like these CRPGs, like you either play them right on release or wait like four or five years for them to be finished.

Yeah.

This is like the most intense out of all of them.

Like I look at the Warhammer one and I'm like, I'm so excited to play that in two and a half years.

That's going to be like my favorite game ever.

I mean, to be fair, I remember when like Baldur's Gate was just at that first chapter and it was like, this is going to be unbelievable.

Give it a minute.

That game has now released three or four times.

It had the early access, then the updated early access, like patch one and seven were worlds apart, and then full release.

And then since the full release to now, they have added like an expansion's worth amount of content in patches.

Like they just added Mass Effect Citadel DLC to the end of the game in a patch.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well past the point where anyone was even asking for that shit, too.

Way past, yeah.

And then last little bit here, but we'll see what the ramifications of this are.

Sony in talks to buy Katokawa.

Sony in talks to push you further towards anime piracy.

This is particularly relevant because A, Katokawa, who they actually had a huge server hack the other day,

and

they got

whatchamacallit, ransom, server ransomed, you know, by a

ransomware or whatever.

And it brutally affected them.

Like, they got everything,

like, tons of employees had got fucking died.

Like, it was really, really bad.

It was one of the rough ones.

I was looking into it.

So, I, I feel, and I feel like, so the last couple press releases they've had for a while have just been like, here's the state of the damage we are undoing.

I feel like that must have had an effect.

But they are also, in addition to being the owners of a ton of like manga and different

studios, the owners of Fromsoft.

So if Sony buys Katokawa, Sony buys Fromsoft.

And that becomes a lock.

It's really interesting how Sony waited until Fromsoft was super expensive to buy instead of buying them at multiple other opportunities they've had over the years

when it would have been just as smart of an idea.

One could argue that if it bought, if they bought them then, that they would not have necessarily had the same trajectory.

No,

I wonder.

I wonder.

So Sony's going in on the sound business decision of buy high, buy higher.

Yes.

But what I mean is, is if Sony bought them when they were smaller, is that a limiter on them that they wouldn't have had now?

You know?

I doubt it.

I don't know.

What will

you know

what would happen, of course, is like, okay, so

fuck any multi-platform releases from then on.

Well, not necessarily.

I mean, I'm playing Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghosts of Tsushimi on my personal computer.

Okay, fuck any multi-platform releases to people.

Simultaneously.

Yes, simultaneously.

You can definitely promote your sequel once the old one gets a Steamport for sure, as long as you sign into your PSN account.

But

now

you have to do Bloodborne?

No.

No, we don't.

Shut up.

Stop asking us about the critically acclaimed game game

we purchased the development from software to do for our hit platform that is there, that is beloved by all.

Last of us, part one, Redux.

Let's go.

That's crazy.

And again, it's not the Fromsoft purchase.

It's the parent company.

Yeah.

And

they want that anime.

Sony wants to own anime.

Katokawa has their hand in every pie.

Like, they own a fuck ton.

Yeah, they also get crunchy roll with that.

They get a bunch of shit.

Hey, what if, hey, what if

Sony did anime, but it was bad?

I wonder what people would do.

Anime can't be bad.

It's anime.

I wonder if people would.

I don't know what people would do if purchasing anime legally would become prohibitive or

arcane or hard to do.

It's just impossible to foresee.

I feel like

Katokawa and Shueisha are like 90%

of all of it.

All anime, all manga, all of it.

I think that covers like.

I wouldn't know.

I know.

I'm not super familiar with that scene.

I'll take your word for it.

All right.

Let's take some letters.

Hey, I just want to give a shout out

to a friend of the show to Purple Sharpie, who is watching the arcane and then said, I got to get back into League of Legends.

And that was like four days ago and now is back out of League of Legends.

Oh, the update from last week.

I was about to say, are you repeating yourself?

Okay.

Yeah, because she lost a match really bad and League of Legends sucks ass and makes you upset.

So all is well with the world.

Return to Skullgirls, stomp someone out, feel better.

Yeah.

Whoever had to.

Whoever was on Skullgirls right after that probably fucking

got a big band symphony finisher.

Let's take, if you got a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Send a good letter, though.

I know some of you are writing, like, shitty letters right now.

Look at it.

Okay.

Think.

Okay, I think I have a good one.

I have a good one.

Here's a good one.

No pressure.

No pressure.

So, name not given.

Hello, Woolwool and Pat Pat.

Aw.

I've heard Woolly express interest in previous podcasts to the subject of rage quitters and the psychology that goes into it.

So I thought I could try to offer some sort of insight.

I am a rage quitter.

Oh, man.

This is going to be fucking awesome.

Yeah.

Hey, wait.

Before we continue, name not given,

I'm going to judge you at the end of this no matter what, but I appreciate

that this is a genuinely nice, yes, like, kind gesture to put yourself out there, and that's cool.

This is a moment of rare introspection into a world that you could never know because they don't think this hard, right?

It's, it's, it's a fucking, id in control driving, and you've had a moment where the id took the back seat for just a second.

The super ego of this gentleman is talking to us.

He's typing to us for a brief moment, and I appreciate that.

I am a rage quitter, and a pretty bad one at that.

And it's not just limited to multiplayer games.

If things don't go my way in single-player games, I'll rage quit them too.

Stuff like XCOM, I'm safe scumming like crazy.

I've even pieced out of DD sessions when combat isn't going my way.

Okay, so what we got is we got somebody who is for real.

Oh, I'm so grateful.

The best way I can describe it is two factors that go into it.

I have high expectations of myself, and I need things to go well as possible, as well as possible the first time, or I can't accept it.

Things must be perfect immediately, or it feels bad.

The second that that's fight or flight, I always choose flight.

When I'm put under any amount of pressure, my immediate response is to want to leave.

It doesn't matter if I'm enjoying the thing in question.

If problems arise that are beyond a comfortable level of challenge, I want to get out of there.

If I'm playing a game and I start losing, I get salty.

Wonder why I'm even bothering to convince myself I've been cheated in some way.

So I leave and move on to something else where I can get my way.

It's not universal, though.

If I'm in a good mood, I can roll with the punches.

If I'm stressed or annoyed ahead of time, I'll give up faster.

I'll try and relate it to you.

Do you remember when you were playing Mass Effect 2 and you reloaded the ending because you got screwed over by mechanics you weren't aware existed?

Yes!

It's that feeling, but my threshold for what counts is way, way lower, and it contains a bit of lying to myself.

Okay.

I'm aware it's a massive problem, and I've tried to work on it to little success.

The DD example I gave was a one-off that resulted in my group dragging me over the coals and giving me an ultimatum of sucking it up or getting kicked out.

Five years on, and I've not done it again.

The feeling hasn't gone away, but societal expectations seem to help me get over myself.

So, yes, making fun of these people does work.

In private, I still do it.

The best solution I've found is to just not play multiplayer games and save scum my 100th hour of fire emblem and peace.

Hope you enjoyed the clown exhibition.

Okay, so there's a lot going on here.

Number one,

this is a lot more,

this is a lot more

personally understandable than I was expecting.

I understand every emotion he's describing.

I felt every single emotion that he's describing, especially I have to do it right the first time.

It must be perfect immediately.

I have to do it perfectly the first time has resulted in me failing out of things that I wanted to try because I'll go, I'll try it and be like, I suck at this,

and

walk off.

That's an anxiety response.

Right.

Yeah.

So,

to step that up,

shame

is the way to deal with this

because shame

causes the same anxiety response, but stronger.

So you get like...

Because

it's in your head confirmation versus everyone around you actually confirms it.

Yeah.

They actually hate you.

And

the other thing.

The other thing is that if you take this to its absolute extreme, this is the mental trap that leads to what's called family annihilation.

Are you familiar with that term, Wooly?

No.

Okay, so for people who are not familiar with the term family annihilator, this is what happens when a traditional,

upstanding, providing man

becomes the centerpiece of his view of his family.

And I am the patriarch and everyone's counting on me to bring home the bacon and provide for them and protect them.

And I lose my job.

And there is a percentage of people that have this flight anxiety response that is so intense

about that failure that it is better for everyone to kill your whole family in their sleep so that they don't find out

that their world is coming to an end.

I've always, I've always, yeah, I've always wondered every time I hear about those stories or like the mom that swerves the van off the road, like, why do you think that, that your family are your objects?

Like, how do you perceive them as your objects

that you are taking with you?

Like, I do.

It is

a form.

Yeah.

Like, it is a form of

my kids look up to me.

And now that I have a little baby man, I understand the feeling of the baby like like going dead dad when i come in the door and how that's the best feeling in the world and letting me down

is worse of letting them down and ruining their life by their dad is now a fucking loser

you feel that is so

destructive that it would be better if they never woke up ever again

and they could just sleep away in blissful ignorance and then once the deed is done, they come back to the real world for one second and go, I just iced out my whole fucking family because I'm a pussy.

And then they kill themselves.

Yep.

But the rationale is that you are the center of the universe and everything revolves around you, including other people's existences.

Therefore, the flight from that feeling should be a black hole that absorbs all around it.

Now, I want to be really clear.

I'm not saying that rage quitting equals the predisposition to family annihilation but you're connecting the threads to the same source feeling yeah so there are little bits and pieces and all of them have to line up just so

to cause a certain situation but yeah no he's describing perfectionist anxiety swerve that spaceship right into the asteroid yeah

and it's and it's the kind of it's the kind of anxiety that would be like

uh hey hey buddy you want to come play baseball with us And you're so fucking freaked out that you're going to do a bad job or embarrass yourself playing baseball that the very first strike, you just throw the fucking thing down and go, no, no, no, it's not for me.

It's better for me to say that baseball is cringe and gay and pretend I don't like it.

Naturally.

Than

to be bad at baseball.

Because that's embarrassing.

So instead,

I'm going to be above baseball because I'm so,

I play real games or, you know, whatever it happens to be.

I mean, to be fair, baseball is boring.

Baseball fucking is awesome to play.

That's the tragedy of baseball and golf is they fucking rule

rules to play.

Yes.

It sucks to watch.

And to be fair, baseball is cringe, okay?

Yeah, there we go.

Hey, listen.

cheating in baseball is lame as fuck.

No, but the actual

fascinating part,

the actual fascinating part is because when you talk about instant perfection,

right?

And needing to have that feeling be immediately like no, no resistance.

I want a smooth ride right away.

Like, I think about how I immediately get rocked by something and and then I'm like, ooh, shit, you, I want to learn.

Game over.

Fuck yeah.

Okay, let's go.

What is it?

What do I got to change this time?

Right.

And you'll, and like, you, when I'm, when I'm LPing and stuff, like, I'll talk out loud.

You'll hear me literally going into Radon being like, sidestep left.

He's going to swing twice, back it up, right?

And like, just doing, I'm just slightly adjusting, slightly adjusting.

And that, and that's how I do everything.

Um,

I found fun in that through, you know, the hobbies and stuff that I've picked and all that.

But I'm, but I remember when we used to talk about this going back way, way when, where

I have

almost never,

there is nothing in my life I can think of except one thing where I've started it and been incredible at it immediately right away, crushed it,

and then it felt amazing.

And then I'm like, oh, I'm great at that.

Like almost everything

has been

fucking eating shit first.

I feel like.

So that makes a good attitude.

But there was the one thing I remember was I skipped grade one.

and I scripped grade one and as a kid who scripped grade one, oh wow, you're so smart.

Oh, you're so smart.

You're you're you wow, you're you're thinking ahead of the average.

You should be you, that's a good trend.

You should be on track to go really far and do a whole lot.

Oh, I guess I am smart.

Yeah.

And you think of that study you learn about where you're like, oh, you praise effort versus

values.

Right.

You praise someone for being smart.

You're so smart.

And then you reach something that's actually a challenge.

And guess what?

You're not so smart anymore.

There's a million kids that are way smarter than you, and you don't instinctually have the answers right away.

You meet some resistance, and you fucking quit.

Because guess what?

You have to work for it for the first time versus praising someone for hard work where they go, I'm going to stick at it and actually try to overcome whatever this wall is.

You're describing the tragedy of the gifted child.

Sure.

That's my life story.

Sure.

Where I went to school, and school up until grade 11, up until grade 11 math, school was a joke.

Like I was like, I was so fucking far ahead the rest of my peers.

I'm like, and like, you know, when you're in English class and like Jerry can fuck, he's like

barely like putting his finger on the page to read like Shakespeare or something and like like stumbling over his shit

and you're sitting there going, man, I'm so fucking

smart compared to these fucking

these

shonen.

And I was grade 10 and 11 math.

And like, despite the fact that I now know I definitely have the capability to do that, I never learned how to study a goddamn thing in my whole fucking life.

Never have.

And I fucking failed that multiple times.

I had to switch math programs in that school.

And if I had done bad enough, it could have stopped me from graduating high school.

Yep.

Yep.

But you, hey, in the first episode, you were so talented.

You overcame the struggle that everyone thought you would never be able to overcome What's going on now in season two?

Oh fuck actual talented people are showing up and so now even now I have this thing in my chest where I'm like well I should be good at something right away because that's what smart people are they're good at something right away

And I'm a smart guy, so I should be good at it right away.

And if I'm not good at it right away, I guess I'm just terrible and stupid.

So yeah.

And so I ate shit and my my face in the dirt on that for a while in multiple things to get, you know, until you kind of go, oh, this is what,

like, there's actually a benefit to being willing to take taking a second, third, fourth, fifth swing at it, right?

Getting into art school in particular, getting into the illustration program, which had a bar where you had to submit an impressive portfolio because they selected,

I think it was, I think year one, they allowed 35 of 200 applicants, right?

So it's like, oh shit, okay, yeah, I'm feeling pretty good about that.

Oh, I managed to make that cut.

That's cool.

I guess I ain't so bad after all.

I managed to do that one little thing in 3D that time, and I dicked around with

a Photoshop.

What are my peers up to?

Oh, they're fucking painters and classical Kari Scuro artists that have been trained from in July like, you know, multiple, it's in, like, absolute, like, violin music is happening when they hit the canvas.

Oh, wow.

Okay, that's cool.

Some of them are already famous.

They're, they're coming from families that are known for art, and some of them are getting hired out of the program before it even finishes because their careers can't wait for them to graduate in time.

Oh, that's cool.

Okay.

Here's my little fucking, here's my, it's, it's, it's not Dragon Ball, but it's, it's, he's got spiky hair, though.

You know, like, you know, I, it's insane what you have to face up to and compare yourself with.

And this is you want to hear how late in the game this mentality can get.

Um, in grade 11, there was a girl who joined my grade 11 grade, and she was homeschooled prior, but she had to you know finish out a year so she could get a proper uh high school certificate so she could go on to university.

And um, she was

she got 100 in everything.

Like literally perfect.

Yep.

And also

the extracurriculars, a bunch of them.

Always.

And I,

she would study in between periods and she would go home and study and she would come in early and talk to other people about their study plans.

And then, and I remember thinking, well, the only reason she's getting better grades than me is she's studying.

That actually means she's stupid.

Because I don't want want to study.

My grades are almost as good.

Oh, that's incredible.

If you have to study, you're basically dumb.

That's crazy.

And that's the way that I convinced myself.

That's wild.

Oh, man.

Okay.

Yeah, studying's for dumb people.

Oh, my God.

See, because I thought you were going to say, because that girl in our class, like when she did not

crush it one report card, still on the honor roll, still fucking, you know, first percentile.

but when she did not, she did not get perfect one time and absolute devastation and tears, right?

No, no, she, she, she rolled it.

Okay.

What are you going to be when you grow up?

I'm going to be a doctor.

And everyone's like,

yeah, she's going to be a doctor.

That, you know, that type of person.

And this discussion is also never complete without talking about Tomo Ohira, the first, the first

Street Fighter 2 champ back in the day before people knew about Devon Daigo or Alex Valley.

This was the early, early years.

And he disappeared.

But after winning so many tournaments,

people were like, where the fuck did he go?

He's the greatest.

What happened?

Right when things were starting to pick up, before

the FGC, as we know it, was getting the balls rolling.

And basically, he's like, yeah,

winning felt like nothing but relief.

There was no joy.

There was nothing positive.

All I felt was relief.

Oh, thank God I didn't lose.

I won because I'm supposed to.

And losing was non-stop agony for weeks.

Why would you do that?

Why would you opt into that in life?

I don't mean to get like too personal, but I have had a long, long struggle for like most of my life that I am getting better at now.

That

I like will resent.

a certain degree of compliment.

Like, hey, you did a really good job.

And I'm like, I was supposed to do a good job.

Huh.

Like, why would you compliment me for doing the bare minimum, which is excellent?

Like, anything less than excellent is failure

and would be embarrassing.

So, why are you telling me that you're proud of me for not being an embarrassing fuck-up?

Oh, yeah, that's a project you got to work on.

That's something to work on.

Yeah, no, that's been a lifetime thing.

That's that's

uh the

yeah, like, what, like, 95%

is like the like average.

And then someone correctly says, that's insane.

That's not how numbers work.

To which I'll reply, that's loser idiot talk.

Second place is first loser.

Yeah.

And that's what losers tell themselves when they only get 80 on a test because they're too stupid.

And so in conclusion, our dear, our dear rage quitter, we all actually feel

things similar to what you're describing, and there's reflections in that and the insecurities and anxieties in day-to-day life, all over the place, from top to bottom.

But if you don't have the pleasure of eating shit really fucking hard somewhere early on in your life and getting a nice little combo breaker to what you expect your natural abilities to be able to deliver, then

yeah, when you're sitting down having fun playing a video game, which is supposed to be a leisurely activity,

you can find yourself experiencing this, where if it doesn't go yourself your way immediately, it sucks.

And the whole point of these games, in many cases, is that there's a challenge, and that the challenge overcoming the challenge is the fun part.

You know,

that's literally what a lot of games are designed to be.

It's, it's, um,

it's a lesson that fucking sucks, but is fantastic for what you eventually get out of it.

And now I've, I always talk about like, I got to kick the tree, I got to rock Lee it because my instincts are not going to give me what I need to do when I see something for the first time.

I don't have, I don't grasp it as fast as other people might.

But if I get around to it the fifth time through, then okay, cool.

I think I get what it wants me to do now.

You know?

But yeah, to

pare this off, this gentleman or lady, possible, is correct.

Shame is the solution.

For people trapped in what's called maladaptive reasoning or maladaptive coping, I mean, you can heal yourself and all that shit, but that could take your whole life.

What you need to do is create a larger, scarier threat if you don't do it.

Like, hey, are you having trouble filling up this paperwork on time because you're getting distracted and it makes you nervous?

you need

to set up a threat that will burn your house down if you don't finish that shit on time.

Because the fear of your house burning down will cause you to file your paperwork.

Yeah, so if you run out of the D and D game like a huge piss baby, everyone's going to call you that for the next couple of years.

And then you'll suffer social ostracization, which is terrible.

But

when you rage quit out of the game at home on your own, you need to set up.

Who's going to judge you?

No one.

Me, Woolly.

So you need to set up some consequences we'll judge you

like you know like you know what's a really good example of this to rage quitter people

if you were like even on discord streaming your matches to your friends

that will help because your friends will be like did you just quit out you pussy yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

and so so this is the what i really appreciate too about this little insight as well is the part where you can take this nugget of data and extrapolate it to other versions of this type of player.

So there's the type of player who needs not only everything to go so smoothly and feel no resistance whatsoever, but they also have to feel like they're stomping on you and taunting you and teabagging you, and they have to feel superior to you and you have to be inferior because their day sucked that much.

And ooh, it feels good for someone else to be dumber and worse at the game than me.

There is an entire genre of professional content creator who decries

sweaty matches in a wide variety of games.

But what they're actually complaining about is that their wins that they still get

forced them to try

because forcing them to try

means they weren't so far above these people that it's like a joke.

Winning isn't enough.

Destroying isn't enough.

I had to do so without any effort whatsoever.

Yep.

Yep.

I shouldn't have to sweat.

I shouldn't have to sweat here.

Fuck this.

Why do I have to try?

I came on to stomp.

It's not enough for me to be good.

I have to be so good that other people are non-threats.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And,

you know, I love, because there's people are, you get these clips every now and then of like, it's, yeah, the person who, it's the triple combo, right?

You have the teabagging taunter who uh

then proceeds to uh lose because they were taunting long enough for you to fall on the ground after getting wall-splatted, wake up, like the best ever, wake up, and then while they were taunting, you comboed them, you supered them to death, but before the super finishes, they rage quit,

you know, and you're like, oh, it's the one, two, three.

Like, you're a shitbag on top and you need everything to go your way.

And also, I'm out if it does it for a second, right?

The part where you're like, I deserve that never even remotely happens to occur.

Like, yeah, it's, it's great.

It's great.

Oh, hey, there's a last second piece of news today

from Steam.

Steam is now changing their store descriptions to include descriptions of the type of anti-cheap

included in a game.

Cool.

So instead of saying something like includes anti-cheat software punk buster, it will now say user kernel level anti-cheat

requires manual removal afterwards.

Nice to know.

Nice to know.

Yeah, as this shit is becoming way and more and more common.

Nope.

That's good.

Anyway,

yeah.

Good stuff.

Good stuff.

Do as I say, not as I do.

Just be bad at things.

Not like me.

You know, I actually look back, and this is a little bit too therapizing, but fuck it.

I'll say it.

I talked about this on a different stream.

I was talking to my darling wife, Paige, and I was like, you know, it's crazy.

My dad was good at everything.

And like, you've heard me talk about my dad.

And like, my dad was awesome, and he's like my hero, and I love him.

And it's crazy.

My dad was good at everything he ever did, ever.

And then Paige said, Well, that you could see.

And I'm like, What do you mean?

And like, we went through it.

I'm like, oh, dad didn't try new things in front of the kids.

Everything my dad did was something he already knew he could crush.

Yeah, there you go.

We'd play pool.

We'd play cards.

We'd play backgammon.

He'd work on the yard.

He'd build things, stuff like that.

I don't think I ever saw my dad try something new in my entire life.

Brilliant, absolutely fucking brilliant.

Yep.

And that's the gift I must give to my child, in which I am perfect.

Put the blinders up.

Controlled, controlled exposure.

Listen, little baby Pat Jr., do you want to learn how to play Street Fighter?

Well,

yeah,

get ready for this.

I appreciate as well

the Herculean effort it takes for

someone to rip outside of their

in the middle of being shitty and knowing it's what you are to take a second to like have an outer body experience and capture that because I find I find these types of things incredibly fascinating I need to get that inside look you know you know it makes no sense but you're just like this is what I am I am is what I am and I and I and I admit it I I I admire the ability to to capture that about you know what

I just I just internalized like uh something to somebody who doesn't understand like the rage-quitting feelings that we're talking about I can I can turn it into everyone's favorite a food analogy uh have you ever taken a bite of something someone's made for you

and every cell in your body is like spit that the fuck out right

you get that out get it out of your body

and what do you do you go

and you chew it and you fucking force it down

because you don't want to deal with the societal blowback that's going to happen of you spitting it back out on your fucking plate.

And that's how shame can prevent you from rage quitting.

However, if they eat the rotten meat that is your emotions, but if they gave you Tupperware to take home and you were by yourself in your apartment and you took a bite of that shit,

you would throw the Tupperware away.

You wouldn't even keep the fucking Tupperware.

It is hitting the walls.

There you go.

All right, that's a good one.

We'll leave it there.

Have a good week, everybody.