CSB294: Louis and the Gayboi Squad

Hello.

Hey, Wooly, how you doing?

What's up?

How's your back?

It's doing better.

Fantastic.

Yep, definitely doing better.

And I have a...

Yeah, basically

the...

Are we, yeah, I'm waiting to see if

OBS is doing the thing it did last time.

Oh, I'm delayed again!

Huh.

Woo-woo!

Huh.

It's not a muting thing, but it's some weird issue that OBS has just decided to start doing.

You start desynced, and then you re-sync eventually, right?

That seems to be.

That's what I do.

Okay.

That's a weird one.

It's a weird one.

It's a weird one that...

Are you just doing like

display capture?

It's the exact same setup it has been for years.

I've changed my mic to

like

my gain and stuff.

I've put more

that wouldn't.

Yeah, I've put some better filtering on so the peaking won't be as bad as it used to be, but that has nothing to do with the video.

All right.

I've also changed my lighting, and I can tell I've done, I've changed some stuff behind me as well, but none of this is,

yeah.

Okay, well, are you synced now that we've stalled for time?

Oh,

I don't know.

Am I?

I think you should be.

That's crazy.

Let's make sure.

Let's.

Oh, my goodness.

What an exciting adventure.

Nope.

I'm not.

Okay.

You know what?

Just go to Be Right Back and come right back and see what happens.

Okay.

Am I synced now?

Oh, man.

It's got to be an OBS bit.

It's got to be an OBS bit.

It's got to be OBS.

Not even close?

All right.

Turn that shit off.

Let's start off.

All right.

Well, BRB for the video.

Audio will keep it.

Audio's here.

Y'all, this shit is.

No, no, the audio is the desync part.

But I mean, but it's like it's...

Through OBS in particular that this

comes up.

Obviously, our conversation's fine right now in Discord.

I guess so.

Oh, my goodness.

Just don't even put this part into

the home version.

No, I'm super keeping it in for the home version.

Oh, yeah.

I did.

Oh, that's great.

I think it's the last time as well.

And I'm super keeping it in.

Oh, that's great.

It's a little secret cast in the middle of the cast.

I don't know how you would even test this.

Well,

ultimately, whatever.

We're back live now.

Oh, we are.

I sure am.

And I imagine

it's totally not scuffed anymore.

I can't see that shit on my end.

It's totally going to be great.

It's super good.

I'm sure it's great right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Perfect.

Not a problem.

Not a problem.

All right.

So I'm.

Apparently.

Apparently it's still scuffed.

The last couple of times we had to restart OBS, if I remember correctly.

That's what I just did.

You know, what?

The whole OBS?

Yep, I shut and restart OBS in that.

Oh, you're going to have to restart the whole computer, brother.

All right.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, sick.

All right.

Actual BRB for real.

Big, big, big, big, B, B R B.

Shabam.

That's live.

That's back.

That's live.

I'm back.

Hello.

And you are synced.

I'm synced now.

Yeah.

Synchronize.

You can pre-wash me

synchronize.

Because I'm going into the sink.

Hey,

there you are.

That sucked.

That's terrible.

But at least it happened at the same time as your video.

So good.

Alright.

So how's your back?

Yes.

So

it's improved a good bit.

And yeah, you know,

physiotherapy exercises.

You know, less and less of the straps and drugs needed as time has gone on.

I've, you know, been able to kind of go like, hmm, how long can I go without needing a re-up?

You know, and you kind of test the boundaries a bit.

And yeah, no,

it's improved quite a bit.

It still is basically at a point where

too much in the same position feels like it activates, and a couple of like, you know, twists and turns here and there will get it going.

Similarly, like, so this chair I can chill in,

you know, and it's not as much.

The couch, I feel a time limit.

This is a Herman Miller, right?

This is a Herman Miller I'm sitting on currently.

Yeah, exactly.

So I'm feeling a time limit on things, but

yeah, no, it feels as if, like, okay, from here on out, I'm just going to have to keep up the

strengthening stuff.

But the majority of the moment-to-moment pain is gone.

And I'm super happy and thankful that that was the case.

And that was a lot quicker than I was originally fearing.

Yes.

Last time was,

you know, yeah, that's terrifying.

So, um, no, no, that's that's it's good, it's cool.

Um,

I'm glad, man.

Thank you.

And yeah, then, you know, time to not let that shit ever happen again.

And

yeah, so in terms of no more jumping.

Well, over again.

Fuck.

Yeah.

No, if anything, it's like time to make my core like ridiculous.

I'm time to get that fucking insane super middle going so that the strength is, you know, so that I'm ready for

title defense mode.

You know?

So

I don't know if this was pointed out to you, Woolly, but there's actually an incredible continuity over the last couple of weeks of podcasts.

Yeah, I did see the hilarious bit from,

was it Hat Talk or so, where it was like, hey,

I found a new way to sleep.

Check out my pillow, guys.

I sleep on it and it's pretty great.

And I'm like, I don't know if this is a good idea.

Let's check in next week with how you're feeling.

Yeah, and there you go.

You know,

there's a lot of things we can point, we can point towards, we can point fingers at.

You know, is the pillow one of them?

I don't know.

I doubt it, but who's to say?

Even if it is, it would be be like minor at the unbased.

But it is, there is a, there is a, a, a continuity that, that, that we can draw there.

Um, yeah, yeah.

But, uh, no, the, the, the goal at this point in time is to get a fucking eight pack, and then nothing can ever hurt my lower back again.

But that's on the front.

Well, it's core.

It's all, it's the middle.

It's the whole middle.

The whole middle gets tough.

The whole middle?

The whole middle gets tough.

I know I got a tough middle.

Hit me with a baseball bat in here.

I wouldn't feel nothing.

Damn.

You're protecting these organs, sir.

You ever see Qi Kong,

the conditioned breathing, where

someone just punches your stomach 80 times, and you just kind of like, oh,

you take it, you're like, oh,

you know, it's wild shit.

But, you know, I don't need, I don't, I mean, we'll get there.

For now, I'll settle for can I skip a rope?

Yeah.

Two times.

Can I lift both feet off the ground a couple inches without lightnings shooting in my body?

That's that's that's you know basic basic simple baby steps.

Um

but yeah, so um

I

did

take the time to

besides kind of like adjust some sound setup, lighting setup, and things

around here.

I sat down and

put some work into Metaphor Refantasio.

Metaphor Refantasio out now on the Xbox.

I don't know if it's out on anything else.

I can't say for sure whether it's out on anything else.

You can't say for sure.

It may or may not be, but it's definitely.

I don't know what a not an Xbox is.

It's definitely out on Microsoft PC and Xbox.

Man, that is like the funniest thing over and over.

All right, hey.

I don't know what kind of backroom deals have to be made to do.

I know exactly what backroom deal is.

Microsoft agreed to handle their advertising.

Let me rephrase.

I don't know why these kind of backroom deals,

but, you know.

Seems like a stupid, stupid deal.

But hey, none of that matters because the game is very fun and it's very good

and I have enjoyed it.

Where are you at?

So progress-wise, I have just completed the Necromancer Dungeon.

That's a good dungeon.

And the first thing that

I want to bring to attention, call attention to, is

I know that this is a much more recognizable kind of fantasy setting, and we also know that the Persona and SMT games are known for their music, and you've talked about how fucking solid it is.

I am like jaw a fucking gape at how awesome the music is in a lot of these instances.

So in particular, right, you have to go, well, all right.

The Velvet Room theme.

What do you, this has been so good that it's become become a staple of the entire franchise that you've stuck to.

How the fuck are you going to compete with that?

How dare you even think about competing with that by bringing some new shit into the equation?

That's nuts.

That's insane.

That thing is so good that

it amplifies why three is as good as it is.

That theme in particular.

The fucking academia theme, man.

Oh,

it's like we take, so we like perfect example.

Um,

I've been when I've been playing it, Punch Bomb has heard that music playing in, you know, throughout the house and whatever in the background, and came up and was just like, So, are you at like the final boss or something?

Like, what, what, what are you playing here, you know?

And I was like, oh, yeah, it's the new thing that's P6, but not P6 and stuff.

It's like, yeah, I'm like, right.

I'm just chilling with more.

Yeah, and I'm like, so that, that's not the final boss theme.

That's the new Velvet Room theme.

And she's like, oh, and I'm like, yeah, because you're going to hear it a lot, so it better be fucking good.

You know, the entire concept of we're going to take something as good as a finale and just drop it immediately in front of you.

What a good idea!

What a great idea, man.

It swells, it builds, and like listening to it on loop, I have no issues whatsoever because of just how fantastical it is.

So, there is a specific problem with that piece of music,

like explicitly, that one piece of music.

And that is

on like Moore's second upgrade, you can do all your archetype stuff without going to see him.

I was about to bring that up.

So I was about to bring that up.

And it's to say, because I was like, and I just got the thing that says, you don't have to go visit him as much as you used to.

And it's like, and you're like, I wonder how often I'm going to go see Moore.

Once I got that upgrade, I think I saw more like 10 times.

Oh, man.

Okay.

Okay.

I was worried about that.

Dude, you never go back.

Because sometimes you'd at night, like, I'm thinking of an average P game and like

you'd get, you'd go to sleep and just get pulled into the Velvet Room for random reasons, you know?

Yeah, all the time.

There's scenes happening, you know, Igor's got shit going on, or the twins, or the attendant, whatever.

But yeah, here, I guess you'd go back to either read entries on the new archetypes you get and to finish his quests and pet the cat, right?

That's it?

Pretty much.

Well

there's a couple minor features that unlock about halfway through the game in there, but like you go in, do them and leave and then they're done for hours.

Well, I'm not going to say I don't want quality of life because yeah, walking around and changing.

Okay, first of all, I do have to say changing archetypes.

Why is that buried in the equipment menu?

That's an odd question.

You can do it through the archetype menu, also.

Okay, so early on, when before you have the archetype menu, yeah, you have to do it through equipment.

Yeah, and I was like kind of going, why is there not an archetype thing here?

And it's just, it's not, I guess it's not there yet until you get the

yeah, no, when you get the ability to go to the archetype menu on triangle on the main menu,

you, you, you just start changing through that.

But it initially took a second for me because I couldn't find find where to change archetypes.

I'm like, there's no way.

Yeah, it's a fucking item.

Yeah,

it's listed amongst your equipment, you know?

It's fucking weird.

So I was like, that's baffling.

And then also there's no quick D-pad button to go straight to that screen.

You hit left to go to your items.

You hit right to take on, to go to your, to go to all the other ones, you know, but you just don't, you don't go straight there.

But anyway,

I have a question for you about metaphor.

Okay.

You're at the end of the first big, big dungeon.

Like proper timed calendar dungeon.

Proper calendar dungeon.

What

is

the stat distribution for your man?

Your main man.

Okay, so when I started, I chose...

When they asked me what kind of person I was at the recruitment, I said I'm pretty lucky.

Yeah.

So

I had a massive luck boost, which not typically what I go with, but fuck it, whatever.

Let's see what happens.

so

those little teeth shitheads will tell you how all the stats work throughout the game,

and they're all good.

Okay, they're all good.

Luck is literally a skill.

The question here is that it's what it describes the benefits as is item discovery, right?

Yeah, it also affects your critical rate.

Huh.

For with physical attacks, interesting.

Well, I don't do that.

It also affects

how fast you recover from statuses and if you get affected by statuses and if you affect others with statuses.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Critting, I don't see often because I'm not using regular attack that often.

Oh, no, crits can happen on all physical type attacks.

So all the warrior skills can crit.

Okay.

But that is to say, like, yeah, I'm mostly doing skills and I'm mostly seeing, I'm mostly doing weaknesses, you know, so there's not many opportunities for a non-one more

action to occur.

You know, yeah, so for physical attackers, like strength builds, luck is, is, is very,

very appreciated because every crit is another half turn.

Yeah, so once I got Brawler, I saw that kind of come into handy once or twice with the

fists, and that was pretty sick.

It's interesting seeing the pace of a dungeon in this game versus, you know, Persona and

SMT

because

they don't.

You talked about this, right?

They don't force you to do it all in one day, nor now, and I know from what you said about the way the calendar works, do you feel the pressure?

Because days are not wasted, right?

Days can't be wasted unless you fucking go way out of your way to do something weird.

But that inner min-maxer wants to not waste calendar days where they can be spared and wants to have as many extra days to do things as possible.

And so you're like, okay, in order to do that, how do you take on these dungeons?

P3, 4, or 5, SMT, like all of it, it's always been, well, SMT is different, but

in those games, I've one-shot the dungeons

pretty much consistently the entire time across all of those games.

Oh, yeah.

It's gotten.

I think the one that always gets me is

P5's Kamashita Castle

is

really long to one shot at that part of the game.

Yeah.

Arc, right?

Yeah, the

goal of putting these calendar dates there has always been like, yeah, you have some time

to chip away at it, but

no one does that, right?

Or I don't know if people do, but I know you don't.

I know no one I know that plays it does.

All of the people, everyone I know that plays these games just goes Pam one day, and then you free up two weeks to do all your activities because you want to get all your bonuses from those things, right?

In this case,

they're like, you will go to sleep or you will struggle.

So

the only way

you could one-shot that dungeon is if you

formerly beat the optional Guptaros dungeon

because the optional Guptaros dungeon is way harder but shorter than the main story dungeon.

Okay,

and if you do that, then and you go into the necromancer dungeon, then this is what happened to me for the first 50, 60% of that dungeon, enemies won't be able to hurt you or attack you.

You'll just one-shot them instantly.

So you don't use anything.

You don't spend anything.

Yeah, okay.

So when I went in there, I really only had to fight the second half of that dungeon.

Now, the interesting part about what you're saying here is to get to that Guptoros dungeon first, you have to get your wisdom up, which takes a couple days.

And then you have to go clear that.

So you're spending days on other things anyway, which means you can't go day one straight to

that original dungeon and blast through it.

You could probably do it, but it's hard.

So what I think, So what I think you can do is pick mage and then go to the fountains and just

and stand there, right?

You sure can.

But that's not going to refill your team.

That's just going to refill you, right?

That's going to refill the team.

Oh, the whole team?

Okay, so yeah.

The whole team.

So then that's it.

You can do it the slow

prodding way.

I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking

it only regenerates one MP per attack or kill.

That would take a while.

but it's really, really, really going to take a while once your characters have double, triple the MP.

And that's where metaphors like pacing comes in really, really interestingly.

Every dungeon has a different

core

timeline structure.

So, like, the first dungeon, the one that you just did,

is a Persona 5 castle.

A Persona 5, like, what's it called?

Palace.

Palace, Palace.

Yeah.

Right.

Some of them

are not like that at all.

Okay.

Like, at all.

Okay.

And

the game moves

like...

The game flip-flops between

you should do everything you possibly can before doing the final dungeon, sorry, before doing the story dungeon, or bang the dungeon out immediately

and then have free time.

And it flip-flops between the two places.

Now,

ultimately, I know that you're supposed to have freedom with this, so it's all on you, the player, to determine, like, well, what are you okay with?

And

I was like, I hit a point where I was like, hmm, where am I?

What floor am I at?

Where is this going?

And I was like, all right, you know what?

I've stretched it far enough.

Let me go take a nap and I'll come back and do it in two.

And I did, came back on the next day

and

switched to a low MP efficiency setup, which I found to be pretty solid by having two brawlers and then one healer up top.

And then the healer just focuses on putting their life back in place as they spend HP to do damage, right?

It worked as long as the enemies you're fighting are susceptible to those attack types.

And I noticed, and that's something as well that's really interesting here is like the switch-ups from area to area are like

I had to do full team

archetype restructures as you enter like a new floor where it's like, yeah, yeah, the thing you were expressly just doing does not work here.

Switch it all up again, you know?

Yeah, so the first like half of the game, you're like, oh, this shit doesn't work.

Oh, I got nothing going on here.

I'm going to switch it up to this.

But then, as your number of archetypes increases and your like inherit skill goes up,

you find yourself being able to create characters that can cover like this entire quadrant of the diagram.

And this quadrant of the diagram.

And this and this and this.

So that's my, I'm really hoping that we speed up the inherited skills

because, yeah, ultimately I want to focus in on a favorite type and like push it.

But the feeling I'm getting like right off the bat here in this early game is like we do not want you to sit on one.

Even in Stoll's case, where I'm, I was like, oh, well, his default warrior

setup is pretty good, but like, it was halfway through the Necromancer dungeon where it was like, and time to switch that out, you know?

So, finger raise.

There is,

I've described it before, but now that you're in it, you have like a better like grasp on it, like the feel.

Yes, I am going to call Metaphor's experience system

a democratic experience system.

Um,

so I have gotten to a point, I actually got to this point like on Dungeon 3 where Stroll was on, um, I think he was on Warrior, but he might be on his other like major archetype.

Um, where I'm like, I'm happy with Stroll.

Stroll can just stay like this forever.

He is reliable.

He is solid.

He is good.

I am just going to use him

to feed the other character's experience.

Okay.

And when I wanted to change Stroll to something different,

I had two other characters that were now in his place where I'm like, I'm very happy with this class.

Okay.

I'm very happy with this setup.

You guys are now going to feed stroll your

extra experience.

Okay.

And so, like, yeah, no, if you find something that really, really works and you have the inherited skills that work in for you, you could roll that forever and just use that person as an experience battery.

Something else.

Something else that's interesting too is like,

I remember sometimes going into, you know, again, earlier Persona games with a team that was like, okay, I'll make sure that I have a couple of different demons that have a, you know, that can target, yeah, a good half of the weaknesses or so.

Yeah, you want the weakness role.

You want the whole thing.

And

the

idea here of being like, okay, well, you can't cover it all, but here's some little things you can do to supplement that.

And one of them is like the mage skills, where you get like mage wind or like, you know, mage electricity or mage fire.

Oh, the

accessory that you have.

The accessories, yeah.

If you put on the character, exactly, right?

And it's like, okay, so that'll supplement and give you a nice thing where I'm like, great, I wanted Hamma on Hulkenberg.

Let's go.

Or you want a full party heal on the character when you don't have access to it.

But the trade-off there is you're spending double the MP on those casts.

And you're losing

your accessory spot.

Yes, true, true, true.

So it's like, how badly do you want to round out your ability to take on the weakness chart?

I don't know what you could do, right?

You could just wait until you get to the part of the dungeon where you just auto-kill people and just get a little bit more archetype XP.

I mean, I,

yeah,

yeah, and I did spend one or two of the little collectible pocket ones just for like, you know, getting, getting me to the places I wanted to go.

But

what I eventually hit was as I was, I really wanted to do it in two, and I was getting to the like final scraps of my MP pushing up that staircase to the necromancer and

I was like I think I can do this.

I'm using HP brawler spells mostly.

It's okay.

Boss is fairly difficult.

But you wander into like one kind of room past

this point and the shit in there is like, not only does what you have not work, but like you better just quit and reload your save right now because you're like the fucking humans in here are going to just fuck you up.

You have nothing on their weaknesses, and they have

and you're you're they have everything on you, essentially, you know?

Um,

so it's like, right, right.

This is the

press turn,

uh, um, the press turn.

Feast or famine means something.

This is now on famine, yeah.

And it's like, I'm just gonna, like,

I literally just reload your save.

You know, like,

don't even try to play.

Um,

but it forced me to then go rest a second time.

And I was like, motherfucker, three days?

Oh, and that felt bad.

I was like, I hate waiting.

I'm like, three days is too much.

You know, but I'm like, I guess that's what this game is doing.

It's actually telling you you're going to use the calendar.

I

will tell you something.

So,

particularly since you started with luck,

once you get out of that major story dungeon,

you're going to really

want to do that thing for Brigitta

because you will unlock the solution

to

every numerical part of that game

like that.

Okay.

And that game will change, and your interaction with that game schedule will change as a result?

Here's something, here's a heaping amount of praise I want to put on the overworld as well.

When you are running around town

in Japan and

you're deciding whether to go play baseball or take a hot dip or hang out with a

whatever, a shogi player.

These are all activities that you push here and you get your stats from.

And you know what?

Hey, Shogi Player is cute.

So that's fine.

But, you know, all right, other activities, whatever.

In this game, in this fantasy setting, when you run by a dude who's like, hey, do you want to hear about why everyone hates my race and treats me like shit?

Yeah,

actually, I would be really interested in hearing.

Yeah, and it's like, oh, this will raise your tolerance.

Or like, yeah, yeah, I don't care.

I want to know about the lore.

And I'm like, I'm like, all the little things going on that are like time-spend activities, with the exception perhaps of like people watching every other thing going on was something a lot of them are really good there's a there's one of the towns where you can go bungee jumping oh wow okay okay and everybody but it's not bungee jumping it's like hey you want to look cool and just jump off this cliff with a rope you'll look fucking cool

build up some followers yeah nice get get increase your fucking follower count um but i just i found that like all the activity decisions were really good ones because it wasn't even the reward as much as it was like the thing you got for the activity itself or whatever it was, lore-wise.

It was interesting to me.

And I'm like, damn, I do want to spend my time hearing about this story of old or whatever else is going on in this land.

I want to know more, you know?

It's a pretty good

proposition for your time.

So,

I have two more pro tips for you that will help you in your brain.

Number one is there are some of those stat-up events that are time-limited or on specific days, days, so they happen quite often.

Starting at the second town, you know that podium out

in front of the cathedral where people are hanging out with buyers go hang out?

Yeah, yeah.

So every town has one of those.

And sometimes you can check that out and another candidate will be on there and you can debate them in front of the crowd.

Oh, sick.

Okay.

Hell yeah.

And it gives you a huge amount of points, but only if you win.

Okay.

Yeah.

And the second thing is, I have been informed over and over: yeah, you should not worry too much about time.

Okay.

I'm right now on track to be

ending the game with something like 15 to 25 extra days.

I saw someone say they beat the game with weeks to spare.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I find that

I'm at the point of the game where I've unlocked every bond.

Okay.

And I have one stat

away from being maxed out.

And I'm looking at the amount of days on the calendar left.

And I'm like,

I'm totally going to be able to do all of it with weeks to fucking spare.

Okay.

No problem.

Okay.

Something else that was interesting too is like as I was initially setting up those the builds with everybody everybody and doing the transferring of skills and archetypes, I was getting like kind of mag starved and I was like, ah, shit, okay.

And I was like, I guess that does happen.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I was like running back.

I'm like, okay, one, is there a fast way to just run back to the statue and collect my daily, you know, mag?

And I was like, I guess you got to teleport and surf over to it.

But then, obviously, completing, you know, a dungeon, I was like, oh, fuck, overflowing.

Tons of it, right?

For now.

For now.

Is there a, yeah, so that's kind of the question.

It's like, are you in a perpetual state of like mag overflow

and mag starvation?

No.

Okay.

Not me.

Okay, okay.

Though I may have,

you know, in RPGs, when you're, when you finish a dungeon at level 55 and the party member joins you and they're level like 38.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, you know what?

Overdoing it, yeah.

Yeah, I'm not too worried about Mag, I'll be quite honest.

I mean, I'm assuming the fact that there's an exchange rate person to be like, do you want to turn it into cash?

Is there because people will find themselves with more mag than they know what to do with that sucks.

That is useless.

What you want to be able to do is turn cash into the other way around, but that would defeat the whole thing.

That would

defeat the game.

That would literally, yeah, no,

that doesn't work.

But I want it, though.

Unless you plan extensively for it, like Darkest Dungeon and its multiple currencies in one, you know.

But yeah, okay.

That is a situation that you find you don't have, but you also go ham.

So

there's an ability that you get to equip that causes a bunch of extra money to drop from enemies when you kill them.

Okay.

And

once you you find a spot with those flowers that just spawn enemies infinitely,

and you're auto-killing them with a single strike,

you could put on a podcast such as the Castle Super Beast podcast, and you can just abuse it as hard as you want.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, I think I'm just going to take the game at its own pace.

I don't know that I'm, it's long enough, and I don't know that I'm going to necessarily feel like stopping to,

you know,

fuck with the flow.

there's a very strange thing that happens when you do that

when you when you get significantly stronger than the game's um

base content

um you are flying through those micro dungeons in like half an hour because nothing in there actually fights you

um and as a result you essentially stop gaining xp entirely uh

because you're not having to stop you're not having to retread you're not having you're just auto-killing everything at like a 50% reduction.

And it's giving you less because it's because of where there's relative, okay.

So then eventually it catches up with you, yeah.

So the place that I'm at right now, I'm like, there's I don't have to do nothing until I get to the final dungeon.

Like, I'm good to just coast on my current character strength until the final dungeon.

Well, shit, okay.

Yeah, that game's real good.

It's very good.

It's very good.

I would say the most interesting thing about it is that it is consistently exciting in the way that it changes up its own formula.

Hmm.

Okay.

Like every

calendar date has its own flavour.

It's not like, all right, this is the

dungeon.

Yeah.

This is the

art dungeon.

It's like they're like different things.

Because yeah, I mean, like

there is always a, like, you know, a particular contrivance that you establish early, whether it's like, oh, we got to wait for Tartarus, or we got to have the next victim in the TV, or, you know what I mean, whatever it is, or just like, and it would just be like, right, you're pretty much, you know, what the next Mega Man Dr.

Wiley boss is going to be, and then you're, and when it's going to pop up on the thing.

Yeah, I was very surprised at a couple of the

calendar events.

But the one thing I do know will happen is every time something big goes down, whatever it is or whoever is involved with it will always be like, and that's why in two weeks' time, I'll be making my move.

And you're like, well, yeah, the game format requires that.

That's not true.

Really?

Okay.

Okay.

I'm trying so hard.

Yeah, okay, okay.

Like, that is not true.

Okay, because it certainly sets up an expectation that, like, you know, it's like, all right, we cleared it.

Well, now what's going to happen next?

It's like, oh, big shit's going down.

And I in two weeks, actually,

I can't actually describe one that, uh, like a way that that is not the case.

The primary deadline, like, there's, there's the story and what I'd call the event

deadline.

That's one thing.

But the real deadline is we have to leave this town on this date to make it to the next town in time.

Ah,

okay.

Like, the way it's phrased is like, yeah, boys and girls, we gotta leave by the 23rd.

So, everybody, get your shit done by the 23rd because we're out of here.

Right, okay.

Kids get on the bus.

Yeah, yeah.

So, which makes it really like natural for

when you've blown through the story event in a single day and you're like, well, why am I sticking around for 14 more days?

It's like, because you don't have to leave because the trip is all, we're only all leaving in a couple weeks.

So, I guess then to that,

my last question, I wonder, for anybody who waits until the last days to do the task and hits that point of realizing, oh shit, this takes more than I thought it did, they are pretty much forced to

do the mage grind strategy or reload an old save, I imagine.

You can get fucked, basically.

Or will the or will there always be a slow go farm MP from a

volcano?

And, you know

so

each

calendar deadline has its own focus the first one is the one that's the most like persona three four and five okay like the the necromancer dungeon is like extremely clear it's get strong enough do the dungeon maybe come back do the dungeon etc

um

don't assume the next ones are going to be like that yeah the next one is it like pushes you to like

do this, this, this, and then this.

And

if you, the, the basic logic is like, if you are able to have completed the side content in an area,

you are able to beat the story event.

Okay.

Right?

Like, like, you like, because sometimes the side content is more difficult than the story content.

And some of them are implied to be like,

do it right now.

Do it right now.

And some are like,

you should probably just do it on the final day.

Like the sense of urgency between them is very different.

And it makes it clear.

Yeah.

But you can still

fuck yourself over.

You can.

If you have poor planning.

I wouldn't be too worried about it.

Yeah.

Okay.

The only one, the only one that I would say

is

that

the fourth dungeon

you should do, you should walk into that motherfucker day one

and just ignore everything else and just go right in there.

Yeah.

I've also been playing Metaphor.

I'm very far into the game.

Sounds like you're approaching.

I am approaching.

I'm in

the middle of September right now.

Okay.

And

I have passed

the,

what would I call it?

I have passed by the dramatic climax that is Metaphors

Culprit Pancakes reveals.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is like six hours of non-stop.

Go, go, go, go, go.

It's very, very intense.

Nice.

There is a 48-hour period in that game that takes like six hours.

Just non-stop.

Go, go, go, go, go.

Okay.

And

they nailed it on that shit.

The payoffs, the setup, the twists, the, et cetera, like fantastic, amazing, great.

Um, and then the game points at a WrestleMania sign and gives you the rest of your calendar.

Um,

and then

you uh

see where they cut out a major dungeon out of the game.

Okay,

you go to a location and you see it, and you're like, wow, and there you're like, we're not going inside.

And I'm like,

really?

We're not going to go

huh

and they're like no we're not gonna go in that's uh it's very obviously got cut before release

and we're like but it's so elaborate looking from far away like no we're not gonna go in

dlc

it's like at the 60 mark it'd be really weird to go back there for DLC, but I don't know.

Isn't that what Phantom Liberty is?

But Phantom Liberty is like an open-world game that you can go anywhere and do anything at any time.

Now, granted, this game does have a post-game, so.

But,

yeah, that's a really good game.

And

I finish every time period going, wow, I made a lot of progress with all of these bonds.

Like, wow, I made more progress than I thought I was going to.

Wow.

Like, I'm looking at it, and I think I have like 20 bond levels left across the game, and I definitely have more than 20 days.

Okay.

So, here's a not necessarily in your wheelhouse question, but I'm just curious what you think.

I mean, the

first

human designs that we see are all really fucking wild and interesting.

And then, of course, you have your

reference to

a Bosch painting, right?

Yeah, Hieronymus Bosch.

Yeah, so

does that power level of human design keep up

going forward?

Are you continuously impressed and or pleased by the designs for humans?

There's some good-ass humans in this game.

Okay.

There's some killer humans.

I think the...

Wait, did you beat the first dungeon?

Yes.

you beat it yeah okay that fucking thing is probably the coolest one i've seen so far that shit's out of control so the raddest part if anything is like well you're looking at uh uh uh the yeah the well yeah exactly the the bosch painting right and

i remember i think i told the story about like how like as a kid i remember we had a couple of those art books around the house for some reason.

It was in the guest room.

And I would stare at them because they were just so fucking like I didn't know what I was looking at.

And it was just like depictions of hell, you know.

Yeah, seeing them 3D animated with all the fucking people dancing around.

It's like, and I well, I remember my dad like came into the room once and was like, you shouldn't stare at that for too long.

It's not good.

It's weird.

Right?

You know, and I was like, weird shit.

Well, yay, and it was just like, because it's hell, it's bad.

You're looking at hell, you know?

And it was, it was the, yeah, I don't know, whatever.

The, the, the, the spiritual vibes were, you know, oogie boogie,

fucking, whatever.

But, but, um,

but I was just like, so I was super interested in because I'm just like, what are these weird forms?

And all the, you know, and so looking at the, the, you know, the, the, the actual,

the one that you end up fighting, there's that bit with the egg part of the design where you're like, the frogs are inside the egg.

I'm like, you should, if you know the source material, you know what's going to happen, you know, and then sure enough, yeah, you crack that shit open and then it comes out.

I'm like, oh, that's great.

Like, there's a whole thing to the reference.

So

that's kind of my thing.

That's probably the strongest.

That's the strongest one?

Okay, okay.

But I think there's a reason for that.

So that one

is

directly taken from a

Hieronymous Bosch painting.

Like, it's a one-to-one recreation with the frogs and the egg and all that shit.

And

I,

I mean, people are saying nay, but I mean, I haven't seen all of them.

People, sorry.

Before, when I was playing through the early part of the game, I noticed a bunch of design elements from the humans that I thought were really interesting.

So the game is like overwhelmingly painted like a 2D filter.

Like there's a 2D anime filter or password filter on everybody.

Absolutely.

Except for humans.

Humans are realistically 3D modeled and don't have a 2D filter on them.

Also, in the anime cutscenes, they're depicted as 3D models instead of

2D animated

creatures.

There's a watercolor filter on everything else.

You're right.

And on top of that,

the one we're talking about, I forget its name because they are all homo-something.

Yeah.

With the dancing creatures

on the leg and

the fucking frogs that live inside,

it is overwhelmingly obvious once you encounter that that these aren't just like creatures or monsters these are like transcending the internal logic of the setting yeah no it like these are patently unreal creatures it feels especially looking and then like even looking at shit on the title screen as well and things floating around it does look like this is from

another exact from another world from the like with the imagination what i don't know if it's you know from more whatever the case is it feels like it does not belong in the same setting for sure.

That is that vibe is clear from that.

I don't know if this is an inspiration, and I don't know if this is going anywhere.

But one of the things I did during that first metaphor stream is I pulled up a video from Cosmos where Carl Sagan starts to talk about Flatland and the hypercubes.

Okay.

And he basically describes that to a 2D creature in Flatland, a three-dimensional creature would look nonsensical and contort in and on itself and be able to appear and disappear and do all sorts of zany shit.

And that's what I feel like you're looking at when you look at humans.

Like they defy the logical rules of its own setting.

You're missing information and what you're seeing is the best you can grasp from your limited plane.

Yeah, that's it.

My favorite part of when I was doing all of that like speculation is that I noticed that the archetypes are also actually displayed as 3D in the animated cutscenes

and are also realistically 3D models.

That's an fucking interesting concept.

Yeah, if that's headcanon, that's pretty strong.

I mean, we'll see where things go.

It might go somewhere.

I don't actually know.

But that's really conceptually interesting, yeah.

But yeah, no, the fucking

humans are great.

And there's parts of the story that have more humans and less humans.

But they're always kind of around.

Okay.

Yeah.

The

2D Flatland creatures looking at you and seeing a bisection of your insides and going, what is this weird stake thing that is constantly becoming bigger and then constantly getting smaller as you can only see one particular sliver of existence.

Fascinating.

Okay, that's fun.

That's a fun way to do it.

Yeah.

That game's real, real, real good.

And they even have time to throw in a little

fucking

anime death game situation with the idea of like the, well, well, the setup essentially,

there's rules that must be followed, otherwise, you know, the whole thing doesn't work.

That shit is obviously there so that the player doesn't go, well, why don't we just fucking jump Lewis right now?

And so, like, two things.

One,

like, it's stated outright, like, you would lose.

I mean, he would totally whoop your ass.

And two, because you'll just fucking die.

Well, so there's what you're left with is an overwhelming feeling of like you're just not even remotely

allowed to approach, which, hey, guess what?

That's a Griffith vibe.

It's like, it's bad enough when the fight, if it were fair, would be unfair.

But then also, fate has conspired to not even let you approach.

So far away.

That's how you properly Griffith, you know?

So that vibe was established very, very strongly immediately.

Yeah, fucking great.

Fucking great so far.

We'll see how that comes along.

And I appreciate too as well that they're being generous with those archetypes because, hey, no personas, right?

So you want to

be able to feel, you don't want to get too bored

with your styles and things.

And

like right off the, yeah, it's like within one dungeon, you have like six sorts of things.

They come

fast for a while.

Awesome.

Like they do start to slow down, but

as it starts to slow down with the like brand new types, your bonds are getting high that you're getting the tier two types of a bunch of them or the tier three types.

It's interesting to balance a game around the idea of like not allowing you to switch mid-battle, you know, where that would be too.

You can enter into fights and be fucked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because that, because there is that, that freedom brings a,

you know, well, it's, I mean, it's a problem where if you have the ability to

spend a turn doing anything, then there are no real problems, right?

If you have a full

pocket of personas that have enough diversity amongst their skills, you will never, ever, ever need to switch to a different persona.

You know?

I think that

except for your own boredom and interest.

I think that I think they really split the difference really well because in the modern persona, you have three characters that can't change shit and hope you brought in the right guys because they're coming in with what they're coming in on, but then you have an infinite variety of whatever versus here where it's like everybody has an infinite variety of whatever

as long as you actually set them up to bring that shit in.

It's even interesting how

they have your partner start out as AI-controlled, just like almost like an older game, just to like

show you that feature in a way, and then you unlock the full control, but it's like, and if you want to go back to the AI control with behaviors, you can.

So you have your full gamut of three, four, and five possibilities.

Yeah, don't do that.

No, no, no, not at all.

It was the worst thing ever back when you couldn't control your partners.

But they put that in for the beginning to be like, if you want to, you know.

And the game does like kind of expect you that if you run into an encounter that you're just completely fucked on to like back out to your save point and like, maybe I can mix and match.

So like the dragon in the mines is a good example.

It's like, you know what the best way to beat that dragon is?

Three mages.

Just ice blast that shithead for fucking 10 turns in a row.

I overthought it because turns out I was super ready for it just without any switching up or grinding.

I just walked into it and I was fine, you know.

Should I always have a mixed party?

Nah.

Sometimes the best solution is four warriors.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, no.

So,

fucking

Halkenberg with the

knight dual tech that creates a weakness to pierce.

Just do it over and over and over and over and over.

Lock two of those in and watch things melt.

It's so strong.

It's like, oh, you have no weaknesses?

Cool, let's make one.

There's three ways you can basically build your kit.

I built my kit very classically, and I'm like, I want to have a magical attacker, a physical attacker, an agility attacker, and the flex spot for whatever, right?

But you can just figure, you go talk to the informant, and you can just walk into a place and and just build the whole fucking team around what the area you're walking into is weak on.

True, even if they're not all very strong, like they all have the right shit.

Um, the informant is a really interesting way to basically be like, hey, man, we know you can jump on Google, but why not do it diegetically here?

You know, why not do it within the world?

Spend some cash, we'll tell you what Google will tell you.

There's a really incredible piece of advice that the first informant gives you.

He's like, Listen, if a goblin sees a staff, they're going to go fucking crazy and kill you.

And so I'm like, how bad could that be?

If a goblin sees a staff, every goblin does a multi-hit AoE attack on every turn that will kill you.

You're not bringing magicians in there.

Okay, okay.

It's Death Megadolion.

Yeah, it's like every turn for everyone will just wipe your shit.

It's crazy.

Hey, death, I've blocked physical and all magic attacks.

Now what?

Oh, cool, bro.

Word?

Check this out.

Yeah, all right.

Cool, cool, cool.

Also, when you get to the 60, 70% mark, you start to earn two types of abilities that change the balance of the game.

One is party members start learning:

I want your Tetra break or MacArthur break.

I want your resistances gone.

You're gone.

Fuck off.

You also learn

you're weak to electricity now.

You're weak to fire now.

Fuck yeah.

I decided that you're weak to fire now.

Yeah, yeah.

As long as you did.

Some of them learn, does wind damage, ignores everything.

Like it does, it said, like, it's doing wind damage, but even if they have absorb wind damage, it's ignoring it.

It's just going to go right the fuck through.

I don't care.

Go just die.

It is

interesting to be looking at press turn

half steps, half turns, and things like that, and like thinking about guard and all those things.

Like,

let me rephrase.

I remember when I was going through like a P5 Vengeance or SMT5 Vengeance the other day, and it was like, oh, you're not going to fucking beat that boss without guarding.

He's like what the fuck?

And I'm like, yo, I'm like, I never guarded.

I played the original game.

I never fucking guarded.

And they're like, yeah, dude, you're dead.

And I'm like, okay, watch me.

And I'm like, look, I fucking just DPS raced and managed to do it without it, you know?

Here, like, it definitely feels it's like, it does, it takes away all elemental weakness.

It mitigates the damage in such an extreme way.

And there are times where you literally have nothing.

You're going to go.

You must, right?

And then furthermore.

You're going to go into the back row.

And you're going to guard.

And then even going like, hey, and if you put this item on, you can guard for less, you know, of a cost.

And you can still take two half turns and use that to do a dual attack.

And you're like, okay, I'm like, ooh, I am now really...

Like, I paid attention to the turn

before,

but, like, I wasn't doing...

like really particular math on it.

I was kind of just going like, all right, which character right here or which of my demons has the thing that can nuke this fight?

Let me get it to him.

Let me keep passing the ball to the one who can do it, you know, know, and let me buff that person to eliminate the fight.

And that's kind of just, that's how I said it.

It still exists here.

You know, I get into a fight and like, I have my main guy.

He does holy damage and the thing's weak to holy.

So like, okay, everybody pass.

Just or buff or debuff or just fucking, just give them the fucking ball.

But I do find myself, especially with mixed enemy groups, like stopping and thinking more than I used to about, you know, half turns and the exact, what would be remainder and be like, okay, let's get it it down to one last half turn, and then the last person heal everybody up, let's go into the next, or, or whatever the case is.

You know, it's, it's, it's, I'm thinking about it more than I did in the previous games.

So, um, yeah, yeah, absolutely phenomenal so far, and just bangers in the classical fantasy sense, which impresses me more because

we hear a lot of fantasy music in fantasy games and fantasy settings, and when you're

like the part of the

novelty of the persona music is that that's a genre of music that you don't find in rpgs very often which makes it extra endearing it's got a very unique style and shogi megaro has like you know created an identity for that franchise here

It's just fantasy RPG music, but it's fucking phenomenal.

You know, it's doing what you've what you expect it to do.

It's not changing.

Like, there's nothing I've heard so far that feels like it shouldn't be a part of the genre.

We're not cowboy bebopping it, you know, but it's just really, really, really good.

Um, so yeah, there's something extra impressive to note about that, too, as well.

I eagerly await more thoughts on this because that game's real good.

Um, yeah, so that's that's you know, pretty much all I have to talk about.

But um this week I will you know return to um some streaming.

So yeah, he's back not gonna not as of tomorrow.

Tomorrow is still gonna be off, but as of Thursday, I'll pick back up with Phoenix Wright and

a couple of other things.

Like I mentioned before, I want to take some one-offs into account before

making any big, big, big moves.

So I'll post a schedule and

we'll see what's going on.

So,

in addition

to

many more

metaphors,

I also played the last Allen Wake 2 DLC.

What was that called?

The Lake House.

Right.

Okay.

It is called the Lake House because,

yeah.

The Sam House.

It might as well be called the Kojumbo Zone.

It's really good.

It's a nice, short, sweet, interesting new story told with a new character.

Or no, an existing character, but not one that got a lot of play

inside Alamake 2.

It's one of the FBC from Controls labs that is run by a research couple that is clearly getting divorced.

Interesting.

So

you're like reading, like, as you're reading through

documentation over time, they're getting more and more and more and more antagonistic and hateful towards one another.

And it's really interesting.

What's one of the strangest things

in an oof kind of way or in a ha-ha kind of way?

No, oof.

No, it's getting toxic in there.

Okay.

What's weird of the timing is that one of them is a Frenchman voiced by an actor named Philippe Spall,

who happens to be one of the party members in Metaphor that you have not met yet.

Yeah.

Interesting.

And,

yo, this dude's awesome.

Like,

he's my favorite party member in Metaphor, and a lot of that is because of his incredible voice and fantastic performance.

Okay.

And right after I'm playing Metaphor, I walk over and I see him in live action.

I'm like, oh,

there he is.

I would like to see much more of this guy in the future.

He's fucking great.

He doesn't happen to be Scottish, does he?

No, French.

Okay.

You said, yeah, it's true.

Shout outs to the Scotsmen that are all over the beginning of Metaphor there, by the way.

Oh, everybody, everybody.

Everybody that you get to hang out with has a slightly different accent and metaphor.

They go all over the place.

Yeah, but like right off the bat, between

Alsis and

your necromancer, you got your Scots ruin Scotland.

Right off the bat.

You're Shreking pretty hard right away.

Good stuff.

Jojo character.

Jojo characters standing around, looking like part five.

Dude, Zorpa's ridiculous fucking part five boys standing around talking like Shrek.

Zorba, like holy shit.

I'm gonna be really honest.

Like, you, you, you hang out with Lewis and you check out what Lewis has got going on, and he's got that fucking panning shot of a bunch of silhouettes behind him, and it's like Lewis and the gay boy squad.

It's it's ridiculous, it's ridiculous.

Passione Scotland expansion team.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But yeah, no, Lighthouse

is quite good.

It's short.

It doesn't overstay it's welcome.

It's very control.

It is more control than it is Alan Wake.

Okay, in the middle of Alan Wake.

Yeah, but it's not Alan or Saga.

It's off to the side.

Self-contained.

And controls differently as well.

Yeah, and the reason why it's so much more control is because it is the

Allen Wake 2.8 fragmentary passage control.

Love, love that.

Where

dream drop fucking

whatever.

If you dig a little under the surface, you can get a control 2 teaser in there.

And

that game looks like it'll be cool.

Okay.

Here's hoping.

Here's hope.

I don't know when that's going to come out because apparently Al at a Max Pain 1 and 2 remakes are the next thing and then the Firebreak thing.

So Control 2 might be far away.

Next gen.

Maybe.

Let's see.

Anything else?

Yeah, nothing too crazy with me.

Just those two, really.

Okay.

What's your schedule looking like?

My schedule this week is going to be more metaphor, shocking, absolutely astonishing.

But it's also going to be on Thursday, I'm going to be taking a sponsored stream look at Dragon Quest III and a sponsored stream look at Rue Valley.

And then the thing on Friday.

Cool, Friday.

Did I do DD yet?

Ask people in the chat.

I'm going to that after today's podcast.

Dragon Quest III remake.

Is the art from that just grabbing the old art and using it?

Or are they putting new art out that looks like the old art?

I don't know.

I saw like a really cool like portrait

box art thing that was like Toriyama style and

it was awesome.

It looked like it was made for a booklet back then, but I can't tell if it actually was or not.

It's new assets, okay?

Fantastic super nice art in that shit.

I'm very impressed.

That's dope.

That's cool.

Yeah, that's that's it for me.

You can go down to twitch.tv/slash pat stairs at for that stuff.

Right on, okay.

Quick bathroom.

Take a quick bathroom break, yeah.

BRB.

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A cha-ching is the sounds of

a sale on a cash register, which doesn't exist anymore.

No, those are real.

I've seen one.

Like, not lately.

I've had a.

I've been to a place where I bought something with a tap card, and it had a Kakash register sound play.

off the machine, you know.

Yeah,

so

um

this week the podcast is sponsored by Factor

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Keto cookies in particular,

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I mean,

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There you go.

All right.

This week the podcast is sponsored by Henson Shaving.

If you were born after 1970, there's a good chance your first razor was a multi-blade razor.

Yeah, and it was a piece of crap.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, okay, if you were born before then, there was a chance that you had to trust the person who put the thing over your shoulder,

and then to not slit your throat like somebody.

What's your name?

Is it Todd?

I don't like this.

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Why is there a little hinge beneath the the back of the seat here?

It seems like some kind of trapdoor mechanism.

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it's it's bad enough to have to deal with a really bad quality multi-blade razor.

Even worse is dealing with Sweeney Todd.

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Don't trust the meat pies next door either.

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So that's less than the thickness of a human hair.

I mean, if you're talking about

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I mean, your face is in space right now, if you think about it.

It kind of, you know,

one one could consider it that.

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given that a once-over, it has been particularly nice for getting my little lineups done on the side when I want to, you know, when you want to feel particularly sharp, when you want to get an angle, you get a protractor out for your beard.

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I think the worst part about that is when I've done that in the past, and they're like, can you get me the razor?

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No, I don't want the question to be like, are you here to see Avon Barksdale?

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And last but not least, this week, the the podcast is sponsored by Boot.dev.

Boot.dev, help me.

I don't know what is a computer.

We have been talking about...

Okay, maybe that's a bit...

That's...

That's probably a little bit outside their scope.

Hey.

They can't help you now with that, old man.

What's ah?

Is that like a phone?

Well, the things that are appearing in front of you on the computer are things that are programmed.

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Dude, that's crazy.

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in fact,

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Apparently, these computers are not a fan.

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Oh, and I should also mention as well that, yeah, you're learning back-end web development from start to finish with Python and Go programming languages in particular.

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And that is what you can learn with boot.dev.

Like the snake.

Yes, and the board game, which is really fun.

It's so funny that we're advertising for boot.dev because I desperately need that kind of thing because I don't know what

I don't know.

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So, legitimately, I have never been or worked at any place where having that knowledge did not become a value add for the person.

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yeah it's a it's a higher paying position it's you you're much closer to the dev team you work more intimately because you're involved with the coding that's going into the game as well before it launches and gets uh compiled and goes out to test in a a regular qa build so you know it's just a net positive across the board real talk yeah

um cool

All right.

I got breaking news that's strange as shit.

The Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition, do you remember those games coming out and being like fucking busted?

So they have been updated like a couple hours ago with all of the bug fixes and lighting changes present in the Netflix mobile version of the Grand Theft Auto series.

Okay.

So the Netflix mobile version came out and was actually exactly what it was supposed to be, like very accurate and fixed.

That was like a year ago.

And now those changes have been back ported into the PC and console releases.

So the version they pushed was just the port to a different platform.

So here's where it gets really fun.

There was a developer called Grove Street Games that made the definitive edition.

Okay.

They're not in the credits anymore.

It's the new dev.

So this looks like a just complete redo.

Okay.

A handoff of and then, yeah, okay.

It looks like Netflix wanted a version that worked

and got their own people to do it.

So one of the things to do whenever these types of things happens is to go find a particular issue or bug from that specific version and regress it.

to see it's like, did you literally just grab and drop it?

Is that what we're looking at?

Or is it in fact, you know, something else going on behind the scenes?

So, yeah, that's good.

That's good.

That game's worth playing now, probably.

Hmm.

Okay.

San Andreas is the best one.

You could say Vice City, and you might be right, but like

four and five can suck my fucking dick.

Was the next Netflix-released version the best functioning of the ports?

Is that

the one the Netflix version on your phone.

I see.

I didn't get that

in what you were saying.

I am shocked at that.

Okay.

Huh.

Isn't that special?

I mean, the Samurai Showdown on my iPhone ran better than Samurai Showdown on the Switch.

Isn't that awesome?

Isn't that just great?

Isn't that super?

So that's the world we live in.

Oh, video games, man.

Oh, you know what?

I forgot to talk about something.

Uh-huh.

So

I have been inundated with people whose opinions I respect, such as Gene, telling me, actually, now that I'm deeper into it, Dragon Age Vailguard is awesome as shit.

It's actually great.

And I'm sitting here going, wow, really?

What?

Okay.

So I was like, like, you know what, I'm gonna do it's cool.

I'm gonna load up Dragon Age Origins and I'm gonna I'm gonna fucking go back and I'm gonna check that thing out because that's the game that I loved.

Origins, okay, yeah, the first one from 2000, the remake of your first one.

No, that's that it was always called that.

The first one was called Origins.

What a weird, like suffix.

The gimmick was that they had like every

race and class combo had like a completely unique like five-hour start to their storyline.

Okay.

So I'm like, yeah, I'm going to get origins.

And then I tried to load it up on Steam and that shit won't run at all.

Like it just won't even fucking turn on at all.

Is there any

bioare, middleware shit going on?

That's just fucking

sucks ass.

So then I'm like...

And then I checked.

I'm like, oh, right.

On top of it just not booting, even if I could boot it, Dragon Age Origins requires a CD key to be linked to your BioWare social account.

So when you click on it in the launcher, it goes to a website that doesn't exist, so it can't unlock it for you.

And then I was like, fucking wow.

And I looked it up and oh, the GOG version actually has all that shit included.

The GOG version ignores all that because it's GOG.

How about that?

So then I went to, I picked it up for like 20 bucks on GOG and I'm like, cool.

And I ran it and it also doesn't work.

Even the updated GOG version.

Why?

And then I'm like, oh, it can't work through its own launcher.

I have to launch it manually, but only after I install a third-party patch that gives it four gigabyte address aware.

And then I load into it and I discover one of the issues with Dragon Age Origins is that it came from that period before 4K was the resolution anyone planned for.

So the interface in Dragon Age

Origins tops out at 1080p resolution.

So if you put it at your regular monitor's resolution, everything is like two pixels high and impossible to read.

So then I downloaded the 4K mod, which increases the size of all the interface elements to be normal.

Okay.

And then

I loaded up the game and was like, oh my God, this is so much uglier and terrible controlling than the version of Dragon Age Origins that lives in my mind.

This is like one of the worst interfaces I have ever seen for one of these types of games.

This has aged worse

than

tons of its contemporaries at the time.

It has aged way worse than Lost Odyssey.

It has aged way worse than Mass Effect.

It is astonishing.

It is

aged?

I don't know.

I haven't verified it.

It aged way worse than

Bioshock and all that shit.

And I'm sitting here and I'm like,

yeah, I made the, somebody mentions it in chat just now, and I mentioned it at the time.

I think it has aged worse than Baldur's Gate 2.

Okay.

I don't, I, I'm not, I don't fault old games for not supporting future resolutions.

It's nice when it happens, but

there's a lot of shit that doesn't, right?

That's I definitely think it

asking me to link up to a non-existent website for my account is definitely yes.

No,

everything prior to that resolution shit is absolute horseshit.

Now, here's the question:

pop it in on console?

Yeah, which console?

Is there any

which one?

Which one would I do that?

The Xborks?

I could

play

the rap like dramatically inferior console version as an xbox 360 download on an xbox through backwards compatibility yeah um xborks like which then i have to deal with the fact that uh the interface was made for pc and the controller interface is like a horrible afterthought

um and then i was like oh you know what i could do i could just i could i could use my my controller on my my PC.

Oh, no, wait.

That's the era of BioWare telling you to go fuck yourself if you wanted to play their games on PC with a controller.

Back when all three Mass Effects didn't have controller support, you could only do Mass and Keyboard, even though they were designed for a controller.

But if you just played it on the Xbox with the Xbox.

Wait, the Xbox Store is gone?

Wait, can I not even...

What?

Is that is the Xbox 3?

Oh, whatever.

Anyway, hold I'm saying like if you jump on the Xbox and you grab the digital copy from that that's the old port that's digit that's uh

you know whatever the um

what is it called whatever the legacy store is there for all their 360 shit is the Xbox 360 store gone it's oh the 360 store is gone

worse

is the Xbox One does it have it oh my god this sucks also I'm pretty sure that Xbox behind me died uh the like it got dropped and the pieces are falling out.

So I'm pretty sure it's dead.

Disc only.

If you have an older one, it would run, but you can't go buy it.

So I could reach out

to get a fucking 360 disc of Dragon Age Origins that won't have any of the DLC on lock because it still wants the fucking Bioware social account on console so that I could play the bad version of Dragon Age Origins while I look at like it, dude.

It's it's it's

so my memories aren't wrong,

but

I am sitting here going

that like this might be one of the games that has aged the worst

I've ever played that I cared about.

Like,

visually, controls,

the stability, just holy shit.

And then I'm like, oh, and Dragon Age 2 was like all fucked up.

And then Inquisition was like boring.

And I'm like, and then I'm sitting there going, like, why do I even care about your, why would I even care that Vailgard is different?

They're all kind of fucked up in some way.

I don't imagine the PS3 version.

I don't want to hear the word PS3 again until I die.

Like, you know why.

But as people who did recordings of video games,

everything that came out on the PS3 could go fuck itself.

HTCP for days.

Fucking piece of shit.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, ultimately, there's...

So I'll be getting back to you next week or something with a Dragon Age Vailguard report or some shit.

Hey, hey,

if it's good, then good things are happening, then that's good.

That's right.

That is true.

Good things are good.

I hope that's true.

So what's up in the news?

Especially because

while it wasn't something immediately slated or so, after playing through the Mass Effect series, I've always been like, huh, Dragon Age, huh?

Maybe one day.

And just put that over there.

But, you know, of course, there needs to be an ability to boot the fucking game.

And now it's a series with caveats on every single fucking game.

So,

like I think, I think what broke my brain is that I'm looking at the class selection on the thing, and I put, I skeeted out on Blue Sky, which you should follow me on, everybody.

Um, that I can't believe this game came out and only has three classes,

like fighter, mage, and, and rogue.

And then people responded, like, Pat, every Dragon Age only has three classes.

What are you talking about?

And I'm like, oh my God,

what?

Yeah.

Those are the three classes in Dragon Age games.

I guess because the other classes are people you

that join you, Ben.

No, everybody's one of the three classes that just has subclasses.

I don't know what Dragon Age is.

Well, guess what?

Every single game in that, every single game in Dragon Age is completely different.

I thought I

had an inkling of what the fuck this whole franchise was.

I have no idea what these games are, dude.

You know what?

That's crazy, man.

Okay,

you know what Dragon Age is?

It is a role-playing game series made entirely out of the way people felt

when Dark Souls 2 came out.

Every game that comes out that says

Dragon Age on it is the Dark Souls 2 release.

Okay.

My head is like the, I just was like, you have a Lord Lord of the Rings party of classes you can pick from, and then you can bang whoever you want in this, like, that's true, you can bang.

In this, you know, BioWare-like setup.

And you have relationships, and you go.

That's true.

RPG.

But how do you control your characters?

It's different in every fucking game.

Veil Guardian.

I'm serious.

It's a fucking action game.

No, no.

Yeah, I don't know.

You point and click.

But oh, is that even true?

So like, yeah, every single game that says Dragon Age on it came out and is like Dark Souls 2, even the first one, because people were like, this isn't enough like Baldur's Gate.

Three classes, and

every single one of those is someone's favorite now

for reasons that are incomprehensible to the fans of the other ones.

Is it one of those like the first one you play is the one you fell in love with type of situation?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.

Yeah, it's Mega Man 2 versus 3 and Sonic 2 vs.

3.

It's just.

Dude,

I'm so sick of Mega Man 2 and 3.

Both of those games are like the best ones.

What is it?

Like, can we not just agree that they're both incredible?

Yeah, it's whatever your childhood brain took in before the other one, and then that was it.

You fight to the death on that hill.

Okay.

Okay.

Wow.

Well.

That game series is so fucking confusing.

Is that the only franchise where the first game out had the word origins in the title?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because, like, has it sounds like a re-release of a game that you slap that on to distinguish it from the first one, you know?

That's crazy.

Huh?

I wonder if any game had the audacity to come out and have one

in the title as well.

That's, yeah.

Anyway, all right.

More combat.

But

I mean, actually, is the first entry.

Oh.

Oh, oh, like it comes out and it's like Dragon Age 1, but it's actually.

It's the beginning of the franchise.

Yeah, this is as close as you're going to get.

Yeah, okay.

Okay.

Because

you can use one when you do a reset and come all the way back around.

That's when you use it.

Like Battlefield.

Yeah, like people were pointing out Battlefield 1 did that.

But they had to come back around to it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ah, Tobal number one, I guess.

I suppose you can throw that in there.

But wasn't that supposed to be like, I'm number one?

Yeah, it's not actually the, you know, but

I'll allow it.

Speaking of dead fighting games,

new virtual fighter confirmed.

Fuck off.

You didn't see the news?

It's not dead.

It's been alive this whole time.

Stasis?

Fuck it.

It's been alive this whole time.

Running on Red.

Virtual Fighter is fine.

Okay.

All right.

In our hearts.

Hey, hey, hey.

They just, so they basically a new interview came out, and in addition to the current, probably heading downhill releases of Jet Set Radio, Golden Axe, and Crazy Taxi, because they're doing live service stuff that seems like a really bad idea,

they confirmed that Virtu Fighter is also coming back on the list of new things that Sega's working on.

And

if I can offer you some hopium,

maybe the reason why there's no Kiryu in any Teken games ever is because

something, something, something over here.

No.

No.

So

when this news came out, I was like, please keep it boring.

And people said, but Pat, wouldn't that kill Virtual Fighter?

And I said, I don't care.

Yeah.

It's not rational.

You're not going to give out a rational opinion.

You point out Virtual Fighter VI that has two new characters called Jimmy and Steve, and they're a Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy and a fucking obscure form of kung fu or taekwondo, and it has rollbat neck code, it can die after that.

Once there's a version that you can just play forever, it can die.

Just keep it boring.

You know, you know what you're getting, right?

You know you're getting.

I know they're going to make it.

They're going to make it flashy.

You're getting heat moves.

They're going to do something.

You're getting,

you know, if not a fucking direct Kiryu crossover of sorts, you're going to get costumes.

I'm going to see...

Akira throw a sonic boom and just vomit blood all over the floor.

And

you might not even get rollback.

But I am.

But I am.

I imagine.

I imagine.

I imagine there will be.

But it's like a

6, 70, 30 chance, maybe?

What happens if I type in Virtual Fighter 6 rollback net code?

Does that happen?

Do I get...

I don't know.

okay all right monkey's paw you get

VF6 you get it with rollback you get it with Jimmy Steve and um

uh

I don't know Mary Catherine Gallagher

she's a Scottish boxer yeah there you go right

um

and it's all set and ready to go and

but it's also also a live service game because everything else they're making now is live service.

What do you want from me?

This is my credit card.

Suffering, pain.

So, um, I.

The weight of your soul.

I think that turning Virtua Fighter

into a live service game might be a way to just rack up the grandest loss on any Virtual Fighter ever.

I can't think of a series that is less ready to be gassed than Virtua Fighter.

A series in which people play the default-looking characters that they picked 20 years ago exclusively.

It's entirely possible that in this quest for negative money,

that they look at it from the jump and go, we're looking for you, Pat, actually, and we're looking for the three other people like you to just fund this forever.

And that'll be it.

We don't even want mass appeal.

I don't think,

I don't think there's like I could, I mean, I could hop into the discord between me and the 10 other guys, but I don't, I don't think we can bankroll it ourselves.

That just seems non-viable.

Also, inside of it is a VF5 mode where you can just go play that.

I'll be really blunt.

I would legitimately be happy if Virtua Fighter never came out again as long as they re-released VF5 Final Showdown with good net code.

Like it and like made it in a backwards compatible, you know, like on a console and PC so you could just play it for a while.

But now that they did it and embarrassed themselves,

that was the shot, you know?

It doesn't, I don't know that

they come back around and go, oops, we fucked up here, we're going to do it again.

I think

you wait till you think you got to wait for whatever comes after this, you know?

I see someone in the chat describing live service as a game released and then updated with regular content, which is the state of fighting games for forever, right?

However, I need to be very clear with people who are not familiar with Virtua Fighter.

Virtua Fighter gets a new character on a rate of approximately one every two or three years.

Every two or three games.

Like new characters are at a violent premium.

So you would get the fucking Virtua Fighter VI season pass.

Aren't there?

And it would be like, next year we'll give you a character.

Is Virtua Fighter a franchise where there are less new characters than entries in the franchise?

Let's find out.

No, no.

Because there's five virtual fighting games.

Five games, but there's only been four characters over time.

Each game adds two.

You added Lion and Shun, then you added Aoi and Taka.

Okay.

And then you added Vanessa and Brad, and then you added Go and

but it's the closest to that number of all fighting games.

It's the closest what, like one game equals one can you character?

yeah no it's it's a it's a series that's defined itself on a lack of change and the people who like it like it like you know Leon Rafael the the Mantis fighter that came out in Virtual Fighter 2

He's he's been like mostly unchanged since I was a child.

Yep.

I don't make any

fight the elder.

If he changes too much,

and that's why if you want to play a different character that feels different every three or four years we have

one or two new characters for you

okay this guy's name is brad he's a kickboxer

do you like him no then go fuck yourself forever i guess okay monkey's paw you're getting the exact game you just described down to the exact characters and it's not live service right

but it is not called Virtual Fighter VI.

It's called Virtual Fighter Kids 2.

That doesn't sound like the exact same game.

It's the exact same content, except

through the lens of the big head, small body, Virtual Fighter Kids.

Well, okay, so I have a child, and I love my son very much.

So the option of just saying that I would kill myself is no longer on the table.

I have to go on for my boy.

Forced big head mode.

But I'd think about it.

Okay.

I'd be like, oh,

we're in the ballpark.

No, but no.

And all the big heads affect all the hurt boxes and hit boxes and collisions.

So all moves.

This man is a threat to my mental health with this discussion.

He is psychically attacking me.

Hey, man, Sega made an announcement.

I'm just running the bit that you were destined to be.

You know how this goes.

When Virtual Fighter is in the news, you need to put a mental shield up, cast fucking Makara Karn, and come into the podcast.

You know how it is.

So

the thing that I'm actually really worried about

is that I don't know

who the fuck at Sega still works there that made Virtual Fighter V.

That was a long time ago.

Oh, nobody.

Absolutely.

And I don't mean the updates.

I mean, like, a proper new Virtual Fighter.

Yeah.

That was in the 360 era.

That was a fucking 2007 game.

No, they are long gone, dead or in jail.

Like,

they're not around anymore.

Like, Sega AM2 is dust on the wind.

So.

But I bet you that your hopes lie with the one person who is on the RGG team, who keeps wanting to put that arcade machine in there, who's who pushed for the Blitz Netcode version and is like, no,

you know?

I think that's okay.

There's someone over at Like a Dragon in the RGG team that decided that one of the classroom storylines in Lost Judgment needed to be about the fantasy of a fighting game club in the high school that played exclusively Virtual Fighter V.

Actually?

Yes.

And that the main character of that questline was a teenage version of Segata Sanchiro.

I'm serious, by the way.

He had a kid.

There's Segata Sanchiro, too.

No, no, but it's not his kid.

It's Sekata Sanchiro as a teenager.

Okay.

And that the entire storyline is trying to figure out how this dude is managing to sneak input lag into your controls.

Like,

it's inspiring.

Oh, that's incredible.

It is incredible.

Wow.

Wow.

Someone on that team

fucking loves Virtua Fighter to have put that into the video.

There you go.

There you go.

It's one person holding on.

Yes.

It feels like it.

It feels like it.

You can tell.

Over the years, the fact that that shit keeps coming back.

There's always a little, the fact that you have a little bit of hope that you didn't even know was there to hold on to is absolutely the result of that.

It's funny you mentioned

the bit about like the lag hitting the lag switch or so because

I saw a post the other day that was a screenshot of the Teken 8 cheat engine like options.

And

there's a cheat, it's a the cheat,

when you run the cheat engine on a PC, it has like because I was like, you know, there's a lot of games where you see footage of people like whatever, like auto-blocking and things.

I'm like, what are the actual options here?

What do people have on?

Because it's like, how

tiny is your, is your, your, your e-dick?

How, how is your ego, uh, what does it need?

So you have the electric wind godfist macro, so you can set a hotkey.

Um,

control opponents' inputs on a hotkey.

Like,

right off the bat,

right off the bat, you're just like, yeah,

I just put a little input in where you didn't press anything and took over your controls for a second, made you drop your combo.

Whoop.

How subtle do you want to hide your shit, right?

Yeah.

So take over the opponent's controls.

Lag switch, literally a hotkey.

Yeah.

Set close range, mid or long range counter hit

in neutral.

So every time you touch the opponent, it'll always be a counter hit.

And you're not even attempting to live in reality on that.

No, just like, I thought, yeah, it's like, it's not even like, oh, I'm an incredible player.

It's like situations that should not occur within the game logic.

Force them to occur.

Random block, low block percentage.

So you can, yeah, how often do you just want it to auto-block lows?

Viewframe data during the game.

Prevent disconnect percentage from going up on rage quit.

If you are running a cheat and someone is stomping your ass with the cheats on and you baby out

you can run a cheat to stop your disconnection percentage from increasing do you understand how fucking tiny your dick is dude like the the level

the level of insecurity it's wild

um

duck under strings that have highs auto

timing, you know, whatever the case is, and then all these ones, and then the last one is perfect punish, and then you just put in a combo, and the moment you block something that can be perfectly punished with a full max damage thing, it'll just do the full thing automatically.

Yeah, that's a fun one.

I mean, wow,

wow.

I always just thought it would be as simple as like, oh, um, you know, yeah, auto, auto-block or whatever.

It's like, no, you can get granular on the tiniest little level that gives insights into the mentality of the cheater.

So isn't that fascinating?

This is, this is not a fighting game example, but I remember when

this is a very old conversation.

I was playing PUBG a lot

and that desert map came out.

And I played that for a couple of weeks.

And then I quit and I never looked back.

And I would like check in every six months to be like, have they fixed the cheating problem?

And the answer was no.

And what was occurring is that you would play about half a match of PUBG

and you would get killed

like from miles away.

Like it would do a kill cam thing and it would show you nothing because the character was so far away.

And they would be shooting you from an infinite distance through the entire geometry of the world to kill you.

Yep, yep, yep.

And

I remember, and that was that, there was a streak where I played like two or three games every day for like a week, and that was how I died every single time, like 15 times in a row.

I'm like, all right, done with this, right?

But what stood out to me is that like, this is not even a proximating effectsimile of playing the game at all.

Like,

you're loading into a map.

And the robot is pointing you at things you can't see.

And then you're clicking and seeing a little ticker that goes up and goes, killed, killed, killed, you won, you won.

And I'm like, you're just playing a slot machine that always wins now.

Oh, do not underestimate how pathetic

the person running these things needs to be for that to still feel good.

Like they're actually still getting a little

spark of enjoyment out of that, you know?

Or in some cases, it might even just like

everyone else being salty or so, right?

There's the, I never forget, I I think I talked about it before, but the Tarkov cheating community

and like how there's videos.

God, I forgot who made a really interesting one about discovering the wiggle, where you do the lean, right, to kind of indicate that you're a cheater and someone else on the map is also a cheater.

And then you can find out when you load into a game how many people are

just you're playing a different video game where you're all on the same team against everyone playing normally.

And then amongst yourselves, you're basically just like, yeah, we won't kill each other.

And so, there's a cap, you can only get to whatever top place before

the cheating community that is secretly on Teams in their different games are all communicating and taking you out together.

Incredible, you know, we're like, there's two games happening here, and one is for a paid subscription to a cheat service, you know?

Yeah, wild.

I'm infinitely fascinated.

I'm so beyond the mentality.

I, I, it's so

to understand.

Yeah.

I want to know.

That's, that's why I find like when I see things like this, where it's like, oh, what options do they create for themselves?

Because I'm like, like, what does the person who has got the capability to crack a game open and do all this to it, but is such a baby inside?

Like, this feels like you've come so far in his adult, but you still have a fucking sus and bottle.

Like, it's a little bit of a bad thing.

This feels like me teaching my baby to play Monopoly, but every time I pass go, I just give myself $1,000 because he doesn't know the rules super good.

And if he complains, I go, no, no, no, no, that's not how the rules work.

And then I beat a two-year-old and go, man, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

I'd love to know how many

was the pipeline I played normally.

I got destroyed.

I got destroyed.

I got so destroyed and so upset that I just started rage.

Not rage, not just rage quitting, but then,

you know, whatever, toxic messaging, shit, shit talking people, and then, and then you just have this like, okay, maybe I'll just put it on once, you know, and then you just kind of like, oh yeah, and then you get a little bit of a, get that little endorphin rush, and then you put it on a little bit more, you know, like what, like, I, like, the, the timeline, you know, can you look at somebody who just rage quit on you and go, oh yeah, they're on step seven,

you know, they're, they're, they're a couple weeks away from loading up the auto DI detector.

Yeah, incredible.

That forum where the guy, the kid was like, I'm so tired of losing.

I just wanted to win for once.

And now my brother's account is banned.

He's going to kill me.

You know, we're like,

I have a job.

I'm busy.

I don't have time to play this game to get so good at it.

God, it's so unfair.

It's like, yeah, anyway, anyway, anyway.

Infinitely fascinating stuff.

So, yeah.

Like, I hear that, I hear that scenario, and I go, I guess the situation's going to work itself out then.

Cause,

anyways,

so

on that note, oh, hey, I'm gonna go for a public service announcement to anyone who can hear me.

I'm not watching it yet because I never finished the first season, but that second season of Arcane is out,

which means I am watching many people

think

about reinstalling League of Legends.

Don't do it.

Okay,

don't do it.

no i saw to purple sharpie do it

and she says i didn't know any better and it's like you did you did know better you absolutely

you knew better sharpie i'm watching i'm just scroll past like two other people going should i reinstall league of legends you come on now sharpie you know you know you know better

uh so i haven't started it but i'm probably going to and

league of legends yes uh no arcane season two because

i loved arcane season one 1.

And I'll tell you what will happen because it happened to me last time as well.

I'll finish that and I'll go, damn, that was really awesome.

And then I will take all of that energy and thoroughly divert it into watching some music videos.

And then perhaps even

looking up some 2XKO footage.

Yeah.

And then I'll chill.

Watching a bunch of music videos after Arcane Season 1,

that's how I contained it.

You The KDA stuff

and whatever else.

I don't want to derail this conversation, but I do have something to say because you mentioned 2XKO.

So Jinx got announced for a playtest.

She was revealed in a little clip before anything.

And every comment underneath that was like, when is this coming out?

Like,

the new reveal of a character is actually the first character we ever saw, like three years ago.

And like, what.

I suspect it's not going by a marketing budget as much as it is, like, hey, she wasn't ready before, but now she is.

So, hey, take a look.

Oh, absolutely.

But also now's the season of the Arcane.

So

maybe show Jinxa.

But it just seems like...

It seems like it's progressing at a Virtua Fighter series pace.

But we can confirm it exists.

I played it.

You played it.

It's pretty good.

We can confirm.

But the other thing that I have to point out is that in the blog post that the devs posted about 2XKO,

they are shortening that game's name in regular conversation to just 2X.

I thought the point of 2XKO was to not have a long name that took a long time to say, and that's why it's this horrible acronym.

Well, I think

we had the conversation on this, but like 2XKO is still four syllables you have to sound.

And League of Legends is also for even syllables.

So now they're bringing it back down to 2X.

Are they just going to start calling this Tex?

Is that what the name of this game is?

I saw people calling it Tucco.

I saw Tuco being the effect.

That's the effectiveness.

The effect way to call it.

Yeah, that's a thing.

This feels like an X-bone scenario.

Double-cross knockout.

In any case,

other news going on.

Hidayaki Itsuno established

head of Lightspeed Japan Studio.

For Tencent.

Yes.

Tencent, owner of Lightspeed Studios, establishes Lightspeed Japan, led by Hidayaki Itsuno, and

him sitting on the couch,

looking swaggy,

says that they are going to focus on developing AAA action games.

But will they come out?

So far, Lightspeed has not put out

stuff.

No, they're brand new.

Okay, well, no.

There's Lightspeed Japan is new.

Lightspeed Not Japan existed, and there was

a Lightspeed LA that had an announcement for a game called Last Sentinel

earlier this year.

And

there was also, I think they did some work on

the release of FF

15 or 14 in China.

But

no major particular releases from them directly.

But yeah, it's a 10 cent thing.

Hey, man, if he's got original shit and he's been thinking about, that he's wanted to do

30 years at Capcom is a pretty good fucking amount of time.

I'm excited to see what Atsuno does.

I

really like Itsuno-san's games, and I love Double May Cry and Dragon's Dogma as anybody.

I'd be super disappointed if this shit is

angels will laugh or whatever non-branded equivalent.

I mean, ultimately, like,

you know,

if you get your bayo off of your DMC style, like just, it doesn't matter, like, whatever he's got in mind, whether, you know, even if it's just far out there, as long as it's fun and stylish and has, you know, a lot of the things that he's established that he's great at, then we're all going to be excited to play it.

What I don't like seeing, of course, is just, I don't like seeing the word triple-A anymore.

I don't want to read it.

Like, I see it and I go, no,

you don't have to do that.

Just make the rest of that, whatever you're going to do, but you don't have to set the standard for cost.

What are you talking about?

The biggest pusher of the AAA

label, Ubisoft, is going to be releasing their hot new game, Assassin's Creed Shadows, this February.

And

that's how you know quality.

Now, the fact that it's releasing in the middle of a packed season of six other games that all look more interesting.

Notwithstanding, AAA is where it's at, brother.

Remember when that word was like, oh, shit.

Oh, it's going to be realistic and has the best graphics and it's going to be crazy.

Oh, man.

It's going to be.

That lasted for like three games.

That lasted for like one year.

Like,

it was the idea that was basically like, it's going to be a console mover because it's going to just look so impressive in screenshots, and people are going to buy Madden, they're going to buy Call of Duty, and they're going to buy this thing, you know.

And now I'm just like, you are all you do is you just tell us that you're spending probably more money.

It's so money, brother.

Yeah, is it

so so?

So there's that.

I don't care.

I just, uh, I, uh,

but uh, yeah, it's you know,

fucking uh

godspeed.

I would rather have

20 double A games like what Like a Dragon's been doing.

20?

Two?

Like

two.

Fucking like less.

I don't care in exchange for one triple A.

My point is, is by not making triple A games, they've been

able to make dozens.

Yeah.

comfortable double A's.

Sure, sure, yeah.

Single even.

Just, you know, whatever you can do, whatever you need to do.

You don't, I just, I, I, like, I, you're, I don't need your game to fucking

fight the stock market, you know?

Dude, you know what, what, you know what game I think of now when I think of triple A?

I think of fucking.

Who put this out?

Uh,

was this EA?

Do you remember a fucking game called Immortals of Avium?

Oh, Oh, where you're shooting the monsters?

You're shooting.

It's like a shoot, a first-person shooter, but it's all magic shit.

Yes, yes.

The one that Reggie thought was Mass Effect.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

I remember watching the first trailer for that and being like, money in the toilet.

Just straight, like,

just right in the trash.

And sure enough,

yeah, yeah.

So to me, it's

Agni's philosophy.

Right?

Forspoken.

Forsaken.

Forsaken?

Forsaken?

No, hold on.

No, no, is it?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The future is Forsaken.

Forsaken is the old game from.

I'm thinking of Forspoke.

Yeah, it's Forspoken.

Forspoken?

Is it Forspoken?

Yeah, it is called Forspoken.

Forspoken.

God damn it.

I was.

Damn, it's not.

Yeah, okay, right, right.

Oh, boy.

Uh, Agni's philosophy, tech demo,

forgotten,

man,

hey, man.

I gotta take a quick break.

I'll be right back.

BRB.

Next up,

hey.

Blizzard looked down at the keyboard and found the fuck go back button

They said, fine, leave me alone.

Take it.

For three weeks.

You guys don't like Overwatch.

We're making a new better Overwatch.

It's called Overwatch 2, but really, it's about story content.

Okay, we canceled the story content, but Overwatch 2 is still good.

Oh, wait, you don't like it?

What if we just went back to Overwatch 1, the game we took away from you?

Overwatch 1.0, the backdown event begins.

The backdown event.

It's embarrassing.

So Overwatch Classic is coming out, and you can play as all the original heroes in all the original ways.

Mercy with the full res,

you know, original strats, original hooks,

etc.

So, and maps and so on as a limited-time event for three weeks.

And it's like, hey, guys, come on,

come on,

it's the vent.

And then, you know,

and maybe one day you'll boot it up, and then you won't notice, and you'll just get queued into a regular match of Overwatch 2, and then we got you.

Hey, Willie, I have a question.

What would you consider classic in a timeline sense?

2016.

2016?

Oh, not 2023?

Because, like, everyone thinks about Overwatch came out in 2016, but Overwatch was

playable and normal video game up until Overwatch 2's release in 2023.

This classic only left the ability to be played 18 months ago.

So what you and you can tell from the way people are responding to it, what it's actually bringing back is the untouched characters and maps that are no longer removed from the game.

It's old maps and characters in the way that you originally played them, to which for me, it's just like, oh, it's the one that I was playing before i stopped playing it and for a lot of people i'm sure it'd be the same um um when i heard about this on stream the other day i described it as a world in which classic coke was coming back for three weeks but new coke is just going to be the way forward forever well you have to buy a two liter of of new coke and inside of it there's a classic coke can that you have to get at that's that's how that's going to work

Blizzard is in this weird state in which all they can do is release older, not ruined versions of their existing games.

I tried to find the right musical artist for it, and my brain couldn't find one of just like, the fuck you find.

Here's my old album.

Shut up.

Leave me alone for a limited time only.

It's Madonna.

Or when you go to the concert, they refuse to play anything that people came to play.

Madonna is the all-time greatest because she did an interview about 15 years ago in which she was talking about how annoying it is that at her concerts for her new album, that people ask her to sing like a virgin.

And she said, You know, I don't even remember the lyrics to that song.

That's what I was going to say.

She doesn't, she'd have to remember the words for that to sound like that.

And it's like,

that's a lie, Madonna.

Oh, yeah.

You don't remember the words.

I can't believe it.

Your biggest hit of all time that you sang tens of thousands of times on stage.

She's pretty old, and there's a lot of

alterations going on.

I don't know.

I can believe anything not being forgotten.

Did the great equalizer COVID remove your memories of how to sing your own songs?

I saw one pop up there.

Lincoln Park.

This is

the modern Lincoln Park.

And everyone's like,

all right.

Here you go.

Here's hybrid theory.

Meteora for three weeks only.

Yeah.

Yay.

Yeah, Blizzard just seems like

a fucking.

I mean, but you have to admit, like, it is the ultimate Trump card, right?

It's in the playbook.

you go the last thing is here's the thing you it's the thing you know and you want yeah so it's hooked up to a little string and we'll you know you get you get three weeks and then so you're completely right but i feel like blizzard has ruined this um wow classic blizzard specifically for themselves have ruined the classic thing

because wow classic

was

the single most requested thing from that company for like eight or nine nine years.

And then they were like, fine.

And it was like really

dismissive.

You think you want that, but you don't.

Like this really higher, high and mighty attitude where it was like, no, people actually want that.

They very much do want that.

That's interesting.

You said, because, oh, where the fuck was it?

Somewhere in the announcement for this,

they were talking about like, oh, so like, what's the, what's the plan?

Or like, why just three weeks?

And they're like, oh, well, um,

you know, there's kind of like, oh, you never know.

Maybe we'll see if we want something like that to linger.

But the phrasing in one of the interviews was

talking about how it's like, what was it?

Like, oh, it's great to see how much the game has changed.

We've added a lot over the years.

Yeah, there's a lot of format changes.

We want to...

You can go back and experience the way it was when it first launched.

There There was something to it

that kind of sounded almost like, hey, you can go back and see how nuts and crazy it was so that you can appreciate the current thing.

Yeah, how

slick it is now.

Look how crazy and wild and dumb it used to be.

Now you'll appreciate it.

So, yeah,

when they did that with WoW Classic, I have a lot of friends who are like, yeah, no, this is better.

It was better.

I like it better.

The old wow was better.

And then you get to like, oh, you know what?

Well, at least they're remastering their games like Warcraft 3.

Oh, you mean the game they took away from you and then ruined?

Warcraft 3 was removed off your Blizzard account and replaced with Warcraft 3 Reforged, which is ruined.

And then they removed Overwatch from being able to be played and replaced it with Overwatch 2, which is worse.

But also, like I've said every day, every time I ever talk about Overwatch, that Overwatch is the only game I have ever played in my life that every single patch made it worse.

Every single change was worse than the version before.

It's the only game I have ever seen like that.

In the trailer, it was like three weeks, two tanks.

You know, as they're doing a little countdown.

And then they specifically show you Mercy doing the full team res

and

all the other infamous things.

So, yeah, people would be a lot less mad about everything if they went back and redid Warcraft 3 Reforged.

But I do think it's the same subtext you're mentioning here: like, man, look how dumb and busted it was.

Don't you appreciate the new thing more?

No, as a result, I think, I think that energy is coming through here, too.

I hope people can see our willingness to

experiment and take risks.

You probably wouldn't label doing a classic mode as a risk.

We're experimenting with format changes for season 13, different team sizes, 6v6 formats in season 14, and there's going to be limited-time events.

So,

when's this classic?

When's that running?

November 12th to December 3rd.

December 3rd.

Oh.

It's

three days before Marvel Rivals comes out on the 6th.

Ah!

Oh!

You don't say.

So we've gone

from the blizzard.

We have gone from the blizzard that is so confident about the quality of their games

that they are actively planning their open betas and releases to kill other games.

You remember the open beta for Overwatch was announced to kill Battleborn?

I'm sure you remember that.

Yeah, Marvel Rivals releasing on December 6th.

And they would announce World of Warcraft release dates to kill other games as well.

And we've now

moved it to

make sure you do this classic event before Rivals comes out.

Oh, shit.

Oh, shit.

The sabotage.

Hey, remember the original?

Come on back.

Don't go away.

Don't go over there.

And you know what?

I mean, shit, it might work if the whole team gets fucking arrested and locked up by the time it launches.

Yeah, that's pretty wild, actually.

Like, maybe.

Dudes over at Rivals getting fucking money launder arrested.

Right, right?

Hey, that's it.

You go, hey, check out the classics.

Check out the the old, don't look over there.

They're like, nah, fuck you, Blizzard.

You're not going to trick me.

I'm going to look over there.

And you look over there, and you see a fucking police car pulling up, and dudes getting slammed in the back seat.

Sirens are going off.

What the fuck is happening over at Rivals?

So,

yeah, apparently

nine employees at Marvel Rivals

and Destiny Rising over at NetEase got arrested, including two senior executives, for laundering money

to the tune of some 200 million plus dollars

or over a billion yuan.

So,

like,

whatever the fuck is happening over there ahead of this game's launch is

pretty nuts

this is um

this is total rabid speculation by me pulling this out of my butt but like

i remember looking at marvel rivals and we played the the open beta and i was like wow compared to

compared to other netties games

This thing looks like super slick and super polished and like there's a ton of money going into it

and

i guess some of that money was going into it and coming out in a very specific way yes that was a lot of money allegedly allegedly and it

um

the two executives apparently

yeah some 27 other different companies are linked to the fraud case um that's a big um number that's a big amount and this is this is pretty significant and if that if that is yeah if that's coming if that's oh my god yeah so somebody points out that um

specifically it's people in the esports and publication departments

and that makes perfect sense right okay okay okay yeah i'm gonna pay this player four hundred thousand dollars a year to play esports does that player exist totally

totally

or even right over there

Or not even the team and the players, but even just the establishment of a league, right?

Oh, I'm going to need this chunk of the budget to create the league, bro.

And plan the events and do the whole thing.

You know, it could just be a simple thing.

You know what, man?

Sports.

Esports is catching up.

Esports, sports, sports, sports, sports, sports.

Esports is catching up.

People are going to prison for financial crimes.

They're catching up, baseball.

The drugs aren't here yet, but Adderall is already here.

They are here.

They are absolutely here.

man

so but here's the thing like

what an amazing like so yeah overwatch is just like is just playing a sad old game of like texting you back sending letter dumps even after being blocked you know trying to find sideways ways to hit you up on like whatsapp or overwatch is like hey you remember how good we were together before before i before i fucked your boss and torched your clothes look at at the photos.

My phone just sent me this memory.

Good times.

Isn't this great?

Oh, my real reminded me of how good we were.

But the current bae is like, yeah, don't worry about it, babe.

I just got to talk to the judge.

It'll be like two, three days tops off it.

That's a misunderstanding.

It's a misunderstanding.

My cousin's a lawyer.

We got this covered.

It's fine.

Don't worry about it.

We'll be straight in five minutes.

Don't worry about it.

Don't read the news.

Don't look at the newspaper.

You know what?

Just don't even take any phone calls to tell you home.

And you're just like,

damn.

But he kills it when he's here, right?

When he's around.

Shit's good, though, right?

That gameplay is incredible.

It's so good.

Wow.

Well, anyway.

I got to admit,

I'm shocked more

parts of large gaming publishers don't get fucking caught with their money laundering shit.

Oh, yeah.

No, the question is

not

like where, but like, just simply how many.

And, you know, not if, but how many.

And you have to kind of wonder in these types of cases where it's like, okay, so net ease is getting pulled up.

Did somebody not get their skim?

Did somebody not, you know, grease a palm that's supposed to be greased?

Did someone that was the system failed somewhere?

Is this now is the system working one where the grease is consistent throughout the entire conveyor belt?

You know,

is that baked?

If somebody was unhappy with with their circumstance within the system

or

really afraid of going to jail themselves.

An accountant doesn't suddenly carry the two, look at the numbers and go, oh my God, where did $200 million go?

I just don't know, man.

All of a sudden in a single TPS.

I don't know.

No, actually, what does happen is that the

national IRS equivalent goes,

wait, wait,

these numbers don't make any sense.

Maybe I should look a little more careful into these.

None of these numbers make any sense.

Where does the money go?

Yeah.

Anyone could get pulled for any reason at any time that may or may not have anything to do with

what's happening on the books or what they say.

You know, never forget.

Jack Ma can get disappeared for a month.

Come back and be like, it's cool.

So

there was that.

And,

well, we were talking about cheaters earlier here's a

here's a particularly interesting one um the ps5 pro has dropped yeah

and

uh it appears that scalpers are forced to sell them at a loss because they bought up a bunch on release uh in anticipation of you know the the price hike that would come with the surge once the console became unavailable

which the console continues to be readily available at major retailers everywhere.

I could walk into a store anyway.

I could go to my Best Buy and just pick one up right now.

Anyway, not a problem.

I've seen them.

Nope.

No issues whatsoever.

It's very, very, very available.

It's so available.

And

as a result,

the gamble has led to a number of scalpers being forced to

shove them up on resale sites

at a loss.

Awesome.

Too bad, so sad.

Wop wop

play again.

Dude, I found out that the PS5 Pro was out by seeing the scalper article.

That's awesome.

That's great.

That's great.

I mean, you don't really think about that on the back end when you release something that is not going to move because people are not about purchasing that at that rate, at that price.

And then the scalpers go, It's a new, it's a new PS PlayStation, go get it.

Who cares?

What the fuck?

I don't know who this fucking thing is for, man.

Yeto, fucking $1,100

console.

People who are going to spend that have a PC.

That's too much.

The Digital Foundry came out

reviewing the features and everything on it.

And one of the main takeaways was that Elden Ring remains undefeated,

cannot hit stable 60

on that either, and

never goes below the 48,

but it can't get a rock solid 60.

It's

yeah,

nonsense.

I do

wish that it were not once once per decade that a scalper come up in story would happen, but

I'll take him wherever we can get him, I suppose.

Hey, you know what?

You know what?

Hey, you know what?

We're not going to hear a

scalper come up in story about?

The Nintendo ounces, or whatever the fuck it's going to be called.

The Switch 2?

Is that the.?

I didn't hear that.

What's that?

The ounces is the code word that

code name that came out for the Pokemon shit.

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

But

you'll get ready to fight to get one of those things.

Get ready to fucking kick a mother of four down the stairs and steal her Switch 2.

It's mine.

I'm going to wait for the game announcement that needs

to get it.

Oh, they announced that game.

They announced that game.

You can play your Switch games on a more powerful piece of hardware, so they might act like real video games.

Right, right, okay.

That game.

Right.

Yeah, okay.

That old

Age of Calamity, Hyrule Warriors may actually be coming out.

Sure.

See, but the thing is, if you're going like Metroid Prime 4 or whatever, it's like, okay, well, then when that exists and there's a trailer and a release date and a thing that I know is going to occur at a point in time, at that point in time, I can go and deal with it.

But I don't, there's no benefit necessarily if I'm not really going to be doing much with it.

My shit's collecting dust right over there, you know.

Yeah, I just when there's a reason to interact with it, there's what I is when I'm down to go.

I don't, uh, I don't have to get in early particularly.

There are so many Switch games that I would like to play that every time I pick them up and play them, I go, oh.

And, you know, well, so timing-wise enough, I know that I was planning to replace my PS5 anyway because

besides the storage space bit, recently playing with

Metaphor and such, you know, Punch Mom was kind of taking a look and was looking at getting into FO7R2, which means we can't do what we did last time, where before we did a,

she used my PS4 to connect to the PS5 when I wasn't using it to

do the

stream thing.

But in this case, that's just not going to work as much because how frequently it's being used and everything.

So my current PS5 is going to probably need to, you know, go there.

So, the whole thing is going to get shaken up anyway.

So, like I said, I'm sooner likely to grab one of these than

whatever ounces is going to be necessarily, unless they fucking hit me with the right exclusive announcement or something from the jump.

But,

yeah.

I would, you know, would make me laugh really hard if the Nintendo Switch 2 or whatever is like we've taken

many steps to ensure that Nintendo Switch games will be exactly as you remember them and will be emulated exactly as they were on the Nintendo Switch.

And then they just put up a fucking piece of footage of Hyrule Warriors, Calamity, whatever, just at fucking 10 frames, going, Look how accurate it is, just like you remember it.

Just the black and white nostalgia filter of booting up the emulator.

God.

Well,

anyway, that's all good times.

I will.

Oh, do we have the Nintendo PAL World lawsuit on there?

Oh,

no, but

okay, so here's the fun bit.

I'm just going to fly right through it.

I'll let you know.

Nintendo's patent lawsuit against PAL World, like the details have come out.

And it's all really, it's exactly what people thought it was.

It was like throwing the ball and catching the monster

and just really lame-ass mechanical shit that tons of other games do.

Three in particular.

Yeah.

Yeah.

More importantly

is that all of these patents were filed after fucking Power World got announced.

And

they were filed worldwide after Power World came out.

So

it just feels like they saw Palworld and then they filed all this shit with the plan to sue them over it later.

So if I hold out my buddy device and then my monster comes out of it directly, but I don't throw it to catch necessarily, that's fine.

And many rises are things that they did in the Palworld devs did in their prior game called Craftopia.

So, like, Nintendo is just flat out in the wrong.

It's just, again, it's the fact that the vibes are so on point as opposed to every other.

Oh, I'm wrong here.

Oh, of course.

Okay.

I was going to say, every other Pokemon clone,

this is the one that has been the most shameless and like fucking taken the piss.

Like, this is Monty Python's Pokemon, you know?

So So I think the energy

that PAL World has is part of why Nintendo is so upset at it.

I'm now seeing people argue with me when I say I'm wrong that I'm not wrong.

This is awesome.

Okay.

Well, I, so it was the, yeah, but I saw it's the Pokeball toss, it's the riding of the monsters, and I forget what the third thing was.

It's shit that a billion other games do that Nintendo would never have them sued because that's stupid.

Renewal filing?

Is that what it is?

So they yeah, the renewal filing was in 2024.

The original filing was in 2021 after PAL World was announced.

Okay.

And after Craftopia already had many of these features.

Okay.

Well, if that is the case, then the renewal, then the filing is not as spiteful a point.

But nonetheless, I do wonder: is Nintendo coming after any other Pokémon clones that have been released in the years since Red and Blue?

No.

So

they're asking for 60K, which is like really small, but they're also asking for an injunction to ban sale.

Ah.

So,

and apparently, I saw some lawyers talking about how fighting the lawsuit could cost millions because of just the time and hours required and patent laws and all that shit.

But

I kind of expect my gut says that what we're going to see is like

a settlement in which Pal World either changes that shit or just doesn't sell it in Japan.

Well, I'm just like, well, how hard and how out of character would it be for Powell World to just remove the ball and make nothing?

You know, like whatever.

Some light appears from the sky and it just appears, whatever.

And then, okay, you don't fly on it, but you maybe Ben Hur chariot it.

Yeah, turn it.

You know what?

Have it?

Like

scoop up dead pals into

a fucking drum and resurrect them.

Fuck it.

Like, I don't, like, throwing a cube, I think, is not going to work.

I think the throwing of the object is going to be the problem.

So, you know, whatever.

Light in the sky shines.

It comes.

Who the fuck cares?

Some bullshit happens and then your pal is on screen.

You know,

flying on the backs of the things or riding on the backs of the things as a mount.

It's crazy that mounting is an issue compared to any other game that has that concept.

And, you know, like

these are stupid, dumb changes that they can make.

Yeah, no,

Nintendo's evil, and um, they're stupid, and they're the most regressive, anti-consumer, anti-innovation developer/slash publisher in the industry, like period.

Um, and it's always been that way.

The way they've treated everybody with their IP is always like, no, but us, though, no, and it's not, no, you don't do it, though.

No, not you, but us, though,

um, we'll steal your emulator that you made and your run and your versions of games, but like, don't you fucking emulate our games.

No, no, it's Nintendo.

Nintendo.

I fully look forward to the update that changes these features and introduces

a new Hanafuna card company as an evil faction in the world.

Oh, that'd be awesome shit.

That just dumps their pals into mulch in order to

create the Hanafuna ink, you know, to print on their cards.

That'd be great.

Uh,

yeah.

All right, let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send a letter in, send it to castlesuperbeastmailgmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Wait, I wanted to call to everyone's attention a new game announcement

that looks pretty cool.

It's called Acts of Blood, and it is the raid cross seafood.

Okay, well, that, okay.

Okay, I'm, I'm, okay.

Yep.

Go check it out.

It's a gritty raid-style character fighting in the rain, doing seafood shit, beat him up, looks like a thing, calling it to your attention.

There's a demo available, and

yeah, I

wow, that really is just raid/slash seafood.

Yeah, like, that's, that's, I can't describe it any other way.

Uh, acts of blood.

I'm going to check out to see what's going on.

Philippines is doing some stuff.

We'll see.

Cool.

All right.

We got a letter coming in over here.

Hey, Pat and Woolley, every once in a while, historians will dig up a jar of honey or pickles that's been preserved for decades.

Would you eat a decades-old pickle?

Thank you for your time, Gabe.

I wouldn't eat a pickle that's fucking fresh from the goddamn jar right now.

Oh, there you go.

I'd eat honey, though.

I'd eat old honey.

Honey doesn't go bad.

Honey keeps.

Yeah.

Honey keeps crazy.

I've had natto, so I've already ventured into that territory.

I guess the question is, is like, what fermented ass thing would you do?

Would you actually opt in to try?

I'd try a lot of things

for money.

I like kimchi.

I could probably do some really strong kimchi because I really enjoy the flavor and taste of that.

Of all the movies.

Okay, hold on.

If somebody, if I'm at a place and somebody offers me a new food and it's like weird or something,

I'll put it in my mouth and I'll try it.

Right.

But we're not talking about that.

We're talking about

the black sarcophagus juice.

Yeah.

Do you want to sip?

So how much for a can of surstroming?

I don't think I have the capability to actually eat that.

Like, I think I would try, but I don't think I'd be able to get near it.

I think my body would rebel and fight me.

And

most importantly, how much to open that can in your kitchen?

Oh, zero.

No, not doing it.

Oh, man.

Apparently, once you get past the absolute fucking blight town gas that comes out of it, the flavor of the meat is not the worst in the world, but it's just that the you're selling me.

You're selling me.

But they have to they have to the the

herring needs to ferment in its in its own rotten juices.

And for that, the canning process is ideal.

So it's the gas release is not the flavor of the meat is what I've been told.

Bro, I'm the kind of guy who'll have a bite of yogurt and be like, this tastes off, and dump the fucking the rest of the tub like

food goes bad you shouldn't eat food that goes bad and i don't care if you tell me no it's supposed to go bad shut up

this is the europeans trying to trick us

i mean

dairy do you you know in general you wanna you wanna you don't want to fuck with um

i

would do kimchi.

If it's something kimchi-based,

an aged kimchi, providing that it's within the realm of okay, but that's like a regular food that people eat.

But I mean an aged kimchi.

I think I could take.

Of the aged foods, it's the one that I think I like the most.

Blue cheese is good.

I like blue cheese.

Yeah, blue cheese is fantastic.

Although blue cheese itself, raw versus blue cheese, like cream or total.

No, you have to put blue cheese on something.

You can't.

That's.

Yeah.

You can't.

All right.

Durandal here says, howdy, nurgling Pat and Zergling Woolly.

Simple question.

What is your favorite faction and unit hero from a strategy game?

It can range from traditional to 4X, grand strategy, etc.

Have a good week.

Stay safe.

Man, I'm a big fan of those siege tanks.

Siege tanks and siege mode and switching out is pretty rad.

I don't know.

Like, to to this day,

I still randomly think about ghosts.

Ghosts,

the way they move with the gun on the ground, like the giant rifle, it reminds me of

that one scene in Spriggan where he pulls off the giant gun from

the back of the tank and he's dragging it on the ground.

The fact that they're stealthy and that you can hide outside the base, get intel, and then call in the nuke.

Like, the whole thing, the whole thing with ghosts is just so, so cool.

Big, big, big fan of that.

And the functionality of like what an Archon is is also super rad.

Right?

Doing a fusion dance with two units to create a powerful one permanently.

That's a cool concept.

So there are an enormous amount of units that I would say fit this thing for me from Dawn of War 1.

The Warhammer 40k units.

Okay.

There's a, I forget the name of it, but the final

unit for the Necron in Dark Crusade was this absolutely ridiculously gigantic floating pyramid that just vaporized everything that came near it and was the coolest fucking thing.

Okay.

Special shout out to the canine in Red Alert.

Simple.

Oh, yeah.

Simple but effective.

You put a dog down, a soldier runs by it.

Unit lost.

Oh, man.

You got to look.

Oh, the mammoth tank from CNC Gold.

So good.

And

Grenadiers from Command and Conquer.

Sure.

As a generic unit.

We're so good.

Tanya.

Oh, yeah, Commando.

Commando from fucking from Command and Conquer.

Absolutely.

For me, Tanya, Red Alert.

Hit the building.

Tesla Coils.

Sick.

Yeah,

those are the faves.

Man, I wish real-time strategy games weren't just completely fucking dead.

Did they not just evolve into MOBers?

Those Those are very different genres.

That's like saying, I wish beat-em-ups came back, and you're like, but fighting games are here.

Yeah, I know, I know.

And I know that the same audience moved on to that one as well.

But

you kind of like, yeah, I guess you just, someone needs to hold, be a champion of the old genre and hold on to it no matter what

the tide is doing.

Pikmin?

Pikmin is not.

Does that count?

Come on.

Okay.

No.

Eventually, the audience changed, but it did.

That was the pipeline, right?

You RTS into MOBA.

Oh, yeah, it's very direct pipeline.

Yeah, that's the basis of where the fan base,

how it started so big to begin with.

Well, it's easy to control one unit in an RTS game.

Yeah.

It's very easy.

Well, that's.

God, I remember Commando's, the game, and it was just like, it's like an RTS, but there's no buildings.

It's just the units.

There have been a lot of games that are like, what if you just didn't have to build anything in your RTS game?

Wouldn't that be more fun?

And the answer is no,

actually.

For a huge amount of people, building up your big base is like a huge appeal.

Depends, man.

You know, again,

I'm out here talking about Syndicate again.

You know, like, I like just controlling the crew.

That should play Zephon.

I'm a fan.

I enjoy it.

Alright.

Let's take one from.

Okay, well, no straight name.

Given Hay, Cool Wooly, and Cool Pat.

Oh, yeah.

What is the coolest Dreamcast game?

Circa 2001.

My call is Crazy Taxi and Jet Grind Radio.

What am I missing?

I mean, coolest.

So I know

I've got the list off.

Oh, yeah, no.

Even, dude, I don't even like the Dreamcast, and I have the list in my head.

It's unstoppable, man.

Jetset Radio, Soul Calibur, Res, Skies of Arcadia, Third Strike, Marvel 2, Powerstone, Ikaruga, Space Channel 5.

Like, you can't beat that lineup, dude.

It's incredible.

It's either

Jet Set, Marvel, Third Strike, or

Project Justice.

Seaman.

Seaman.

Yeah.

I mean, if you asked me, I would say House of the Dead 2.

The greatest game that's ever been made.

There you go.

But that lineup was why I cared so much about that console and why I always wanted to have one.

It was just like

great arcade-y fucking

There's an arcade machine in your house, man

All right, last one over here

Dear Padreg and Volsworth

Hold on, I have a new answer Okay

The last batch of good sports games to ever exist.

Ooh, the 2K series.

Yes.

The 2K games.

Okay.

history made them even cooler than they were at the time powerful answer

nfl 2k got fucking played

man and that was while i was okay so i talk about when we used to buy madden every year we were a household that would do the seasons and when madden was phasing out and we just kind of were not really playing football games as much

fucking the 2k games were in bro i am like, every time we mention sports games, I get like legitimately pissed off that a genre that I used to really enjoy just

doesn't exist.

I mean, like, annualized,

I spent money every time.

Oh, yeah, dude.

I had 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, look, yeah, the street games were cool, and that's in the kind of NBA Jam Arcade-y kind of thing.

But I'm, no, straight up talking about real, actual sports simulator games.

Aggressively spent money on those, man.

I'm like, you know what else I would like to play a new game of?

I would like to play an arcade racing game, please.

So there are wipeout likes that have come out since.

No!

I didn't say hover craft fucking bullshit.

There is also...

No, there's a couple.

There's a couple because there's those.

There's

what the fuck is it called?

There was a Daytona style indie game that was just like, obviously not drift stage, but there was something that was announced that was like,

I forget what it was called.

Yeah, so

what I'm trying to describe is a little more.

It's like there's a hyper-throwback arcade game from 94 to 97.

But when I say I'd like to play an arcade racing game, I mean every single racing game that came out between Need for Speed 2 and Burnout Paradise, in which they were more or less realistic cars, but they controlled like an arcade racing game.

I think the last one of those was Hot Pursuit 2, and it's awesome.

But that's beyond the actual age of going to the arcade and popping a quarter to play one of these things.

Because when you say that, I think of I popped money into Daytona, I popped money into Cruisin', you know, or fucking Hydro Thunder or some shit.

Like, like someone in chat says, I would should play Forza.

I've played Forza, Forza is a fucking Gran Turismo clone.

That's not what I want.

I wouldn't use arcade to describe.

Well,

that's how it was described at the time.

It just got more confusing over time.

Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

It got extra confusing when versions of Need for Speed 3 and 4 became arcade machines.

Okay.

I'm like, if I go to the movie theater and I see that machine there,

that's the arcade style racer I'm thinking of.

Like, that, you know, the ones that would be at the theater.

Anyways.

I just want to play Burnout.

I just want Burnout to exist.

Driving games, not driving Sims.

No, no one ever called those driving games ever.

No one has ever called Burnout Paradise a driving game.

I mean, I would say non-simulator fun racing

would be my genre.

You know what?

I've played two of the Forza Horizon games.

I would like to play a fun racing game.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is good and fun to play.

Top Gear 2 lives in my heart forever.

Split second for me.

Man, split second.

Great answer.

Oh, that's a good fucking game.

Yep.

Burnout?

You know.

All right.

And last one over here.

Der Der Patrick and Volswirth.

What's up?

You ever experienced a scenario where inaccurate leaks and negative doom posting in a community have unfairly poisoned the discourse around the release of something you were looking forward to?

Misinformation so widely circulated as true that it becomes difficult to distinguish nuanced criticism from negative circle jerking in said discourse and communities.

So that's a very specific phrasing, so it's like, what's the context?

A lot of games are like that.

That happens a lot.

Popular manga Oshino Co.

will have its final chapter on Wednesday.

For the last several weeks, chapter discussions have been pretty toxic on a significant portion of the fan base.

Reading poorly translated leaked spoilers instead of the actual chapters.

You'll see comments with hundreds of upvotes referring to poorly written dialogue and plot points that never actually happened in the official chapter.

By the time anyone calls them out, it's too late.

People parrot the misinformation in future threads.

It's frustrating watching the vocal portion of the community judge a piece of media on false preconceptions and spreads negativity outside of the community.

So I got got for this on Attack on Titan.

Attack on Titan immediately came to mind.

Because,

and it wouldn't have been,

so a lot of that is my knee-jerk response, but more than that,

more than me being responsible for how I felt, there's someone else who is at fault and it's not me.

No, it would have been a lot easier to move through that extremely negative feeling.

Is it Aaron Yeager?

No, no, no.

It would be a lot easier for me to move through that extremely negative feeling and give AOT's later bits more of a chance if the anime hadn't been released in the most fucked up, bizarre way possible.

Because I would have been able to go, oh, the season is out.

I'll just watch it and I'll see.

And the two things I have to that, one, what I said in the actual discussion was that Attack on Titans anime ending benefited heavily from the extra time it took

and the adjustments, the changes, things that were, you were able to see dialogue improvements and expansion of things that were rushed and stupid about the manga version.

So

it got a lot better and things made more sense originally than they did.

So that's a big thing.

The release of Attack on Titan being so fucked up and everything, I found out that a big part of that was because Mappa,

they had similar things going on with Jiu-Jitsu Kaisen, where season two is fucking insane over-the-top, incredible quality animation and stuff, but there was a ton of

churn with artists, and people were crunching out, and the amount of work they had to do was getting stacked to the ceiling.

And so, basically, Attack on Titan's release schedule was the product of this is as much incredible, like high-quality work as this team can do in this time frame.

frame and like the idea was essentially you either wait a super long time for it all to come out in you know one big thing or

put it out piecemeal as they go and um

yeah the the the release schedule was basically like

a product of the artists being able to only do so much and there's people that were like kind of reporting and we're finding out now that like even with that they still should have had more time and more breaks and

should have been paid more as well and all these things, you know?

So like at the time, I'm like, yeah, Attack on Titan, the final season, part A, act B, fucking 3.2, whatever.

It's like,

it's super silly when you're looking at it.

And then when it's like, yeah, because there's a team of people on the other end of this that are like only capable of putting out so much and they're already being worked to the fucking bone, it's like, okay, fine, fair enough.

That shouldn't be happening.

That sucks, You know?

So, I think the most interesting version of this possible is a BioWare situation.

And

it's when a huge amount of story details for Mass Effect 3 leaked out onto 4chan like months and months and months ahead of the game's release.

And they were very negative.

And then

NeoGAF NeoGAF

had a thread on it.

And then, in order to confirm that shit, BioWare sent them a cease and desist to take the thread down.

And

a bunch of that, like, you know, it's a fortune, it was a green tech, so it was like, oh, like, how, you know, how biased could this be?

And, but it created this, like, very negative aura around the game.

And then when it came out, they did rewrite some of the stuff.

But like, most of that shit was in there.

Striser.

And

the gut feeling of that can't possibly be that stupid was then given to you with, yes, actually it is.

Oh, man.

And was just like,

like, it was just the worst of all possible worlds.

Like, there was ending shit in there, and people were like, there's no way.

And that led to the questions to Casey Hudson about what the ending would be like, to which he responded, it's not going to be red, blue, or green.

And then it literally was that.

Red, blue, or green.

Just the worst possible version of events.

But just the idea of like a green text thread, and then it's like OP's full of shit.

And then it's like, OP posts, a fucking cease and desist.

Like, well, then why are there lawyers coming at me?

Yeah.

Hard confirms.

And like, and to be fair, like, reading plot points wildly out of their own context always sucks unless they're what you were wanting.

Like always.

Why do you do it?

Pardon?

Why do you do it?

Why do I do it?

Well, you've done it a couple times.

Because I'm stupid.

Okay.

Is that what you want?

No,

I'm just like, I...

There are times when

the wiki dive will just never satisfy, you know.

But I guess

if there's an upper limit on how much you can give a fuck about said thing to begin with, then you know.

So, like, sometimes it doesn't always suck.

Like, I remember when I failed out of playing Horizon for the third time in a row, I was like, I'm just going to look at the twist.

I want to know what the fucking twist is.

Okay, okay.

And then I looked it up and I was like, oh,

that's pretty good, actually.

Like, I like that.

So, there is some tilt to it, right?

But

yeah, no, this was a situation where it's like the leaks came out and they were really bad and you were like, nah.

And it's like, no, it totally was just, it was exactly the thing you were worried about.

Boy.

They should have taken that time to look at reaction to that and maybe put the goddamn ending

better.

Well, no, because the like

the

only thing worse than all of the above is the deliberate swerve after the public finds out or guesses what you're going to do, like Lost or Game of Thrones or fucking Star Wars type shit, where it's like, oh no, the writers saw that people online figured it out and decided to specifically go against that shit.

Well, Wooly,

don't forget, don't forget, Woolly,

that

Mass Effect 3's new direction

had already swerved because people were starting to figure it out.

So this leak was a reaction to the swerve.

Fucking Westworld, dude.

Fucking Westworld, and every time.

No, you know what?

It's a one-season show.

Don't worry about it.

It is a one-season Anthony Hopkins masterpiece, and that's all there is to it.

Man.

God, I wonder if you asked him about like season two and beyond if he would just punch you.

Was he in it?

It feels like

I'm

going to, I'm pretty sure no.

Then, does he even know?

I'm, and I feel as if he might just punch you if you asked him,

which is the correct response, you know.

Anyway, anyway, all right, that'll do.

Have a nice day, everybody.

Goodbye.