CSB338: That Giraffe Is Getting Sloppy Toppy

Hello.

Hey, buddy.

How you doing?

Doing all right.

You know, just a little tired, but doing good.

I'll start with this.

Yeah, let's hear it.

That is.

Those mutton chops are upsettingly sick on you.

They look really good.

So

I got the mutton chops because of the sub-a-thon, and then I walked out of the the barber and went and met up with Paige.

And my wife was like,

hey.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They look really good.

I'm being told that the mutton, I'm being told that the chops are here to stay.

It's kind of weird how this joke has actually turned out to be a completely flattering joke.

Yeah, I guess it worked out.

Perfect shape for your face.

It looks dope.

Thanks, man.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, I really appreciate it quite a lot.

You're that guy now.

You're the expression.

Also, hey,

don't have as much food getting lost in my face anymore.

That's nice.

Have a nice, clean chin.

Very nice.

The soup catcher is gone.

You got your...

Yeah.

There you go.

That's a funny one.

That being said, when I walked in to a barber that I got a highly reviewed barber because I don't want to fuck it up, I was like, hey, man, I would like some mutton chops.

And he went, really?

Which is an awesome start to that conversation.

And he's like, I've never done that before.

I'm like, cool.

Can you do it like this?

And I pulled out my phone and I showed him the expression.

And he's like,

okay, boss, whatever you want.

Now, the thing is, is that even though that works and like you have that look, you're now giving out the impression of being someone that is super not who you are.

Oh, dude, I was, I don't have it with me.

I think I took it back to the house, but I had my gigantic mirrored aviators on

with my Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 bass fishing shirt.

And I put all that shit on for Bioshock Infinite, of course.

And

I put the headphones on and I put my bass

hat on and my mirrored aviator sunglasses and this.

And I was like, this is my,

I'm walking to the store or I'm taking the baby for a stroll i don't want to talk to you outfit

like i don't i don't want to talk to you don't talk to me but just the the energy that that chops give off especially with accessories as you've mentioned denotes a lifestyle that you do not

represent more than i do yes like right off the bat there should be something up on engine blocks in the garage that you're currently working on you guys you guys want to listen to some pantera and drink Bud Lights?

You should probably own some leather articles of clothing.

I don't.

Instead, I just have this ugly little dog that I fall over.

It was just a little lady.

Yeah.

So, no,

when you bait certain people around into, you know,

thinking they got a new little trucker biker friend or something like that.

I'm really waiting for the moment where someone says something

to me and expects me to go, yeah,

and for me to go, hmm,

mm, no.

I don't know about that, Booker.

I don't know about that.

But you've got opinions about Silk Song.

That's an unexpected.

I have

several.

I have at least three opinions about Silk Song.

But let's start with Silk Song in the other direction.

Woolly, do you have any further opinions on Silk Song?

I didn't boot it up.

Okay.

Don't go any further.

Got it.

We'll start there.

So

as of

about one o'clock, maybe midnight last night Pacific time,

I got my 100% clear

and have it in the bag for the

proper, proper true ending version of Silk Song.

How soon, how much time between having the ending or the boss accessible to you versus cleaning up?

45 minutes.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Yeah.

I got to have a, I got, so I, I had, I got a little,

I got a little up my own ass because why not?

Because I've been so humble about Silk Song for a bit.

So I titled the stream, the second to last stream, um,

Nothing in Act Three Can Stop Me.

It can't even slow me down.

Um, and I really, I really like just pointed at the heavens with that one and was like, boy,

I really hope something doesn't just completely fuck my shit up.

And nothing fucked my shit up.

I actually just coasted through it like no problem and felt like a big man.

Oh, yeah.

So, as a big man, as a really big man who's very strong and muscular and smart,

who totally crushed Soak Song,

I have some takeaways.

Uh, one, the first one is the absolute bizarre nature that 100% completion does not actually mean you've done everything because there's over a hundred percent,

no,

there are parts of the game's uh structure that just do not count for the percentage at all.

Uh, huh.

Uh, one of those is filling the hunter's journal, which means fighting every enemy a certain percentage of times.

Okay, okay, okay, sure.

And like

six of them are optional bosses that don't give you anything at all other than a little badge that you can hang in your little house.

It just goes, hey, you did it, but doesn't count for completion percentage.

I don't like that.

I have no problem with things that have entirely intrinsic value where it's essentially like,

you know, if you take your braid star as an example where there's no achievement associated, it's like, whatever, that's fine.

But if the percentage number is the one we're playing with, either...

Let it count so that it moves the percentage closer to 100 or go over 100 into 101, 102, right?

Do that if you need to, but it should be something.

There's a little itch that bugs me about there being something as significant as a boss fight equaling nothing on the percento, the percentile.

The percentage tracker in Silk Song tracks quests,

items,

abilities,

areas.

It does not track bosses.

It feels weird, but it's fine.

So

it feels very strange,

And I will talk incredibly vaguely about the game's structure.

It's a three-act structure

in which the game expands further and further and further.

But the third act

actually has like a really clear beeline through it of what to do and where to go

and has a lot of new stuff added.

to the overall game that you don't have to do and is just there for flavor.

Okay.

Because I hit the third act with like 94, 95% completion.

Like

I got like really

close to the end.

Okay.

It almost sounds like you're describing a like a state change where you mainly have to get to a location, but you can go do other stuff if you feel like it.

Yeah.

That's basically it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Cool.

And I was was like, I want to get my final four mask pieces, which is what I needed.

And I want to polish off the three or four quests that are on the board.

And then I want to go fight the final boss.

Like the final, final, finale final boss.

Which has hands, which has extreme hands, and is very, very good and very satisfying.

Silk Song's good.

Good game.

Thumbs up on Silk Song.

Good game.

I'd give that game a 10 out of 10.

Uh-oh.

That's an excellent game.

I know your voice way too well.

Yeah, I know way too well.

My ears are too attuned.

Silk Song has like, so I would call Hallow Knight a 10 out of 10, and I would call Silk Song a 10 out of 10, but they don't share a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses.

Playing as Hornet is more fun than playing as the pure, as the knight.

Ooh, okay.

She moves faster.

She has better air control.

She has a wider variety of moves.

Just actually just moving around and platforming and playing as Hornet is like a big improvement.

Maxed out versus maxed out, of course.

Not like not even a little bit.

Like the fact that the knight never gets a run ever, so you're dashing everywhere, like compared to Hornet's sprint,

she gets immediately.

Outside of that, a character that that

is for the most part, a character in a sequel should be more fun than

the one from the prior.

So absolutely.

Yes.

She looks cooler.

She's a little more proportional.

I like the needle better than the nail.

All that stuff.

Right.

Her itemization.

in that her tools and her crests and all that

uh like not not the different moves you can unlock, but just the itemization, like compass or magnetism for money or whatever.

Pick which ones, yeah.

Is way worse.

Okay, okay.

Hollow Knight's charms.

Okay, because, okay, so last week I felt that was the case, and you did mention that you're like, well, what if you could change the whole moveset?

And I was like, oh, okay.

Well, now we're getting interesting if there's an idea that says you can mix and match certain movesets with different balance of, you know, what if you want compass and pickup and this.

What if you want, you know, red, red, red, red, red, yellow.

Weapons like Castlevania.

Right.

And that was like an, okay, so we're going to give you options for your build instead of the full free form

smashing charms into your slots, right?

So the issue is, and this is really strange.

So they took the criticism of, so in the Hollow Knight, you had charms.

And charms, you just had, I think it was like five slots total.

And you could fit anything you want.

More than that.

What was it?

How many was that?

There was like...

There was like 10.

It was like, there was a bunch of them.

Hollow Knight charms.

Anyway, so let's say there were 10, right?

Five charms.

Nearly 10, 11?

Wow, okay.

So yeah, let's say there were 10.

You could equip all of them at once.

And they had no designation or classification.

Right?

Some took two slots.

Yep.

Some took one, yada.

And And so it was this thing of like, well, do I want the compass, which is the single best navigational item in the game, but I'll be one charm weaker.

Right.

In Selk Song,

it's been split into active tools, which I would call like Castlevania sub-weapons, you know, throwing a knife or throwing a boomerang or some shit.

Passive buffs like faster heal.

or heal more or poison damage on your tool attacks.

And then what I would call utility,

which is

the compass,

the charm that makes it so when you get hit, you don't get knocked back.

The charm that magnetizes currency to your character, stuff like that.

So there's a weird problem.

Is that there are like you get enough slots for like four utility charms.

There are not four good utility charms.

There are three.

That's fucking weird.

And on the other side is the blue charms, which are passive buffs, all of them are good.

All of those ones are excellent, but you can only carry like two or three.

Right.

Okay.

And you also don't have weighting applying like charms had weighting, right?

Where something could take up multiple slots.

Yeah, no, everything takes a certain amount of slots.

One is one.

Your moveset determines how many of the different colored slots you have.

Yeah.

Okay.

So no.

So there's one that has like three three red slots, so you can have like tons of sub-weapons.

Yeah.

No, my first impression of this was that, like, yeah, I was like, I don't like the lack of freedom there.

And then the other thing, too, was that,

well, I guess this could still technically apply, but not really.

In the case of Hollow Knight, like, if you had to go sit down and hammer out

a hard boss, right?

And, you know, if you're, if the plan was to just focus on that, take a bench outside and go for it, then you would take off all your navigational charms and put on combat-focused charms for that fight and then switch it back when you're done.

So

that happens in Sulk Song, and what it is, is you're changing your entire crest.

So you're changing from your navigation moveset that has the really, really, really good pogo that's trivial to the I'm going to fucking fight a boss moveset that has like a longer range or

has more damage abilities.

And then you'll just have, you'll just have like the

charms and tools you want slotted into those to go.

So when you're switching between them, you're not going like, how much should I mix and match this?

It's going, no, I'm going from my platforming moveset to my boss killing moveset.

Okay.

It's all set up and ready for me to go.

But the fact that you're losing a slot to a navigational color, no matter what, isn't like taking away something that you would, you know.

No, it's, it's, in fact, the navigational ones are like,

I never, there were a couple that I picked and I put them on every single one and I never changed them because they're not.

The compass is the good one.

The compass is the one that you need.

And if you need money, it's the one that magnetizes money to you.

But I did.

I ran that shit on every build that allowed to yellow charms the whole game.

Yeah,

I guess I'm just saying, like, I would rather take both of those off and put fight things in there for a boss fight, you know?

Yeah.

But you can't because the yellows don't have anything that make you stronger for a boss fight.

This is what is bugging bugging me about that system.

Yeah.

So the knight was able to mix and match his build to more properly accommodate

any particular challenge, right?

Hornet has a bigger focus on,

you know what you're going to have to do to beat this boss?

You're going to have to fucking fight your ass off and just fucking lock in.

That's what you're going to do.

Don't get touched.

There's and so now we get to like the difficulty part.

And after crushing that game

and having no troubles,

I think that that game has a fairly unique difficulty problem that I have yet to see in anything ever.

So the platforming is,

I would say, consistently difficult.

I would say the average platforming it expects you to do after about three or four hours is significantly tougher than anything you would expect outside of a core platformer.

I would say it is like asking

like

celest minus 20%

on average for all platforming sections.

Okay.

And this is again a revisit to the conversation.

You know, is it okay for a sequel to pick up where the escalation left off?

Yeah, no, it's a it's a straight line.

It's you know, That curve just goes right up.

Can part two of a game start where the last one left off and ask the player to, yeah, that's where we were.

So now take it from here.

And I think that's totally fine.

And then we get to the combat, which is, I'm going to say traversal combat, which is like, you know, enemies out in the world.

Or

there's a lot of arena fights where they just lock you in and throw a bunch of enemy combinations at you.

And the enemy combinations are pretty devious.

And then there are boss fights, right?

I think

those

are pretty tough on average, but like they're not crazy.

I think the issue, and I think what's like slamming people into the floor is that the game wants you to do

like,

let's say

75% of your personal ability platforming.

and then land on a platform and fight like a fairly difficult batch of two enemies and get immediately back into the platforming

and then fight a couple enemies and then the heavy platforming and then the hard boss that you're actually stuck on.

And there's two particular bosses in the game that require a run back.

And

one of which is the judge.

And I was, I got that run back down to like 65 seconds and never took a hit of damage doing it.

Okay.

Like just wall bouncing and, you know, dashing over to where I needed to go.

And I was able to do that boss fight maybe 15 times in a 45-minute period.

And it took me, you know, 12, 13, 14 tries.

And I beat it.

And I was like, got it.

If I was not.

absentmindedly annihilating the platform section prior to that boss it would have taken three four five times as long because i would be getting to the boss hurt and frustrated and sweaty, walking in the door.

So this is, this is reminding me of Hollow Knight where some of those runs would be super trivialized and made easy so that you had a clean fight against the boss, but it would cost you resources, right?

You would use your

fucking soul bug milk.

It's bug milk in the little, you know,

it fills up and then it's all white liquid.

You'd be using your soul on the way to trivialize the enemies and then get to the boss and be like, well, I'm out of soul, so I got to do this clean.

Or you try to do those enemies clean and then take damage and then get into the boss fight.

And then you pick one or the other, right?

Yeah.

So I remember those runs and they are

a joke.

compared to the the average run back to a boss Silk Song expects.

And there is one in particular

that is maybe the only part of the game that I'm like, this feels like genuinely sadistic, where there is a secret bench that is hidden behind a secret wall.

But if you don't find the secret bench, you are doing like a 15-minute run back through an entire zone to get back to the boss.

Now, luckily, the boss is not that tough,

but like, I can easily see it causing people to super crash out because

it can take, it took me 12 to 15 minutes to do that run.

If you were not crushing it platforming-wise, it could take you like half an hour.

And even if you beat it in five tries, we're talking like two and a half, three hours on

one guy.

Does this does Silk Song also have what I just described where you can spend

to get through it faster and then get to the boss?

No?

Okay.

You just got to do it clean every time.

You're going to have to do the platforming while being attacked by enemies.

You're right.

Okay.

You can spend

the ultimate resource of time to kill enemies and do the zone properly on your way back up.

So yeah,

I think that the combination of what it is asking for you to get get back to some of those bosses is unnecessarily cruel for some players.

And

you know that it's a balancing problem because there are bosses in the end game that are really quite difficult that have no run back at all.

There is essentially a bench in front of their door.

In front of the boss, yeah.

And these are the only bosses that Team Cherry was like, oh, you can't make people do a run back to this one.

That would be too hard.

But you guys should have extended that backwards to like

the fucking halfway point of the game.

Okay.

Because it's ridiculous otherwise.

So whoever was on the team that was their like their cutoff point for difficulty being reasonable basically set that bar too high.

Way too high.

Yeah.

And no, it's, you know, it's not for difficulty.

It's for frustration.

Right?

Because I don't think any of the bosses are...

actually, no, there's one boss that's like, I would say it's actually like fucked up and designed badly, and it is a

fucking trash fire.

Savage Beastfly 2 is

fucked up.

Like when I beat the game and I got 100%,

I said, if there was only one part of this game that sucked ass,

it is Savage Beastfly 2 is fucked up.

That is a terrible boss fight.

I don't know what the fuck they were thinking.

awful.

Just terrible.

But

I think it is their

threshold for frustration of like

they thought the average player was going to hit it like I did.

Right.

Right.

And like, that's not the reality at all.

Also, even if you were super good at Hollow Knight, again, that was seven years ago.

You know what I mean?

Well, it's also, it's not a really applicable set of skills.

Like, Hornet requires

way faster

reaction time

on a lot of her stuff.

I'm kind of reminded of,

I think it was

the show Fear Factor back in the day, where there was one dude on the staff that would just do everything and be like, oh, yeah, that's easy.

That's fine.

That's nuts, no problem.

And therefore.

So, yeah,

you can throw it at the random.

You can throw it

at the average contestant.

And it's like, nah, dude.

You're nuts.

That's crazy.

It also provides like a very weird problem.

So the beast crest is a crest that allows you to kind of fight bosses a little dumber because its heal is actually just like every damage you do heals a pip instead of like a I stand there and heal.

So it's a very in-your-face like I'm just gonna stand here and fight the boss thing, right?

The problem with the beast Crest is for any boss that requires platforming, its pogo is

suicidal, it has like a very awkward curve where it goes forward for a little bit and then curves straight down.

It is dog shit for platforming.

So, if you have to platform to get back to the boss, fucking tell the beast crest to go fuck itself,

and you can't switch unless you're at a bench.

Yeah, it's a bench switcher.

Another nitpick, I think that

by far

the most fun crest and the most interesting crest in the whole game being locked to the game's final 1%

is fucking stupid.

Oh.

It's fucking stupid.

And I don't mean like you hit 99% and then it unlocks.

I mean it's like it's in a hidden area that you can only unlock in the very, very, very, very end of the game.

Is it meant to be a new game plus?

No, no, it's, it's, it's meant to be,

it's just meant to be something, a really cool thing

to have.

And I really loved it and was just like, man, I wish I had the ability to play through more of the game with this thing.

And I know it's not for balancing because the strongest crest in the game by far can be unlocked like pretty early and you can actually break the game super hard.

The other thing is that Silk Song has what I would call an anti-Elden ring problem in that the more

like the more people, you know, let's say there's a boss mentioned that got nerfed a little bit called Moor Wing.

Right.

And Moor Wing is pretty tough.

It's not the end of the world, but he's got some gumption to him.

And so the usual advice would be like, well,

Why don't you look around

and see if if there's something you can find that would make the fight easier?

Maybe you can get more health.

Maybe you can get more silk, which silk spool, which is your MP.

Maybe you can get a cool tool or a crest or whatever.

And what I found to be the case is that

it almost never makes you meaningfully stronger to find anything.

Traversal, absolutely.

That's really good.

But out of 57 tools, I would say that there are like five strong ones.

And they're really, really fucking strong.

Like they're crazy busted.

Like you guys didn't do a numbers pass on how effective these tools were.

Busted.

I mean, but like usually you'll get like a blue, you know, passive upgrade and you're like.

Yeah, that's okay.

It's not going to help me beat Moorwing, though.

Well, in a lot of cases, it's like, this will allow you to make one more mistake or this will allow you to

hit the boss one less time, or something to that effect.

So getting their upgrade

is very important.

The health upgrade is bordering on meaningless.

So

you

start with five pips.

I think you start with five pips, right?

And you can get to up to 10.

of health, right?

So most enemies do two pips of damage,

right?

This means when you get your first four mask pieces and upgrade to six pips of health, you have not actually increased your health at all because things are still hitting

enemies three hits to kill you.

Yeah, yeah.

So you actually need

eight masks to feel any difference at all.

And after that, you would need eight more masks to feel any difference.

and getting the last mask beast feels like nothing has changed in any way.

The only thing it really does is that since you heal three pips of health at once,

in fringe cases, you can end up like maximizing your healing

to a degree.

But it's

like the difference between the difference between

starting game health and end game health is two extra hits in a boss fight.

And yeah, well, yeah.

And if you work tactical healing into it, then you

can.

But like, it's real, it's really, really bananas.

It's like, it, it,

so, when I'm like, when I'm like smashing my head against a boss and I'm like, maybe I can search for mask fragments, finding three fragments that don't upgrade my health or five that upgrade my health once, but the boss does two hits.

And so it doesn't actually change how many hits or mistakes I can make during the boss.

Like, it doesn't, it's not meaningful to explore to get stronger outside of

a couple of very insanely over-tuned

sub-weapons and buffs, which are so ridiculously much better than their counterparts.

It's genuinely unbelievable.

Do you remember the in Hollow Knight?

There was like the,

I forget what it was called, but it was the, the, the build that you just cover yourself in flies and bugs and it would just shoot out like oh gross thing yes yeah yeah yeah

okay so there's a version of that

for

uh hornet okay and it is it is wildly busted it's super crazy crazy busted it is by far the strongest thing in the game i stopped using it because it was so good um you can put out four little minions like before you walk into a boss fight, and they attack the boss during the title boss intro

when you're frozen.

Ah, sick.

Like they start fighting the fucking boss early.

In the stop time, that rules.

Yeah, and it's like there's that's there's no fucking way that was on purpose.

Hell yeah, scum that shit out.

That's great.

And each time they buzz in and attack, it does like one nail, sorry, one needle hit worth.

So if all four attack and you swing, that's like five hits.

Yeah, that's phenomenally good.

It is going to.

Okay, if you don't have the cog flies or haven't been using them in Silk Song, you have like two weeks to fucking use them as hard as you can

because it's going to get nerfed.

It's getting touched.

It's Street Fighter 4 Sagat.

It's going to get nerfed for sure.

The way you're describing this reminds me of like bosses where you start hitting a soft cap in a Souls game on increasing your HP by one pip or two.

The number goes up a little bit,

but you're fighting a boss that's like, I don't care if you're at max health, this thing hurts, and that's the end of that.

There was a boss that I threw down the cogflies and there's a...

There's a

little minions and I threw down,

I think they're tacks.

They're like thumb tacks, right?

They damage enemies that stand on them.

And I tossed those up before activating a boss and skipped like multiple phases on it so hard during the intro that the music never started.

Wow.

Okay.

Okay.

So like, yeah, no, there are definitely tools in this game to like nullify a significant proportion of the game's challenge.

But

like the strong options in Silk Song are like 15, 20 times stronger than the normal options.

Like they are crazy.

I'm curious about your approach

in this type of game, where there's two things I notice about

hitting a wall on something, right?

You can look and you can go, okay, either I will, as you've learned the boss move set, you can either go, that move keeps fucking me up when I try to hit, so I'm going to stop trying to even engage with that move and just treat it as a get the fuck out of there, take no damage.

Or

you can go the other way and say, I need to sneak more hits in, more risky earlier in the fight to like speed this process up because my survivability is not going to get longer, right?

Okay, so I have option three for you.

Well, both of these things, as you play, are going to happen at the same time, and as you learn it more, it's going to improve.

But I'm kind of just more so, like, do you tend to go for the first initially, or do you go for more survivability?

No, I go for the third one.

There is a

correct answer to this move that is giving me a problem, and I need to find it.

There is a movement pattern that I can do, or there is a way that I can mitigate this that I can do that will break this move,

and I just need to figure out what it is.

And

if you have beaten Silk Song, you can go look at on my YouTube channel, you can look at the final part where I fight the final boss.

In which you can see per attempt, I go, I don't know how to deal with that.

Maybe if I jump this way, maybe if I jump this way, maybe I need to jump that way.

Yes, okay.

And then I go and I figure out, oh, it's it's jump up and then dash and then fall and then run.

Well, no, so that is the second option I've described.

So that is, that is effectively, yeah, learning to learning to deal with it, handle that move, evade it in the right way.

And then when you get comfortable with that, maybe even sneak a little hit in, you know, sneak that, see, sneak the hidden.

Sneaking the hidden is

so

I think I understand

why Cherry wanted you to do so much like above average difficulty platforming on the ways to bosses.

Because what they want you to do

is learn the boss pattern.

And be comfortable enough with Hornet's movement that you know you can sneak in there, dash in,

stab them once, and dash out.

Right, right.

Or you know exactly when a boss attack goes like a wave across the stream that you can go, oh, I can double jump that.

Or

I can wall jump and grab and all that and then tag the boss and pogo them.

Like every single time a boss goes along the floor in this game,

pogo them.

You've got to pogo.

Like every single fucking time.

Unless they're wearing like a helmet or like a big skull or something.

Yeah, no, as they say, when somebody tells you you keep spamming a move, the answer to that is, well, you keep spamming a mistake.

Yeah, you know, absolutely.

Learn what that is.

And

it is, it is a, it is an incredible game that is much larger than it appears, which is kind of a crazy thing to say because it appears extremely large.

There are a bunch of cool routing

situations where there's like

strange ways into zones that you wouldn't think you'd be able to.

There's a hidden move in your base moveset

that is built for complicated routing.

If you click in on the right analog stick, Hornet uses a piece of silk to do a taunt.

And the taunt brings enemies closer to her.

So if you're standing at a goofy platform and taunt a flying enemy,

you can use them to pogo up into sections you would not think are.

That would have saved some time instead of waiting for the pattern of the fly to do a slaps.

Yeah.

There's a taunt to bring him closer.

Get the fuck out of here.

Yeah.

God damn.

All right.

Yeah, Hornet's great.

The game's story as it is, which is fairly simple, is great.

There's some nice twists in there, like genuine, proper twists.

uh, your uh, your long-term antagonist, Lace, is great.

Um,

the nice,

the, the, the, good, remarkable, and ridiculous span of different types of environments is fantastic.

Um, I spent, I, yeah, so I said it last week.

I spent most of the game thinking I was like halfway through.

I spent maybe 80% of the game going,

I I guess I'm about

55, 60%.

When you walk into a vertical

area in Silk Song where bodies of warriors are falling onto the platforms and you're like barely anywhere in the game, but it feels like you're like, oh, this must be an important area.

It's like, no, no.

This is just a zone that has that as a set piece to it.

Yeah,

are we like hitting that level of presentation and

going above the

gorgeous?

There's even a bunch of

what I'd call single-use tile sets

where you have like a wildly different environmental design and

particle effects and all that for a very,

very small sequence.

How is the,

I guess,

I'll just say like runtime to credits compared to hotels.

So I took 42 hours to 100%.

Now you need to,

if you're going to, if you're going to 100% in the game for realsies, as in

not look up anything and not have anyone whisper in your ear when you miss that thing,

I do 50, 55.

I had a fairly good intuition.

Like, I would have probably beat it at 45 and just not gotten some of the mask upgrades.

Did Did it feel?

As for like where to go,

I would have gotten,

I've probably gotten there in like 45, 46 instead of 42.

And no, no feeling of drag on that?

No.

So

my opinion of Silk Song is going to be massively,

massively positive compared to many people.

There was not a single point in the entire game that I got stuck for more than 40 minutes.

Okay.

Nowhere, like absolutely at no point did I ever actually get properly stuck.

Okay.

And so I'm like, wow, the pacing was incredible.

And every two hours, there was a new area, and I was getting new tools the whole time.

And it was just this magical, wonderful experience.

And then I just think to people who are like in my chat that are like, I spent like the entire day on Moor and didn't beat him.

That's a different experience.

That is a pacing annihilator.

The other thing that I was thinking about, like, you know, because Dark Souls has lots of run backs, and Elden Ring has tons of runbacks, right?

But in Dark Souls, when you do a run back to a tough boss,

you fight your way to that tough boss, which is your warm-up for fighting the tough boss.

Sometimes you sprint and roll and fucking fall out

when you're getting goofy with it.

sometimes you're hoping.

Most of the run backs to bosses are just pure platforming.

They're not actually fighting.

Okay.

And so you're not actually getting better at fighting the boss at all or even using your own abilities to fight the boss because you're just platforming.

I will say one thing that's really annoyed me about the way people talk about Silk Song, and maybe this is just me being

like a negative Nancy.

I can't stand the way everyone refers to two masks of damage as double damage.

I hate it.

It's not double damage because that would imply that that enemy had the same attack that did half as much.

No, what you're saying is that in Hollow Knight, things did one hit of damage, one pip of damage,

and in Silk Song, many attacks do two pips of damage.

That's not double.

That attack is just stronger.

Yeah,

some things in Zelda do different hearts worth of damage, and that's that.

That's fine.

Double means that there's two attacks, and one is the same, and the other just does twice as much.

But I suppose one would expect that the one pip would be the baseline default unit.

in a game so that when you start multiplying it, it indicates more power, strength, and difficulty, as opposed to the default being automatically two.

The reason why that is is because the night is tough and the hornet's fast.

Right.

So they want.

Like, if the knight was in Sulk Song,

he would take one pip of damage from nearly all these.

All these enemies and such.

Right, right, right.

And then some of those enemies would be

violently difficult to deal with his moveset because he's not fast enough.

Like, he would be, it would be.

some of those bosses would be miserable

with the night's moveset.

There's always, well, again, there's always almost like that depraved style run of just like avoid it all and then take a swing or shoot a fireball out when you get an opening.

And then for the most part, you're evading for most of the fight.

There's a build you can use that has you don't have to attack.

Interesting.

You don't have to attack at all.

it'll take a really long time, interesting, but you can totally actually just focus exclusively on defense on defense.

Um,

I used it for a little bit, and I found that it was cool that it exists, but that I was like, I just want to play, I want to hit things,

I want to hit things with my store with my sword.

Okay,

so

all in all,

uh, great game

with uh, the caveat that uh it really demands that you lock in super hard.

Like, it is a straight lineup from Godmaster, like, it is not a straight line up from

Hollow Knight and Hollow Knight's Dream No More ending, it is a straight lineup from like the Godmaster DLC, the final DLC, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, and I think

I

really genuinely think this thing should have had two difficulty levels.

I think it should have had the one they have now, and I think it should have had the one that everything just doesn't have as much damage as it does right now.

I mean, but you know,

souls game difficulty levels, people don't want to get into that, but there's also multiplayer summoning and other elements to mitigate, right?

Baby mode, call it, call it grub mode, whatever.

I mean,

probably more so an in-game way to do that for elegance you know instead of like select a different item a menu item

the the things where you can summon for boss fights in souls games or the things where you can put on an accessory

yeah there are occasionally npcs that will help you but finding i never found one

I never found one NPC to help me with any boss fight, though apparently a bunch of them can.

But at the same time, So hold on a second.

Just hold on a second.

When you describe, like, well, souls things, that's a really bad example.

Okay.

Because souls allow you to numerically empower your character.

Yes.

Silk song does not allow you to numerically empower your character in any meaningful way.

Okay.

But I'm using souls not as an example of powering up, though, for the difficulty.

I'm using it as an example of if you don't want to have a main menu that says normal and then hard mode, you can put a thing in the game that the player can do to optionally choose to make the game easier, such as bring your friends along for the run or put on an accessory that is effectively an easy mode thing, but it's just

within the same difficulty world

game you've started as opposed to a main menu distinction.

You know, I don't think there's all that much that could be done.

I think that

people complaining about like the bosses and stuff like that is actually like

I've like y'all you will take like a

contact tag off of an enemy and take two pips of damage and then fall into a spike for two more pips of damage.

Well you fall into a spike and that's starting five.

Fall into a spike and that's that's that's that, right?

That's reset position.

Yeah, and so it resets your position and now you're down 90% health.

And like I think I think

they actually toned down all the spike damage in the last patch.

I think they toned down the spike damage from two to one

last week.

Specifically off of that complaint.

You know, it's kind of funny to imagine a...

This light is bugging me.

Hold on a second.

Sorry.

Yeah, it's right in your face.

Yeah.

It's funny to imagine a...

Like, a lot of the time these things happen as a result of something gaining more popularity and accessibility and reaching a larger audience, you know, in a world where this game was as popular as Hollow Knight was or less of a huge buildup to its release, there's probably less of a discussion about, you know, some of this.

Yeah, I'm like, you know, you're allowed to make a hard game if you want to make a hard game.

You know, that's you're allowed to do that.

Yeah, yeah, you can do that.

Yeah.

Like it would be, it would be best as a product to I totally agree with that.

And so, like, it's one of these things.

It's like, I would not feel super comfortable saying this had I not just stomped the final boss out in like 40 minutes last night, like, no problem.

Like, I feel very comfortable saying that I beat the shit out of Hollow Knight Silk song in a very fast pace.

I loved it.

I was in a perfect you stress flow state like the whole time.

I stream video games all day.

Like

it's it's

it's it's weird that the game's difficulty starts at like 90% of hollow nights instead of like even 50% and then rising up to 150.

What wait, what what did you say?

What stress?

What did you say?

You stress.

EU stress.

You stress.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's a beneficial stress for flow.

Let's learn.

Moderate or normal psychological stress interpreted as being beneficial.

So like

there's some ant enemies in

in a very early area, right?

Those ant enemies have more moves, and you can encounter the ants in like the first 45 minutes, right?

Those ant enemies have more moves

than the first like four or five bosses in Silk Saw in Hollow Knight.

In Hollow Knight, yeah, yeah.

I mean, first boss has one move, it's like it is, it is awesome how complex and interesting all the new stuff is, but like the ramp, it like I played the Hollow Knight seven years ago.

Most people played that game six or seven years ago if they did.

And a lot of people are coming in new.

There's like no ramp at all.

It's like just go.

And like, I'm ready to go.

I'm ready to go right now.

But it's, it's like, it's super extreme.

Also, the beginning of the game, the game has an inverted difficulty curve.

You power up and get the ability to crush things harder as you unlock all the

expertise.

Like, basically,

you get like the

first act is the hardest, and then the second act is pretty tough, but you do actually have some good upgrades, but you're very comfortable with your character's movement.

And then the third act, you have had your good upgrades for 20 hours.

And

even if stuff is getting stronger,

it's not getting that much stronger.

Yeah.

I honestly think game difficulty as a discussion is just going to exist forever in the industry because

because

creators are objective people with their own outlooks on

what things should feel like for new players and

what games are for.

And everything is usually made as a reflection of whatever that creator experienced as a kid and what they cherish.

So it's just going to be like some games are going to be made because some people want freak beasting as part of their menu, you know, and others are going to be like, no, we want everyone who buys this to enjoy it.

And then some are going to look at it and say, yeah, but I spent money on it.

Therefore, I should have the ability to not feel like I'm getting bounced out by it.

It's always going to come up to how the developer feels about that piece in the same way that movies will offer up an explanation for things when it's not necessary.

And then sometimes it'll cut to black and play Don't Stop Believing over the credits.

So I think that I can only speculate because I don't know Team Cherry, but I think Team Cherry

doesn't realize that they are out of touch with the level that people play games at.

Well, if they dodged the complaints and the level of bullshit that's been building while developing the game, while being insulated from it, yeah, I would say that it's not just complaints not reaching them.

It'd be a lot of things not reaching them.

Failed in their intended difficulty curve because they forgot that everyone else is not them.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, when I think about the Souls series, and I realize, and you think about how Hitataki Miyazaki hasn't actually played almost any of them and just uses all his knowledge, like, he played through Elden Ring recently for the first time, start to finish, and was like, Yeah, I'm not good at them.

So I used all the tricks that I know from being the game's director.

Okay, right.

Okay.

But by that same token,

so Lies of P, which you said is really good, and it's

absolutely stellar.

Does Lies of P kind of have you walking in there going, I know you fought the orphan of costs, and we're coming in with that expectation?

As a new player, we're going to treat you as somebody who has handled that challenge.

So that is a really, really, really good example.

Because when the DLC came out, the very excellent Elizabeth P DLC came out, it also came out with multiple difficulty modes that they added to the game.

Okay.

um because you know the other thing that i always am reminded of is how a game comes out you know it's a new thing in a genre it gets created and then after that a lot of fans make derivative things and or homages that enter that genre and are and it's like people who have gotten used to this that want more from it and that want to see it pushed further they build and build and build and so there's a level where that floor goes higher and higher for the expectation of of what you're going to have to accomplish.

So Lies of of P is really interesting.

There are multiple reasons why those difficulty levels got added.

One of which is they felt that the base game might be too tough for the average game player.

The second of which, way more interesting, is that the DLC came out, but lots of people were on like New Game Plus or New Game Plus Plus.

And so the DLC on those levels would be fucked up.

They'd be crazy.

It was the old hunters problem.

Okay, okay.

So if you were on like new game plus plus or some shit,

you can tone the fucking difficulty down so that it becomes back to like a normal fucking game.

Yeah, okay, okay.

Yeah.

And then alongside the easier difficulty modes, once you beat the DLC, you unlock the ability to actually fight every boss in the game in a boss rush mode or like solo for like, you know, high scores and you know, little medals,

which also includes

multiple extra escalating difficulty levels.

Like you can beat, like you can fight the final boss of the DLC on like extra difficulty five,

in which he feels like a fucking Dark Souls Kaizo hack.

It's fucked.

So they expanded it into both directions.

Okay.

So yeah, then just put a little easy mode accessory in the main game and call it a day.

That's it.

Have it take a charm.

Put the hat on and then, you know, everything.

Put a charm out that fucking, I don't know, decreases contact damage by one.

Sure, you know, gives you, exactly, gives you a little bit more control over your healing or your

the ability to make mistakes or something.

A shield that regenerates and absorbs a hit, you know.

So you want to hear something really interesting.

So there's the fur, there was Berserker, the first Kazan, that Souls Like game by Bandon Amco, I think.

The anime game about DNF.

The first Berserker.

Yes.

So they were like, hmm, because they look at the metrics, right?

They look at the achievements.

They're like, wow, a lot of people are getting stuck.

A lot of people are getting stuck in the game, right?

We should put out an easier difficulty so that people who have bought the game are more likely to finish it.

And then they got more data off of that.

And they discovered something that I have been wondering for a really long time, but there is finally a primary source data point to confirm it.

When people are playing

a souls-ish game or a harder action game, people on average would rather quit playing it entirely than turn the difficulty down.

All the data they got was they found an extremely small amount of people turn the difficulty down, and most would just quit entirely.

Right.

Okay.

The pride point.

And the fact that you're coming along to this type of game to begin with

qualifies qualifies your personality type and what type of gamer you are.

Which of the people who are in the middle of

Easy Mode is now selectable.

How fucking dare you?

It reminds me of the way that puzzle games are designed in that it's not important that you make a puzzle that requires a smart player to solve.

What's important is that you make puzzles that make the player feel smart for solving them.

And the action game equivalent is that you want it to be hard enough that the player feels good that they accomplished it, but not so hard that they don't actually accomplish it at all.

But that's a problem because every single person has a totally different skill set.

I think Elden Ring might have the best

default difficulty of any game that has ever existed.

I think Elden Ring might be one of the best design games ever made because the strength of I will go somewhere else and maybe find something easier or get stronger is so perfect for everyone.

It is absolutely incredible.

There's also always somewhere else to go.

Like,

you never

hours and hours in, there's always some brand new thing to be like, I'll just go there instead, right?

If this wall, if this boss of this particular pathway is not working out for me.

I was going to say on the puzzle bit that

solving puzzles in Baba is you never felt good.

No.

Solving puzzles in Baba is you was always anger at the game.

I feel like I fell into them and like I got, I would go, I guess that worked.

It was, it was a hearty, oh fuck you

as the solution popped off and you moved to the next level.

Yeah, no, it didn't feel good ever.

Interesting.

Okay.

All right, good stuff.

Silk song.

But Silk Song's great.

10 out of 10.

Incredible game.

If you have not played Hollow Knight

and you're interested about Silk Song,

I would highly, highly, highly, highly, highly, highly recommend playing Hollow Knight.

Highly recommend.

Not just because it's a direct sequel,

but also because

you will find out if

you

want to keep going on that difficulty curve at the end of Hollow Knight.

It's a good game, and I guess it expects that you have learned the skills up to this point.

Like the final boss of Hollow Knight

is

a fucking chump compared to almost everything past the 20% mark in Silk Song.

There are even redos of that style of boss fight that are dramatically harder and they're not like even important.

They're like

say.

There's a mid-boss at like the 25% mark that is way tougher than the Final Boss of Hollow Knight.

I would say Final Boss of Hollow Knight is super squashed by DLC

of Hollow Knight.

Yeah.

In its own right before you even get to Silk Song.

Massively trivialized.

So,

yeah.

Okay.

Very good game.

I like it.

Very cool.

I guess.

So, just to jump in here, the only thing I really have personally

was

getting some 2xKO in.

Yeah, I also did.

Which you did too as well.

So, yeah, that's a.

So, before we get into that, what we need to talk about.

I briefly mentioned this on my stream like three, four days ago.

We need to talk about a discussion that you and I had very quickly at the end of last week's podcast, where I joked during the podcast that if Timo and Blitz got into the game at launch, I would take back everything negative I ever said about 2xKO and would, in fact, say, good game.

I really like it.

And I kind of jokingly said that, and we all had a good laugh.

But of note is that I really, really meant it.

Yes.

I was not actually joking at all.

I was so for real.

Yes.

That was a and I have maintained that decision.

Yeah.

This is a really good game.

I knew that.

This is a really,

really good game.

I knew when you said it because I know that's your thing.

And like, yeah, clarifying in case anyone thinks it's a bit there.

It is not a bit.

So, yeah.

This

Tatux KO now

is out there.

Still a terrible name, though.

Holy fuck.

God awful.

Okay.

Terrible name.

But

here's what I'm going to give you.

Here's what I'm going to give it, right?

Have you happy birthday, someone to death?

I have not, but I have seen it.

When you happy birthday, someone to death, which is when you kill both characters at the same time, the announcer pops up and says 2XKO.

And it's like...

It's cute.

There it is.

You killed both characters at the same time.

And that's your little, you know, Expedition 33 counters you know

um they said the thing but uh so yeah now we're here we're playing the the you know the the latest patch latest update um bunch of balance changes bunch of damage changes huge improvement over the last closed alpha um

i it fucking rules it's so fun man it's it's really fun so fun

um

i i love that at no part of this conversation do we have to mention netcode because hey, guess what?

It's been flawless the entire time.

End of story.

We should, though.

I have been playing, I've played maybe 30 or 40 matches a day since the closed beta came out.

I have not even seen a single frame of latency.

It's insane.

It's insane how perfect the game just runs.

It's literally perfect.

It feels and acts local on every single fucking match.

I had a hiccup in the intro as a character, as the intros were loading up, and there was like a sync issue there, and then the game, the actual fight ran fine.

Phenomenal.

So everything on that is great.

The, yeah, completed the tutorial.

You get your two tickets, so you go buy your two characters, you know, and

then after a week, you buy your third character.

So it takes about three days of playing, it felt like, to get enough to buy your third character, really.

Yeah.

Extremely generous with

the rate of

coins or in-game XP to buy stuff with.

And this is really important to the game's later economy and complaining: is that

characters cost 10,000 credits, and 10,000 credits is the cap.

Right.

So you can stockpile enough money for one character.

You can stock up one, yeah, which is what Riot did with their other games, right?

That's that's you know why they did that?

Yeah, so that you can't just eliminate the entire rollout process.

Well, that's what happened to League.

People who started playing League at the beginning ended up stockpiling like 15 years

worth of character unlock currency.

And so you never have to engage with any of the.

Yeah.

And that's when the skin shit started to go crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's that, you know, I get it.

Even or Valorant, where they let you go a little bit above the number,

but not enough for two.

Yeah.

But so here's, yeah, it's so about 10,000 currency to buy a character, but then, you know, notably, about 7,000 to buy a color that you want.

Crazy expensive.

Yes.

A character is only 30% more than a color.

Because we want you to get the character and gameplay stuff easy, and we want you to spend more time getting your cosmetics or your little taunt.

And also, now that I have all the characters and there's no character on the horizon, I'm going to be spending the next next 6,500 credits on the red color for Blitz.

There you go.

Um, I, yeah, I just didn't even buy Jinx because I'm like, I don't, I don't care, you know,

but um,

you get to people said for people asking, if you do your dailies, you get about 2K,

I'd say.

So, you know,

ah, yes,

sure, sure, yeah, you get

yeah, you get, you get about 25, 2,000 to 2,500 for doing a daily.

So it's it's it's not that that yeah a day, yes.

Um

so then yeah, on that, okay, so I've basically just been uh playing with Vi and Elaoi.

And uh, yeah, Elawi is as great as she's been.

They made some changes, whatever, and all that's fine.

She's really strong.

She's strong, she's fun.

The stuff they took away, there's some stuff she can do.

You know,

nothing much to say there.

Um, Vi is fucking great.

Vi is a whole lot of fun.

And

she's all the things I want my boxer to do.

And there's absolute gaps to her pressure.

So you can't just do it all for free.

It doesn't feel like there are gaps to her pressure.

There are.

There are holes.

And you can hit those holes.

You can blow her up if you know what she's doing is not real.

But the ability to just, yeah, dash in there and just put some fists on people is a whole lot of fun.

It's very, very cool in particular that she has like electric wind god fist style, like perfect charge, you know, combo sequences.

So you can swag if you want to swag and show off and do some fancier combos that like have harder to execute moves in them.

But overall, they did something really smart with the game in this build, which is the damage standardization has become really, really tightened.

So, the problem last time around that people were having was how long it took matches to last and how long it took people to die.

It was so fucking ridiculous.

And that things could get to a point where it meant that people didn't want to fight because if I fight you, then I'm giving you more meter for next round and

burst from, and that's bad.

So, why would I want to do that?

So, yeah, the whole thing, right?

The incentive structure got fucked up.

And this time around, they made a lot of changes to make sure that damage is much more complete and you can die a lot faster.

So doing a normal basic anyone universal bread and butter combo, you know, like

magic series, light, medium, heavy, special move, launcher, light, medium, heavy, down to the ground, and special, super, super, like that will do like 40 to 45%.

It'll do a nice, nice, big fucking chunk.

Pretty reasonable.

And

so that means for the most part, you're playing a game where two touches is standard on a character's life bar before they die.

You know, if you get to three or two to three or so.

If you start doing fancier stuff, you can definitely take that past the 50%.

You know, you can get up to characters up to six or seven or so, especially.

You can blow every single bar you've got and all your tags.

Yeah, you can get up to 90% or a touch of death.

But

for the one bar and you get super, super, super fancy,

you're going from 40% to 60%.

It's definitely good and you want it.

But

it's not the cataclysm that is a basic combo and Street Fighter being a jump in to a low to assure you to whatever Aki's fucking nonsense.

Sure, sure.

But one thing remains the same is whether I do 70% damage to you or, you know, 51%,

I got to touch you twice.

So, you know.

Three times if you snuck some

normals in there, you dropped it.

Or you jumped out and you started healing or something like that.

So the flow of the game remains pretty consistent with that.

And it makes it so that basic combos do high enough damage that you're going to have matches go quickly.

And then big fancy flex combos, they do more, but they're not like so ridiculous that it's like you just don't get to engage with the game at all.

Furthermore, the big fancy flex combos that are still in there, and that there's still stuff that's very execution, you know, that execution-heavy if you're feeling like a beast, they don't last eight years.

They go quickly.

I would say that they've shortened every Ari has gotten shortened on her combos, especially.

Yasuo still has some really long ones.

So he's got some extended shit that he can do, which I imagine we'll see if they want to leave that in place or not.

But generally speaking, the combos are a lot shorter and they do more damage, so the game is moving much faster.

Even if your opponent could style on you for 45 seconds, you're going to die before they could ever do it.

And then I would say, even if all of that too were not sort of doing it, the X-Factor mechanic, you know, the basically your Fury mode is now going to just make the rest of the match clean the fuck up.

So

you have a burst like you do in Guilty Gear when you're getting off me, right?

And you knock them away.

But when one of your characters is dead, that burst becomes fury, which makes you glow red and just do a billion damage and a billion chip.

And take

it.

And if the burst could hit you in any way ever as part of the combo that you're doing, it'll wall bounce you and reset all the rules for juggling you in the combo.

So your

basic ass 40% bread and butter has now become a 75% basic ass bread and butter.

Also, while doing a combo on whether you're hitting or blocking, you can dash, cancel it, and then start doing new things again.

Doing stupid, stupid shit.

For spending some of that Fury meter.

So basically, what they did is they made it so that when one of your partners is dead, you have this rage mode that just makes the rest of the round go way faster.

And you just get to the next round way quicker.

And both, and you know, both, both players have it.

Therefore,

you just, you see

the turnover time on these rounds just way, way quicker overall.

You know, either you're doing these extremely optimal, super sick combos and taking out both characters, juggling them, and they die, or you're using fury mode and cleaning the fuck up.

And people are using a, so there's Juggernaut mode, which is like a single play character, no assists.

There was something you forgot to mention that's important before we get to Juggernaut, which is your meter for your supers resets every round.

Yes, true.

There's no reason to ever keep your meter ever.

Spend all of the meter, because no matter what happens, round two, you're going to start with that one, and it goes back, you know?

Nothing carrying over.

Their burst carries over between rounds, but not meter.

So they're encouraging you to not hoard, to just use your shit.

But burst, you got to think about.

And then, yeah, unless you're playing Juggernaut,

you don't have any tags at all.

You're playing a fucking solo game, but you get rage mode every single round.

And you start with two bars.

Yes.

And in rage mode, of course, in this fury mode, you can absolutely touch of death characters

when you're activated.

You're so insanely strong, and you have the ability to do that right off the bat.

Not to mention, your own character can go from a level one super into their own level three super.

So, all of this is a different level one, depending.

Yeah.

So, all of this to say is they just made it so that, like, damage is higher and the game is faster.

So, you're just having these really fun interactions with characters as the screen is filling up, and people are tagging and left-writing and doing all these different things.

Um,

and it's really nuts because, like,

I've seen a lot of people talking about how, oh my God, this game has so many fucking systems in it.

It's insane.

There's a lot going on system-wise, and whichever groove you choose to pick, whichever style you want to go with, whatever fuse is the official word,

there's a lot to dive into, like what makes that fuse good and

how best to use it.

But the idea that no matter what's going on, you're kind of still just playing

this basic game of like, yeah, I'm trying to touch you three times, right?

Tag, you're it.

That's that's kind of what the game is, no matter what is going on, no matter who's on screen, no matter how complicated or whatever.

It's, I'm just trying to get, I'm just trying to touch you three times and do like a combo and take you out.

Um,

makes it just go quickly and it feels like a lot of fun, man.

Um, so I think they've done something really incredible because there's people like me.

I play Street Fighter, I play Guild of Gear, I play,

you know, all sorts of fighting fighting games.

I've never been good at tag games ever.

I've never really gotten into Marvel.

I dabbled in DBFZ, right?

And Juggernaut in the old alpha tests was just like really bad.

It was just like, there's nothing they can give the old Juggernaut to make up for the fact that it's losing out on assists for attack and defense, right?

So here we have, okay, well, Juggernaut has like 30% more life.

It has an X-Factor style comeback/slash damage thing at the beginning of every fucking round.

It starts with a full bar of every meter.

You can 80% someone off your first jab at the beginning of the round.

I'm like, okay, I've been playing Juggernaut because I don't know how tags work and I'm getting to learn the character that I'm playing, which is.

Oh, you're playing Juggernaut.

Oh,

nearly exclusively Juggernaut.

Okay.

And I, like, I'm, there's tons of situations where, like, I wish I had an assist here.

So I can see it, right?

I'm like, I, I wish I had an assist here, but I'm able to do so much motherfucking damage and I can learn my combo roots and like the core of my character's kit that I feel very comfortable.

Two days ago, I started messing around with the new fuse, sidekick,

which is just juggernaut light.

It's still just one character,

but you do get tags.

You can tag.

Assists, not tags.

Sorry, you do get assists, which is really useful, but you don't start the round with Fury Break

and you don't have quite as much health.

So I'm a little weaker, but now I'm covering with assists.

So the

no, no, the health values on Juggernaut and

Side Kick are the same.

You do get the buff life and you do get the buff damage.

There is a secondary feature which is damage softening which your partner if you're playing with another human being can soften your damage or so.

But yes, that allows you to play Juggernaut while getting to start using the strike.

And you can't level one into your level three.

You can only level one into your partner's level one.

Right.

But that gets you thinking about what level ones from your guy actually link up and fuse and work correctly with the level ones of the other guys.

And it lets you pick two characters and then switch between rounds if you want to switch to the other.

I want to play Braum this round.

Yeah, yeah, you can pull them in off the bat.

I'll have Blitzcrank on Sidekick.

And then you have the other three fuses, which are

double assist, double tag, and double down.

Yeah.

So the other thing you got too with Juggernaut is the ability to snap back, right?

Which is also a fucking tremendous thing in games like this because

you force the character you're fighting out of the game and then force their partner in, and whatever life they had that was healing, they lose all that.

They just are forced to come back in and lose all the gray life that was going to heal up.

So,

really, really nice.

I have happy birthday people, and then like a happy birthday, like the tag damage.

Like, I, you know, I got like 40% off them, but it's all gray.

It's all gray.

Unless I hit them with the snapback, at which point I've done 40% to both.

Yeah.

28%.

No, I think this is a a much better thought-out and executed version of what Skullgirls was doing, which Skullgirls introduced the idea of letting you pick one, two, or three characters, you know, having a big solo or multiple assists and etc.

Ratio force, Sagat.

Let's go.

Right.

But in this case, the incentives are like really tweaked against each other, where like you're not just having the number of characters, the systems are also making up for it.

Because the ability for you to take a character, rush up to somebody, do a combo, and get it blocked, and then call in an assist to make what you just did safe is huge.

It's really strong.

So when you can't do that, you need something to make up for it, you know?

Yeah, no.

The something I'm going to use to make up for it is to

play neutral a little bit better because the opponent is scared of me because I can touch of death them if I have two bars of meter, which I started with.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Something else that's really fun about the character designs here too,

I would say Blitzkrank represents a new style of character that has like all the things a grappler ought to have, which is, you know,

your pressure tool for zoners, your big scary command grab, your big scary command super.

But he's got something that is like really interesting that

you don't see in a lot of old character designs, which is moves that serve more than one function depending on holding the button down.

Right.

So he's got that rocket punch, but if you hold it, it charges up his steam mechanic.

And they're both the same input, the same button.

He's got a rocket punch that pushes you really, really, really far out that combos into the grab.

So you can either push them out and then pull them back in for a mix-up or push them out and

make them think you're going for a mix-up, but just whirr up like 60% of your steam.

Yeah.

Or is Zagus running bear grab?

And it's like, what if it was just, it was spinning pile driver up close, but if you held it down, he just walked walked forward and did the other one, you know.

Like, you just universalize that because that's effectively how you're using it, you know.

Um,

you put that all on his S2 button and such.

So, they made like a grappler have all the different utilities a grappler would have by just like adding secondary uses to each of these moves, depending on how you hold the button down, you know.

I gotta tell you, man, I gotta tell you,

it's nice to have Hakan back.

Yeah, you like oiling up and grabbing people.

Well, because getting Blitz's charge of electricity has an unlike it has like an unmentioned buff, where his dash is like three times as fast.

Oh,

I didn't know that.

Like he

becomes like a way,

way faster character with the electricity.

Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah.

And even if even if his grab is blocked when it's electrified, you're super plus.

So like you're going to beat them out with like a medium.

He's also going to hit a button.

He's also a grappler that has

Dolcim's arms.

He has Dolcim's arms and the anti-air grabs and stuff like that.

But then he's also just got a big fill the screen with a big electric orb.

Like fuck whatever is happening right now.

You know, like pop off like super.

Yeah, he's amazing.

So dude, his

bread and butter.

Which is like light, medium, heavy, you know, launcher, light, medium, heavy into

like, you know, the grab into,

you know, super one.

So his, he has a, he feels like he was built alongside the nude juggernaut because his super two

gains extra damage from the steam he gets from super one

so when you link those two that basic ass bread and butter without even using Fury does like 70%.

Self-amplifies.

You're giving yourself steam with the super.

Yeah.

It also feels like, just in terms of the, the, the, the 2v2 teams and the tag mechanic stuff, um, he's an incredible partner because he's Spencer.

He's actually the best assist in the game.

Yeah, he's Spencer from Marvel 3, right?

He can grapple you from the air.

And in a lot of combos cases, the combo ends, and then you pop them up off the ground.

He grabs them back to standing in front of you, and you just continue it.

You know, even on a block string, if you're gonna push them out, he can just pull them right back in for more block string, which is good because there's a lot of chip damage in this game.

Yeah.

Um, so no, it is like

you know, it is like nuts to kind of see, like, okay, he's in, he's got all these abilities and stuff.

But then I'm like learning how to deal.

There's a couple things you got to react to, and you know, gaps in the pressure you got to blow up.

And if people get

predictable with the

get over here, you know, or the rocket punch and stuff, you got to parry on your side.

Parrying is interesting, of course, because it's like it costs you a fucking...

This game is really weird and really interesting.

It costs you a super to call someone out.

No, it doesn't.

So the parry in this game, you know, you put up your hand and you block anything, and the enemy that gets parried is like fully

vulnerable.

Like two full seconds.

Like, you can do anything you want.

Um, and when you use the parry, it uses up a full bar of super meter.

And if you succeed in the parry, it gives you that full bar back.

And then so it's all victory.

Yeah, it's like all plus for you if you get it.

Yeah, just don't fuck up.

You know, you know, I was playing against like somebody who was playing as Vi, and Vi pushed me into the corner and started her infinite block string.

And then she jumps up to do the dunk, and I parry it no and then it's time for her to die yeah yep so um

there is something that ex okay so in in there's moves in fighting games where um the longer an animation is for a move the more time both players have to recognize what's going on and in and thus the easier it is to confirm what to do next right as a player um part of the reason why tagging in this game is so great is because when you switch from one character to the other, that little

moment pauses for just a fraction of a second.

And both players go, what's going on?

Right?

You take a second to take the state of the screen in and go, okay, here's what I'm going to switch to next, right?

And you get better at like that.

It becomes Pavlovian, where you hear that little clap and then you go, stop.

What's going on?

This way now.

Yeah, exactly.

And

so when you see a character that has a move like Vi, for example, has

right?

Or you have...

I parry that all the time.

Yeah.

Or

whatchamacallit?

Take a second hit off Darius's axe move.

Right.

One, two, right.

If Ilawi does her Rekka, her boom, one, two, three.

Echo goes, take a break, you know, and he goes, he hits you from the left, left, and then from the right.

There's all these moves where there's like a big startup to like a big, obvious thing, and then the last hit is really emphasized because it wants you to be like clear about no, no, no, no, no, that third hit, you should parry the fuck out of them and take that, uh, take the offense for yourself.

And the other thing about having time to actually recognize the parry has a really distinct high-pitched noise.

It has like a flash, the screen goes dark, the characters go, oh,

it takes like two full seconds.

You have all the the time in the world to go, I parried them.

Time to get ready to kill them.

Yeah,

I think every character has a big

multi-hitting move that has a very parryable thing at the end of it.

It feels like there's, you know, there's a lot of characters have, just about everybody, really, if you think, like, yeah, the Lariat and all that stuff.

So, you know, there's a, there's a safe place to put it in there

unless they either don't complete it or tag to their partner beforehand or, you know, then you start getting layered with it.

But, um, and there's a safe way to start being a little less afraid about spending a bar on a parry, you know?

So that's really well done.

You know, we've talked about the ability to walk around lobbies and just spectate people's games, which is

fantastic.

That's great stuff, too.

Yeah.

I have a big complaint about the game that is getting fixed in two days.

What's going on?

So the game is using some kind of hidden matchmaking, even for player matches.

Because have i've i'm getting a lot of even matches lately yeah it's pushing it pushes rooms i think where you end up with people of similar skills somewhat similar but you also

but what's new in this version is also if there's no one in the room that is available people from another room will appear as ghosts that you can you can match up with yeah uh the game needs ranked really really really really bad because um even within that range of public matches uh there is some highs and fucking lows I'm getting a lot of, I'm getting like five matches that are like, oh yeah, I could have had that or oh, they were close.

And then just people that I'm like, I actually got fucking double perfected yesterday in a tag game.

That's fucking crazy.

That's nuts.

So

let me point something out, though.

I have seen that and felt that.

And I've done long sets with people who have done that to me.

And what I realize is they have what appears to be an airtight offense, and there's something else in their ability that's lacking, right?

Usually, you'll see that's a front that looks really impenetrable, but behind it is a cardboard fucking facade, you know, and you just gotta.

Their offense is airtight, though.

Yeah, yeah.

Once you crack, you crack behind it just a little bit, and you'll be like, ah, that's why you're in my lobby.

You know, there's a reason why you're here and not somewhere else.

And this is what it is.

It's, but you got it, you gotta, you gotta find that little that little spot, you know.

If the only game plan is this one thing that works on a whole lot of people, if they never get a chance at playing, and then you, you, you dismantle it and they got nothing else, you see that.

But it is.

I really cannot overstate how much more fun I am having with 2xKO in a version of the game that includes

a cool grappler and a boxer and Ilaui.

Like,

I liked Ilaui and Darius, right?

If none of the other characters, I would play them.

But I don't love Ilaui and Darius, right?

I like them.

I like Elaui's assists a lot, right?

Now they have a grappler and they're going to put Timo in.

I will be thrilled and happy.

And now I have things that I'm actually really, really interested about the game.

Like, I'm super interested in what the fuck they're going to do with Timo.

I also realize that if you play League of Legends, that me saying, wow, I really like Blitz and Alawi and Darius and Timo, it's, yes, Pat is top heavy.

Top all day.

You're a particular kind of league player.

Yeah.

So you're playing Juggernaut

Blitz, and I guess, you know, as you dabble with Sidekick, you can start to use this assist system.

I'm guessing when Timo's out, you're going to want to have Timo running on a tag setup as well.

Let's see what Timo does.

Okay.

Because, yeah.

Because Blitz is really interesting, for example, because Blitz is a character that I'm like, if I would play, let's say I wanted to play Vi, I don't need to have Blitz on a tag.

I just need Blitz's fucking godlike assist.

Like, Blitz's absolutely unbelievable fucking assist.

Timo is going to have

an assist that is a projectile, like Vi.

Sorry, not Vi, like Jinx.

And Timo is going to place a mushroom.

That's going to be his two assists.

One is going to be really useful for continuing combos, and the other is going to be for fucking insane Oki and just be the most nightmare shit.

He'll be a lot like Jinx's assists currently.

Yeah, okay, like zone support.

Also, I was going to say, too, is that the whole thing with like tagging is

tricky for new players to get their head around.

And it's just like a lot going on.

It's a whole mechanic to learn.

There's a spectrum here because if you're like, you start with Juggernaut, and then you're like, okay, we can do sidekick a little bit to get a bit more used to occasionally jumping in with another character, but I don't have to switch to them or anything.

I would say that my comfort level is generally double down, where I'm like, well, double down is the best one.

It's fantastic.

I love going.

It's like, I don't even use it, and I can tell you right now, it's obviously the best one.

It allows you to swap out your characters during combos for safety.

I love it.

It allows you to.

it allows you to, I didn't realize this until Rufalmonger explained it to me.

You can do the super and then do the super and then tag back into your first character if they're still on the screen.

Yes.

If yes, you can do a move, do a super, and then have the other character on screen.

And then, yeah, if they're still on, it lets you do that.

That's fucking weird.

Now, here's the thing.

You can,

once you go above that, you get into freestyle and two times assist.

Both of them.

I'm never going to pick that shit.

But if you have, if you're completely comfortable in the chaos where you are not at all having a hard time with too much going on on screen and you can just see it.

Listen, I play Morrigan and I want to play Morrigan Super as a character.

Yes, people like that are playing freestyle and loving it and doing insane shit that are just like, I'm not, my brain is having a hard time keeping up.

I'm getting super opened up, right?

So, like, the more you're able to become in the chaos, the higher angle, the higher level of like fuse you can pick.

And some of that shit is disgusting.

You're getting hit every single time with the left, right, left, and you know, two assists.

You switch to somebody, try for something, and then switch back, and so on.

It's crazy how much you can do there.

But do you know?

I'm just sitting here thinking

just how

fucking annoying Timo is going to be.

So, like, so Timo's going to have a poison mechanic.

He's going to be Aki,

right?

Where you take poison damage over time.

This game has really long

block strings.

Not Dragon Ball bad,

but

there's pressure.

Well, I'm just thinking like Timo and Vi, where poison him up with the assist and then just

pressure him and pressure him and pressure him.

Well, so this is where also, if you have

a partner, you can do a push block and get them off of you.

Or you could do retreating guard to get out of it too.

Actually, you can do push-block with Juggernaut as well.

Okay, but with costs.

It just uses the tag timer.

Oh, okay, okay, great.

And now I'm just thinking about Teemo and Darius, where it's bleed on chip plus poison.

Stacked.

Or

I think, do you want to

just...

I'm for seeing a Sajam video with Sajam making a silly face, and it's Teemo and Jinx,

and it's just like the you should kill yourself team

just absolutely like congratulations you've recreated Arakune in a tag game man what the hell is this game doing oh so you a Sajam fan now

yeah yeah

um I was gonna say though that um with the whole

crazy switching um to X assist and and freestyle thing, because most combos are doing what we what I mentioned, where you're doing like almost half damage with a very basic, simple combo, and you're kind of touching the character three times.

What becomes a lot more important is a reset.

You know, it's before I end that combo, I actually like

unbox when I did something new, and you didn't even see it coming.

And now you're getting started.

We started from scratch again, right?

Or I'm going to let you out of the combo in the hopes that you flail your way out.

Or do something stupid.

Yeah.

Do something stupid or ill-advised.

Right.

And so that, because resets get more important, that's where

freestyle becomes huge.

Because in the middle of this, you know, whatever's going on, I'm going to mix you up and like let you hang yourself to dry and then fuck you up and sue.

And like, it's not a touch of death, but it might as well be because there's one moment in here that you need to see in order to stop yourself from getting comboed twice.

But good luck seeing it.

I saw Sonic Fox posting some disgusting, I can't even see what's happening behind the tentacles and the the like the the echo like rewinds going like it was just i'm like what what is happening on screen that right now type shit and that's what i think is going to be important a bit later into the game you know

so um yeah no that was that's that's very fun um

uh all in all uh by the way i want to say um uh of all so i think that

I think that every character getting a status effect that's unique to them or a bar that's unique to them is super super cool.

I think the fact that Darius applies

bleed and Braum and Jinx and Blitzcrank all have their own meters,

like

that's and Ari even has a little bit with her the way her fireballs work.

I think that's awesome.

I also think that Blitzcrank is by far

the best

translation from League

in terms of Faithful to the Kid.

He is so

like, like, he is so perfectly translated from the things that Blitz does in League to the things he does here.

Because he has his Rocket Grab, right?

But his other, like, I think it's his W is Overdrive, which is you're faster.

So they combine Mana Barrier with his Overdrive to make a version that's like, you know, he has a hit of damage.

Like that little

orb that appears on him when he's electrified doing the command grab, that's the armor barrier.

Okay, it's armor.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

I was just going to say something right before that about

shit.

What did you say?

The status effects?

Oh, yeah.

No, I was going to say that

Guilty Gear and Blaze Blue both did really well at like making every character have their own kind of bar or system thing going on,

feeling really unique.

Like that, that's something that they got pretty good at.

But like, yeah, it is nice to see, it's always fun to see characters have their own like subsystem in that way.

Although, you know, I'll say, like, side-eyeing Tekken a little bit, that it's like, even when it's unnecessary, because everyone in that DLC has like some sort of install or like point-based thing that other base characters don't have.

And it's kind of like, eh, Tekken doesn't seem like the game where you really need that.

But in any case,

like right now, it's like, oh, Timo's next, so he'll have a poison mechanic, right?

He'll have the poison tick status.

And after Timo comes Zed, and Zed will have a bar that will determine how long his double gets to stay out.

I went back to the initial reveal of the game after the Project L announcement, and it was when they're showing it before the cell shading existed.

And they showed footage of Jinx fighting some redhead that could teleport.

So that would be Katarina.

Okay.

So Katarina is definitely coming.

She was the basic character that they planned to put in.

Okay.

So the thing with Katarina, I read an interview they did later where people were like, so Katarina was like the first character ever shown.

Why is Katarina not going to be in the game and launch?

And

they discussed that they used Katarina as the test character for every change they made on the game for like five years and turned her into like an unrecognizable, unusable, busted piece of shit.

Okay.

Just like

Akuma times a million.

Okay.

And we're like, we have to redo the whole character because there's no way they can, we can even figure out how to de-bustify her.

Okay, we can't see it anymore.

Yeah, they turn her into a Mugan character, essentially.

Kung Fu Man.

As like a, as the prototype test freak.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Fair enough then.

Because I saw her on the thing and I was like, oh, you've got got another one that, like, I don't know who she is, but I saw her doing some moves and getting hit and stuff.

So that's assets already in the bank, you know?

Okay.

So she's got to come out at some point.

Well, she'll be later.

I foresee,

I think there's a League of Legends guy named Big Bear.

I think his name is Big Bear.

Who is the one that put out this massive list of, here's the number of letters in the characters' names for characters 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14.

And

he was right about Blitz and he was right about Timo.

Wow.

Wow.

So the next character.

From data hacking.

No, it wasn't.

No.

He just, I don't know where he got it.

Okay.

But this was a while ago.

Okay.

The next character supposedly only has three letters in their name, which

really,

really, really narrows it down.

Okay.

And it's going to be Zed.

Zed will be the first post-release character.

And

now that Timo and Blitz are in, ah, put Zed in there.

It's not going to be Zach.

Claw Ninja Man.

Is that a ninja?

Yeah.

His gimmick is to create a double of himself.

Okay.

Which makes...

Yeah.

It's a fucking tag game.

So

you want to put three fucking characters out on the screen at once?

That's going to be a mess.

It's not going to be Zach.

Blitz is the weird.

Blitz and Timo are going to be the only weirdos for a while.

It's going to be like

Blitz, Timo, Zed,

Katarina, Akali.

So,

you know, like it'll a bunch of normies.

One other thing, too, as well.

And now, based on the fact that this has happened twice in a row now, and the result has been a very, after a character leaks, a very casual tweet pops up.

I'm going to go ahead and say that every one of these characters will be revealed via leak.

Accident.

That is a total

intentional leak, right?

A screen,

like a community store, a website page, some bullshit will show you a character that's like, what?

That wasn't announced, huh?

How did that get there?

And all lowercase will be replied to.

Because, hey, guess what?

News travels that way, doesn't it?

Right?

Oh, absolutely.

As soon as someone shows up somewhere they're not supposed to, and everyone goes, what?

Did this just leak?

It's like, yes,

that is our main means of getting the news out there.

So

both characters have been leaked.

So I think that in its current state, 2XKO is absolutely stellar.

I'm eagerly anticipating ranked mode with baited breath, so I can actually play against people my exact skill range and learn how to do things that maybe I'm not super comfortable doing.

Um,

now it's just okay, when's final release?

Hopefully, it's not too far away.

When's Timo, and I want an interview with Mr.

Cannon where he tells us how many fucking characters a year they're planning to put out.

So, you're probably thinking that that answer has to be six or more.

Sean is probably going to be the one who

does that

unconquerable.

But

we'll see.

We'll see what number.

It cannot be for a year.

That is too slow.

Have any of the other games,

any of the other riot games been...

Have they ever put out a big paid content pack that's not cosmetic, but like a story or something like that?

Yeah, okay.

It's always been cosmetics.

It's always been cosmetics.

Okay.

All right.

Like, like, you know, people say League is now three or four a year.

Yeah, League used to be a new guy every two weeks.

Like, that's not feasible for anyone ever anymore.

It's the MOBAs are now fighting games.

Right.

But, like, it needs to be six, dude.

This game needs to exist in a state in which the new character came out and you spend a couple weeks learning the new character and then you enjoy the new character for a month and then they reveal the new character and the new character is coming out in two weeks like so that you're in this persistent state of either enjoying the new character or getting excited for the new character yeah well the um well i i i you know i say it each time but like the the way it's been going with rivals feels like you know

the a decent turnaround time for new stuff showing up

I would say that like with because Street Fighter where it's like oh hey Viper's demo is going to be right around the horizon and Sagat just came out a minute ago.

But that only feels that way because we're in the season right now.

Once the season wraps up, there's a long period of time where there's nothing going on, you know?

Yeah.

And Street Fighter can get away with four a year because it started with a roster of like 25?

Was it 24?

There's a lot.

Yeah.

Oh, by the way, did you know that the music into XKO is Casey Edwards?

I did not, but it's good.

I like it.

Yeah.

Fucking, I just, I went to their profile and saw that on the credits.

I was like, what?

Let's go, Casey.

Okay, it's 18 for Street Fighter VI's original roster.

So I don't want to hear at the launch of this game that in two years they're going to catch up to the initial roster of Street Fighter VI.

That's too long.

It's too long.

Also, I maintain that there is a list of characters I could could give you that if they come out for this game, the game sucks.

We can go back to this every time.

But Garen or

get in there and it

sucks.

You know, say the line, Bart.

Yeah,

that's the deal.

I want to

also, yeah, we'll jump back over in a second to your week because I know you've got more.

Just wanted to

quickly point out this weekend, UMad is happening.

I will not be there.

However, my stream will be.

So

the Woolly Vows that work.

Basically,

Wooly versus will be going live and they'll be running the tournament off of my stream

channel.

So

you can tune in for some fighting game stuff popping up over there.

So, you're not mad.

I'm not mad,

but the community perhaps will be.

And I'll see if Reggie is heading down to play.

I'm assuming he is.

He's probably going to be there doing commentary as well.

So,

that will be popping up this weekend.

So, do not be surprised when you see that notification.

Yes, that's the deal.

Bro, I got a piss.

All right.

Piss break.

Piss so bad.

Piss break brb

all right what else is going on well uh i hit a sub goal so i'm playing through bioshock infinite

uh haven't touched it in many years

and uh let me tell you aged uh like shit even more like milk did yeah like breast milk no did you uh did you take my my request and did you watch the

the first reveal before starting well yeah, I had always planned to do that.

We watched all the old trailers, and there were a bunch of people who had played the game and liked it well enough who saw the breadth of lies on display and how none of that, none of it, ended up in the game.

I don't want to spend a lot of time complaining about the story because I'm doing a full LP/slash stream of that where I'm going over exhaustive detail at all the parts of the game that fall apart.

Other than the fact that it is absolutely crazy how much of Bioshock Infinite is damaged by its reality hopping stuff, because it means the entire plot is antagonism and plot lines between people who don't know each other and have never met and who think they know each other, but in fact don't.

Like, it's fucking super weird.

The villain of the game that you have a final confrontation, you have never met or spoken to, and doesn't know who you are because he's actually a different guy from like four jumps ago.

The worst of the multiverse problem where things don't matter and thus the stakes of what you're doing feel inconsequential.

No, they matter.

Well, so

I saw that that

thread where someone was discussing this actually makes everything everywhere all at once so much better.

Super good.

And

it's a really nice comparison point because, you know, I mean, slight spoilers for Everything Everywhere All At Once if you haven't seen it.

It's a very good movie.

Shout out to Michelle Yeo.

But yeah, the idea of a villain who has looked into the everything and seen it all and therefore nothing has any consequence, therefore nothing matters.

Contrasted by somebody who looks into that, sees it, and therefore decides that everything matters as a result of seeing the infinity and it's all in your perspective is it's a beautiful way to present that idea, as opposed to one where you go through an entire narrative on a single plane of existence where everything does matter, only to be told suddenly that it doesn't.

It's a really, really steep injection of nihilism

at

the last second into the story.

Also,

one of the other things that I picked up that I didn't pick up long ago was that, you know, there's all the racist depictions and all the the the diet racism and and name-calling and all that um but what's really strange and it really stood out to me really strong is you have like this this that that giant mural that racists love now

that gets used unironically

keeping out the foreign hordes yeah it's got a jewish guy and a mexican guy and yeah the negro etc yes yes and uh the irish get it really bad like the irish get it like weirdly wildly disproportionately bad but what's much more interesting, there is not a single mention of Italians even once.

Italians out of everybody dodged the whole thing.

Dodged the whole thing.

They didn't back then.

Neither did Asians.

No, right?

Like, it was the Italians and the Irish.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just totally dodged it.

Anyone landing at Ellis Island.

He'd be throwing a pizza and have a big silly mustache or something.

And anyone, Captain America or Bugs Bunny were punching back in the 40s?

Yeah, they forgot.

They forgot about Italians.

Interesting.

Yeah.

The other thing, and this really stood out.

This really stood out.

Because I played Bioshock 1 and 2 on my channel, like, I don't know, like two, three years ago.

And I really liked Bioshock 1 and 2.

And I know you liked Bioshock 2.

You went with the drill build.

So

I liked enough of Bioshock 1 that I liked the setting, the premise, the whole

prospect of the idea of Rapture is awesome.

I just thought that the fucking ending was weak bullshit.

Absolutely, you're well, you're right.

And that the back half of the game suffered for it, you know?

Yeah.

But I'm specifically talking about the game, right?

Yeah.

It's like you have all these tools and the camera and all this.

What I remembered, but it really stands out to me now, is like just how much less fun Baashaki Infinite is to play.

It is really boring.

It was in that weird thing where Halo 3 came out and everybody wanted to be Halo 3.

So you went from the weapon wheel of eight totally different weapons to

two guns at a time.

And they're all just normal guns.

And

the plasmids, sorry, the infusions, instead of plasmids, sorry, vigors.

Vigors, vigors, vigors.

Yes, yes, yes.

The vigors, instead of being all these different things and having multiple trap types and you can use different plasmids on this plasmid as a trap to make a different trap, it's like you have

a stun,

a different stun,

a different stun,

a different color.

Blue stun, red stun.

A different stun.

Yeah.

I think six of the eight are stuns.

Yellow stun.

Like, it's crazy.

It's absolutely fucking nuts.

Bird stun.

And so like

I'm just like rolling through these areas with like a pistol and like a rifle shooting crows at people.

And like I, you can probably watch the footage.

Like if you look at my eyes, I'm spending like a really,

really high proportion of my time reading chat, like doing this, like just look at as I'm going through these gunfights.

It's just boring.

Like the parts of Bioshock that I remember are, oh, there's a big daddy I better lay down a bunch of traps and trip wires and get my guns ready and figure out where I want to go and then I'm gonna have the big daddy fight and then I'm gonna get upgrades out of the big daddy fight and then I'm gonna and that's just not there.

There's like there's regular humans there's the handymen and then there's uh the firemen and that's and the crow guys.

That's it.

There's four enemy types

so for all the stuff that that like bugged you about infinite over the years that we whenever we talk about it for me that's the thing is like I was always the thing highest up there that I always was annoyed about the most is songbird because of how much I liked the concept of the big daddy like that to me I like fuck the racism diet fuck the infinity the infinity consequential shit or the commstalk or the what like the big cool fucking robot suit thing that should have been really cool and should have had done stuff in the game

that's the thing that bugged me the most

down of bioshock infinite

so i'm getting I'm like setting up the stream title for streaming, right?

I'm setting it up and I'm putting in Pat plays Bioshock Infinite and Paige is hanging out with me in the living room.

The baby's running around.

And I had not talked to Paige about Bioshock Infinite that day and we had barely discussed it in the setup for the sub-a-thon.

And I'm putting the title in and she looks at the screen and just goes,

You don't even get to fight Songbird.

Like, that was the first thing she had had to say about.

I mean, fuck, man.

Ever to me.

That's what I'm saying.

Like, fuck all the other shit.

That's what bugs me.

I love the idea of, like, okay, we're taking the big daddy concept to the next level.

What do we got?

Oh, we got a songbird flying thing.

Okay, what do we how do you plan to fight it?

What's the environment gonna be like?

Is it gonna be persistent?

And, you know, is it is it a Mr.

X or is it like an actual, you know, people who don't know crashing out in the comments?

Yeah, you never fight a snow boss fight against Songbird ever.

You literally never have a fight against Songbird.

Not even once, not even a little.

It's the oh, it's the, you, they point at the WrestleMania sign, and then it collapses and falls into the audience.

Like, nothing happens.

I don't care.

Like, there's so much of that other shit whatever about the plot story.

And the, I don't care.

It's a cool robot thing.

Let me fight it.

Please.

Or let me become it.

You know?

It's absolutely wild.

Like, I think that, like, all the social commentary.

Yeah.

I think the fact that Ken Levine doesn't understand either the word infinite or anything about quantum mechanics or anything about multiple universes.

Well, I don't know.

But like the part where they're like, hey, let's build up a cool monster the whole game and then did not fight it.

Yeah.

Whoa, you guys are game developers?

Holy fucking shit.

You know, I mean, like, and then you want, like, tell me the story about how the big complex boss fight got cut because you just couldn't, there was no time.

That's too video gaming.

You know, like, just

the state reason, but the real reason is they would have had to design and build it and they didn't have enough time because the game is actually rushed.

Because if you think things are too video gaming and you want to change the way it's done, then do it like God of War, where you're like, you have your, you still have your incredible boss fight and your, your denu mall, and then you climb down and then the credits roll in that peaceful way.

And you can do things like that if you want to subvert the trope or whatever.

But you built it up so much, man.

Also, one of the other things that's happening during that LP is that Elizabeth keeps getting more disheveled and wearing tighter and sexier clothing.

Don't

sexualize my daughter.

Every time she does that, I just go, no porn.

No.

Don't sexualize my daughter.

Don't do it.

No, ripping off of the

hair changing.

And you know what's funny too, I guess, is now playing it with the context of the current year as opposed to on release, we now have things where you can go, oh, so like the defanged kind of take on the social, socio-political commentary and the way the approach to racism and all that stuff is taken.

What if this setting, what if these ideas, what if directed by Zaum 2019?

Yeah.

Right?

Show me the lottery scene

as directed by Zaum 2019.

Let me see what that looks like.

So, um, there's also a

bonus uh social effect that I'm encountering, which is really funny.

Uh, there's people making burner accounts on the subreddit to tell me how dumb I am about Bioshock Infinite, but they're not using their real accounts for some reason.

I don't know why.

Uh, but the other one that made me laugh really hard was that uh what I was going through after the raffle scene,

I said, So the problem with Bioshock Infinite is that Bioshock Infinite's depiction of racism is fake and gay.

Because it is.

And

when I said that, that got screenshot with the subtitle and got put up on the Blue Sky

where people thought I was serious.

I saw something implying that apparently due to some recent changes to Reddit, bots have been purged and thus the subreddit has now made its way to being way more visible by people who don't know what the thing is about.

So therefore, a lot of new people are showing up into these threads and that's where these opinions are coming from, apparently.

It's possible, but who knows?

There's a lot of people that really love Bioshock Infinite because they played it when they were 15 and they thought it was really deep.

And when I tell them that, in fact, it's not deep, it's actually stupid.

So you know that thing where

you know that thing where when you you shit on something somebody cares about

uh they take it as personal offense and you usually say that's not no i'm not i'm not i'm not saying you're dumb right i just don't like the book that you like right the problem with bioshock infinite is that bioshock infinite appealed to like a really specific type of white teenager who felt really smart and like really good about themselves for going yeah

yeah that is wrong but also oh this is so deep.

And when I point out that it's not deep at all, in fact, it's stupid as shit, their earlier feeling smart and good about themselves inverts on themselves because I am calling them stupid.

Oh, interesting.

Oh, this is this I did.

This is news to me.

Okay,

why

is like a story about traveling to alternate universes to find more fences, you can shove up your ass.

And hearing that makes the person with this universe's fence shoved up their ass feel it for the first time and get a little uncomfortable.

And then, of course, there's always that, like, is this your first time?

Is this your first game?

If this is your first encounter with the subject matter, you know, were you 12 when you encountered it?

Like, there's always, you know, where in your media journey did this pop up, you know?

Or is it, uh, or was your first time encountering it?

Um,

What was the game you were just telling me about?

What the fuck was it called?

Hell is Us?

Hell is Us, yeah.

Yeah.

Isn't that not a steep relative point of comparison?

Oh, yeah, no, that's.

For approaching the idea of racism, yes.

Oh, so I saw a comment in here that

I have to point out where it's like, I actually just really like, they said, I really like the art, the cover songs in it, and Elizabeth was hot.

And you know what?

That guy's right.

The art team on Bioshock Infinite, A plus.

Holy shit.

If not for that incredible art team,

no one would ever have talked about that game.

That game is beautiful.

It's

purchased.

I still talk about the awesomeness of the idea of the Columbia as a setting.

I still like the idea of the crow power as an idea as a concept.

And again, the songbird as an idea, all of that, all of that on paper.

Fucking phenomenal.

Super cool.

Yeah.

But yeah,

zip lining after auto thing.

One of these things is that Bioshock Infinite is actually really boring to play.

It's really boring to play.

It's not a good shooter.

Ziplining.

while shooting

in mid-air off of multiple things in a in a big environment shouldn't imagine it being dull, but hey, but that should be the most my shit ever, right?

Between fucking

Titan Falling and Jet Set radioing and even that Fortnite thing where you could kind of do that, you know, yeah, yeah,

yeah, anyway, all right.

Uh, what else?

Uh, I beat Cena Blade Chronicles uh, Future Connected.

It's a nice little outside ROM, it's it's cute, I liked it.

That is all I have to say about it.

Um, And

that's it.

If you want to go see more stuff from me this week, go to twitch.tv/slash pet stares at.

We're going to be finishing up Bioshock Infinite this week, and I'm going to be starting Lisa the Painful.

Wasn't there, sorry, I just got hit.

Like, wasn't there also supposed to be a sort of like biting Christian commentary to it as well with the baptism?

Well,

it's Christian,

Christofascism.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

And it's like, there's a lot of, it's a lot of like Mormony stuff.

And, you know, Comstock's a prophet by God.

I'm just, yeah, I'm like, I don't remember how.

Don't go anywhere with that either.

I feel like, and I'm trying to remember, I'm like, I feel like it doesn't, it leans into the idea of like, there's a man talking and quoting Bible and scripture and being all faith-based in his like

pulpit, you know,

whatever.

Bible thumping.

But

I don't know,

I don't remember how much it like goes like, and now we're going to take it down a peg.

Yeah, okay.

Apparently, you take this with a grain of salt because I can't confirm it, but supposedly the game's original ending was supposed to be confronting Comstock about the religious basis for his racist beliefs and opening up a portal to literally show him the crucifixion.

At which point he would crash out because he's a brown guy.

Wait, wait, wait.

I think you told me this years ago.

Yeah,

I think this is ringing a bell, yeah.

And it's like, that would have been fucking awesome.

That would have been so fucking awesome.

But instead, what we get is nothing.

People mentioned, I played Borderlands.

I forgot that I played Borderlands.

I was provided a copy of Borderlands.

This is important because Borderlands is incredibly expensive.

The full deluxe gold version of Borderlands is $172 Canadian.

That's ridiculous.

That's more expensive than Super Robot Wars with all the music.

Yep.

God damn.

Thoughts on Borderlands 4?

Runs really bad.

Runs really bad.

Like my PC, I have to turn on frame gen to get it to run well.

Are we going to just, should we just fold the news story into this discussion then?

Yeah, Yeah, let's do that.

Runs really bad.

Writing is a quantum leap ahead of Borderlands 3 and 4.

I have discovered no plot, like main plot line

discrete jokes.

There's like a humorous tone to some of it, but side quests are where you get little goofy things.

The

tutorial/slash introduction of that game actually features a triple fake out

that tricked me.

Like it actually properly got me during a cutscene.

And I was like, oh, oh, hey, yeah, all right.

From the outside, the impression I've gotten, because

I've heard no one saying anything bad about game content-wise, or so, it seems as if if Randy's phone were turned off, there would be no issues to discuss this week.

Or, or at the very least, or or rather, that's not true.

If perhaps a generic message that simply said, the dev team is working on it, more updates when we have news.

Right.

I also played a couple hours off stream.

It's a really relaxing, pleasant Borderlands game that I really enjoy.

I really like one and two.

Does it harken back to the first game and the stuff you liked?

It feels like the three that should have been.

Great.

Other than the fact that it runs like shit.

Great.

Great.

I'm enjoying it.

Have you tried adjusting your FOV, perhaps?

No, I have not.

I have not.

Have you checked the specs on...

Yeah, I checked them, man.

Okay.

So

it seems as if

perhaps the performance...

Well, the problem is that it's a premium game.

The problem is for premium gamers.

It has a fucking memory leak on the console, dude.

Yeah, well, Pat, if you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leafblower motor...

you're going to be disappointed.

I don't understand why Randy is even talking at all, because they put out a patch a couple days later that did improve performance a little bit.

So, it's like really obvious that the team is actively working on optimizing it right now.

So, just shut the fuck up and say more optimizations are coming.

Like, that's it.

Just do that, Randy.

Yeah.

So, I just, I just saw basically

a series of tweets here to which I'm seeing

Randy is getting quote unquote dogwalked in the comments.

Because,

because it's like he's getting in there and arguing with people over the hardware over the specs over the FOV stuff and basically going you don't understand no shut up though this is like it's it's the PlayStation will teach you discipline ass kudaraggi language and it's like dude just say the team's working on it because they are are you guys

they're working on it just say that and put and put the phone down

um

you know and instead yeah you've got it yeah you've got Borderlands as a premium game made for premium gamers.

Just as Borderlands 4 cannot run on a PlayStation 4, it cannot be expected to run on two-old PC hardware, it cannot run on 10-year-old PCs.

It's like driving a monster truck with a leaf lower motor.

You're going to be disappointed.

So it's always the same thing.

So as somebody who plays a lot of PC games on a high-end PC

at or near launch, every single one of these discussions is the same thing.

Game comes out and it runs like shit.

And the devs go, well, what about turning down the resolution?

What about this?

What about that?

What about that?

Whatever, right?

And then people go, I shouldn't have to do that.

And then the response is, well, you know, new games need new hardware, blah, blah, blah.

And then it always, always, always, this was like the exact same discussion as with Monster Hunter Wilds, which is, okay, so I have this game over here, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2,

which looks 10 times better than your game and runs at twice the frame rate.

Fuck off.

I just, there's no reason for your game to run like shit.

Yeah, well, code your own engine and show us how it's done, please.

We will be your customer when you pull it off.

See, that really opens the door to a different dev going, well, I've made my game and my game runs like good.

So what's your problem?

You don't have to test on Real Engine.

They didn't even make their own engine.

Like, tell their engine.

Telegraphing the foot into the mouth.

It's just so unnecessary.

You know, people.

Did they ever make their own engine?

Hold on.

The people doing it now are clearly dumb and don't know what they're doing.

And all the support and recommendations and code and architecture from the world's greatest hardware companies and tech companies working with the world's greatest real-time graphics engine coders don't know

what you seem to know.

Like, they've never used their own engine.

Like, they used Unreal 3, 4, and 5.

Like, you didn't even make your own engine, Randy.

And now, and then, and then then the salt continues into posting customer service reports for tickets

for complaints and the 0.0.1% of customers that are complaining about performance issues and the other tickets that are being flagged that are not valid and just crashing out over nothing.

This sucks so bad because the game is good, except it runs bad.

That's the discussion.

Much like 2XKO is a great game, needs more characters, Borderlands 4, from what I can tell and from what I have played, is a really good game.

It just needs to run better.

That's it.

Like, that's the entire discussion.

I don't even have any detailed thoughts to give you other than I'm really enjoying it.

I'm having fun.

It needs to run better.

There doesn't need to be a story here.

There doesn't need to be.

Just stop.

Just stop talking.

Leave it alone.

Like, you don't need to be the center of attention.

You don't need to be the person.

Just stop, man.

Fuck.

Anyway.

Yeah.

So there's a little bit of that going on.

Randy's so stupid.

Yeah.

Before we segue out there, though.

Before we get away from Randy.

Before we go into the rest of the news,

wrap up your

play.

Well, that's it for me.

Twitch.tv slash Pat StaresAt.

We're doing Lisa, Bioshock Infinite this week, and we're also going to be doing a Stormlancer-sponsored stream, which will be followed by some 2xKO ranked mode.

And, you know, playing some matches with the people.

Did they announce when that's dropping?

2XKO is ranked mode?

Yeah.

That is in two days.

That's on the 18th.

Sweet.

Alright.

Yeah, I already said it, but this weekend, U-Mad is going to be

happening over on Wooly versus L.

And I was shooting a message over.

Did I get a reply?

Yes.

So Reggie will be jumping in on commentary.

So

you'll get to see our boy and what he's up to over there.

Okay.

Quick word from our sponsors.

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Why are you taking so long to get to where I need to get to?

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Um,

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There's no

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All right, all right, nothing there.

That's fine.

Just check him out.

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Baby.

Baby's cool.

Baby's cool.

Baby is cool.

You want to take a second?

I think for your own sanity?

I think it's good.

I think it's good.

Okay.

This week.

I love that feeling.

What the fuck is that?

What is that?

Nah, she's got it.

Yeah, yeah.

What else is going on?

This week, the podcast is sponsored by Hello Fresh.

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Okay.

So,

there was one other

noteworthy story I wanted to bring up before the big one,

which is

an update to the Nintendo and PAL World lawsuit that's been going on.

Essentially, there's a patent that Nintendo

has pushed through, and they were awarded

a patent to

summon and fight mechanics.

Oh, yeah, no, it's ridiculous.

It's way beyond the scope that they should have been given.

They'd probably lose any lawsuit involved in this patent.

It's ridiculous.

So, the U.S.

Patent Office has awarded them

a patent over the concept of a summon and fight mechanic.

And the depicted,

you know, drawing and description basically are showing you the idea of

any game where you can move a character in 3D space.

Or no, no, not non-3D space.

Anytime where you can move a character in a virtual space,

and any game where you can summon a secondary character, and if there's an enemy present, um the enemy the the summoned character either fights the enemy automatically or based on your input and if there isn't a summoned if there isn't an enemy the summoned character can still move around and fight when it sees an enemy later you hear that right oh kuzanoha

you're against the law bitch

so absolutely batshit overpowered insane patent um

and arguing nintendo arguing infringement on anyone that does that.

Obviously, if your brain thinks, wait a minute, that's everything, then

you are correct.

Have you ever summoned a demon in any game you have played?

Have you had a pet class in any MMO ever?

Have you perhaps summoned in

a mimic tier or an ash of any kind?

Yeah, yeah.

Right?

Anytime there's anything you summon into the world that is there fighting alongside you.

Gee, Devil May Cry.

Did you know that your cat summon is infringing a Pokemon, you bitch?

Standing next to an AI combatant which will fight with you, essentially, is this.

Insanely, insanely overpowered nonsense, a patent towards it.

Also, it wouldn't help them in the PAL world shit because they got it mid-lawsuit.

Yeah.

So

this is one of those things where, again, it has to stand up in court and it has to stand up to secure.

This is so tooth and nail, obviously.

Lee would crush a bunch of devs

outright.

And then the other thing is it's like, well, it's up to Nintendo to choose to, you know,

whether they want to pursue it or not based on.

It's up to Nintendo to suck my fucking game.

But that's that.

Because the idea that it's like, well, we're going after the game that's making fun of Pokemon because it's too similar and fuck you.

But we're not going to touch on any of the other things is like, yeah, we don't know that for sure in the future based on who's working there, based on what they feel is worth pursuing or not.

If they suddenly just decided to become a shitty company that was going to sue everybody because that's another way of making money, they could become that kind of a troll-ass shitty company.

If they're already doing that, they're already taking those steps.

What's to stop that from being the case?

You can't give them the power to fucking abuse this and then just hope that they don't do it in the future.

Hey, I just want to take a single moment to be like

they had a recent Nintendo Direct where they announced that Donkey Kong Bonanza is getting like fucking $20, $30 paid DLC like today.

And what an obvious fucking bullshit post-release fucking motherfucking ripoff that shit is.

How fucking ridiculous that is.

It's been how many weeks?

Like, it's been like a month, dude.

Like, fuck off.

Sick.

Yeah.

That old Kamiya thing in Bayo, where they're like, we made DLC and then we just put it in the base game.

Yeah.

Well, that's

a fucking garbage.

Because then he made some games where you're like, could you take it back out, please?

Well, that's a different story entirely.

That's a different story entirely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But the

idea of just not fucking being shitty about that to the customer is like you have to put that to put that on Nintendo to be like, nah, they're going to be good with it, though.

Don't worry.

They have the power to attack everybody, but they just won't pull the trigger.

Fuck off.

So that sucks.

And obviously this PAL World lawsuit is,

well, this is spanning much, much larger across the industry, especially in America.

And like, you know, I don't know that,

again, I don't know that this will be awarded from a judge if it gets pushed to

but also in different countries.

But you never know, and why even take the risk, right?

Why even take the risk?

So that sucks.

Yeah.

And then beyond that, there was the Nintendo Direct from earlier.

A whole lot of shit was announced there, indeed.

Samus has joined the Nintendo gang of I Would Like a Motorcycle.

And what, I mean, is that not suited?

Is she not suited?

Samus specifically?

She fits a motorcycle a lot better than most.

It's way better than Link on a motorcycle.

I'll tell you that much.

What the fuck?

Tall, agro-blonde woman?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, get on the motor.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

It's like,

you know, it's like that reboot, Andrea.

Like, what is it with you and bikes?

You know, just fucking biker chick.

Super sick.

Absolutely works with the tech and all that.

That's nice.

And I'm going to try and tell my son that motorcycles only exist in fiction and see how long I can keep that up.

Until while you walk around with the facial hair that denotes that you have one.

Yeah.

And yeah,

I guess I'll say too that like

watching that game have that big third-person motorcycle stuff going on.

I like Metroid Prime as a franchise.

I love the series.

I'm always way, way more excited about the the traditional 2D Metroid games.

You know, that's where my heart and soul is.

It's just three Prime games, which is your favorite.

Go.

Two.

I loved...

I would have said two if not for the bullshit at the end.

Up until the end.

It had its Triforce Paces moment.

Okay, so I'm...

The light suit.

The light suit is the sickest suit in the franchise.

And Metroid Prime 2, up until the puzzle pieces, was it.

But that took me out of it so hard.

I dodged that whole thing.

When they're like, go get the 11, whatever the fucks, I had like 10.

Okay.

Like, I was

like almost completely done with it by the time they were.

No, no.

So, so by default, my brain just, I go right back to one.

I go to my entire journey through one was, I loved it.

And I also, when I think of music, I think of the menu theme from one.

I think of Fedrana Drifts.

And I think of Magmore Caverns.

and

I think my heart just says Metroid Prime 1 is my favorite, for sure.

Two could have had it, but it just let me down.

And I'm, again, I'm way on board with that light suit.

But yes,

and then three existed.

This I see.

And I see the bike and I'm like, cool, there is more third-person things happening.

Awesome.

I like that.

The more I can see Simus in a Metroid Prime game, the happier I am.

So yay to a mechanic that enables that.

And, you know, the rest is fine.

It's, it's, it's Prime.

You know, lock-on, shoot.

I like Metroid games.

Yeah.

Have a cool visor.

But fuck me.

Is it just great to flip sideways and grab onto a ledge and pull yourself up and then parry a thing and then fucking charge a shot and, you know, and just navigate a world and I love that man

but yes the

other thing what do we saw we saw hey Mario Galaxy is the sequel to Mario movie you know what makes sense because I you're gonna use your Mr.

Gay you are you are Mr.

Gay that is correct Mr.

Gay

I think that the fact that they're you you know

they could take everything that happens in Mario 2 3 Super, and so on up to that point and just skip and just throw them on planets that he's going to land on.

So you're going to get the journey there anyway, you know?

And Galaxy was, I'd say, it was the, it was the

one of the bigger like franchise reset moments in an, you know, where it's like, oh, we took Le Petit Prince as a setting and kind of introduced Mario to that.

Like, that's a cool thing.

I think, I think it'll work for getting tons of references off for any Nintendo game where he just lands on a little planet that's themed after

insert reference here, you know.

Yeah.

So, sure.

Um,

what are we going to talk about?

Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 also getting released on Switch 2 with that.

And that's $50

each.

What the?

Each.

We've re-released one and two as a collection, and each

will cost you full price.

What?

Yeah, yeah.

They will not bend or break.

There is no discounts in this Nintendo world.

We don't stop.

The price is the price is the price.

Boy,

that's wild shit for a remaster.

Mario Tennis Fever.

Cool.

Mario Tennis is fun.

So the best part about Mario Tennis Fever.

Hold on, let me see if I can find a

let me see if I can find the screenshot of the box art.

Can I get the box art here?

Yeah, okay.

So the best part about Mario Tennis Fever is the box art

because I saw a tweet that said it looks like Bowser's shit on the ground and is stomping in the shit.

Wait.

Oh

no.

well, now you can't unsee it.

Yeah, no, he sees

shit.

He's waffle-stomping because he's mad.

He has to be walking with Mario.

That's fucking gross.

All right.

Ah, that's the best.

Yeah, that's the best part.

The

new Yoshi game, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, which is I'm like, it's the book from the divorce game, hanging out with Yoshi now.

Absolutely.

Yoshi's going to get divorced because she doesn't do what she houses.

Yoshi's getting super divorced.

Never mind Kirby.

Yeah, cool.

New Yoshi game.

Always dope.

In the same way that I love Kirby's

whimsy and

lighthearted nature and aggressive art styles,

I love that Yoshi games are willing to go out with that, go all out with that too.

So that was cool.

Bunch of stuff popped up, A couple small things.

I want to note one thing about.

Did you see Papu Kom?

Papukom was the game where, what if it was Splatoon mixed with Puyo Puyo?

I

bunch of kids with.

I was going to go look at it, and I saw the direct live.

Okay.

Looking at it.

So basically, like what the fuck this is.

A bunch of kids walking around, Splatoon Puyo Puyo.

A bunch of kids, two-player co-op, walking around.

You shoot from your gun into

little puzzle slot shapes, and then when there's three of a color, they disappear.

But it's an adventure.

That's Puyo.

Puyo Puyo, the puzzle game.

With the little gels that stick to it next to each other.

Or...

Okay.

I'm looking at it.

Sure.

There are puzzle games like the one I just described, or Puzzle Bauble is another one.

You know the Bubble Bobble dinosaurs?

Yeah.

They shoot the little arrows, the little color balls, and then when multiple of them come together, they disappear.

Wow, I completely erase this game from my mind.

That's crazy.

Okay.

I bring this up to say that this game is not officially a license of any of those, and that's fucked up because they easily, any of those existing puzzle games, should have done this.

This just took their lunch because it's just an adventure game where you're doing the thing you do in any of those puzzle games where you have to match three together.

It's kind of insane that the first people to think of this and try it in an adventure context are not Taito or not Konami or not any of the companies involved in

Puyo or Puzzle Bobble or any of those things.

That's nuts.

That could have easily been by them.

Anyway, that's just a really good idea taken.

Hey, did you see that dual shocker shit about Silent Hill F?

No, what's going on?

Fucking the guy who dual shockers

got to review Silent Hill F went up on a Reddit and was just like talking about it a bunch.

And

when people were like, hey,

are you supposed to do what?

Aren't you under embargo?

And they were like, nah, man,

the thing just says, don't publish spoilers and told me the date for the review.

I could talk about it.

And people are like,

I don't think that's what that fucking means.

And they're like, no, no, it's fine.

It was not what that fucking means.

The person did not understand what the word embargo means.

Literally didn't know what the word embargo means.

Ah, first time, huh?

Yeah.

Well, last time.

And no one told them.

No one told them what the word embargo means, which is crazy.

But I don't know about you, Willie.

I've gotten those emails.

They're really clear.

I've gotten a code with an email.

Yeah.

And it has like the...

No, no, no.

It's really.

There's a wall of text and a signature attached that says, I understand what this means, for sure.

Oh, it's crazy.

Damn.

First and last time.

LF kicks ass.

All I saw was a thing of like James doing like a side, an animation of James doing like a sidestep, sidestep, and then the girl just kind of like fucking.

blinking left and right.

She's got moves,

and it's just like, yeah, evasive techniques are not comparable.

Shout outs to the Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection trailer, which is the first trailer I've seen for a collection of games that doesn't tell you which games are in the collection.

It also has no blood.

It also has no blood.

I was like, oh, okay, so this is the part where you list out what's going to.

Nope.

All right.

I guess nope.

Go find out on your own.

Hades two-launched trailer 1.0.

That thing was super sick.

Like, fucking.

Hey, man,

I ended that direct, like, kind of bummed out.

And then at the end, I was like, wait a second, what am I fucking stupid?

Hades is coming out in like two weeks.

Hades 1.0, finally.

Let's go.

Yeah, I've been waiting.

I've basically just been like, yeah, I don't want to.

I'll wait for the 1.0 this time around, which was a lot faster too.

They worked.

Full-size team and they know what they're doing.

So I got to the bottom and beat Kronos

once

in Hades 2 on the launch version.

And I went, yep, that's enough.

And that version of the game had way more shit in it than Hades 1's or first version of the game.

It was way further along when they went into early access.

You got to love that little trailer tagline, let's kill time.

Yeah.

Like, ah, ah,

yeah.

That's cool.

That's really cool.

Amiibos for Kirby Airriders.

Okay.

So I think it seemed, I'm looking at Hyrule Warriors now and how plot-centric and content-heavy these are, right?

Which they have been from the jump.

Like, it's not just Zelda Musso.

They're heavy with all of this.

And it certainly does feel that, like, this is a sister franchise to do all the things that they're too coward to do in the mainline Zeldas.

Is that assessment about correct?

I don't know about that.

No, as far as I am sitting around looking at

High Warriors

Goat Fucker Edition,

I see a console-based Muso game running at 60 FPS FPS in its own trailer, and I go,

Wow!

It remains to be seen what

a sex pervert the devs behind this game didn't pay enough attention to when they weren't looking at it and see what ends up in here.

Because they, they like, I don't know if you saw that interview about Dynasty Warriors Origins where the director was like, I turned my back, and all the Fujos on the team wrote a ton of gay shit when I wasn't looking.

Yeah.

That's the actual statement.

Yeah.

I did not realize, but a lot of the women on the team got really into writing it, and I didn't realize how homerotic it was until I liked the near final version.

Ship it.

So now we're dealing with like

going back in time to hang out with a bunch of hot goat men.

Ship it while you ship it.

Yeah.

And it's like, who knows?

Who knows what what could happen.

Good stuff.

Good stuff.

I'm liking this.

I'm liking the idea of, all right, we've got our mainline Legend of Zelda.

Oh,

Triforce.

We do the same thing and keep it generally safe.

And then we've got Hyrule Warriors where anything goes.

Anything can happen.

Yes, yes.

There you go.

Just filter everyone over there.

What else is going on?

What we need to know is that when Link wasn't looking, Zelda killed 5 million guys.

Stylishly.

Yeah.

Sign me the fuck up for a big, dumb piece of plastic that lets me emulate 16 bad games.

I am so excited for the Virtual Boy.

This was a wild thing to cover on the Direct because there's a lot of people, a lot of people that are watching or listening to this right now who have never personally used a virtual boy.

Cat hype.

I have used a virtual boy, and I know you have.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

The virtual boy is,

and I know I say I exaggerate, I talk big.

The virtual boy is, I'm not joking, I'm not doing an exaggeration, I'm not being sarcastic.

It is the worst product of any kind I have ever used in my life.

It is the only thing I have ever encountered that harmed everyone who used it immediately.

Every single person that I have ever known to use a Virtual Boy became ill and in pain within like half an hour, 40 minutes.

I already know that like I haven't done it, but I was always a little suspicious of the like, take your phone and put it in front of your eyes as a virtual thing,

as a VR headset, like replacement.

Seems like it, I guess, works, but I'm like, I hope the brightness is not searing to the eye or so.

Seems like this could go wrong depending on, you know,

how they put in brightness and safety features and how the screen looks up close to you.

But I sure as shit was not surprised at the end of that thing when they're like, this mandatory thing to use the games or whatever with the games, or you can get this cardboard one, will be available, whatever, or whatever.

People seem to get really hype over Jack Bros.

couldn't tell you, I don't know.

Uh, and the Wario game as well, couldn't tell you, don't know.

But it is a harmful device, but for the most part, the Virtual Boy library, as far as my understanding and what I have played is, is these are, this is a premium collection of bad games.

Please enjoy.

Um, hey, any, any, any DS emulation coming anytime soon to the Switch 2?

Here's a fucking bored board virtual boy.

You shut up.

Bro.

Hey, hey, how about that dual screen that you think we could maybe get fucking you shut your fucking mouth?

Bro, I would go fucking so nuts for DS or 3DS emulation on the Switch.

I would go nuts.

Stab you with this fucking master sword.

How dare you?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great.

No one asked.

No one wanted it.

Here it is.

You will never.

It hurts you.

Like, it harms you.

I don't know how to anti-sell it more.

Like, it will hurt you.

It will hurt your eyes.

It will just hurt your brain.

Well, just, you know, that thing that happened every time you booted up Elden Ring and you got bleached the fuck out?

What if that moment was stretched out definitely?

It crossed right in front of your eyes.

It's unbelievable.

Like, you're booting.

Imagine you strap that shit on and then you boot up fucking Elden Ring or another Bandai Namco game that goes from dark to bright.

Oh.

Oh, man.

Wow.

The potential.

Yeah, flashbang yourself with the Switch too.

Please, thank you, Nintendo.

I don't know if you have any opinions on Fatal Frame 2 remake.

It's the best one.

So that's the good one to do that, too.

Okay.

Did they do the first one?

Or do you just skip right past that, huh?

Yep.

Okay.

Second one's the one.

Yeah, a bunch of

other games coming back.

And okay, so Pokemon Pokemon Pocopoe,

just want to say, one, it took you too long to make an Animal Crossing with your own little

franchise

of sorts.

But

as you do this type of game with these little Pokemon, it makes perfect sense.

It's a cute little island world and all that.

When you see a ditto turning into a human and becoming your main character, you're just like, oh, that's proper horrifying.

Here we go.

There's a lot of questions you have to answer.

There's a lot of questions to answer about that human ditto.

Yes.

Yes.

And I don't think that Pocopia will answer them.

I don't think it will.

But we'll see where it goes.

Very cursed.

But there is, I will say that when it zooms out of that village they're building, and then it looks like a town from red or blue.

I was kind of like, oh, okay, I see what you're doing here.

You're building a location that would exist in the original Pokemon games, essentially.

It's kind of what it looks like.

So I was like, okay, sure.

But yeah, we're going into uncharted, dangerous territory with human Dittos.

That's no good.

Don't like it.

And then they showed off, you know, some of that other stuff.

You mentioned the Donkey Kong DLC, Danganronpa 2x2,

yada yada,

and a trailer for Resident Evil Requiem.

Kind of surprising that it's coming to the

Switch 2.

Well, it's a fully powered console that can keep up with the rest, rest, right?

What do I mean they say that?

Well, it's demonstrated

so far it's demonstrated to be capable.

I think what's much more interesting is the Team America World Police is getting a new video game and they're calling it Dragon Quest VII for some reason.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

The

Claymation style.

That's pretty cool.

It looks great.

That's really cool.

I like the bold choice of the art there.

It looks like fucking Thunderbolts.

It looks great.

They don't look like puppets to me.

They look like claymation.

So they are puppets.

They're literally scanned in puppets.

They scanned in puppets and dioramas to get that look.

But you don't see the joints, I guess, right?

You're not seeing the lips.

No, so they just use the model.

Like they made a, you know, a discrete puppet and then they rigged it.

That's cool.

That's a cool.

That's a cool art style.

That's a bold choice.

I like that.

And DQ7 was one of the good ones, right?

It was 7, 9, and 13.

Or 11?

Fucking no.

I feel like it was 7, 9, 13, 7, 9, 11.

13 doesn't exist.

No, it's in 7, 9, 11, then.

Or 9 and 11 are the two.

Yeah, something like that.

Something like that.

Yeah.

7, 9, 11 the good ones?

I believe so.

It's the one that.

The one that

people talked, the ones that people talked about.

They sure do.

It's 8, man.

It's 8.

Oh, okay.

Toriyama art style.

Yeah.

And then, lastly, Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave.

So that's a sequel to Three House.

The stinger at the end of that means that it's a sequel, right?

That's what I took that to be.

Sothis.

I took that to be.

And also,

that's why there's the poor kids, the cool queen lady, and the Edgelord Alcar-looking guy.

That'll be your three routes.

But also,

that nun has a pistol in that trailer.

Did you catch that?

No.

There's a, hold on.

Fire emblem gun.

In Fortune's weave, I'm going to send you a screenshot.

In Fortune's weave, there's an action shot of the Alacar guy fighting a nun, and she just has a fucking pistol.

Oh, that's a gun.

Yeah.

that is

it's not even like

like a primitive gun either like sci-fi gun it's it's a it's like a glock yeah it's that is not a primitive magic gun like that is a metal gun that would fire metal bullets it has a safe stabilizer and safety yeah on it's it's a gun there are sights that's crazy holy shit okay and i love i love that that's just tucked away in a tiny tiny little part of the trailer to be like huh that's incredibly anachronistic

um

yeah where does that fit onto the weapon triangle gone

where do where do we place that in the in the no all right um

yeah cool and i i guess i also i don't know uh too much where it went to uh in the original game or so but all the fights seem to be taking place in this gladity gladiatorial arena it's not going to be the whole thing okay society will crumble and it'll be a whole fucking thing.

Sure.

Sure.

When was Three Houses?

How many years ago?

It's a while ago.

Yeah, it's been a minute, hasn't it?

Doesn't it doesn't drop too often.

I'm excited for this.

I really, really, really, really like Three Houses, though it had some flaws.

2019.

I would like to play this.

Yeah.

that was pretty much it.

Um,

I saw there was like a co-op, um, you know, side-scrolling game called Stormlancers that that popped up for a second, which is like anime style.

And I was like,

I really miss sprites.

It was just a perfect example of like a game that is harkening to an aesthetic that is retro style, kind of like anime stuff, but then the 3D is not going to sell that as well as some Sprites would, you know?

I think

that Stormlancers, the game I'm playing this Thursday as part of a sponsored stream, actually looks really good.

And I think their decision to use 3D was a really smart one.

You have convinced me.

I have changed my mind.

I have seen the error of my ways and I too am now supportive of this bold new 3D art style.

Gorgeous.

We'll see.

We'll see.

It looks interesting, but we'll see.

All right.

That was super worth it.

Just to see the tight, tight smile on your face.

That was super worth it.

All right.

I fucking love that reaction.

That's so much fun.

Okay.

Let's get some letters.

Hey, if you want to send in a letter, make it good, but also funny, but also not too funny because you're not as funny as you think you are.

And send that to castle superbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castle superbeastmail at gmail.com.

All right, Tobias says, hello, bloody hell, Woolly, and

Gora license for that pat.

Been loving the recent dad talks as a man who's had

a less than attentive father who I'm now estranged from.

I don't think people give y'all enough credit for being such public, excellent fathers.

Well, hold on a minute now.

We'll see how that goes.

Pending.

But thank you very much.

Appreciate that.

No, you're doing a good job, and I know I'm doing a good job.

I'll take that compliment.

Like, for now, says Homer.

Love you guys.

And

the show and the work you put in is inspirational.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

My question is: what are your favorite volcano throwing slash meth cooking bad dads in media?

I mean, the volcano tosser is a pretty good one.

You know, we reference Heihachi properly

as often as we do because he's exemplary, but it makes it better that he has favored children that he actually just is nice to.

So the fact that Reyna exists means that it's not like he's mean to all of them equally.

He's selectively shitty,

which amplifies the distance of how bad it gets.

No girl dad things.

The all-time greatest shitty father has got to be Gendo Akari.

Gendo's Gendo's top.

He's the fucking ultimate.

Gendo's top of the list.

Yeah.

It took Virgil a second to catch on to what was going on.

And

some stupid translation issues aside, he's pretty bad at it.

But the level of being bad at it slash absentee.

Then there is one thing.

And then there's I am actively vindictive against you and using you and your emotional connection to me to get my to further my ends is like

you're gonna have a hard time beating beating our boy gendo um

I mean there's a lot of people that just don't show up right like there's a lot of there's a lot of Dio like

I'm barely even there

okay okay I don't know

I was thinking I don't know much about about what goes on in there except for the we're all gonna laugh i heard that there's an oh we're all gonna laugh at you moment and whatever that is but i have seen one

thing so far his first shot is when they're looking at the greed island uh tape and then jing goes hey gone do you want to meet me well shit Truth is, I don't want to meet you though.

You're just like, what?

Hey, dude.

So, hey, listen, you know how you're like, I don't know much about Jing.

Guess what?

You know what else doesn't?

Gone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there that is.

Although that moment, I will say, huge shout out to God there because then he goes, now, about your mother.

And God just goes, stop.

I don't care.

I've got Mito.

I don't want to know.

Everything's fine.

Fuck that.

And I'm like, huh?

Good shit, kid.

The curiosity eating away at you,

the curiosity did not eat away at you.

You kind of just went, nah, I got my bonds.

I'm fine with what I have.

That's very respectful.

That was a good ass moment.

There's a relatively famous description of Hunter Hunter that I don't know if you've ever personally encountered, but Hunter Hunter is the story of a little boy whose father leaves to go get cigarettes and never come back.

And his son goes on a continent-spanning journey to find out about the joy of cigarettes.

Like that, like that's Gone's personality.

It's fucking weird.

Yeah, yeah.

It's super strange.

But unfortunately, that does apply to a lot of anime in general.

Your dad was the greatest whatever, and now you two can become the next one.

And he was not around because he was so dedicated to being whatever that it consumed him.

Or he disappeared into the ether because of whatever the job is.

But you got to be...

the very best though, you know.

I remember when there was those theories that uh that giovanni was ash's dad for a while

that was some wild shit something there because there's like because like because then ash's mom is hooking up with giovanni like

what the fuck you know that was a crazy head cannon for a minute

um but yes yes uh i'm gonna go ahead and say we got gendo at the top of that list sure he's he's the fucking worst it's crazy how shit he is it's crazy it's crazy how awful he is he's bad bad man I didn't even...

That's the one.

And that's why I'm like, to give

3.1, not 3.1, whatever.

4.

Re.

4.0 plus 1.0.

Yes.

To give for,

you know,

to give for its flowers, I will say that even though he didn't deserve it, he still gets his moment, and he's the only one who never did.

And that's the part about it that I liked.

Fuck him.

Fuck that asshole, bro.

Just like I can say that a four-armed Unit 1 type with

our boys hanging out playing piano together is the sickest shit ever.

It's the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen.

No matter how dumb the rest of that is.

Anyways.

No, Kendo's the worst.

I like to think that

Heihachi was right about Kazuya.

Because Kazuya is super, super evil.

I don't know if all of that is about climbing back up.

It's also infused with the devil, like the literal devil.

Yeah, but then there's Jinn and the body counts, and you're kind of like, whatever the level of evil Kazuya is up to, you just don't have the numbers on the leaderboard that Jin does.

You know which one isn't evil?

Reyna.

Reyna.

She's morally gray.

She is pretty cute.

I didn't say that.

There was an attempted torch pass to

the Swede, and it didn't work.

Hell no.

It would light his fucking hair on fire.

All the fucking hair spray and product he's got to put in that shit.

Yeah.

and you know, and then you have your comically bad dads like Goku and Ken Masters, who are, you know,

they're fine, they're just not as present as they ought to be because fighting is fun.

You know, one of my favorite pieces of fan art of Goku ever is is Goku with like reading glasses on and over a bunch of paperwork.

And Gohan sees him and he has, Dad, are you doing our taxes?

He goes, Don't tell your mother I know how to do this.

Good times.

I love it.

All right, let's take one over here.

A Swedish peasant asks regarding the Fatal Frame 2 remake.

Hail and well, met, Lords of Castle Freak Beast.

With another version of Fatal Frame 2 upcoming, it continues to be the only game from the PS2 trilogy that's easy to access.

Since it's standalone, I feel that Koi Tecmo could have just called it Fatal Frame Crimson Butterfly Remake and dropped the number from the title.

I feel like this would be a justifiable case encouraging game purchases by hiding the sequel stake.

Am I onto something, or should a remake stay true to its original title?

Oh, I totally agree.

They've made no effort to bring over 1 and 3 to any console or system at ever.

Okay, but I okay, I don't know anything about it, but I'll say that the reason why I disagree is because...

You can remake something to be way better than its original, and to take that possibility away from from you seems a bit silly.

So, why not just like keep it faithful so that if you felt like making one a remake but making it good, you could always do that?

You could, you know, but yeah, no, I understand.

You could do it, you could always do it again with a number, but just make it not suck instead of making it suck.

That's that's all you have to do, you know.

Do you know we're pointing out that Fatal Frame 2 has also already been remade once before?

While the others have not at all.

No.

Yeah, it's one of those ones.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's the one.

Got it.

Got it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right.

And one last one here.

Hello, Elder Woolly and Elder Pat.

Recently saw Book of Mormon on Tour when it came to my city.

One thing I didn't expect was the amount of people who left early because they didn't do research into what the musical actually was.

Wait, what?

I did the same thing for Heather's, but was pleasantly surprised when it was a dark comedy despite the Preppy Girl poster.

Have you ever gotten blindsided by something like this and 180 Dear Expectations?

So,

no, on the level, I guess what more interesting than that is the idea of walking out, to which I'm like, have you ever walked out?

I'm thinking the better question here is, have you ever walked out of something?

I've walked out of something.

I'm like, I'm trying to think, like, I feel the, I got, I felt close to walking out of Underworld, but I didn't.

Underworld rules.

Oh, fuck.

I'm not.

underworld's great oh my god

so hot in there oh my god i came out of that thing so angry and i felt like what are you stupid we cross a threshold we cross a threshold mid underworld i felt it crossed where i'm like i have to stay here in order for the hatred to be righteous right and i also felt it when i saw terminator salvation right i was there i remember seeing you gearing up to leave but we were all like oh no this no no you have to stay so that the hatred will be righteous.

You got to write it out.

Oh, my God.

I was so upset.

I can't think of actually walking out, though, especially after paying for a ticket.

At a certain point,

you got to know.

Yeah.

I know I've walked out of something, but

I can't remember.

What it was.

I walked out of one movie.

I can't remember what it was.

And like the thing is, too, is like now you're when you're in a world where like the movie, it's content.

You know what I mean?

Like you have a place to vent and talk about how bad that was.

If I'm sitting here and watching some dog shit, like I have to finish it so I can come here and talk about it.

Exactly.

You know, in a previous life, that was not the case.

That was just suffering for suffering's sake for no one.

You know?

Yeah, now it's for you, dear listener.

Yeah.

Little did I know that taking photos of me every half hour playing Devil May Cry 2 would have become content years later.

Yeah.

That was worth it.

You know, I was thinking about Silent Hill F and how Silent Hill F is apparently really good.

And the F can be a stand-in for five,

right?

So they're similar to Silent Hills.

The S can be a stand-in for five.

Okay.

And it was like, it kind of sucks to the people who made Homecoming and Downcoming and all that that their games suck.

And then

I sat there and I was talking to Paige and I was like, like,

man, thank God Silent Hill Homecoming sucked.

Cause like that defined like a huge proportion of my life.

Like literally every single thing in my entire life would be different if Silent Hill Homecoming didn't suck shit.

I mean, like I was about to say that.

Like I remember telling you years ago that I sat down on this project when it came into the office and the project folder and build title was SHV.

Yeah, and then they fucking took that shit off, didn't they?

And I was like, Oh, I don't really know much, or I'm not big on this franchise, but huh, interesting.

So, this is five, is it?

You know, and yeah, that

crazy.

There was a point where that stopped being the case, but it was actually called SH5.

Six, sorry, five, six, seven, and eight have had their

implied numbers decanonized.

Isn't that crazy?

You know what?

You know what?

Shout outs to Requiem, right?

Shout outs to putting that number out there and finding a way to just make a goofy...

Now we have to guess what the word is going to be with the letters every time.

You know, take your, embrace your high number.

Don't be embarrassed by it.

I wanted Resident Evil.

I wanted Resident Evil 9 to be a remake of Resident Evil 6, and I wanted it to be called Resident Evil SIX.

Yeah, I made that joke.

We made that with the IX 9.

We did that before.

That's what I wanted.

We did it.

Yeah.

But no, full-on, just embrace the fucking high numbers with that giraffe getting head.

Never forget.

That giraffe's really, really choking on it, too.

It's fucking in there.

Who's getting the best head?

Is it the Resident Evil?

The Resident Evil 6 logo is getting the best head.

A long time ago on a stream,

somebody was like, I don't see it.

I'm like, what do you not see?

I don't see

it.

It's been too long.

How can you not see the giraffe just deep balling it?

It's been too long.

Too many people here don't know.

Go back and look at the logo for Resident Evil 6 and just see a bipedal giraffe is getting head

like deep.

It's going it's going it's getting in there.

I don't know how that logo made it all the way to the box without someone somewhere going, looks like a giraffe's getting topped off here.

What the fuck's going on?

I mean, like, it's lead, the giraffe is leaning back, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, like, like the, like, like, the draft, the giraffe is saying, chill, chill, chill, chill, chill.

The, the, fucking, um,

fucking Resident Resident Evil 6 logo is more explicit than the cover for Sabrina Carpenter's Man's Best Friend album.

You know, it's just, it's barely implied.

You can see the hand on the top of the head.

You can see the arm that's getting ready to work it, you know.

I'm telling you, man, RE6.

All time, all time.

That's way up there.

Good stuff.

Never forget.

All right.

That'll do.

That'll do.

Have a good week, everybody.