CSB342: Maybe The Religious Trauma Wasn't 100% The Cause Of All Your Issues feat. Edmund McMillen

All right.

This is the weirdest first impression I think we've ever had to make.

Nice to meet you, Woolly.

How are you?

My name is Patrick.

Yeah.

Hey, Ed.

Welcome to Castle Super Beast.

Appreciate you being on for a juggalo episode that we're apparently...

It's Captain Spalding, bro.

It's a Juggalo.

Ed figured it out on a glance.

It's not a juggalo at all.

Recognizing what it is doesn't explain why it is.

Oh, it's for money.

There's that.

Yes.

That's good enough.

Yes.

Speaking of for money, by the way, hey,

what's going on, Ed?

You are

somebody who's made a lot of video games,

and I'm happy to have you on.

Thanks

for jumping on with us.

I heard this is the place to be.

So I'm here.

Yeah.

No, I do appreciate the level of like, hey, kids, who the fuck should I talk to?

I have a game coming out.

And just

people.

Who do you, what do I, and then they're like, these ones, and you're like, that one?

You're like, yeah, okay.

You know.

So cheers.

Appreciate that.

Let me bump your volume a little bit, actually.

Let you a little bit louder.

Sorry.

Here we go.

I can pull this closer to my face, too.

All right.

Is that any better?

I get louder.

Yeah, I expect it.

Yeah, no.

So that's, you know, as good a way as any to link up over here.

But I guess I'd like to say that right before that, when messaging you, I saw right above that was when you were like, hey, do you want to try out Bumbo?

And I don't know if you know, but that game is the game I've spent the most time on of anything you've played.

I've got at least 97 hours on that.

Bumbo is crazy shit.

I love it.

I didn't know there was 97 hours in the game.

Yeah.

For some reason.

He has a tendency to just extract every single iota of value out of whatever he loves.

Well, I lock in on some things and, you know, like Isaac is the shit.

Super Meat Boy is a lot of fun.

Really love those.

Those are great.

Lots of fun.

But I love Bumbo specifically for post-stream.

One arm clicking the mouse, dragging things around, brain off.

And I do appreciate that because it's not

actively...

Because it's turn-based, or it's a puzzle game, essentially, I can do it as lazily and as slowly and as brainlessly as possible.

That was super sick.

Much appreciated.

Well, Mugenics is right up your alley then.

It's literally the cross-section between Bumbo and the binding of Isaac.

Yeah.

The breakdown of that I saw was basically, well, I mean, we'll definitely get into that a good bit more later.

But the tactical RPG

right off the bat is like, okay, eyebrow raised.

That's pretty interesting.

I'm by default down with that.

But I'm also curious, like, there's a couple of things about that where I'm like,

some of the tactical RPGs that I've gotten into the hardest are ones with perfect information like into the breach or

fights in tight spaces tactical breach wizards games where like the enemies are have uh attacks that you can see coming because they're basically like puzzle games I don't know if this is that necessarily like do you know what the enemies are doing each turn or is it like based on

I mean they have AI um they have things that they want they want to do um and then you have a bunch of information I mean it's not like Isaac where there's anything hidden information-wise from you.

Like, there's tooltips for literally everything.

Okay.

And every keyword has a tooltip, and every enemy has a tooltip, and all their stats, their HP, the damage they do,

you can even right-click on them, and it shows

where they can move and attack, like the range and everything else like that.

Everything is there.

It's very

the standards of a tactical turn-based strategy game is there.

And then it goes far, far beyond anything I've experienced.

I guess before like kind of jumping into it a bit more, we should probably, I guess, yeah, set up like, so you've been around this block for a minute.

You've

started with Flash games a bajillion years ago.

And then I guess like,

I think for me, Super Meat Boy, and then

Super Meat Boy was like the first time I had

seen your work online and like noticed, you know, what was up

and then we played you and Pat you and I played the binding of Isaac back on

best friends

yeah and well that the episode we did when we LP'd that was one where I got

I got I didn't know what what it was or much about it at all I just knew people I just saw recognized the sprites online and people had been using them and like Bible thump and stuff you know yeah but um

I didn't know any of the story involved or any so the intro that played there

People have described it as me getting hit with a flashbang of like PTSD because I had an extremely strict religious upbringing which like freaked the shit out of me and eventually I got out of there but not without scars from it and so that like moment of mom saying yes Lord speaking to Lord and talking about Abraham and that entire thing that was all just like oh my god I didn't expect this to get this real this quickly and was kind of terrifying

in a goofy little flash game with these cute animations.

Exactly.

So I'm like,

has someone else been through this?

Are we understanding?

Are we having the same understanding here about just like scripture being quoted at you in a hostile manner from childhood?

I think a lot.

I mean, think a lot of people can relate.

I thought I was writing about stuff that was quite unique and I thought there's no way.

People just think it's strange, you know?

But there's a lot of people out there.

And yeah, no, I grew up, I grew up with the duality of

so half of the family, the family that I lived with mostly,

were Catholic.

And so I was, I went to catechism for seven years and all that stuff.

And then the other side of my family were all born-again recovering addicts who got really into Jesus, like really as hard as you can.

It's basically the new heroine.

Yes,

that's how you get off into the drugs yeah

you replace

it together a hundred percent it is a better better replacement yeah and and those are the most those are the most extreme ones because they're like i couldn't hold it together without this replacing my addiction so you need that too and they push it that hard it's wild yeah yeah yeah and so yeah i had the fire and brimstone come from that end and then i had the kind of like

comforting but disturbing ritualistic aspects of catholicism um at my core and that kind of built me into what I am.

Are you holding on to any of that guilt?

I mean, I've been told I am.

I feel a great deal of guilt, and they always say it's Catholic guilt, but

I'd like to think I'm just a human being who can feel feelings, but maybe, I don't know.

Ah, man.

I just, yeah.

I'm like, there's just these little, these, these moments that I have of like,

what kind of did it for me as a kid was

there'd always be these moments because I was basically raised Seventh-day Adventist, which is a particular

offshoot of like

Millerites, which were the people who believed that like there was a specific calendar day in

the 1700s when they knew when the world was going to end.

So they sold off all their possessions and

then it obviously didn't happen and then the great disappointment.

And so there's this whole thing about them being particularly like, we crunch the numbers on the Bible and we're extra dogmatic about it, you know?

And so what that kind of led to was a number of people would come through our church and like a pastor would be on tour and he'd be like, okay, this is the pastor who's specifically here to talk about why drums are evil and music with drums are bad because it syncopates with your heartbeat and anything that is that's syncopating with your heartbeat is pagan and it's like, you know, the dark music from the other continents that we don't listen to.

That's that evil summoning music.

And I'm sitting there as a kid in grade seven with my drum set going, so I'm not supposed to play along with the gospel songs at church, which is the really fun thing for me to do.

And this is a bad idea.

And it's like, yes, this one person on tour came and said, it's a bad idea.

And then they'd leave.

But a couple people would be like, oh, drums are bad.

And then some would be like, nah, they're fine.

And I'd be like, wait, well, which is it?

Which one's going to lead to me burning forever?

Like, don't make any mistakes, by the way.

Don't make any mistakes.

Yeah.

So

that's like little things like that.

I just, I'm like, oh, shit, this Isaac intro is fucking wild.

You know?

Yeah, I mean, I, yeah, I can, um,

I can relate.

I mean, it wasn't,

I,

again, like the, the more hardcore side was my, you know, weekend, weekend dad.

Um, okay.

And, uh,

so it wasn't all, it wasn't constant, but whenever I had to go on family trips, it was kind of a nightmare.

And,

everything that I liked was the devil.

Yeah, everything.

It didn't matter what it was.

Everything that I liked was the devil, which as a kid makes you like kind of identify with that, which kind of was like, okay, well, I guess I'm a bad kid and I'm evil and I like all these things that are bad.

You know, you just have this kind of like

cloud looming over you and keeping you in the dark.

But I had some weird fucking interactions.

Like my

the Macmillan side,

a few of them were like,

what's the word?

They went to the Fiji Islands and converted people and stuff.

Oh, wow.

Evangelizing.

Okay.

They did missions.

My dad ended up being like a pastor.

Okay.

He's not anymore.

He currently is retired from that.

But

yeah, so it was pretty crazy.

And there was a couple of situations.

I remember when I brought my like magic cards or whatever to Thanksgiving.

I think it was might have been a ⁇ D book or something.

And then my uncle, Butch, pulled me aside and was like,

it was the weirdest conversation.

He looked me right in the eyes and he's like, you know, you couldn't kill me if you wanted to.

And I was like, what?

And he's like,

you wouldn't, even if you tried to kill me right now, you wouldn't be able to.

And I was like, okay.

I don't know.

I don't know where this is going.

And then he like pulls out the D ⁇ D book or whatever.

And he's like,

I've got the angels protecting me so no matter what spells you cast and whatever else like you wouldn't be able to and i'm like i dude i don't i and i think i tried to explain like how the game works like

it wasn't he wasn't happy 20.

yeah yeah oh man

No,

so our so the thing is my house was it was that house you would go visit where they're all strict.

Like mine was that one where I had cousins that would come over that were like, what do you mean?

Like, I can't talk about my comic book or, you know, whatever, we're, whatever gamer show.

Um, I mean, when there was a game that came out called Diablo, are you out of your mind?

You're telling me I should play this?

Are you crazy?

It's got an actual pentagram on the back, you know?

And did you, but did you gravitate towards it?

Were you like, ooh, I like, you know, so I wanted to- I wanted pornography where you're like, ooh,

what is that on the ground over there?

Absolutely.

I wanted to know, but I was a good boy who was very much not into the idea of burning after I died.

So I went, no, I'm not going to.

And I was.

I should have started worshiping the devil.

I've held on to that for too long.

You should have done it.

I stuck by it and I really believed and was like, no, I want to be good and I don't want to play these devil games.

Which, yeah, my mom would call them devil games.

Doom, you're.

And my friends would be like, no, no, no.

Explain to your mom that you're killing the demons.

It's okay.

You know?

And it's like, that's not the way it works.

It's the depiction at all is a problem.

So, yeah,

that's crazy.

Oh, man.

Like, what I always wonder, too, is,

and, you know, I don't know how it is for you, but like, as time goes on, there's always this sense of urgency is like things are going to come to an end.

You know, like, they'd meet up and then I remember how many countless weekends after church I spent in the back of a car as everyone is talking about how, you know, everything's going to end soon.

The times are coming.

End times are coming.

You know, you better be right with the Lord and so that whole thing was like well now we fast-forwarded like 35 years and I've been like 10 raptures man so what happens to the person who was like looking at the clock every day after that time you know like have you seen any of that at all with like some of these folks that are you're kind of just like well we're still here and life is moving so what now I mean, most of them have died off.

They never saw it.

But I used to hear that.

I remember being a kid and overhearing my mom and my grandma having conversations about the end times.

I mean, they would talk about it like, like they were trying not to scare us.

Yeah.

But so it was like real serious shit.

Like they're really like, they're like, well, did you see the

hand gesture the guy had made?

You know, you know what that means.

End of times are coming.

And I'm like, what the fuck?

What are you talking about?

And then she's like, well, there's this thing called Revelations in the Bible.

You should read it.

And I read it and it was like, like, this is crazy, but this is like the coolest shit.

Like, this is really cool.

This is the old.

The time it pops off is awesome.

And I remember being like, can't I just like, well, when the giant beast rises from the oceans, can I just repent then?

Like, what's the problem?

No, no, take back seas.

Yeah.

Like, once you show me proof, I'm going to be like, okay,

I get it.

Sorry.

And I mean, like, and it's like, you know, it's the rattish rattest shit as long as we're enjoying it through the lens of anime, you know, as long as, like, like A Vangelion is like interpreting beasts and demons and angels and this cool shit.

You're like, that's dope as fuck when you're looking at it from a distance.

You know, and every

RPG that uses Christian mythology is like a mystical background, you know.

But yeah, I mean,

it's current,

current mythology.

Like,

it's a very modern mythological storytelling, which is cool because it works in this age.

Makes sense to what we know.

Not like Greek mythology or Egyptian mythology.

We know what the sun is.

We know the sun's not a god.

Right.

Do you?

Maybe.

Have you been inside of it?

Can we open that up and see?

Were you there?

Oh, yeah, unless.

No, but

the thing is, it's it's like that's that's all fun and dandy.

But then for me, I have those, I have the

moment for me was the end times are coming talk eventually became a, I discovered that

some of my family had purchased land far outside the city to be a escape for when things got too hot.

When the end times prophecy meant it was time to move away from the cities, which is what it says, you know, when John the Revelator wrote about that.

And they got that planned and they had a whole plan for we're going to leave, and they didn't tell me about it.

You didn't have it like as a vacation, a vacation little area to go to?

Yeah, a little bit, you know?

And I just, yeah, I was, I was apparently not invited, but

a couple other families, you know, put the, put the money together and they bought the plans for this place to escape to.

And I'm like, oh, I'm out.

That's it.

We're done.

Like,

this is cooked.

There's no coming back from that.

Drum music, dog.

Terrible.

Yeah,

I would have drummer boy led the demons right up to the escape, you know?

That's the problem.

So anyways, anyways, all this to say,

that was like that,

that hit me.

That hit me hard, you know?

Yeah, I feel like, Pat, you managed to escape all of that baggage.

So

I had a

Protestant Protestant mom and a lapsed Catholic dad.

So the lapsed Catholic dad was just like, the boy can go to church if he wants.

And then I went to church a couple of times and I was like, really bored.

And I was like, I want to play video games on Sundays.

And my dad was like, well,

boy is smoking.

But my brother and sister, their mom makes them go to Mass.

And that's it.

Like, at Christmas Mass.

Okay, okay.

Yeah, it's interesting because I'm like, you eventually are like, I think, well, at least for me, you come to a

détente, you know, with everything.

And you're like, all right, you guys are the way you're going to be.

And that's it.

We're family.

That's fine.

We have an understanding of where we are at in life and stuff.

And as I have my daughter now, who, you know, just arrived,

you know, there's definitely a part of this, which is like, okay, I have to sit down, you you know, some of my very beloved family and kind of go, we're not going to like have her fall asleep with a Bible in the crib every night, actually.

That's

we're going to not do that one.

That's new.

Yeah, that's going to be fun.

That'll be fun.

It wasn't, it wasn't too crazy on my end.

There was a, because my, my mom still is mildly Catholic.

And my dad's quite religious still.

But my kids, my oldest, who's now 10, when she was about seven, she was like, I want to go to church.

And I'm like, what?

Whoa.

You want to go to church?

She's like, yeah.

And I said, okay.

And she's like, what's it like?

And I said, it looks cool, but it's really boring.

And she goes, I want to go.

And she lasted all of like five or five or six minutes.

And then her mom, her grandma took her out.

And

the end of the greatest reel of your local church looks really good.

Like, it's got singing and dancing and

like contemplation and enlightenment, but then like it's a lot of, it's a lot of sitting and talking.

It's so boring.

A lot of it.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, especially like at a black church where we're popping off, the music is going and like you're holding, you got the tambourines in the choir, although tambourines is a type of drum.

So some people might have an issue with that, with the, you know, but um, no, that's a, that's a ton of fun.

And could you imagine like a couple hundred years ago when you would go down to your local small town,

you know, give your confession, and then later when you heard a sermon, it was like the sermon was exactly about the thing you were confessing.

It wasn't crazy.

It was like, it was almost as if like it read your mind and the book had an answer for everything.

That must have been a huge pop-off.

That must have been incredible to be like, wow.

I don't know, Wooly.

I think even back in the day, people were like, did that motherfucker make Riley's sermon about me getting drunk all the time?

What the fuck?

I just told him that yesterday.

In confidence at that.

And now he's staring at me from the pulpit, talking about the demon in the bottle.

Yeah.

It's fine.

Just throw an indulgence at it, right?

Just pay that off, and you can drink all you want.

Yeah.

All right.

That's it.

I'm going to ask you.

There's

Edmund.

There's clearly like a, like, Isaac had like a.

We're just talking about a religious backing, right?

Like, historically.

Mugenics is about a bunch of

cat freaks.

I guess.

Like, where is that coming from?

I mean, mugenics is coming from, like, originally when it was conceived, like, ages ago, like, what is it, like,

12 or 13 years ago when I made the prototype, it was kind of like almost a gag based off of a thing, in joke, that whenever I would start a new project, my wife, before we had kids, had to buy a new cat.

That was the like, I need to, I needed to release the

The bomb the bomb's about to explode.

I cannot do another, you know

year-long project Here's a cat and then she diffuses Okay,

how many cats

we got four we had four cats and then she wanted she wanted all these like kind of exotic weird cats and she went deep on that and I thought like how twistedly awful, you know, the cat breeding actually the reality reality of cat breeding was.

Like, she would get Sphinx cats, so hairless cats.

And

there's like,

there's like freaky variations of these.

You got like odd-eyed ones that have like one blue eye, one brown eye.

You got Bambinos that have like half-sized legs, like dachshunds.

You've got all these weird.

There's like a, there's like a brindly ones that have like stunted hair.

So it's not, it's like really, really short and

like tight, like really, it's like this.

They, they have like a carpety feel to them.

A lot of, we had, we had one of those.

And

it kind of like just, I thought it was interesting because it was this morally questionable thing that so many people did.

And having pets in general, I thought was interesting.

And then hoarding, you know, like we, I collect a lot of stuff.

We collect a lot of stuff.

That's, that's what, that's a, that's what I'm talking about.

Did you know that that nose on that dog can only go up so high.

If it went up a little higher, that's illegal.

The nose cannot go higher than the middle of the eyes.

So, this thing, you probably don't know, this thing is a mutant, homeless piece of shit with crippled arms and

horribly overbred

that's a rescue.

So, this thing is like the peak of what you're talking about.

This is the worst created dog of all.

So, I don't know.

Which is why he hangs out in his bag.

If we see him walking around a bit later, right like the front legs kind of drag around and the back legs are up so there's always that booty in the air like pushes along which is why his name is caboose

he's the sweetest guy but no he's a horrible freak mutant

And I love horrible freak mutants.

And that's like kind of what it's about.

And then I put that project down for quite a while.

It got canceled on like a year and a half into the phrasing.

Yeah.

and it re it was reborn it was reborn later um and uh at that point in time i had had a kid um and my perspective on

the whole theme changed a bit and it became more about

genetics and legacy and the things you pass down to your offspring and

all that stuff.

It just became more real, I guess.

And I just started writing from that perspective.

So, I mean, you know, off the top, there's like, yeah, it's a, it's a cool, it's a turn-based roguelike tactical RPG.

So, you know, you're seeing the grid and,

you know, the things you like to

see if you're playing a game

with different,

with different, you know, different synergy and classes and things like that.

But what I heard that was pretty sick about it, I don't know if, Pat, did you catch

the feature with disorders?

I have not.

I'm actually looking at Ed play it right now.

So

as it's roguelike

and there's randomized cats and stuff,

there's disorders that your cats can get.

Right?

And like you were describing in the note clip

that

you could have cats that get ADHD and it affects gameplay.

or autism or cancer.

That's not a disorder.

The last one's not a disorder.

It's not, I mean, you're not born with it, but the other ones are inborn disorders.

But

we call them disorders.

There's a pool of things that negative, negative things that could happen, but every negative has a silver lining you can kind of draft around.

Like

I passed a kidney stone last week, which was the worst pain I've ever been in my life.

Fuck.

Congratulations.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Why are you here?

That's crazy.

Well, the day after I was, well, the day after I was very drunk, but the day after that,

I was fine.

And it's like,

the only thing that looms is like the idea that I have two kidneys.

And so the other one could have something rattling around that just gets

dislodged.

And no,

it was a pain I would wish on no one.

It was laughably awful.

But it's one of those things where you're going in and it's not like you're dying, right?

Like they just like you, I went to the emergency room and I'm like, I'm quite sure I have this kidney stone situation here because this is such a specific pain.

They sit you down, they give you drugs that don't work because this is some different, like a spinal tap would have worked.

Like it's like birth pain.

And then after six hours, I passed the stone and I went home.

And that's it.

But

you can get kidney stones in mugenics.

Okay.

And what it does is it randomly fires a rock out of your ass.

ass.

Yeah, yeah.

The positive gameplay element.

If you're always angling your ass towards an enemy, there's a chance that when that happens, it just fires the rock out at the enemy.

And you're good to go.

You just got to make sure you're not angling it at your own guys.

Is the projectile strong?

Does it do good damage?

Is it all right?

Yeah, it does five damage.

It's a rock.

I mean, it leaves a rock behind and you can interact with the rock.

You can hit the rock around.

Hey, let me ask you, I've got a, you can't see him now.

He's at the house, but I've got a dumpster cat who's disabled as well.

Uh, do you have any wobble cat disorder on there?

Yeah, wobble cats and wobble cats in there.

Fuck yeah, yep.

I think we hit all of our bases.

Um, I'm sure there'll be more that pop up after release that we can uh add in later, but we got a tremendous number.

And once, once I finally like took the plunge, because there was some hesitation of you know, putting real disorders in, and the first thing I did was put in the disorders me and my kids have, so it's like, well, I can talk about these things.

But then once I posted those, people were like, why don't you put this in?

Why don't you put this in?

Like, we want representation.

Like, give us, give us more.

Cover all the bases.

And I was like, okay, well, let's do this.

And

I think it's working out pretty good.

I really like it.

Like, it's a really cool aspect of the game that feels honest and fun and funny and interesting and not

disparaging or negative or whatever.

And like each one as each one, for whatever it causes, each thing has a gameplay positive bonus that you can work into your build in some way.

Yeah, that's sick.

That's fun.

I'm kind of going through now and just making sure like

this thing is a gambling addict.

Is the positive,

is the con too much of a con?

And then we go back and forth on that and arguing numbers right now.

It was like the last, that was literally the last thing last night.

It's like gambling addiction, if your cat is born a gambling addict they have a 33 chance of failing but when whenever but also a 33 percent no like a 66 chance of critting every single time or something along those lines how much so there's like a double oh that's objectively better off that's yeah that's and that's the argument right but it feels bad like it feels it feels bad when when when you're only seeing those misses because those misses are putting you in danger so if you're going out and right and confronting something and hitting it and then you miss it and it doesn't die, it's going to turn around and hit you.

So it's like the numbers are correct, but it still feels bad.

And I was arguing, saying,

let's raise the damage the crit does.

But I think in the end, we just settle on the fact that sometimes things can feel a little bit bad, but you can still draft around it.

I'm going to tell you of Expedition 33, where the roulette gambling picto is only available to people who don't understand gambling.

Oh, by asking you the questions about gambling.

You can ask you the question, if you get it correctly, they won't give it to you.

Because if you do understand gambling, you look at the roulette and you realize it's like a statistical number increase.

It's just a straight-up upgrade.

But if you get it wrong, then you get the gambling upgrade.

Here you go.

You're perfect for gambling.

Get addicted.

When you balance stuff like that, Ed,

is it kind of like you just go off of a vague feeling, and then I guess play give you a bit more data, but do you look at any sort of like metric on full release and then go back and tweak according to that?

No, I've never really worked that way.

I don't want to crunch numbers because then you can just do it for fucking ever and then it kind of becomes a little watered down.

But I have a good feel for things, and usually I can pull the audience and say, like, which, which of these, what are the worst items?

And I can like balance those or whatever else.

But

I'm a big fan of kind of just throwing stuff at the wall getting a feel for it and um me and Tyler together since we know this game so well we've been working on it for six years so we know the game really well we know

you know how to balance things specifically and once they're balanced enough we're fine with it the only downside is this game like is a lot deeper than Isaac.

The combinations are kind of infinite for a human being.

Like if you can imagine, like Isaac has 700 700 items, right?

700 items.

So, a mugenics has about 900 items, but it also has 1,200 abilities.

And all of these things interact and they combo.

And, and it goes infinite to the point where every time I play,

I'm finding combinations.

I'm finding insane interactions that weren't thought of.

We were just building them out in a way where they could all speak to one another naturally.

Kind of like the original Isaac.

Like, the the original Isaac had a lot of synergies that weren't programmed.

They just worked.

So

that was the follow-up, I guess, was just like, yeah, like if you're not tweaking according to that, then

is the idea that every once in a while a couple of these things will just be insanely busted and that's the point, but you got lucky.

So it's not even so much of luck.

It's also just...

keeping your eyes open and knowing what works because you're being not only are you you you you're drafting your um your abilities this time

not one item you get.

So you're going to be drafting four abilities every time you level up specifically, like passives and actives.

And you'll get that multiple times.

But you're also basically drafting items too in shops and stuff that you find.

And the cool thing about this game is the stuff that you come home with, you get to keep in your storage, as long as your storage is big enough to keep those things.

And then you can actually build around the things in your storage.

Like if,

like, you brought up autism.

So autism

lowers charisma, raises intelligence.

The abilities that your cat is born with, you're more efficient at.

Yeah, I mean, cats are like,

the abilities that

you're born with, you're quite good at.

You're very efficient at, you're very good at.

Everything else is difficult.

So, that's represented in the spells that you are born with.

The ones that you pop out as a kitten with, cost two mana less.

And all the other spells you gain from then on cost more mana.

There's an item called the Two of Spades.

And you wear it around your neck.

And it says, whenever you cast a spell that costs two or less mana, double cast it.

So it double casts those spells.

If your cat has autism, the chances of it lowering the spell to two,

are much higher than the other cats.

And which makes it, there's just, you can build around, like I said, like 900 unique items, 1,200 abilities.

Like, you can build around these, and you can have all these aha moments where you're like, wait a minute, this spell that cost four now costs two, and I can double cast it, and double casting it would yield more mana to this other character than they would, you know, it's like a net gain passing the mana on, that sort of stuff, and double casting all the time.

There you go.

So, it's like you can

it goes way, way, way, way deep.

Okay, let me ask you,

this sounds complicated.

This sounds like

an enormous amount of in-game documentation.

Because Willie was asking you about perfect information.

Yeah.

Like, it's got tool tips.

It has explanations.

One of the weirder things

that popped up on my Steam just a few weeks ago was that you finally added item descriptions to Isaac.

Yeah.

Was working on this level of

text complexity for mugenics responsible for going back and just going and giving the item descriptions to Isaac?

I would say somewhat yes.

This was something that I've been wanting to do for many years.

I wanted to do it for release on Repentance, but we did not have the time to do that.

And it kept kind of getting pushed, push, pushed.

And then it was like, the conclusion was always like, well, there's already a mod that does this.

That was kind of always the conclusion.

And I was like, well, what about the people on console?

And what about, you know, the people who don't use mods?

And what about, you know, like all this stuff?

It just pained me deeply to the idea of everybody who plays Isaac, unless you're like this giant-brained monster, has their phone open on a website to double check what items combination,

what's ideal, like every item, whatever else.

It's like, ah, that's like bad design.

Well, I initially

situation.

I just played it and I would be like, I don't know.

That's fine.

And that's fine.

And a lot of people, like, that's how I thought people would play the game.

That's why I didn't put the item descriptions in.

Like, I wanted you to just fly by the seat of your pants, just accept what was given to you and make it work.

I thought that was the more interesting design.

But I realized that much like kind of mugenics is there's different players who like to play different ways.

And

it turns out, A majority of Isaac players really want that information.

So it is an option now.

You can have that if you want, but you don't have to have it if you don't want it.

So the other thing that makes sense to me, too, is

if the style of game is meant for you to trip across and like fuck up and pick something you shouldn't have or learn the hard way, if you ever see it again, you will have that memory or so.

But that is

it's reminiscent of so the part of this I heard that you guys were in somewhat inspired by Kingdom Death Monster, right?

And that's a I love that board game.

Like, I have a way too much money downstairs and miniatures with that stuff.

Uh, okay, okay, yo, I got a

delivery for a box from them, like, a couple months ago, and I'm like, Yeah, I bought this 10 years ago.

What are you doing?

It's insane.

That's what happens when we like, when we, when we dumped all of our money into it back then, and now they owe us like so much.

There's another one coming, too.

There's the thing that I've been looking forward to is I just wanted, they had this book.

It was a book that you're supposed to be able to like customize like shorter, shorter, shorter runs and like different ways to do expansions and stuff.

And that's all it was supposed to be, but now it's turning into this like giant $200 value mega box that they're going to put out next year or something.

Yeah, I...

It's like, I had to go to my old address to get the delivery because

the little like guts figure basically showed up there.

You know, anyway, it's batshit, but

this is, that's an example of a game

where you're supposed to go out and die.

Like

you're supposed to have whoever you pick up like barely struggle to survive.

And those who can make it out, you know, are going to be a lot better next time around.

But essentially not knowing is part of the appeal and the difficulty, you know?

For sure.

And I don't want people to think that mugenics, mugenics, not really like that.

Okay.

But we, it's not harsh like that.

We don't want you to like just get fucked up and die.

And the way things progress, like once you've gone on a run with your cats and they come back home, those cats are retired.

You can use them to defend your house

and that sort of stuff.

But other than that, it's just breeding.

Okay.

You can't take them back out.

So it's not one run.

Kingdom Death.

Yeah.

So like Kingdom Death, where it's like you've, you incrementally, if this guy survives, then it gets up, up, up.

It was inspired by, there are some aspects of Kingdom Death that I really liked that I tried to pull from.

I played a lot of like, I played a lot of board games, period.

I played more board games than I do video games.

And we also were playing a lot of DD and Dungeon Crawl Classics.

And

I love those.

I love tables.

There's lots of tables in this game, too.

So lots of like random roles and stuff like that.

Because the other thing, because I also think of like, I play, I have, hey, unsurprisingly, a lot of hours in Darkest Dungeon and Darkest Dungeon 2.

I love, love those games.

And those are ones where it's like, you don't get one run, you get a couple.

But like, if you start pushing it after that, like, you know, good luck.

Some of these diseases are going to build up and make it impossible, you know, and the stress and such.

But

here, I guess, so the idea is you just, you keep those traits and then pass it on as you breed the next generation each time.

Like the whole breeding aspect of the game is quite deep.

And there's recessive genes.

And

you can, you can breed in disorders, you can breed in traits.

Like, let's say you go out and you have this ability, like wind gust or whatever else.

It's really cool.

You come back home, your guy's all maxed out, and you breed that ability into a kitten.

So, every kitten is born with one starter ability, right?

Sometimes more, depending on how comfortable the room that they're born in is, how much stimulation it has, and everything else, which is something you work on in the long game.

You buy furniture, you fill your house up, the furniture has a bunch of attributes.

Sounds more complicated than it actually is, but you're just throwing furniture in a room to make your cats comfortable so they breed and they inherit the cool things that their parents have so let's say it the cat's born with gust that's a mage spell and let's say you decide to class it as a fighter now you've got a multi-classed cat with a mage starter and you can build around that um

it

like the mid to late game you start pushing into this where you're trying to do that and your cats are always being born your kittens always will have abilities of their parents okay and and you're like oh shit i'm gonna i know that i know these archetypes well enough to know that if they have this ability that summons a shitload of leeches and i put that on um a

hunter the hunter has a bunch of boons and passes that like enhance your familiars then i can draft around this you know that sort of stuff okay you get a little bit more uh control as as time goes on a little further i i wish i could hear the word recessive gene without my brain just exploding into a shitty bunch of metal gear.

You too, right?

As soon as he said it, I just heard Liquid Snake going, brava!

And it's like, yeah, okay, thank you, Kojima.

It's done.

I can't talk about genes ever without fucking.

Yeah, okay.

I have a

potentially annoying but nonetheless pertinent question about this game that I think, Pat, you might be with me on here.

Okay.

Is controller support a thing for this mouse-based game that is pretty much mouse-centric?

Controller supports being added next month.

That's what Tyler is begrudgingly doing.

Let's go.

But I will say a few things about this.

It's not practical, but it's just, okay.

So we are holdovers.

Do you play on Steam Deck?

No, it's not that.

I don't play on Steam Deck.

I'm just a big baby, and I'm not good at mouse and keyboard.

Just a big baby.

So we're holdovers from an old generation because we grew grew up playing console games with controllers.

So when we started let's playing and stuff, we didn't do it from a computer on our desk looking at the camera.

We did it on a couch with the camera pointed at the TV in the living room.

So

everything we played was like, yeah, the computer and keyboard are way over there.

I don't know.

I got a controller to play my video game.

So that's kind of turned into, I hope this game supports controllers, even though times have moved into a very keyboard, WASD-focused mouse and keyboard thing, you know?

Now, I will say, Wooly, as I've gotten older, my back is rock solid.

My back is super good.

However, using a mouse and keyboard for more than an hour or two does give me some RSI.

So now I have an old man baby reason to like beg for controller support on everything.

Okay.

Yes, on controller support, of course.

We have to do it either way to port to console, and we want to do full Steam Deck support.

But I will say, like,

I would say half of our testers play, like, a lot.

A lot of our testers that are active right now are playing on deck, Steam Deck, and they do like the virtual

little cursor, and that works really well.

Okay.

Man, I wish they came out with a second Steam controller.

That first one was a piece of shit, but like the Steam Deck's controls are excellent.

And there's a touchscreen there, too, if you don't want any of that either, right?

So it has you covered in a lot of different ways.

Yeah.

Sick.

Okay.

Yeah, I know that like so far a lot of the the footage and everything that's been shown off, you always have that like, this is just like the first chapter or so.

Shit goes crazy and it's massive and insane.

This is like, I guess just in terms of sheer content, like

you've described it as like,

how much bigger than Isaac?

I mean, it's definitely bigger.

I would say it's bigger.

I wouldn't say it's as big as, man, I don't even know anymore, though.

Maybe it is as big as Repentance.

I would say it's a little smaller than Isaac and all the DLCs.

I would say it's a little bit smaller than that.

But

it's hard to say.

I think Isaac has more hours because it has so many more characters in the end.

There's a shit ton now.

So a lot of people that are going for like 100% completion, it may take longer to 100%

Isaac, but I don't know.

I mean, I'm so I am.

My current save, I was just finishing up a run when this started and I was losing, but I'm

doing

one of the final runs of the game, and then there's a quest at the end.

Once I do that quest, the game will have ended story-wise, and I'll probably be at like 250 hours for the story.

Okay.

I don't know what that means, is trying to like go back and 100% the game.

I don't even know.

I have no clue, but it is a deep, sprawling game, even just story-wise.

It has three acts, and we've only really spoiled stuff from the first.

As it should.

Someone popped a question up earlier.

What are the positive gameplay aspects of cancer?

Oh, yeah, you mutate.

You slowly die, but you mutate like crazy.

The mutations are like a key aspect of the game, too, that I haven't really shown much in

my Let's Place.

But

so essentially, every piece of the cat, the cats look like the way they do in-game because they're built in a specific way that lets me modularly use every piece of the cat, like kind of like a little puppet.

So you can mutate a cat's eyes, head,

eyes, head, eyebrows, mouth, body, front legs, back legs, tail, textures.

And each of those things has

like 150 to 200 variations of mutations.

So you could have like a spring tail, which makes it so if people hit you, they bounce off of you and shoot across the screen.

You could have like webbed toes, which makes it so you don't get, you can walk on water without issue.

You could get horns, which literally give you thorns and like let you ram into things, that sort of stuff.

And what cancer can do is just give you a ton of these that you just farm.

Okay.

Yeah, that you just, you just go in, but it's killing your cats.

So, like, you're trying to

at the end of each chapter, there's three chapters in a run.

And at the end of each chapter, you get the option to continue forward or check out, go home, like cut your losses.

So, you could farm the first chapter of an area, try to get as many mutations as you possibly can, bring them home, then try to breed those mutations in.

You might get some bad ones, but you try to breathe those out, breed the good ones in, and do some fun breeding with those.

But yeah, that's the design for cancer.

Okay.

I'm thinking of

cyborg justice on the Genesis from back in the day.

You know, getting like the tank legs, pulling off the pneumatic legs and sticking those on to replace your tank legs and get a super jump out of that.

Yeah.

Okay.

You can get tires for legs.

I've had those recently.

I have

water balloon legs right now.

When you get hit, it makes water underneath you.

Sick.

Pat, we got to talk to a friend, Gene Park,

about

his mutating abilities.

About his level of mutations.

Exactly.

Incredible.

Okay.

I also saw, too, there's a...

Basically, like, as you do your inbreeding long enough, you get your family tree where you see the arrows just pointing back upwards to each other.

Just do that.

Just all that, like, oh no, I don't like that this is not a straight

linear hierarchy tree.

There shouldn't be arrows going in circles back upwards.

Yeah, you don't want to inbreed.

Inbreed will yield mutations that you don't want.

They can be pretty bad.

Fuck.

I had a cat with a tail, so it was an inbred tail, and the tail was so fat that it could not take its first turn.

Like, it couldn't move.

It was just, like, stuck and mobilized because its tail is so fat.

Not the greatest, but it did buff, it did buff its constitution.

So, there was like a

I was able to breed it into a bunch of hunters that were just staying back and just they didn't need to move first round.

Okay, so they'll just take they'll just take the constitution bonus and just fire fire it out.

The more we talk about this, the more I realize that I have to get Paige, my wife, to take a look at this because she had a barn cat situation when she was growing up.

And like, everything you're describing was basically occurring maybe 100 feet from her house in that barn.

Also, I think like the idea of every,

we're all thinking about our disabilities and weird shit we got going on, and going, okay, but what is the stats on that, though?

What, what did, what, where did the buff go?

Those points got taken away here, but what did they get added to, you know?

Yeah, it's a, it's a, it, that is the reality of, um,

honestly, it's the reality of a parent.

Like, you're going to, in the coming years,

tell me, speak to me, let's go.

In the coming years, you're going to look and you're going to be like,

you're going to realize that maybe

the trauma that you experienced religiously

wasn't 100% the cause of all your issues.

And that maybe

something that you were born with,

maybe something you were born with

may have been not only making you feel how you feel, but also your parents felt that way, which is why they ended up going this direction.

So I've got a bunch of, I've got an endless amount of really poor, barely functional people in my family.

And I was like, why is everybody in my family so poor?

Why is like, it goes poorer as it goes further out, right?

I was like, oh, well, they're just all, you know, drug addicts, right?

So they're all drunks.

But there's a reason, and I found that out now.

There's a reason why they were all having such a hard time socially in social situations.

They couldn't keep jobs.

They couldn't do these things.

And then they self-medicated.

It's because there was something inherently wrong with them all.

And all of those things got passed down and funneled into me.

And now they're in my kids.

And I've got to help them realize that this world does not necessarily function in a way that works for people who aren't just regular old people.

And they have to find their strengths, and they have to double down on their strengths in order to persevere in this world that doesn't cater to people who don't function as well as everybody else.

Makes you think.

That's all the time we have for today.

I got to go.

I gotta get, I gotta get the fuck out of here.

That's crazy.

You can't hit me with that.

That's

been my life for the past five years, and

I'm seeing these things.

The craziest thing for me was when my oldest daughter started to have stomach problems and have phobias of leaving the house because she felt like she was going to get sick when that was my life as a kid.

And I'm like, I always thought this was because I was so petrified to go anywhere because of what was happening at home.

You know what I mean?

Nurture.

Like, exactly.

And then, like, she's got two parents.

She's got a perfect life.

She has the financial stability.

She has the same thing that I never spoke to her about.

And she's talking to me in the same way that I talked to my mom when I was little.

I'm just like, my head's exploding.

Who could have foreseen this?

Okay.

Genetics are strong, man.

Genetics are strong.

Okay,

that's cool.

Oh, fuck.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You just...

That's a crit?

That's a crit.

That's deep.

That's bad.

You're good.

You knew that.

That's new information.

No, but I definitely blame a lot of shit on...

What?

You?

On nurture.

crazy

I'm I am I am I currently build a house blaming nurture you know

I I feel you and I'm not taking I'm not trying to take away from that but there is a perspective there that kind of realizes that the nurture may have been caused by nature

That's all I'm

saying.

Why comes first?

I'm not even necessarily throwing sympathy to anyone who wronged me in the past.

You know what I mean?

I'm not giving them an excuse or anything else, but I'm at least understanding, which is helpful.

So at some point, I'm grabbing my daughter and saying, it's inescapable.

You are destined.

You may grab your daughter and you say, listen, we are mutants and we've got these special powers.

And

you need to learn how to use these special powers.

And you show her how to use those special powers.

And

that's...

And then you hope for the best.

Okay.

Well, we'll start.

Hey, I got a deliberate smile from her this week.

Oh, yeah.

So I'll take that.

Week seven.

So we're just,

you know, Jesus Christ.

I'll start there.

I'll start with that.

And then we'll get get to the meat and potatoes at a later date.

I got to tell you, my toddler is like rock solid, resilient, like a million times tougher than I was.

I walked out with this shit and he just pointed at me and went, purple dad.

Wow.

Like nothing.

Taked absolutely.

Completely taked it.

I remember when my dad shaved his mustache and my entire household just completely fucking fell apart and we all just lost our fucking minds.

All of this stupid clown shit and purple hair is like, whatever, purple dad, yay.

Like, literally, purple dad clap, yay.

And he doesn't give a fuck.

And not even aware of the idea that, like, oh, this is for other people

that are seeing this conceptually.

That's an idea that has not yet entered the equation, you know?

It's like, oh, yeah, dad looks different now.

Okay.

Okay.

Shit.

Well,

let's.

That's that's That's the...

He gets that from his mother for sure.

That's not...

That Pat as a child would have lost his shit if he saw a clown at two years old.

I hate them.

I look forward to what other horrifying realities Mugenix will have in store

getting through that and

taking whatever lessons I can, you know, from this game into parenting, I suppose.

I don't know if that's what you're trying to less at.

There's no no letting.

I think

eugenics is a mirror.

That's all I can do.

That's all I can do.

It's just a mirror.

It's there to see that life,

I personally think, life is about adapting to the situation

and persevering.

And that's really what mugenics is about.

You're going to have setbacks, you're going to have hardships, you're going to overcome those.

And if you don't, the next generation will.

Like, it's just where we're at.

We're right on.

Okay.

Coming out in February?

Yeah, February 10th.

Let's go.

And then if it's, I'm going to assume if it's like other things you've worked on,

shit, shit will continue to just get...

Exactly.

It'll always have an update button every time you look at it in Steam, and a bunch of new shit will just continuously pop into it forever.

I mean, you're not lying.

I enjoy.

Y'all can't stop.

I have enjoyed this project so much.

It feels very much like Isaac.

There's no doubt in my mind that there's going to be a few DLCs coming after this.

It is infinitely expandable.

It feels very Magic the Gathering, so it's very easy to make a new expansion for it.

And I will be doing that with Tyler for sure.

Hell yeah.

All right.

Let's jump around a little bit.

So that's Mugenix, everybody.

Pat, how was your week?

What have you been up to?

Nothing.

No, I dyed my hair this fucking shade of purple.

Um

boy, that takes a while when you got red hair.

Well, professionally, sitting down with

I went and called a very nice lady who is a talented professional, and uh I sat down and uh took like an hour and a half to bleach this shit, at which point I looked like discount gnome Hulk Hogan.

I took a photo of that.

It's not good.

You see, you could you could you could run the bit from last time with with the whole, oh, you forgot to put your makeup on this week.

Yeah, no.

Right.

No, it's no, I'm tired.

Okay.

I don't want to.

Okay.

And then we went with this shade of purple because specifically I didn't want to run into a it looks like purple thing to me on stream, but everyone keeps telling me it's blue situation.

Oh, your GameCube colored beard.

I see what you're saying.

We just went for definitely like not indigo, like

Because that's what the audience wanted.

That's what they literally asked for.

And I knew it was going to be something special when the lady's washing my hair and just going, oh my God, it's so fucking purple.

It came out so fucking purple.

Like those are direct quotes.

Wow.

Ed, do you have any opinions on the Indigo GameCube and whether or not it's closer to blue or purple?

It's closer to blue.

Hmm.

Interesting.

I had one.

Okay.

I would definitely say it was closer to blue.

Let me look it up.

Okay.

I want to look

it up.

It was built to cause this argument.

It's the dress.

The GameCube is the dress.

It's absolutely.

Oh, wait, no.

Okay.

Okay.

This is fucked because there are two pictures as the results and they fluctuate from blue to purple.

Depending on the length.

What is it?

If you look Indigo GameCube, and there's two results on

the top, and the first one's purple, and the second one's blue.

Sometimes JPEGs have different artifacting and such as well.

You know, they release one

purple.

If you Google it, you can see like these shits are.

We've litigated, and this is a closed case, but we I was just curious as a new person was sitting here with what they did.

I will re-litigate one part of this argument.

Yeah, I would like to re-litigate it because I think about it all the time.

It's my go-to example of this scenario where you brought up, oh man, I'm so sick of arguing about about whether or not the GameCube is purple.

And then I said, it is purple.

And then you went, oh, I'm so sick of it.

Like, you brought it up.

It was you.

Notice that I did it again this time.

All right.

So I dyed this shit out.

And then I exited the hairdresser at like fucking 3.30 p.m.

into a major city directly next to a bus stop where like a hundred people were waiting for the fucking bus.

Yeah, they were and got to have like every like everybody's grandma and high school kid just turn to see me simultaneously and just get hit with just a blast of judgment.

Just

a fucking shitstorm of

eyes.

The question is: have you run into anyone that you recognize?

You know,

I have run into people at a restaurant that I go to often.

I have run into my neighbors.

Okay.

And I have run into people at like the play place that we take the baby to.

And it has been a long-term explanation every single fucking time.

Lost a bet.

Just hold up the lost a bet sign.

I am currently telling everyone that I lost a bet that I could beat you in Street Fighter.

That is why I've gone with it.

It is my fastest way to explain it.

Fine.

Yeah.

Oh, it's rough.

But then I, so the worst part actually isn't like going out and being like, um, weirdo.

The worst part is that I wake up in the morning and every single day I'm like, what?

Oh, right, right.

I did that.

Because like, I forget.

Every single day I forget.

Okay.

That I did this.

So just for some weird backstory, but Ed, the funny part is that this whole series of dyes and clown face paint and all that stuff has been part of Pat's Subtember,

One of which was to shave in the mutton chops, which was originally just a full beard.

That's the first one.

That's new.

But when the mutton chops came in, everyone kind of looked at it and went, wait, what the fuck?

That actually works really well for you.

I was just going to say, it doesn't look bad.

Yeah.

That's not a punishment at all.

The flat shit and the purple, that's not really working so good.

Well, although Paige did a really good job with this Captain Spalding makeup this week, the eyebrows are serving words that YouTube don't want me to say, but yes,

they are serving indeed.

I kind of miss my old head.

I miss my old head now.

I want it back now.

I have 27 days to go.

How long is the removal process?

Oh,

for the makeup.

Yeah.

It's a five-minute shower.

Oh, nice.

Okay.

Right off.

Okay.

That's why I have to drink my drink with a straw because if I don't, the lips will come right off.

But then we don't get our smeared clown mascara dripping emo version.

Put your dick away.

But that's what I need, though.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

It's not for you.

Or them.

The way you say that, you say that in a way that implies it's for other people.

Yeah,

I don't know.

I also beat Lisa the Painful this week.

Oh, shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is excellent.

Weirdly,

incredibly similar to Last of Us.

Like, they came out right around the same time and like very weird.

I think it's much more successful in its themes than Last of Us is.

I think it has the best shitty soundtrack of any game I've ever heard in my life.

Farting Tubas.

I think the first, I played the definitive edition.

I think the version of Work Harder with the Shenmue sound effect is better than the replacement, but I understand why they did that.

It is the only game I have ever played in my entire life that I got to the end and went, wow, what a perfect ending.

I really am actually kind of mad that there exists a sequel/slash DLC at all.

I don't know what is in it, but the ending to Lisa is so perfect that I'm like, oh, they should have just left it there, really, genuinely.

Okay.

So, Joyful is going to have to sell me really bad.

Unfortunately, I played it too long ago to remember remember the specifics.

Yeah, but

I remember really enjoying the joyful, and I liked it and thought it was a good addition, but I don't remember what they undid

to do it.

Oh,

okay, okay, that's leave it open to interpretation ending that.

I believe that's your ending that you got, though.

I don't think that's the only one.

So I didn't didn't get that.

I don't recall what you're describing there.

So, yeah, interesting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I had a different route.

Of course, you knew about this already, but you ran into your cameo in the game, of course.

I did.

I ran into me and Matt, and then I was instructed that if I were to help me and Matt, that we would blow up an entire fucking town and ruin a huge portion of the game because we're untrustworthy shitheads with dynamite, which does fit our personality in 2014.

Was it 2014?

Oh my god, that's so 2014.

Okay.

Yeah.

I also fought,

I think, Danny and Sterling as boss fights and kicked their asses.

A bunch of us sprinkled all over the place.

Yeah.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

So, okay.

Yeah, this is an interesting thing you're describing where the ending that you got makes it so that you don't want more game, whereas the ending I got was made it so that more made sense.

I will have to go and look up the variations later.

And that's almost one of those, like, okay, well, you got to pick.

Did you ride out of there?

Out of

this is Ocelot and Meryl, right?

Like, what are you choosing to go forward with?

They both survived.

Shut up with that coward shit.

Yeah, that's stupid.

We had room on the back of the snowmobile for everybody.

Ridiculous.

Okay, sick.

Are you going to touch Joyful?

Yes.

Yes.

I'm playing Joyful this week.

I also bought Battlefield, downloaded Battlefield, got into Battlefield once.

Then, when I tried to load it, Steam got locked into a permanent update is unreleased DLC freak bug that I could not solve within an hour.

So I refunded Battlefield.

So that's my Battlefield review.

Is that I launched it once and then it refused to launch ever again.

Good game.

Shit.

All right.

Great game.

I also played some 2xKO.

Of note is that we discussed, we were playing together.

I discussed the creation of the from Genoru on Blue Sky, the creation of the killer whale term.

Yeah.

Being people who

spend a shitzillion dollars on skins, but then are actually good at the game.

And I remember explaining that to you as we were in duos, and you were like, man, that's great.

And then we went into Versus and you then loaded in with the $140 skin and then beat the shit out of me.

And I'm like, oh, no wonder you liked the term killer whale, Mr.

Porpoise.

Call me Shamu.

Yeah.

And like,

I am blown away you loaded up 2xKO and went, yeah, I'll buy it all.

Yeah, give me, give me now.

Yeah, no, it's one of those, like I said before, I'm like, this is a, this is a free fighting game that I am going to play a lot of.

Well,

it depends on

what your feelings are towards how much you want to go in or whatever.

But I was like, yeah, no, I'm down to give this.

I'm down to

get what I want in this game.

And I'm specifically going to focus on the characters I like playing, you know.

But that

in general has been, I'm looking at the

stuff where I'm like, oh, yeah, you get the rotating

two-week thing for the other skins and stuff.

And essentially, I'm like, okay, I see

stuff that is going to be for the characters I care about.

I don't really feel the need to collect as much.

That's not a part of it.

In rivals, I kind of did feel a little bit what I was like, I said, I wanted that Marvel vs.

Capcom Venom skin or so.

But yeah, in this case, I'm kind of just like happy to lock in on the characters I like and stick with them.

I'm being told in chat they've actually shortened the shop rotation to a single week.

That's good.

That's interesting.

That's good.

Do I have anything else that I want to say about that game?

No, I guess not.

It's fun.

Yeah.

And that's pretty much it for me.

Instead of playing Battlefield, I just hit more matches into XKO,

which I think I'm bad at.

I might actually be shit at that game.

So

you've had, again, a long history of fighting game knowledge in terms of Street Fighter and games like that.

And like there is another reflex, which is the Marvel versus Capcom faster-paced team-based thing.

And there are

habits and stuff that you build up over time in this separate genre.

It's the difference between getting good at,

I don't know, like a Counter-Strike style, you know, realistic shooter versus going fucking nuts in Quake, you know, or Unreal or so.

It's just, it's just, it's two different types of things.

The fundamentals carry over, but learning how to aim is always going to be learning how to aim.

Yeah, I still don't know how to use that tag shit.

It's so

good.

I wish Juggernaut was good enough that I could just use that, but it's terrible.

Yeah, I think

we'll have to see.

I think it's going to be character-specific.

The ability to engage with the tag system or not based on whether you want to sounds like a cool idea, but only some characters are going to be good enough to be able to support having one or the other.

Yeah, Absolum, right?

That's another thing that oh, I did play that.

That was a

beat-em-up roguelike.

It's excellent.

It's by Dotinu guys.

It's by the Streets of Royage 4 guys.

It's fantastic.

It's one of those weird games that we talk about on here where I'm like, I don't know what to say about it.

It feels good.

It looks great.

It sounds fantastic.

It's great.

Okay.

I was sponsored to play it, though.

So take my words with a grain of salt because I received monetary compensation for playing it.

Yep.

But I was going to call it anyway.

So

hashtag sponsored opinions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There we go.

Take, take, take your.

Guys, mind if I run to the bathroom real quick?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Sure thing.

I'll mute my mic.

Okay.

Would that be pretty much it on your end?

That would be it.

You can check out me streaming this week.

I'm going to do Lisa the Joyful, and I'm going to be doing, I'm going to start Kronos, the new dawn, over on twitch.tv slash patstairs at and youtube.com slash patstaresat.

People are asking me to talk about Silent Hill.

Okay, fine.

I got two more of the endings, and they're fucking great.

They're fucking great.

And people who are not playing through that game multiple times and are just looking up the endings, like every person I've talked to other than me, are missing out.

Okay.

Like every single, I literally spoke to somebody yesterday and it was like, yeah, yeah, I beat it.

And then I looked up all the endings.

I'm like, ah, you are missing out.

The part of of that game sucks.

Um, and you're missing out on the part that sucks.

Um,

the there is so much there that is of value.

Like, it's it's in the in the journey, it's fucking great.

It is absolutely worth going through it every single time to get a couple of different endings.

Um, let's take this opportunity to uh thank some sponsors, actually.

Yes, let's, I think it would be a good time.

Uh, so yeah, this week, the podcast is sponsored by Raycon.

It is Raycon's anniversary.

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All right.

This week, the podcast is also sponsored by

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If you're trying to figure out how to get something off the ground, like a business getting started, when we first started podcasting, we didn't know much about how to figure out anything beyond recording and sticking a video or audio file online.

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Yes, and you'll sign up to get your $1 per month trial.

This week, the podcast is also sponsored.

I love these folks, actually.

Hero Forge is really sick.

Oh, you got your little doll?

Yeah, it is not a doll.

It is a miniature.

So if you're doing a tablet.

If you're doing a tabletop campaign and you want to create custom miniatures for your tabletop,

you want to check out HeroForged, where it's essentially like a detailed character creator online.

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Thank you, HeroForge.

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This week, the podcast is also sponsored by ExpressVPN.

Okay.

Here we go.

How are we going with this?

Going online without ExpressVPN is like...

Oh.

Which one?

Not closing the door when you use the bathroom.

Even if you've got nothing to hide,

why give random people a chance to invade your privacy?

Yeah, well, maybe in your own house, the people that you live with don't want to know what's going on in there, you know?

I'm shouting out like update.

Play by place.

You're giving them play by place from the bathroom.

Yeah.

Okay.

The other day I was texting Paige.

I was like, you're going to need a priest to consecrate this toilet when I'm done with it.

Okay.

Well, what if someone walking by the window that you left open was able to see what was going on in there?

Oh, that's a little weird because of the hair.

That's not great.

So

you want to keep those people out.

And

that's what you want to do with something like ExpressVPN on the internet, right?

Protect yourself from snoopy, nosy people, including not just the weirdos walking by your window, but even your ISP who might want to steal and or gather that data and sell it so that you can get targeted advertisers.

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So that sucks.

ExpressVPN reroutes 100% of your traffic through encrypted servers.

So yeah, that is a pretty great way to

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What I personally enjoy is pretending that I'm not from Canada when, you know, I don't know a streaming service is like, hey, you can't watch this if you're not in America.

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And apologies for the extra long one today.

We have to make up for some

bubbling that occurred last week.

But last but not least, we got one more here.

This week, the podcast is sponsored by Rocket Money.

And

I have talked about how over the years we've watched as the internet has become more convenient to order things online and to subscribe to services.

But the process of that has also led to subscription services figuring out that you can forget about them very easily and then not know what you're signed up for.

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Okay.

You load that thing up and be like, Xbox Game Pass, what the fuck is that?

That doesn't exist anymore.

Yeah.

So I guess just

for me, in terms of stuff I was doing this week, not a ton.

It's pretty much just been all

2XKO and Silk Song.

2XKO, yeah.

We played not much else to talk about beyond.

You're really good at 2XKO.

You should feel very proud and big.

I like tag Marvel style fighters.

It's very fun um so to xko is the uh the league of legends fighting game med that just uh that just came out and um we're we love our fighting games over here that's our big backbone genre

yes we are we're not going to be going into the discussions on frame data even though you know that's a nightmare for a lot of our listeners actually um

but um no that it's yeah i've been i've been definitely enjoying and getting in there and getting a couple matches and it's just it's scratching the itch because right now is nighttime baby bottle duty.

And I'm kind of, I need something I can dive into and then throw away and run back to deal with the sun.

It's how I hit Master Rankin in Street Fighter.

It's like, hey, you know what I have time for?

I have time for two minutes.

Yes.

Yes.

So that's it.

Like, this is what is working now.

And anything that's a little more involved or in depth, like, I want to get into Death Stranding too.

I want to see what's going on over there.

Bro, this is the worst time of your life you could possibly get into Death Stranding 2.

Because Death Stranding 2 is all about trucking and time being spent building roads and reconnecting

the time of Death Stranding 2 is like 40 minutes.

Yeah.

You don't have uninterrupted 40-minute periods of time.

That's not happening.

Ed, was your

first months of baby stuff like, did you find ways to efficiently juggle time and diaper change it?

There's a lot.

I mean, we had

pretty amazing infants that just, they got their needs met and they were nursed for a very long period of time, so exclusively.

So they were like very happy with everything and they were fine.

So I did have time to still do some stuff.

It was like

the kids didn't get hard until three.

Then they got exponentially hard.

Oh,

yeah, I've been smooth sailing, and I was told I was going to hit terrible twos, and my man is just still a perfect angel.

And I've then been informed that, oh, well, then you're looking for the terrible threes.

And I'm like, maybe you'll be fine.

Not my

child.

My child is perfect.

Yeah, we never know what's going to happen.

But threes,

for us, threes are for both of them were when they were like, I can run at full speed and I like running away from you and I will run into traffic.

Oh, that's the fun one.

Yeah,

okay.

There's a lot of running after them, and a lot of like, I'll take the phone and I'll throw it down the hill.

I'll, you know, that sort of stuff.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm, so that's the thing is, like, I'm, we're currently like, I know that you can get, like, I get random attributes on baby.

One of them might be a climber, you know?

Yeah,

climbing, hitting, spitting, biting.

And so

I've already done some of the major childproofing in the house and stuff preemptively.

But like, you know, we learned the whole trick of like, no, get down on the ground and crawl like a baby and look at everything that might be around and see what you can pull onto yourself and destroy yourself with.

Find some old Skittles.

Maybe.

You could.

Be wary of corners, wooden corners of tables.

They're always at the height that they are when they're walking.

Both of my kids have giant heads

and they like to, they're like lopsided and they just keep knocking their heads and everything.

Our youngest just had bruise head constantly and even like sliced her head open on the side there.

So,

yeah.

So I've got the bookshelf with all my games and, you know, old console stuff all on it on display.

And I'm like, well, you know, that's nice and sturdy.

And you're like, but what if someone from down here just started climbing it?

And, you know, the heavier books and consoles are at the bottom, but then they get up to my little metal gear figure up here.

And that's really light.

And this whole thing just starts tilting like, ah, you know, so I'm like, I guess I have to get into anchoring all my bookshelves now, you know?

And I have a feeling you're going to be on it, though.

I mean, unless you're just like, letting your kid do whatever they're doing and not paying any attention at all for an extended period of time.

You're fine.

We would like rope them in.

We got these like weird little, almost like plastic, large Tetracy-type pieces.

They look like hashtags, and they would like fit together and make like a baby gate.

And we would just baby gate off like a large portion of the living room.

Okay.

And she would just graze in that area right in front of the TV while we were relaxing.

And all eyes were on.

She's got out.

It's still a large free roam cage system.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's where we're going to need for sure i'm i'm kind of though i'm i'm looking around at this like arcade lasered light i i want to go up there studio thing i have behind me and going no no hyper stimulation chamber no no no no hyper stimulation chamber for you just yet and it's like i i'm sure there will be i want nothing more in life than to get in there and climb up your your thing and

this is like you know blown like what is your obsession with my forbidden cave of mystery

like

yeah.

So, you know, halfway up the, the, the berserk just to see what the Virgil's doing.

And then, oh, we've got a, uh, a neck dive, you know, into problems.

I'm like, yeah, we're going to, we're going to be on top of it.

But the idea of like, you look away for a half second, you know, is like, that's the one that I'm, I'm aware of.

I'm still kind of just noticing.

We put, we put her in the bouncer.

for like one second where you just kind of you have her in like the little like bouncing seat thing and they go like hey this is fine but you know if they start falling asleep, you want to make sure that their heads are not tilted forward.

That's bad.

And I'm like, Yeah, we're gonna keep that eye.

And I remember I like I turned my head and I said something, you know, to my wife, and it was like in that time frame, it's just like, Oh, she got herself right into that position.

It was an, it was just a jerk into that into, and I was like, That's how fast it is, you know.

So

I'm already just doing all the visual calculus, like

you know, preemptive.

You know, is is every is are things safe enough?

Are the corners safe enough?

I don't don't know.

We'll, we'll figure it out.

This may be one of the mutant powers I was talking about.

Sorry?

Sorry.

Talking at the same time.

I was saying, maybe this is one of those mutant powers I was talking about.

When you

can hyper-focus on things, you can hyper-focus on the protection of your young.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

It's not a downside.

I know it's considered neurotic, and I understand.

I, first kid, slept with a baby monitor underneath her to check the heartbeat and everything.

Right, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I had a little heart monitor sock on my,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it was a nerve-wracking experience.

We don't use it, we have the sock, we don't use it, but it's there.

And pretty much everyone went like, you can put this on, and you know, depends on whether you think it'll add to or reduce your stress and anxiety.

What kind of person are you?

Oh, it massively reduced our house

stress.

So, um,

no, I think

there's definitely a little bit of that and there's that part of it too where it's just like okay I'm gonna definitely expect to watch you face plant and just pop back up.

Oh, dude, it's just the funniest thing.

And you're like, we're cool and you're like and then hopefully get like a ah and you're like, all right, yeah, we're cool.

You know?

It's the funniest thing watching you fall down, Slaries.

So anyway, I'm queuing up my future gaming decisions based on what I can do while splitting my eyeballs in multiple terms.

Oh, yeah.

I do have one last thing to say about 2xKO before we leave, which is

because we talked about how League's, sorry, Riot's monetization for Rune Terra like tanked that game because it never made a dime.

It was a massive fucking failure.

They gave away a lot to people.

They gave people a lot of people.

And then we talked about how the costumes are a massive fucking ripoff in 2xKO, but the game's free.

So

judging by the amount of people I fight that have bought that fucking $140 CAD skin pack, that game's got a bright fucking future because it's like 30% of all players are rocking one of those skins.

People really like Arcane.

Yeah, I should probably watch it.

It's good.

It's a good show.

But yes.

So just a quick bit.

Silk Song.

I didn't do a ton.

I'm pushing a little further in.

Did you check out Hollow Knight and Silk Song at all, Ed?

I played Hollow Knight a little bit.

I know everybody loves it, and I know it's considered like right up there for Metroidvanias, but I'm not a big Metroidvania fan.

Okay.

It just didn't.

I think maybe if I had more time to really get into it, I'm probably would have gotten past the initial, you know, little hill.

But

I mean, it looks amazing, and I'm all for that type of unique world building.

I I like the character design and everything else like that, but I have not played Silk Song.

Gotcha.

The main issue that I can see for Hollow Knight as somebody who doesn't, is not like a big Metroid crazy person is that like Hollow Knight and Silk Song are like, hey, do you love Metroid or Castlevania?

Do you wish it was like eight to ten times longer than those games?

And I say, yes, absolutely.

I also really like

the way lore is delivered in it as well.

Just, you know, besides the little like, you know, in-seen like tablets and objects you pick up and stuff,

the idea of a Castlevania or Metro game with like little settlements, you know, is like little areas of respite where people are around and you can talk to them and, you know, kind of get deeper into what's going on.

You do more like world building than story, yeah.

I definitely appreciate yeah, yeah.

And I like that.

I think that's more appropriate in games in general.

I think it's the way to, it really shines brighter in a video game to make a world that not necessarily tells a story, but gives you an idea of the setting that you're experiencing than

a traditional game where you'd like

string it together with cutscenes.

Yeah, I think Silksong does a pretty good job of that because again, you're, you know, you're platforming through this, you know, big Metroid map and it's massive, but like you're working your way essentially from the outskirts of

a kind of desolate area into like this grand citadel on the hill.

And then you're kind of getting to see what life is like for people, you know, on the way, getting closer and closer to this point and

meeting, you know, kind of fun characters along the way and overall having a nice,

yeah, a nice balance between like, that was a, and I get to, to say souls-like is like, I guess, the appropriate thing here, but ultimately, like, oh, that was a cool boss.

What was their deal?

Oh, that was their deal.

Oh, shit, that's pretty sick.

Okay, you know,

but

i had the i was talking last week um pat about the first sinner and yeah so i did that fight and beat it and i think that's my most satisfying single fight in the game so far it's the second best fight in the game so your your taste is on point

i really

like it's not yeah there's a lot of the game that doesn't resemble this but this is a moment that feels like um

everything that you've learned about fighting the hard bosses and all your movement skills and abilities are being tested in this one boss fight where essentially

the best way I could describe it Ed is basically there's a boss fight in this game that feels as if you are watching a fight out of like Dragon Ball Z where things are just flying all over the place and zips and whatnot, but you are doing it manually against a boss that is moving and teleporting around the screen and filling it up with all kinds of things you have to react to aggressively.

And you have to use your movement abilities at this point in the game.

You have quite a few of them to, you know, essentially do the ridiculous over-the-top anime fight moment, you know?

And it can be a game that these skills are really useful for slower-paced moments, for platforming, or for things like this.

And, you know, like it's nice that you,

it has a full breadth of what you can do with your abilities in it.

So it was a great exam, you know, of your ability to navigate quickly, recognize where threats are coming from, and then also recognize where the teleport is going to be and, you know, get some damage in and have a high-paced fight.

It was very, very cool.

I love that part of it.

Um,

and uh, yeah, I guess, Pat, I just want to ask you, like, the thing you get for beating that fight

kind of sucks.

I don't know how I'm supposed to really use it that effectively.

It's rune rage.

I used it twice, and I was like, oh, it actually sucks.

So, is it so I looked it up a bit, and it seems like it's a skill that just lets you cast a spell that has random circles appear on screen.

And if the enemies are in those circles, they'll do tons of damage.

A lot of damage.

But you don't know where the circles will appear.

No, it's totally unreliable.

And I'm seeing people describe it as like the circles tend to be where the enemy was.

And there is a bit of intelligence to it.

It's not completely random.

But I don't know how to make use of it.

You know?

I don't.

Okay.

Go back to cross stitch.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'm just, that's out.

I just want the thing that makes everything around me explode for a couple seconds, and I think that's what I'll do.

Yeah.

yeah.

So, all right, cool.

Yeah, just going to keep going on with that.

And for anyone who's been, you know, checking out over on the Woolly vs.

Main channel, I've been away on the, you know, dad leave for quite a bit, but we have started resuming our streams.

And, you know, I started my first stream back this week, yesterday.

So

I'm going to put out a video to kind of explain some of the changes coming to the channel a bit more.

But essentially, every week we're going to be doing more chill streams, just just kind of hanging out with everybody, talking, shooting the shit.

We played some Wordle and

Street Fight Turtle and Scrandle, which

I don't know if you know anything about Skrandle,

Ed or Pat, but it's on the list.

There's a website where they show you photos of two different

meals you can buy in the in Europe usually at a football game or soccer game.

And it's Scrand is the the word for food you buy out watching a footy match essentially they show you like the meal that you buy at the stadium and they show you the price and they go which do you think more people would have chosen or clicked on based on the food the quality of it and the price and a lot of it is gross looking weird flat burgers with no toppings or this kind of decent looking fry with like cheese sprinkled on it and not much effort but it's only two quid you know and and then you got to pick what you think people went for more.

That's interesting.

Yeah,

it so your first instinct is to be like, oh, well, just pick the more delicious item every single time.

Yeah, but then it's like, but price.

Yeah, but then it's like, no, no, no, no, no.

This is this, that amazing looking hot dog costs like 13 pounds,

you know, and this is in like Norway or whatever.

It shows you the flag so you see the country it's coming from.

So you're like, oh, you can't just go on the quality, you know.

Scrandle's fun.

It's fun.

And it's also a wild, there's some dissonance that occurs where you're like, sometimes you're like, wait, what is wrong with people?

That is a very delicious looking bowl of chili.

Why would you turn that down?

And it's like, nah, people are going for

this weird half pogo hot dog round thing with mustard on it that's kind of gray.

Because apparently that's a delicate.

And you're just like, what the fuck is happening?

Why would you want that?

I don't know.

It's a great website to go to when you want to feel like everyone in the whole fucking world is stupid.

About food opinions.

Yeah.

There's also evil mode, where you click it.

So evil mode makes it so that the food photos that pop up are sometimes inverted in color or blurry or gray.

And then you're like, well, you can't use how delicious the bread looks to determine whether this is a good hot dog or not.

That is evil.

I don't like that.

You got to use the, you got to like invert the colors in your brain or in some cases, it's just a blur, but you're like, oh, that blur is showing some ribs that look pretty tasty, though.

But

you can't see the price.

You're not too sure.

It's just emulating what my wife sees when she goes to eat something without her glasses on.

That bad.

Yeah.

And

at one point, like,

there was, there was like, there was like a hot

British pie or whatever um but it was the kind where like it didn't look too appetizing but like I'm like no but it probably tastes good I've had I kind of get the idea of that and Reggie my co-host is goes on a whole thing just talking about there's there are foods you're not supposed to look at you're just supposed to bite into and enjoy

I can't I can't have to look at food I need I can't I can't be just no yeah anyway

there's a place here in in in Montreal called Eau Noir, Ed, where it's a restaurant that is all in darkness.

And

the waiters that work there are all blind.

And so essentially, it's like emulating a blind experience.

And

you are brought to your table and they bring you your menu and everything.

It has to just be done verbally.

And then you get to eat in the dark.

Your eyes.

Yeah.

I haven't tried it, but...

They probably just bring out microwaved old McDonald's to you.

Well, you can't see it, so you can't see.

Because

the first bite is with the eyes.

I mean, plating is a whole thing.

And

who gives a fuck about plating if you can't see the fancy swirl of, you know, creme brulee.

Anyway, so all this to say, yeah, we're back to streaming.

And, you know, I'll be posting the schedule up on my socials, but we'll be doing another chill stream next week.

Mondays usually is what we're looking at and then um more of the schedule in the into the future after that but it's going to be depending on how much uh baby it needs more stuff so i'm i am currently just ebbing and flowing according to the needs of um diaper diaper changing

um

gotten really fast at that by the way i got that i told you i told you you were gonna get super good at it it's sick i'm like like start the timer and just get that like second layer going scrape up up up up bop, toss, go.

It's, it's working out.

You get really good at a bunch of stuff.

Um, also, I know it's completely random, but the fact that that uh my wife is the one who got all the blowouts and I haven't had a single one, I feel like it's a skill issue.

You know, I'm kind of just currently riding that out and going, like, yeah, no, it's just hey, can somebody clip this and send it to me so I can send it to his wife?

It's just, it's all in the wrist, you know?

And babe, she's just, yeah, she, I don't know what it is, but it's, seems like it's your problem, you know, it's just something about

you've sealed your fucking fate.

I have had, I have had merry a blowout so far.

Oh, damn.

Um, anyways, anyways, uh,

not much else to it, really.

Um, but yeah, Wooly versus on Twitch and YouTube.

We're streaming in both locations now, so tune in if you want to see a little bit more.

Bro, I was, I was talking to Bricky yesterday, and I I was telling him about multi-streaming.

He's like, yeah, I've been doing it for a while.

And I was like, well, he's like, what are you using?

I go, oh, I'm using this.

And he goes, ah, that thing sucks.

You should use this other solution.

And then he went to go stream and his shit completely broke and fell apart.

And he had to contact me and be like, never mind all that shit.

I said,

you just keep doing this thing here.

It's...

You got it.

Yeah.

Just behind the scenes.

Do as many tests as possible until you're sick of it.

And then rest assured, once you go live for the first time, it'll all stop working anyways.

It'll break every time.

Every single fucking time.

So I used to work in QA, Ed, and I used to do

quality assurance for games and stuff and compliance in particular.

So a big thing was

going from the late PS2 era into like Xbox and then 360 and so on.

Just kind of watching as like, oh, we now have things like day one patches that can exist to fix issues and just how much like the dev process went, fuck it, ship it, we'll fix it later, and just hope nobody finds it on the release build.

Like horrible save-destroying bugs.

And it's like, yeah, they won't find it, just push the patch, it'll be okay.

You know, um, practice had one of those, Super Boy had one of those, yeah,

save erasing, yeah, yeah,

and we had to patch it, and we did.

Okay,

only a handful, yeah,

but yeah, we, we, we fixed it, no, it happens, it happens.

I mean, the beauty of Steam, like people get on my ass because the most common thing people ask me is,

why isn't the latest update for Isaac on console?

And as you probably know, like, it's a, it costs money to do that.

And we can't just be like, hey, Sony, we're updating the game.

It's like, no, you have to get approval and it has to go through lot check and all the stuff has to be checked and maybe it will fail, you know, and then you've got to fix shit, right?

And that all costs money and takes time.

So you don't want to take something that is a work in progress and then just be like, well, the people want it.

So let's put it, let's get it going until you find all the things that are wrong with it.

And it's really nice to be able to do that.

Like, that's why I focus my development on PC exclusively initially

because the games I tend to make are stupidly complicated and can go wrong in very specific ways that are a one in a million chance, which still happen.

And there's no way to find those things out until somebody reports them.

So it's nice that Steam lets you just

you're responsible for your game.

Go on the fly.

Yeah, yeah.

They are looser with it for sure.

The hardware manufacturer guidelines change according to just each console.

And so I remember, yeah, so you know, whether it's Sony TRCs or Xbox TCRs and all that stuff, the Nintendo was always really wild with their lot check stuff because

they would find a bunch of issues that were all like, you know, you cannot release until you fix these, but they would hide shit from the devs until the second pass.

So the first pass, they'd be like, we found 30 things that you cannot release the game with, but really we found 40.

And there's 10 here that we're going to hold back until the next build and see if you just do your job and find it properly.

And it's like, why don't you help us and work together

and let us

let us know what you found.

And they're like, nah.

And by the way, that's like, like, there's, there's the UK office versus NOA versus NOJ is a whole other thing, you know.

But like, the fact that they're like, we're, we found bugs we're going to sit on, like, little choice morsels to release at you later is crazy.

But that was a big part of it, too, you know?

Yeah, we had all kinds of horror stories around submission time.

You have like the worst, sorry, you have the second worst, like, bug field of anyone I've ever encountered.

The worst has to be Paige.

The both, like, as soon as you guys touch anything, it just flies apart.

You know, she destroyed, she broke our baseboard heaters in the house two days ago.

Doing what?

Like, oh, it's getting cold.

We got to turn on the, we should turn the heaters on.

So she goes to turn it on, and then I came to stream, and then she's like, oh my God, the house is so cold.

I've been messing with the heat all day, just turning it on up and down.

And I'm like,

they're not on.

She's like, what do you mean they're not?

I'm like, you didn't check to see if you were even turning them on?

Like, no.

Yeah, no wonder it's cold.

The house is totally unheated.

Somehow she tripped the breaker.

I don't know how she did it.

She tripped the fuse.

I had to pull the fuse box out and be like,

you somehow

tripped the fuse on the break.

I don't know what the fuck you're doing.

If, you know, if that's like, she should have gone into QA like I did then, you know,

turned that into an ability and used it to report bugs.

It's, it's super handy.

Yeah.

No, the, um, the, I'm remembering like, too, so when it comes to like non-super serious game breaking issues, though, like, there's always that kind of like, okay, this is like a B-class issue that's like, it gets in the way.

It's kind of, it's not a huge issue, but like, if you kind of

have a game with thousands of moving parts and things like that, you have to kind of just let it go a bit, you know, kind of like old Fallout, right?

And things like that.

I feel like one of the most complicated testing times we had back in the day was scribble knots.

Oh, yeah, that we had to do quality assurance on scribble knots, man.

And you're like,

think of how many words across multiple languages and making sure that the solutions to these problems can be solved in a billion different ways.

You just have to, you just give up.

Like, you're like, we're going to do the best we can, but accept that as a player, you're going to run into some wild shit here and just roll with it, you know?

It's kind of a lost gem.

That game was a unique.

It's, it's like the concept of it is, like, higher than I think the DS is capable of pulling off at the time, you know?

Like, it's something that, yeah, like you, to, to manually be like, a dictionary is how you play the game, actually, you know, or for there to be things where it's like, oh, this is a word and I know it is, but the game doesn't recognize it is a bad feeling as well.

So, um, yeah.

But as an idea, I'm like, I think that's really cool, but it's just like, I don't know if the resources were there at the time to actually live up to the idea.

The, the, the rigging in Mugenics is very similar to Scribble Nots a rigging, right?

Puppet kind of vector animation.

Yeah, in order to make humanoids that can look a billion different ways easily, you have to have that kind of ragdoll setup where they're all pieces that can be reconfigured.

Yeah.

I'm always really impressed with

Super Robot Wars.

They also do that.

It's like a, you know, the Japanese tactical RPG franchise where they get a bunch of different anime mecha and they do that.

Every limb, every piece of the robot is like a different

individual asset.

And they find ways to kind of go from that sort of animation into traditional sprite animation and back very seamlessly.

Yeah, it's always something really cool when

you see that style get

a really detailed new

evolution of it.

I think

what was it?

Vanillaware as well has a really cool use of that sort of style with certain things like limbs being kind of independent from each other and it blends really well together.

It doesn't always look like it is that, but they do it too, you know.

Yeah.

All right.

Well,

not much else to it then.

I did want to, I didn't talk about it earlier with me, Genix, but I did want to ask as well, like, you, I saw that Magic the Gathering played an influence in part of it too as well.

Oh, yeah.

You big on?

I played Magic since it started.

I mean, since revised.

Okay.

My story is.

I was at the boys' club with a friend of mine this summer of like 93 or 94.

I can't remember which it was.

And he's like, this new game came out.

It's called Magic the Gathering, and I was watching people play it.

This guy played a Keldon Warlord, and he was like, Yeah, when he comes into play, his power and toughness are equal to the number of creatures you have.

And I was just like,

This is the greatest thing ever.

And I was like, Let's go get starters.

And we went, and they were just unboxing the revised starters.

And those starters were, I think, $7.99, maybe.

And they had a bunch of like alpha, beta, legends, like all the original stuff, which was about the same price, a little bit more because it was older.

And I was like, I'll just get a starter.

Like, there's more cards in this revised starter.

So, I passed on all these hyper-valuable cards and just got the least valuable things.

And then, like, dual lands, which are like the only thing that are good in the revised edition, they're worth hundreds of dollars now.

Um, they were worth like 250, and you could trade them for a pack of cards.

Okay, I did that.

That's where I started.

I've been playing for forever, though.

Did you excited for Jaws in the office to come to Magic the Gathering?

I am excited for Jaws, the card, the one card.

I play a format called Cube, specifically Powered Cube, which is a customized format where you build a set with access to all the strongest cards ever printed, and then you draft that set.

So it's random every single time.

It's really, really, really fun.

And they put it on MTGO, which is not Arena, but

Magic the Gathering online.

It's this sub-Magic Online thing.

I highly recommend it if you play magic, but um

but Jaws the

the the the uniquely designed Jaws is considered a cubable card.

It's strong enough to go into cubes and I know some people are against Universes Beyond, but I think it's goofy and it works in the cube, so it's going in

Are you do you find yourself more of a Timmy, Johnny, or Spike?

I can never remember what those are

Timmy just wants the big,

cool splashy FUD thing.

Johnny wants to lab and be a mad scientist, and Spike just wants to optimize and win the meta by any means necessary.

You know, you in it for the experimentation to win no matter what, or just to have fun, even if it doesn't win.

I guess I'm more in it for the experimentation.

I tend to lean towards drafting interesting archetypes and trying to do cool things as opposed to always trying to win.

But yeah, the overlap literally is there with mugenics because we find that there are like similar

people that were like

my nephew is all about the chaos, the memes.

Like he's a meme kid.

He will cringe if he hears me say that about it.

But he's in it for the lulz.

And he will find something about the game and break it.

And then be like, okay, well, I'm going to collect all the shotguns that I can find.

And I'm going to

go infinite with these shotguns.

And then I'm going to go and kill whatever the final boss with

all my cats equipped fully with shotguns just because it's funny.

Right, right.

It works too.

It's pretty strong.

But the fact that he went there and like farmed these shotguns and kept them until the final boss is just very funny.

And we've got other people, like the guy I used to work with, Florian.

I guess I still kind of work with him.

I made Isaac with him originally, and he's been testing the game.

And he was one of the people that kind of discovered we put a lot of things in the game just because it's interesting.

You want these things to happen.

So like

when you roll the day,

it does a sim.

And the cats that like each other will start mating.

And then maybe they're successful.

The cats that don't like each other, if a cat tries to mate with another cat doesn't want that, or the cat's gay, or whatever else, the cattle push the other cat away and reject the cat.

Cattle feel bad, et cetera, et cetera.

But there's also a chance that cats that don't like each other or aggressive cats will fight other cats.

And then that rolls a whole sim of like, well, who won the fight?

If so, how badly did the other one get beaten?

And

it can result in death.

So you could have these aggressive cats or cats that you have to keep separated because they keep fighting and it's going to end in death.

But we wanted there to be kind of like a uniqueness to this.

And having an aggressive cat beat another cat in a fight, they're rewarded with a small stat bonus.

And Florian was like, well,

why wouldn't I just make a room full of poop and dead cats that make all the cats angry and I'll just keep putting them in there and

taking the cats that are winning the fights on adventures?

And I'm like, oh.

All right.

Right, right.

I guess if that's what you are wanting to do, then that's what you want to do.

So someone, so I saw someone say just a bit earlier, they're like, oh if i'm if my isaac if i can see isaac in my run i'm restarting right away right like and and there's a like a thought there where you're like oh yeah there's points to this where if you just want to win and you just want to have a super busted build you're going to look for the right random things to occur right off the bat or you're just going to restart do you find that does that apply here at all or is it just a like whatever you get roll with it no matter what no since it's like a locked in world like you can't just keep re-rolling it like you've you've got to go on an adventure if you want to find stuff.

Okay.

And you can, you can then, like I said, you can pull out like mid-run and be like, well, I'm not a one to fuck with, I got a bunch of shotguns, right?

I want to, I don't, like, I might not survive.

Let's turn around and head home just so I can cash in my shotguns.

You can, you can play like that if you want.

Like people always ask about difficulty and whatever else.

And the game allows you to play how you want to play.

If you feel like you're losing runs, you can pull out of runs.

Okay.

But usually the risk reward gets the best of people and they want to go for it.

Even when they know their cats are just destroyed, they're barely hanging on, they're limping their way through, they have a bunch of disorders.

They're like, well, I'm only

one chapter away from finishing it, getting some check marks, unlocking some content.

I'm going to go for it.

And then they die and they lose all the stuff that they went for.

All the stuff that's with them, all their cats, they're all dead permanently.

No coming back.

So there is a game over state at which you must like, or is there always going to be some new cat?

There's never a game over.

There's always a new cat.

Because

your house is always there.

Okay.

Yeah.

So the parents of the cats you brought out are still there in the house.

Right, okay, okay, okay.

All the NPCs, you upgrade NPCs over time and they unlock a bunch of extra content.

You upgrade your house, you add levels to it, add an attic, you know, expand your house out, you expand your storage.

You make friends with all these different people and they give you different abilities, basically.

And that stays there.

The items never go anywhere, like, those are always there.

Whatever cats remain in the house, remain in the house.

And

even if

your cats started starving and killing each other, and they all died,

the next day, four cats come to mourn your loss of your cats.

Oh, no, no, no, no,

no.

And it keeps going.

Yeah, the permanence is there, but it's not as harsh as you might assume.

Okay.

Okay.

Um,

so yeah, just before we take a couple letters and get out of here, um,

I uh

so Pat, I was just curious,

do you have thoughts about

Mecha Zange?

Did you see that?

Mecha Zangeef not only looks incredible, but he also,

going along with the fact that everybody else is getting bathing suit

looks, he looks like he is naked.

It is.

And that the tights are painted on.

The robot version of Zange looks naked.

What a brilliant move.

So, okay,

in Street Fighter VI, everyone is getting these costumes of like, here's your sexy beach outfit, whatever, you know, like, here's

your summerwear.

But Zangef, the big Russian wrestler, is already

wearing like a skin.

Yeah, he can't get sexier than that.

Yeah, so what does he get instead?

A giant mecha Zangeef robot outfit.

Who Who looks more naked.

With sound effects and a special theme song that is like speed metal pile driver, you know, like it's

good stuff.

Brilliant idea.

Good stuff there.

Also, shout outs to the game Dragon Ball Fighters, which resurrected from the dead to announce they're putting another Goku into it.

Another Goku.

This is a game that has some 20 or so playable Gokus, and the audacity to put one more in there.

I love it.

I think it's like, yeah, fuck you.

We're doing it anyway.

More Gokus.

Outlasting two Mortal Kombat games at that, by the way.

Yeah, well, I mean, those games last

the weekend that you saw all the fatalities in them.

Yeah, and

they got the money and ran.

They did their thing.

And then also, they announced an Avatar, the Last Airbender fighting game, which...

I'm so glad to see that game get uncancelled.

It's nice that it exists and people's work is not going to nothing it's a 2d fighting game that looks pretty cool i respect the fact that sprites are being you know used and not just kind of going for the cell shaded 3d model look and um you know from the description there is a movement button that is a part of how things are going to work and i like

yeah it's like you have all these characters that can use their elements to fight each other you know air bending should move differently from water bending should move differently from earth and that seems to be a core part of what's going on with it, which is super sick as well.

So happy that this obvious kids franchise that should have been a fighting game a million years ago is getting to be that now and that this work is not getting canceled and

getting brought back and salvaged in some way, shape, or form.

You know, good stuff.

They're making an airbander, an airbender Magic the Gathering set next year.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, that makes sense.

They're crossing over with everybody.

Oh, yeah.

The whole fancy thing was crazy lucrative.

It was crazy money.

Every single one they do, even if it's a bomb, is not a bomb.

Like, it makes like the last one they did was Spider-Man, and everyone universally hated it, and they still made shitloads of money.

Okay.

Because people still are opening up packs to get rare cards.

You know what I mean?

The lesson from this thing that everyone hated is do it more.

Yeah, they're going to do it until it doesn't, until it's not alive.

Like, it's going to happen.

I mean, even people, yeah, because like I don't play Magic the Gathering at all, but like I've like when it, there's the Street Fighter cards that, you know, were part of, and I got, like, someone gave me like

yeah

where they're like people were going crazy They were like fuck you We're gonna destroy we're gonna sue magic because they're making these unique cards that aren't magic and then they're like okay

What we'll do is in the future, we'll reprint those cards as real magic cards.

And everybody's like, yay.

And then they're like, oh, by the way,

every set in the future is going to be this.

And everybody's just like, yay.

Forget about that whole thing.

But I think it's, I think, like, magic, every year that maybe five sets come out.

And I think three of the five sets are universes beyond.

So they're not going to be magic IPs.

I mean, Fortnite has been sitting here pulling in every pop culture franchise for years.

And like, it's just, yeah, like, obviously, Magic the Gathering is something that could

every like Funko Pops, you know, Fortnite, it's just a thing that

is happening right now where it's like.

Listen, man.

I saw my two-year-old son pick up a dinosaur and a car.

And he went, kiss, kiss.

And, like, that's all this is.

That's all it is.

Like, they have that innate human nature of like their friends.

And then they kissed.

Yeah.

It's like, what if I was playing fucking Fortnite and Darth Vader and the K-pop demon hunters were there?

I'm not going to lie.

Like, when Isaac got in Fortnite and it was finally announced and someone showed me a video of them playing as Butthead with Isaac on their back, I had this kind of like pretty crazy moment where I was like,

it sounds weird, but like Beavis and Butthead was one of the things that made me who I am.

And now

my character that I made is on

this character's back.

And it's like, even though it's this whole other world, it's this twisted

sub-existence in Fortnite, it's still like

way crazy.

Like, that's crazy.

That's nuts.

Like, how crazy is that?

Yeah.

No, when I saw, when I, when you know, I saw people describing, like, oh, yeah, my, my nephew says, oh, it's Chun Li from Fortnite.

And you're just like,

no,

that's fine.

That's fine.

We can live in this world.

That's okay.

Nope.

Yep.

yep yep they they know who she is they know about it's fine yep

oh boy all right uh let's think a couple letters here oh uh before that i have uh a single piece of news i would like to add

uh square enix has announced a uh new decidia game oh uh it looks like shit oh

so so take that emotion you just had and shove it up your arms oh uh is there a word that can describe describe?

Is there a new duodecimus?

Okay, we have new words.

Good, good.

Duelarim.

Okay.

3v3, gatcha, moba.

Ah.

Okay, okay, okay.

Where they all hang out in Japan and have contemporary outfits that you will be able to roll on.

Okay.

I appreciate

the naming conventions that sound like Dr.

House MD should be telling you about them from a hospital bed, bed, you know?

Yeah, okay.

I just want to get that out there.

Duly noted.

Yeah.

Duodecimally noted.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

Let's take one over here

from

user who doesn't matter brackets.

ChemoForce says, Dear dad, dad, R5 Ram cards, dads,

which curse with USB ports are you afflicted with most aggressively?

Only goes in on the second attempt, fourth, sixth,

only when you can see the port visibly,

only when you get on your back or

using a specific hand.

By the way, congrats for fulfilling punch dad status and Pat for secondary anniversary of dad stares at status.

Much love.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I can't get a USB,

a USB-A type port in unless I'm looking at it.

So the classic, like you have to, the three rotations on a type, a USB-A until it works.

I have finally defeated that by putting, when you're not looking, putting my finger on the top and feeling where the solid part is.

Yeah, you would think that would fucking work.

No.

Yeah.

Got to look at it.

So that's one bit.

My absolute grievance forever, like fuck them till the end of the earth, is the USB type Bs with the little extra nubs that are meant to break after like two uses.

The tiny micros that have the

minis rather.

Yeah, mini type B.

That garbage era needs to fucking die forever.

Thank God it's finally behind us.

Those are the worst.

There's a piece of equipment in my house that still uses it.

Two.

One's my salt shaker.

Wow.

Okay.

And one is the Yeti microphone.

My mouse, my computer mice all use it.

It sucks.

And it's ridiculous that we're finally like the USB-C existing and being like, it doesn't matter which way you plug it in, it works, it's fine.

It's like a breath of fresh air, thank you.

But also, fuck you, why did we have this from the jump?

That's crazy.

This is, it is wild how many bad forms of USB existed.

Paige has an old iPhone, and so she's currently fighting the nightmare that is every single plug in the house charges with USB-C except for her phone.

Lightning for one.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like, I think, thank, I think it was the Australian or British governments that basically forced them to be like, stop fucking proprietary ports on your phones now.

Make it USB or you can't release it here.

And they went, fine.

And now it's universal.

But the proprietary port bullshit was their bread and butter for decades.

You know?

EU in general, yeah, EU.

I'm happy with that.

I mean, that's a gambit that works, man.

When Sony was like, we're going to have our Bluetooth, our Blu-ray, and there's going to be HD DVD, and we're going to have a format war.

The winner of the format war just makes bank from

8-track, you know, DVD, CDs, HD DVDs, laser discs, all that stuff, all those format wars, you know,

to the point where I just going back to QA and compliance and stuff, it'd be like, did you insert your memory card?

Fuck you, this is not a memory card.

It's a memory stick duo registered trademark copyright.

And if you say anything but that, get your game the fuck off of my platform, you know, says Sony PSP.

Okay.

Yeah,

that would be the one.

I don't know.

Do you have port problems, Ed?

Just the one, the Yeti microphone one that you mentioned that I'm

not sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes, that one.

Also,

the I still have a gripe over the Wimote, the original Wimote Nunchuck plug.

You're looking at it like

this is a bait.

This is a USB plug, and they just added some extra bumps to the top of it.

And

they don't want people sticking or sideloading things in, so I understand it, but you're looking like, you're like, I know exactly what this is.

You just added a little thing, you know, which is not the first time, because obviously you take a Famicom cartridge and then you shave off the sides of the plastic on your Nintendo and it works fine.

It's just they made the actual cartridge loader physically not fit, you know?

Anyway,

um,

all right,

we got one from Tito.

Hey, gang, just listened to a random old episode

where Pat was describing the outer worlds as the game that would be talked about for decades and would replace New Vegas as top of the genre.

What other examples...

Seems hyperbolic even for me.

What other games, post-nut clarity, have you experienced?

Mine would be the entirety of the Fable series.

I think the easy one on this for me is, well, for us, is Mighty Number 9.

You know, the Mega Man replacement that will surely live on and be the inheritor of the torch.

Did that not, that didn't

already be talking about the torch.

No, you know, yeah, But Red Ash, though,

Redash, that's going to be...

Look forward to that one.

I don't know if any comes straight to mind.

I can think of a game that I was like super excited for slash, I knew it was going to be the hotness.

And then like footage started to come out of its release.

And I was like, oh, I'm going to call Amazon and have them not even bring the copy to my fucking house.

And a lot of people had the same reaction.

It was a shooter from Bethesda called Brink.

The blue one.

It was also red.

It was also red.

Okay.

And just like, oh my god, the marketing guys on that did such a good job.

They did such a good job.

I was so excited for it.

And then they finally, like, reviewers were putting out like un unlike unedited footage.

And it was like, oh, this looks like shit, dude.

Oh, my God, how did they, how did they gussy this up for the previews so good?

I'll also say another one, one that affected you, and it's something to be very wary of during any preview, anything, which is like, hey, man, if you go somewhere and the guys running the event are really nice to you and build you up and sit you down in front of primo ass computers in nice chairs and kind of kiss your ass a little bit and then make you play two rounds of their new multiplayer game Evolve.

Boy, that game seems like a kick's ass

as long as they don't let you play a third or fourth or fifth round and they send you off and they go, thanks, guys, you're great.

You know,

the doctors that get invited to the conferences for OxyContin have really nice steak dinners.

Those steaks are incredible.

The cut is so juicy, it's wild.

And Capcom's like, hey, you know what you guys need to do?

You need to come hang out and learn about the new Capcom games in motherfucking Hawaii.

Who wants to hang out in Hawaii?

I think my favorite one ever, my favorite one ever was when Brian Epberg at GameSpot back in like 2007 was like, for the Forza review period, they flew everybody out to Germany and then they were like, play Forza.

Oh, let's drive real cars.

Drive cars around on the Nerber Grid and then play Force again and see how awesome it is.

And I was just, I was, I remember reading it, I was like, this is the most fucking

shit I have ever fucking read.

Why not just suck the food critics dick under the table?

You know, it's the same thing to be considered for an Oscar as well.

Yes.

I didn't know until, and neither did the Indie Game the Movie People.

So they got a, they got nominated for a bunch of awards and won some awards and whatever else.

And they're like, Uh, we're we're gonna try to get be considered, we're gonna be try to be considered for an Oscar.

And they're like, What the first requirement they heard is it has to release in theaters, a certain number of theaters, and they were to achieve that.

And then it got down to it, like,

okay, well, where's your dinner?

Where's the dinner that you're hosting for a hundred people

for your consideration, right?

Yeah, yeah, and it's just like, oh,

these palms, my palm is so dry right now very dry palms it's crazy how dry these palms are can you

it's like

what are you gonna do

oh man i did i i had i had one experience when i was young that humbled me um and uh i was uh a rabid supporter of super nintendo i still am and obviously it was the better console of those two back then but let's go when mortal kombat came out

on Nintendo,

I was so

into it.

Like, I remember counting down the days.

It was, and this was before the internet, right?

Like, I didn't have a bunch of information about what was going on there.

And I remember I went to the one place that you could pre-order it.

And I remember the day I got it, brought it home.

And then I'm like, where's the blood?

Yeah.

Where are the fatalities?

And I'm just like, what?

And I'm trying to convince myself that this is somehow better.

And I'm trying to do

the

fighting without all that.

And I still fluff.

Yeah, I still had one.

My one argument was like

Raiden's fatality was he like fries you and you become like a skull that spins around and falls.

And I'm like, there, there, there.

This is what makes it okay.

And then I remember visiting my cousins who had it on Sega, which had all of the blood.

Yeah.

And it was like thick, drippy blood.

And I'm just like, God damn it.

Why did this have to happen to me?

Okay, so you had to have advanced copium tactics, right?

So for me, that was a like, okay,

but Street Fighter, you have to press select to get your kick buttons on Genesis because the controller doesn't have enough buttons, so fuck you.

And that was my grade six, like, shut, you know, like, I'm gonna, I'm not, we're not gonna have this argument thing.

But yeah, my, there's so much of like being a Nintendo kid that was ridiculous copium.

I followed that through to like N64 when

I'm like waiting for.

I'm like, these fighting games are going to be incredible.

And by that point, all of the game, like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and every other franchise was just properly on PlayStation and just moved on.

And I'm like, no, but it's always been Nintendo.

It's going to be the thing, though.

And then it's like, nah, you get Mace the Dark Age.

How about that?

You get dual heroes and these, you know, and like the cope was wild.

But I'm like, but we got GoldenEye, though.

You know?

You do, you do got GoldenEye.

Oh, man.

GoldenEye was really good.

I think after the fact, you could game genie and color the sweat red.

Oh, and I remember

going, wow, this is not

out.

That's sad.

The state of putting in the right code to get a little bit of, yeah.

I wanted it so bad.

Like, I wanted it.

Like,

Mortal Kombat in the arcade at that age when I was little was like a surreal experience.

Seeing Goro, like just the model of Goro and like not ever seeing him, even people even get to him, but just seeing and all in Mortal Kombat 2, all the rumors in the arcade before the internet where it was like all this unconfirmed shit that people made up, and some of it was true.

And they're like, you know, you could turn him into a baby and then kill the baby.

And I'm like, that's stupid.

There's no way that could happen.

And then there was a way to do it.

And it was just like seeing somebody do it in real life.

I'm like, what is going on?

And then, of course, that confirmed everything.

Infinite potential of video games.

So

they would take rumors people had and make the rumors real the next time around.

That was their development cycle, you know.

Also, that arcade machine, by the way, they cranked the volume up way above every other machine, standard volume.

Makes sense.

And like, that was a way of winning your attention.

So when you heard

like the

Shao Kong

shaking your chest as a child, you know, and all I did was enter enter my name, Thrill House, you know, like, yeah.

Um,

no, that shit was ridiculous.

I, uh, I also, I feel like the censorship on Nintendo and other consoles like shaped so much of the console war generation after because, like, that that's why Conquer's Bad Fur Day came into existence was because everyone was like, no, there's too many kiddie games on Nintendo, they're not serious.

And then you all from that to seeing like Game Falk, the GameFAQ's facts top 10 lists of most serious games final fantasy had to switch off of nintendo to playstation because it's a more serious console

they released that conquer game for the gba and it was cutesy and yeah yeah and so people bought conquer's bad fur day expecting that because that game already existed

so weird

weird it it took a really long time to get isaac on a nintendo console oh yeah

yeah It was a lot of

rejection, and then it just took kind of people

being phased out, like in the upper, the upper areas, to like finally get somebody to say okay.

It was just, it took years.

It took years and years of constantly repitching, and

then them coming to me and being like, Will you change anything?

And I'm like, No, like the things that you're having an issue with are the core of the game.

So I'm not sure.

Hoop and dead babies are going to be an issue on a Nintendo console.

Are they?

The issues were religious stuff.

There was controversy.

Like, The Binding of Isaac, when it released in Germany, was one of the first games that got an M rated, an M rating or an adult rating, whatever it is over there, because of blasphemy.

And it was such a thing that people talked about that they changed the rating board over there because

of this argument of, like, well, what's blasphemous for you is not blasphemous.

It's for somebody else.

So you can't have this as part of this.

Like,

and it bled into you know, Nintendo.

Like, Nintendo had a lot of issues with the religious themes in the game.

Even, even Magic the Gathering has issues with religious themes in it.

Like, they removed all of the classic fire and brimstone type DD darkness that was in there originally.

They totally whitewashed it all out, got rid of it completely, and they never touch on it again.

They don't, they don't go there at all.

Like, they had a whole, they had a whole

expansion called The Dark, which was all about

Christian,

what's the word?

Not revolution.

The Crusades.

Crusades, okay.

Yeah.

So it was like, it painted this picture of these religious, there was literally zealots and stuff like this that you would be playing as.

And that was way too spicy.

And they pulled back on that.

So I have a theory, and I've brought this up before on the show, but I have a theory that the reason why there's so much Sonic the Hedgehog and Christian fan art

linked together.

And when you go on DeviantArt and over the years, the link between Sonic fan art and Christianity is humongous,

is because I think when you have a restricted household that's not going to allow you to play Magic or Diablo, Sonic is the coolest thing that you're safely allowed to experience.

Because he's not.

He's like Bart, but safer than Bart.

Yeah, he's without the attitude.

Yeah, he's not too rude, but he's still cool and he goes really fast.

And that's good enough.

That makes me feel hot.

I can never see it like a parent being like, oh, I didn't like what Sonic the Hedgehog said.

That's it.

That's it.

You know?

And I think that, and then like, oh, he's got a shadow, a darker version of him, and then Knuckles is a, and it's like, I think it's just, it's the edgiest you're allowed to get in a Christian household without breaking the rules that's it

anyway all right

um

last veggie tales

yes exactly exactly yeah

last one um

uh from title ungiven dear pat pot and dread father uh during your last stream you mentioned um ah yes in ghost of yote using the blood from the sword to cross your names off the enemies that wrongs you on a list is really sick.

What are some other instances of revenge in fictions or games that got you?

I love in the Book of Grudges and Warhammer, dwarves would write the names of those that have wronged them in sacred books inked in their own blood.

Yeah, dwarves carrying around just the big old book of grudges.

Book of names, yeah.

That's fucking huge.

That's sick.

The first thing that honestly comes to mind for me is the complete opposite is the

lack of significance.

I'm thinking of John Witch 1.

John Witch.

John Witch one.

Yeah, right.

Where it's like, you don't get anything special.

Bang.

It's done.

Like, sometimes

it spends 70 minutes of a 90-minute runtime chasing to kill one guy.

And when he catches up to him, he just shoots him once, turns around, and leaves.

And that's it.

You're not special, you know?

I kind of love that.

You don't deserve anything higher than that.

It's a great way to wrap it.

I don't know.

Any cool,

any Any cool revenge lore, Ed?

In real life?

No.

No.

No, no.

I can't talk about those things.

All right.

Yeah.

Oh, my favorite revenge story is probably Carrie, the movie Carrie.

Oh, shit.

Okay.

You've watched that?

Yeah.

I haven't.

I thought you should watch it.

I haven't, but I do.

It's about religious trauma.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's through osmosis culturally.

I know the events that occur, and it's it's a formative experience for

cinema.

Very good movie,

a very good horror film.

Um, and

yeah, the one of the best revenge stories.

I heard there's a remake too that just didn't quite like don't don't do it, don't do it, don't do it, yeah, okay.

Let's just go with the 70s.

All right, well, that's all

guess what?

The remake wasn't good.

How about that?

Wow, shocker,

uh,

old boy, uh,

Perfect.

Anyway.

I can't.

It's a spike lee joint.

Old boy is a spike lee joint.

No, I can't purchase.

All right.

That'll do.

Thank you so much, Ed.

Appreciate you jumping on.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Yeah.

And again, let's plug mugenics coming out next year in February on the 10th.

If you have any affection in your heart for deformed little busted cats,

I do.

I very much actually do.

And sending them out on adventures and

all their little wild isms.

Check it out.

Shit looks dope.

And also, I imagine, I don't know if this is like intended or not, but the games you make are very like...

Twitch stream friendly because of the randomized, insane combinations and nature of it.

I think it just it just happened.

Because those are the kind of games I like.

Yeah, I highly recommend it for people with ADHD and autism.

I make games for those people.

So if you're one of those people somewhere in between, this will scratch all of those itches of collecting and obsessively getting information.

Man, you really loved Bumbo a lot, huh, Wooly?

Bumbo was really cool.

I loved Bumbo.

Bumbo get you.

I have a feeling you'll like me, Jenics.

I'll get you guys codes and I'll get you codes to give away or whatever too.

Oh, thank you.

Oh,

send them out on this.

If people do have ADHD,

what's the buff on that?

What's the ability in-game?

Oh, yeah, it gives you an intelligence buff and a speed buff.

But you have five seconds to take an action.

If you don't, you just get distracted and do something.

Oh, my God.

That's my wife.

That's my wife 100%.

Oh, that's so perfect.

Stress.

That's so perfect.

Perfect.

All right.

Yeah.

Take it.

Strong build.

Strong build.

All right.

We'll see you guys next week.

Take care.