CSB341: White Furi Is Coming

Oh, oh,

hey.

What's going on?

Oh,

so the camera trouble was fixed, was it?

Yeah, I fixed the camera trouble

right at the beginning there.

Okay, okay, good.

Good, good.

I'm good.

It was

getting a little goofy there.

Yeah, yeah, you were stuck in a freeze frame.

And, you know, it's like that's a weirdly completely average freeze frame from a Silent Hill video the other night.

Pretty, pretty unusual for the camera to get stuck that way.

So, yeah, I know

it wasn't even from today.

I don't know why I did that.

Yeah, and for the problem to only be fixed as soon as we go live.

Yeah,

as soon as we went live, it got fixed.

It was weird.

What's up?

Not much.

How's it going?

It's all right.

Okay.

It's okay.

the dog's pretty stinky

you see you see that fucking fury live-action trailer bro and you think i look like a fucking clown holy shit dude

never mind your shit bro holy fucking shit dude full-on kingdom hearts parking lot fucking shit parking lots they tried to hide it but i seen it oh i'm so glad the copies got made so you are not the clown sir you are not the the clown today um apparently

fury live action

it's not good

oh you like you're like okay but how bad can it really be though and then it can be not good man you know um

yeah so right off the bat uh why no white stranger why i i why no like woolly i'm dating

I'm taking a screenshot of my fucking screen right now, okay?

I'm sending you a screenshot of my screen because I didn't play Fury, right?

No, they neither did I.

We are setting up for this conversation.

I am literally image searching Fury.

Yes.

Because I'm like, wasn't that a black guy?

It sure was.

Because I do remember that Afro Samurai artist,

Takashi Ozaki, he made Afro Samurai and then he designed Fury's character to also be like an Afro Samurai character.

And I remember being like, yeah, right, that's the similarity.

So that was Black Guy with the white hair and stuff.

Then to just see this, like...

And he's got the Karen swoop.

He's got the swoop.

He's got the, it's the Karen swoop, and it's also the,

like the villain,

like,

I don't even know what to call it.

But

when you have to, when you have to make like a

like a neo-Aryan villain, you got that kind of thing going on.

The swoop.

It's the blah.

Yeah, you got that.

That is like the Karen hairstyle, like through and through.

Yeah.

It's wild.

Okay, Ed is putting on a red cape and getting in there with the sword.

And then you're like, what's going on, right?

What's happening with this?

And you click play on the backed up, backed up.

Yeah, because they take it down right away.

This is the fastest the takedown has ever happened.

I can't believe it, right?

The level of it's been, we clicked play, we saw the first 10 comments and went, nah, nah, nah, never mind, never mind, never mind, though.

It feels like the kind of thing where they sent it out and they stayed sitting at their chair

in the studio being like,

Might I need to pull this down?

But the fact that you can't tell, the fact that they're like, but what if they like it, though?

They might like it.

Well, hey, listen, dude, dude, listen, listen.

We went out to that cabin my friend's dad owns and we were able to shoot out there because it was free.

I mean, the fact that you take...

So again, knowing Fury from the outside, it's colorful, it's bright, it's neon, it's full of all kinds of techie cyber color.

All kinds of stylized, non-realistic environments.

And then you find this trailer is in one cabin's backyard.

They had your uncle's cabin, and it's the most nature-realistic nothing going on.

You've got parking lot sword fighting and a couple of special effects, and just,

yeah, I don't know.

I'd love to find the story of how we got here.

I mean, so whoever got the license or the rights or whatever is going on there.

Apparently,

so Barty Shepherd is the name of the director, writer, showrunner, and main character.

Oh, it's a one-man show.

I am Fury.

I bought the rights.

I wrote the script.

I am the director.

I wrote the story.

And the stranger is me.

So.

You're playing with the game.

Yeah.

So if you're like Tarantino, right, and you're a writer, director, and you're playing a character in your own movie, and you're obsessive about the dialogue and the directing and all that, if your movie sucks shit and bombs, guess what?

It's on you.

You were like 50% of the movie's production, right?

Eat shit.

But

if you get Pulp Fiction, you're like, oh my God, Tarantino's the fucking greatest.

You're playing with fire.

When you do like, every job you add increases your share of the credit, for good or for ill.

Right.

But I would say that most creators with tact that want to shove themselves into the thing will find a way to do so.

Like if you're giving Tarantino as an example, he's going to put himself in a supporting role and or role of someone that's going to get killed or background character, you know.

So

he gets to get a foot in his mouth for that shot that they need, right?

Or he's going to show up in the car and drop slurs just to get his his lines across as a cameo in his own movie.

But the writer wrote it this way, bro.

You are the writer.

But when you do the Neil Breen effect, when you put yourself in the driver's seat and make it all about you, it's just the most transparent ego trip ever.

It's so wild.

It's like...

I got to watch it again.

I got to watch it again.

It's so bad.

It's that thing where

I think, didn't after

Alex Trebek passed Odd Jeopardy, they were trying to find the new co-host or the new host rather, and they tried a bunch of different people, including like previous winners and stuff.

And then in the end, the executive producer went, ah, we couldn't find anybody, so I guess I am the new host.

And you're like,

just that transparent, huh?

We're not even pretending.

Like, you have, if you can't resist the urge to shove yourself in there and point all arrows at you, you'll never get away with it.

So, yes.

Bartee Shepherd.

Bro, these are supposed to be different planets.

The production studio is apparently called Midnight Embers, and

according to their official channels, they have made nothing.

There's a grand total of zero things there listed on the pages.

Always a good start.

But this is an official project.

So

yeah.

Yeah, I just,

I don't know.

I mean, Fury, you know, like, I know that

I've been very vocal about my issues with Afro Samurai.

And,

you know, there's always been a little bit of like, with Fury as well, a little bit of like.

I don't think you wanted to love Afro Samurai.

Yeah,

you wanted to love it.

You think you wanted to love it.

Yeah, I did.

It looked really cool, and it just never lived up to that original pitch.

That should be the shit that I'm basing my entire personality around.

And it just, it couldn't.

It wasn't.

It didn't.

You know, and

furthermore, Shinichi Watanabe already had Shamplu scratching that itch very thoroughly.

And I said it before, and I'll say it again.

You know, Afro Samurai should have remained a wallpaper, an art book, a concept.

That's maybe a bit strong.

It was really cool to see a character design with a big long fro and the headband and the sword as a piece of art.

And then the moment it started moving and doing things, I just, and, you know, Sam Jackson showed up, and that was cool, but then nothing interesting happened, unfortunately.

That sucks, because Sam Jackson's a great casting choice for anything like this, and it just wasn't good.

Sam Jackson's great casting, except for being a calm Jedi.

Everything else, A.

All right.

Well, look, y'all, it was kind of boring and just wasn't that great of an anime I found.

It just wasn't, you know, I didn't find it that interesting, and that's that.

That's that.

But regardless,

Fury is now

all these years later getting brought up to the spotlight.

And you have to kind of wonder if this was a, I bought it because I got the rights on a napkin

at a dinner at some point for, you know.

How much could the movie rights to indie game Fury possibly cost?

About Tree Fitty.

I don't know.

About Tree Fitty, yeah.

Um, yeah, fucking do whatever.

I don't know.

All-style, no substance is a great way to put it, Afro Senpai.

Yeah, that's that's I would agree with that.

That's the exact issue with that.

And

if we get back into this argument, then we're getting back into the Asura's Wrath argument as well, right?

It's the whole bit.

But regardless,

I just find it baffling in the sense that you could have made a really like

I was expecting when I saw Fury TV show, I was expecting a modestly low-budget CG show that would have all the colors and be faithful to the general art style and direction, but just have really bad animation and perhaps bad voice acting.

I also expected that.

That is also what I expected.

I did not expect to see a human

human.

Much less that dude.

You know, yeah,

discount like Malfoy.

Sure,

I would take Ed as well, you know, from Street Fighter.

I would take

just

any of these villain-type.

What you are not is a black person with big, crazy, white,

you know,

nappy hair going on.

That shit's cool.

And

I guess the whole the internet remembers thing is undefeated.

Oh, okay.

Actually, that's not true.

There is one instance of it being defeated.

I have publicly put out the challenge to people

that

the first show that I put up on Machinima was called Needs More Salt, and there are zero traces of that anywhere online.

It will never be found.

It speaks to its enduring success.

It will never be found.

And

I can say with all the hubris in the world that you can try all you want, but it is not there.

No one saved it.

It's gone forever.

My really nervous

line reading at my early scripts will never be exposed.

However, that being said, if you throw up a trailer for something.

Oh, I just found a 10-year-old thread of people trying to find it and it being deleted.

Yeah, because 10 years ago, I talked the same shit about it.

Yeah.

So anyways,

that's a pretty phenomenal IP drop there.

Good stuff.

Good.

I was so excited for Fury, more Fury, no?

And then I was so excited for this.

Now I am excited for this.

But like, not for the reasons that you want me, a content creator, to be excited for this.

Drop the whole thing.

Yeah, I mean,

the fact that there's no Mega 64 logo in the corner, you know, is already just like, like, your brain is primed to see that pop up somewhere.

Or even just a fan film, you know, the idea of someone's like, no, I'm just a really big fan of Fury, and then I did this.

But the moment you put official on it,

uh,

why, why no white stranger, you know,

why, why no,

hits the ear like shit, dude.

I don't want to meet somebody defined as being the white stranger.

Fuck that.

Oh, good, good, good times.

I'm glad that I saw that right before

we clicked the button today.

Anyways, are you ready?

Somebody in the chat nailed a dumb ensaur is like the white fury.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Ooh.

Good.

White Fury is coming.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

No.

Oh, no.

Oh, boy.

Oh.

Oh, did it get deleted immediately?

Oh, oh, shit.

No, they deleted it.

It's gone.

But people saw it and within like a second were like, I got to save this shit because it's just going to be gone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Should we?

Should we unleash White Fury?

I don't know, guys.

Maybe we shouldn't.

Okay, hold on.

Let's do it.

We've unleashed it.

Oh, no.

Oh, shit.

Hold on.

Wait, put it back.

Never mind.

What are you supposed to fucking do?

Like, remember how the mummy bombed because they put out that version that didn't have the sound effects of the trailer?

And Tom Cruise was going, ah, ah.

And it was like fucking weird.

And everybody made fun of it.

And then it bombed super hard.

That was like a mistake.

There's like legitimately like the wrong cut of the fucking trailer goes up, right?

This was clearly the intentional cut of the trailer that went up, and it seemed to be probably a fairly accurate representation of the movie.

What are your fucking options?

It's not a movie, it's a TV show, and that's the problem.

That's worse.

Jesus, yes, it's multiple episodes, and I said this about Madam Webb, but like you're by the time you're seeing the trailer, the show has been cut.

The footage is filmed, it exists, It's been graded an editor sat down put it together put things in place this person in particular Barty did did what he did and like you know, he said I want to get some cool parts I want to get the coolest parts and put them in my trailer there are so many examples and opportunities to abandon ship here and they and none of them were taken the exit off-road every step of the way between film to edit to cut to upload to final processing You know all of that.

And then you have the page right there, and you just have to click publish, and you have the post ready to go, and you just have to click post, and you're still looking at that button, and like it's not dawning on you.

You know, maybe, maybe we can still, maybe you could still pull out, you know.

There's so there's like, there are so many parts of this project at certain points that somebody should have just said, I've had, I don't know about this.

I don't know, man.

I'm going to cast myself.

I don't know, man.

What's our budget?

Is it $35?

Yeah.

I don't know, man.

And, you know, it's kind of also like, it's probably, in the end, it's for the best that

we have one person putting themselves at the center of it.

Because, you know, sometimes a thing will come out and be like a huge piece of shit or whatever.

Like, okay.

So Game of Thrones fucking flies off a cliff and has one of the worst disastrous shows endings ever, right?

And we know that D and D are the names of the directors and the folks that are to be blamed for the way this went but

i'm sure like they're the folks that are to be blamed yes but but there's a thing here where i'm sure a lot of folks could but personally i couldn't tell you what they look like

i don't know i think i saw them in like the the cast reading

once they look like they look like dudes they look yeah i think i have no defining features but but i i can't remember i think i saw them once in like a behind the scenes thing but for the most part whatever right but could you imagine they have like white guy serial killer look in that they don't look like a person?

They just look like a guy that you would see and immediately forget exists.

Oh, right.

But could you imagine if they shoved themselves into these episodes in the final season?

And then the next time they show up anywhere in a studio and they walk in and people go, I know your fucking face.

Get out of here, right?

This person responsible for the Fury trailer is also, you can see his face.

You see the face and you go, you're the director, you're the writer, and you're the Fury man.

And never, we'll never think of anything but that now.

Thank you for advertising that.

You know, you can't sneak into any other room because it's you.

Oh, I love it.

It's great.

It's wonderful.

Hey, the costumes, though, you know,

he was dressed up like the characters.

They, you know,

did

they tried really hard on the costumes?

They tried really hard.

And I think that you should give them a little clap.

Like, oh, you do,

good job.

You know, I like one of my toddlers who bushes his teeth and he like he misses the back teeth.

And so I have to help him.

I'm like, hey,

you did a good job, buddy.

I saw a lady cosplayer

from Devil May Cry

like.

Like this, just yesterday, that was so insanely accurate that it looked like a render of

the character from the game.

Like,

it's ridiculous how accurate it looked.

And there's, there's like a weird thing that happens to me on TikTok where I'll see a cosplay that is like a one-to-one, it looks like CG.

There's a lady who does like a Monster Hunter once.

She just did one of Gemma.

And like, she looks like the render, but it's actually just good lighting and a picture-perfect costume.

And then TikTok starts feeding me thirst traps.

I'm like, I don't care about that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want to see Devil Man cry in Street Fire character.

Exactly, exactly.

You know,

and I, but I see that, and I go, this is somebody doing their own outfit with attention to detail,

absolutely crushing it.

And then you look at an official production and you're like, what the fuck are you even trying to do here?

You know?

You know what he should have done, right?

Put on

the costume like fully accurate.

I like, cook.

I like where this is going.

Let's go.

Today,

I'm going through

a bit of a transformation.

Let's go, Pat.

I can tell you, it didn't take as long as you would think.

It took about an hour with help.

My darling wife, Paige, helped me.

Thank you, Peach.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Didn't take that long.

It took like an hour.

So

if you were only to use like one paint,

you could you that 40 minutes?

Yep.

I mean, listen.

Okay, you'd still need the red, but like.

There are wigs that are available that you can get that are white colored.

That would be very easy to just get into place, right?

Not an issue whatsoever.

I see no reason why that Fury

protagonist didn't have to.

I see no reason why he couldn't have been more accurate.

I don't see a reason why he couldn't be more accurate.

You know what?

It would have given the show a lot of notoriety.

It would have saved it.

Like a lot of notoriety.

Might have saved it.

Might have saved it.

And then when it shit bombs

because it would, there's like a whole group of people you can blame by default, and then just raking like, like, donation money.

Oh!

And just crift it.

Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay.

Get the paycheck on the other side of that.

Just do it on purpose.

Yeah.

Nah, I mean, look, it was that.

As far as I'm concerned, those costumes were only only half complete.

You know,

they could have gone.

They could have gone the distance.

They could have gone farther in a couple of weeks.

They could have gone a lot farther.

Why stop there?

Why stop there?

You're in control of every part of the project.

There's no one who could stop you.

Yeah, yeah.

Good stuff.

Are we both now the devil on the shoulder now?

We can't, but that's not fair.

You can't have two devils on your shoulder.

Well, I mean,

says you.

I'll say this.

If you're a Fury fan out there,

woof.

Tough times, I guess.

I don't know.

This is so far removed that I feel like there's no intersection at all.

Like,

didn't it get reported?

Like, not long ago.

Yeah, it got ported again, right?

So there we go.

Yeah, so

it got some treatment, you know.

But if, I don't know, if you're someone that's just been waiting for

something,

something related to this brand to show up, then tough times.

Look at this.

Here, here, look.

You're just a fucking t-shirt, dog.

Like, it doesn't need to be like this.

Look at this lady cosplayer.

All right, I will.

Look at this.

Yeah, okay.

I'm going to.

Yep.

That's look at, there you go.

All right.

That's what we did.

That's literally.

And she did up a whole room, too.

It's psychotic.

Yeah, that's immaculate.

That's picture perfect.

It's psychotic.

It's insane.

Yeah.

Shout outs to Carrie Kay for the most perfect lady DMC cosplay I've ever seen.

And it's kind of like, yeah, so we got cosplayers hitting that level and then cut back to official productions and see and see what kind of work they're putting in here.

You know?

Insanity.

Yeah,

this, this, but this, this is, I just typed it in.

I think this is the lady, but this lady did Gemma from

Monster Hunter, and her, her TikTok posts were getting flagged as AI generated.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's that good.

Because it, because

she found a spot with the perfect lighting, also

that looks exactly as it does in-game.

It's like some people are just too good.

And that's, I mean, I know that, like,

whatever, creative decisions may mean sometimes you don't want your lady to look like lady.

Sometimes you want her to look like Captain Commando,

which is

also.

I mean, that's Captain Commando's cool, I guess.

Very valid.

But it's not.

Yeah.

It's just what's possible is crazy.

Anyway,

moving right along there.

And

kudos to

the team.

And all I see you went for the

heart over the eye and diamond style.

Yeah, no, Paige, Paige,

she was workshopping it as she was going through.

She's like, oh, you want to do both?

Eyes blue?

I don't know.

She's like, oh, what if I did a heart?

See, that's the thing is, so I'm getting those Hsoka vibes, you know, and I was thinking, I was, I was thinking maybe a more sobalatro would be your direction.

What I've discovered

in being a fully painted out as a as a clown with mutton chops on is that I bear a not

insignificant similarity to Sid Haig

in the face

when I got clowned.

So if you don't know who Sid Haig is, Sid Haig is the guy who is in all those Rob Zombie movies.

Okay.

Who dressed up like a clown.

Okay.

Because my resting expression looks kind of pissy and like grumpy

when I got this shit on.

Yeah, I would also say that like clown plus

clown plus facial hair is already

going into

a bunch of steps because of the chops.

So I should probably explain why I'm in a clown outfit.

I'm clowned up.

This was a subscription goal during last month's sub-a-thon, which people crushed, and we're very excited.

So that means

for

today, the 7th, the 14th, the 21st, the 28th,

and the 4th of November,

we're going to be doing this.

That's really committed.

Yep.

Okay.

I said I was going to do it.

Yep.

You think that's committed?

Get ready for next week.

Did you take the opportunity to

make a screenshot at every step of the process so that the memory?

No, it was super fast.

It was really easy.

Because you know that the meme, you can just make your own version of it.

And as long as you have each step of layout.

Wooly, I think that my opinions go from normal to clown instantly.

Like, I don't put the makeup on when my opinions are shit.

I just go right to the full enchilada.

It just, it's like the clown makeup shotgun set to whore.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

Paige actually said something similar, but I think that's because her brain is wrong and she looked at me in clown shit and was like, yeah, all right.

So you just, yeah, no, set the Simpsons clown whore shotgun, and then you just Kirk Cobain that shit over and then, like, you're,

yep, that's it.

Instantly, that's your opinion.

Allegedly.

What's Courtlina Love up to?

I bet she does a good clown makeup.

I think I lost the thread on that.

We're going to move on.

We're going to move on.

That's okay.

What else is going on with you, man?

I have to drink with a fucking straw.

Oh, just in case.

Hold on a second.

Oh, did you?

Oh, I know that.

I know that.

Wooly, it's so great because, like, hey, mom's taking care of baby.

And you hear like, oh,

there was.

Probably fine.

There's that.

There was a doorbell.

There's a question of whether or not we could.

It's fine.

Totally fine.

Ah, they're fine.

Okay.

I eagerly await the day that you see your little girl running and just face planting, just like, oh.

And you go, nah, she's fine.

I've seen, oh, no, I've been around that already.

I've seen that from cousins and other kids.

I know the deal, right?

You saw me do it, actually.

Yeah, yeah.

My little guy just, bam.

And I learned early that, like, you know, a lot of the time, it's how did you react?

Did you go, oh my God, are you okay?

And then the baby's like,

you know, versus you fall in going like, ah, whoa, that was crazy.

And the baby's like, the only time I ever do it like different is like if he's at the park and he like face plants super hard on like pavement.

Yeah.

You go, hey, buddy, you okay?

And usually, I want to say nine times out of ten, I hear, yeah,

yeah, I'm okay.

I also, like, yeah, that's my man.

We've all seen rug rats.

We've seen Tommy just going like,

you know, so yeah, that's a thing.

I got a good question from the audience.

Hey, what does my son, my two-year-old, like 28-month-old son, think of clown shit?

I went, hey, buddy, what's up?

And he looked at me

expressionless and then went back to playing with his blocks.

Amazing.

A single shit.

Amazing.

Fuck.

Okay.

So we are far past the facial hair recognition shape change thing.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, he might as well have rolled his eyes.

Okay.

He looked and went, you're in your natural state.

Yeah.

Father, I see.

I saw a really incredible comment scroll past a little bit ago.

Go, oh no, Pat forgot to put on his makeup today.

Which I think is fucking A plus.

That's pretty good.

I think that is an A plus joke.

That's pretty good.

What's going on?

All right.

Let's start like this.

Yeah, let's do it.

Yo, man, fuck Bilewater.

Oh, yeah.

Fuck Bilehaven.

Fuck the gauntlet.

And fuck Groll the Great.

Have you ever...

Oh, so how many attempts are we talking about on this on this run?

We're talking about Silk Song, by the way.

We're talking about the infamous

wild water gauntlet to get to a fairly difficult time.

Oh, oh, it's too much.

It's too much, and it's bullshit.

And

as soon as you start, how many attempts?

On

Groll?

On the whole fucking Schlamiel.

Okay, so on the whole thing,

I'm probably going to say 10.

Okay.

And

on Groll, I'm going to say 3 because upon discovery of a very useful trick, fuck that.

Was the trick?

Hang out in the water.

Hang out in the water.

It's a really good fucking trick.

The whole zone teaches you to not do that.

And then you're like, oh, the boss can't do nothing to me in here.

Nothing.

Fuck that trick.

Fuck that that fight entirely.

I'm hanging out in the water and I'm going to take pot shots and then just run back in the water.

We're not even engaging with this fight.

You know?

It's funny because Groll is.

So, one of the things that happens in Silk Song, and Groll is a really good example, is that everything in Silk Song is the opposite of the same thing in

Hollow Knight.

Unless it's exactly the same.

So, Groll is the same kind of looking guy as Soulmaster.

And Soulmaster also had a god-awful run back in Hollow Knight and was also like super tough.

It's just,

it's the

combination, of course, because now that I see, like, oh,

we talked about the area before this before and the fake bench.

And now you're like, no, no, no, no, here's an actual proper go fuck yourself.

Oh, that one's fucking for real, man.

That's a for real ass go fuck yourself fake bench.

Yeah.

And even after mitigating it with a real bench, it's still just a pain in the ass.

Oh, it's a massive fucking pain.

And the thing thing that I said this before about enemies in the game, but like, there's enemies that are not necessarily hard.

They're just annoying because you don't want to deal with them, but they're so evasive.

Bile water shits are the worst because they actually come back to life forever.

Okay, so there's that, right?

And then there's the part where

I've noticed that, like, bile water.

Oh, my God.

That wig is so itchy.

Oh, my God.

Yo, your head is so red.

Oh, it's so itchy, dude.

Oh my god.

I'm trying to keep it on for as long as possible for the bit, but I literally can't.

I'm going to scream.

Okay.

I think you have permission.

I think you're all right.

I'm going to fucking scream.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

I think that's why they get the, if you get, you can get like a little cap, you know, underneath the wig to

make sure that your head doesn't directly interface with the itchiness.

When you get like a weave cap.

You know what?

We'll just do this.

I have a backup plan.

Okay.

Oh, there we go.

Okay.

That'll do it.

Good sh good.

Yep, good shit.

Now we're clown trucking.

Well, now you're just down with the clown, right?

Now you're just full-on whoop, whoop.

Get the fago.

Yeah.

Like, this is just absolutely family.

Yeah.

So

it completely transitioned into full-on juggalo the moment you add the black at the back.

Do you go backwards?

Oh my God, the juggalo.

Get your hatchet man tattoos out.

Wow.

Wow.

I'm going to need to fix this.

But yeah.

How the fuck do magnets work?

Incredible.

I don't know.

All I know is scientists are lying and getting me pissed.

So

what was I going to say?

The enemies are doing something here that I feel like is a little different from others, which is their tracking is at the last possible second before the animation for the attack begins.

Right.

The tracking on Sulk Song is really aggressive.

It's actually super aggressive.

And

there's three types of tracking.

One,

sorry, there's three types of tracking.

Horizontal, vertical, and downwards.

Horizontal swipes and projectile swipes, enemies will actually input read you on some occasions.

Yeah.

Pogoing, they absolutely input read your position.

Not the pogo, but your physical position.

Once you get into the right angle for pogos on certain enemies, if you're not committed, they will actually move back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But

similarly to how everything in Hollow Knight is reversed from everything in Silk Song, the up slash does not have reactive tracking on it.

Interesting.

Shooting your slashes directly upwards, enemies pretend you're not even there.

Interesting.

So I've noticed it because the barfer, the flying barf flies, when you pogo them, they get the fuck out of the way in an input reading way.

I would also say that the

right, the area right underneath Songclave has the floating orb throwers, and those orbs track in a way where most games

you know the trajectory of a projectile coming at you.

So you anticipate it, and then you jump to be somewhere and to then be out of the way by the time it reaches.

You know how to do that little

visual calculus.

And this game goes, no, no, I'm going to shoot that projectile up where you're going to be on that evasive jump.

Yeah, no, they aim at a trajectory.

It's crazy.

And I'm like, this is the only time I felt this.

The guys involved

absolutely unbelievable predictive aim.

It's crazy.

The darts are not going at my evasive jump, like

over it, or they're going at the peak of the jump.

And I'm like, it's like you have to not use

your air dash.

Because if you air dash and then jump, you have no control over your existing trajectory and they will hit you.

Exactly.

And

it's it's rough because I'm like, the character's in the air, and it's all startup.

It's getting ready to throw, it's getting ready to blow the projectile, and it hasn't done it yet.

And you're like, I'm going to assume you're locked into your position because the animation is still starting, and I'm going to jump now so that I'm moving vertically.

And it's like, no,

as soon as it leaves their position, it's now on it to be to catch you at the top of your parabola.

You know,

absolute nonsense, by the way, on that.

The enemy variety and enemy, I would say, proficiency is like crazy in some songs.

The game's really hard.

Yeah.

I would genuinely put it up above like a Dark Souls game.

I was talking to somebody who will remain nameless

who was talking to me and going, oh my fucking, they were quite a bit further than where you are.

And they're like, oh my God, I think I might have to stop.

Right.

I'm stuck at a boss.

And I said, well, don't worry.

You don't actually have to fight that boss.

And they're like, okay.

I'm like, you have to actually fight

a harder, different boss instead.

And they were like, I can't.

Yeah.

Okay.

We were talking about it.

And I'm of two minds when I talk about Silk Song's difficulty level.

On the one hand, I'm like, yeah, no, this game is actually fucked up.

It's super hard.

It's super fucking hard.

And like, especially as a follow-up to Hollow Knight, which was like considerably easier for most of its content, it's like nuts.

Like, I feel like some people are set up.

Like, they were tricked into getting excited for the Silk Song.

But on the other hand,

when I beat Silk Song, my balls were huge.

And then sometimes when people complain to me, I'm by, how about you go find your fucking balls down in your pants?

And I don't know which one of those I feel more strongly about.

Well, I will say this: right, when I look back on character bosses like

the entire setup to Groll,

it feels like upon accomplishing, it doesn't really feel like, oh, that was sick.

I did it.

Yay.

It feels like, fuck this bullshit.

I'm upset at the game.

Right.

And

then you get the contrast with a satisfying in a moment with like where you have a satisfying boss in a souls game.

I felt that immediately in this because the next thing I

faced in

a Silk Song was

the first sinner.

Yeah.

And I'm.

That thing fucking kicks ass.

Okay, so I'm not done yet.

Like, I was trying to see if I'm like, can I beat this

before tomorrow?

And I didn't, right?

So I still have to.

But it feels so good.

And it feels

the second best fight in the whole goddamn game.

That thing.

It's phenomenally fun.

It's phenomenally sick.

It requires so much of you.

And it feels like fair in a way that is like, if you be aggressive you can keep up but barely and that is so rewarding really good rule for every boss you're gonna fight ever again in this game man

you know and i'm like the difference in how that feels compared to the slogs and the bullshit is tremendous and i want more of that this is the game at its peak when you are dancing around the screen with a thing that is teleporting and landing hits but barely because most of the time you're too slow to get that swing in there.

So, and you're like, I'm not going to avoid that damage.

I don't care.

I need to heal by hitting you enough, so I'll take the hit and keep fucking chasing you.

It's such a sick feeling for a boss fight.

So you are

partially correct.

Much like Hollow Knight, this game has various different parts of the game that are the real game.

Right?

That is definitely the most to your taste, which is it's a fucking fighting game.

Like, it really is actually just a fucking fighting game.

Like, there's a bunch of boss fights in this game that are just one-on-one shit fests.

I mean, you're dragon ball fighting all over the screen, absolutely, right?

You know,

but you're doing it for real

where it's like, no, let's go, let's literally have a Devil Man Cry fight, right?

And there's a couple others, but Team Cherry says, you know what else is just as much a part of a game?

Fighting a

gauntlet of unique enemy compositions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's that.

Which it seems seems to be people's primary complaint is that the gauntlet actually does them in way before the boss does.

There's one gauntlet in the game that I'm pretty sure you haven't done,

which is like

emo fucks.

Okay, okay.

Is it the gauntlet?

Um,

is it the gauntlet above

or uh the gauntlet just above the um

the the where the clock clock dancers are to the upper left of those guys.

Yep, I did I did that.

I did that.

It's fucked.

It's super fucked.

It's so insane.

So that is

supposed to be like a final boss style enemy.

It just happens to be an enemy gauntlet instead of.

That was insane because it's a full gauntlet and then it just decides to keep going.

And then what normal

and what normal bosses do or what normal gauntlets do is they'll give you a wave of easy enemies to heal off of.

But here they just decide, no, heal off of the regular ones.

And they're all doing their evasive screen fulling bullshit tactics.

And the only thing was, I came into that and I went, I beat it, and then I didn't know, or I thought I beat it, and then it was like, no, we're not done.

And I was like, go fuck yourself, right?

And then I kind of went.

On my first run, I got to the mini boss, and I'm like, when I beat that mini boss, we're going to be golden.

It's like, no, that's the fucking fit.

Exactly, exactly, right?

Because the mini boss, and it's funny when you see a big, fat, like club fuck, because there's a couple of boss archetypes, and there's, and like, one of these in Silk Song and in Hollow Knight is the big fat club fuck that just goes,

jump,

and occasionally,

you know?

And you kind of like, I know the deal with you, but you're just going to be annoying.

You're going to take a while, and your

hitbox is going to be massive.

And your hitbox and your hurtbox are like enormous, and they cover like a huge amount of the screen.

I really hope I don't have to fight two of you.

But the clue for me was

earlier in this zone, you showed me that I can acquire a cogwork fly.

And I went, That thing is fucking busted.

Ah, yeah.

I went, okay.

I see what you're doing here.

I think you wanted that in preparation for this.

So I went back to go pick up a fucking brick, a craft metal that I didn't have.

Then I got the cogwork fly.

then I ran back in there with some poison-ass claw cogwork flies, and the situation changed.

That is a build.

So you use that with Architect,

and you do Cogfly plus Tax plus the Saw Blade.

And if you're willing to just blow all of your resources,

you can just auto-delete.

You can turn off entire encounters.

And I saw that, and then I immediately stopped using it for the whole rest of the game because there were fights that I wanted to fucking see, and that thing just fucks it.

So, I don't have the Sawblade, and I'm not going back to the architect because I just like the

Reaper moveset too much.

I've gotten too used to it, and I tried to do a couple of

I moved around the game platforming with the architect and was doing okay.

But when it came to boss fights and precision, nah, I want my Shoryukin.

There is um,

I have a sneaking suspicion.

You have six of the seven, right?

I have Hunter, Reaper, Wanderer, Beast, and Architect.

Oh, okay.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the last one will appeal to you

very strongly.

I mean, the Giga Drill Breaker is sick, but it's not worth the sacrifice of every other move that I really like, you know?

I also think that the sixth one will greatly appeal to you.

The two that you don't have.

Yeah.

And sometimes I clutch out by popping a heel and then getting enough orbs from getting aggressive in that glowing buff to like keep me alive, you know?

So not so like I'm okay with that.

And in fact, what I would say is, if I do a boss and I use my tools and don't get significant progress out of them in like two tries, I stop wasting my chips, you know?

because I went in and I fought, for example,

Brood Mother, right?

Where the screen is just filled with fuck.

And that's okay.

Big, flying, bloated, gross fuck is another boss type, right?

And I'm going to say Brood Mother goes into that category.

Chef Lugia,

right?

Where...

That boss broke on me like four times.

Whoa.

The hatch has since fixed, but they would like shoot off the screen and just never come back.

Huh.

Weird.

Okay.

Yeah, it was a weird, it was a weird

wrinkle on it.

By the way, Wooly, I am going to send you a map picture with no other information whatsoever.

Just a picture of the in-game map because you totally missed the starting point for the sixth crest.

Okay.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Yeah, there was some shit.

That is a picture.

That's the wrong picture.

Yep.

I also realized I missed

a.

There's extremely missable secret rooms, including.

Crazy secret.

Crazy secret.

So you see the photo I said that just has a little red squirrel?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That is the start of it.

I see.

Okay,

it is way the fuck in there, and it's in a place you don't want to be.

So the point where my brain decided to give up on the like, oh, you missed it too bad,

was there was a secret room apparently inside one of the chapels that shuts that you can never go back in once you exit.

I don't think that's true.

Apparently, the church of the architect had a secret room in it, and then you leave the room, and then you leave, and you can never go back in.

There's nothing will stop you from getting 100% ever.

Hmm.

Okay.

Well, um.

Oh, okay.

it's people are saying it's lore only, it doesn't count for completion.

Oh,

okay, okay.

Ah, that still sucks.

Permanently missable, right?

So, so all this, I'm like, yep, okay, mentally, I'm just going to let it go.

But the, uh,

what was I saying?

Yeah, the attempt goes and you fight one of the big fucking fly

fly gross fucks, brood mother, filling the screen with shit, going,

or the, the or the chef.

And

in the case of the brood mother, it's kind of like, okay, avoid the swoops and avoid the butt slams and do the thing.

But then you fight the chef version, and the butt slams are meant to trick you because it has like three startup animations, but two are identical.

You know, and then you're like, oh, what's the trick here?

What's the bit?

And the bit's like, you can run underneath it, but every once in a while it does the same fake startup animation.

So fuck you, you know, and then you get infected and gross.

And yeah, with those ones, I'm just like, go cogflies, fuck this bullshit.

Oh, yeah, um, and they do, but what ends up happening a lot of the time is like, um, if I don't see like a phase two begin or something, then I'm like, okay, never mind, go in clean, learn the movement, do the whole bit, right?

And pull them out,

then pull out the then pull out the bullshit if you need to, exactly, you know?

Um,

because yeah, there's a couple of those.

Yeah,

you're really gonna like the other two crests.

But there's a couple of those, definitely, where I'm like, when you see phase two going crazy,

but again, but you can see it, right?

It took a while for, you know, I talked about it with

the Grim Troop in the first game, and then the same thing for

the judge, you know, the last judge.

And

with this, when fighting the

fireworks dancer.

Trovio!

Trobio!

Yeah, yeah, that's a good example of like, oh shit, phase two is going crazy.

Like, maybe the best NPC in the entire fucking game.

That dude rules!

So cool, so cool, right?

You're watching, you're watching phase two go crazy, but you're like, this is all, this is all smoke.

I can see it.

I can move.

I can get out of the way.

Yeah, there's a tell before every single hit.

It's not that one.

That's it.

And so, like, so it's not that bad as long, you know, and that's training you for like the yeah, seeing the trajectories of things and being out of the way before it starts, you know?

I love those fights where you're just, your eyes are tracking something blipping around the screen and faking you out and reacting to are you still

your positioning?

I just started to look for empty space.

Instead of tracking any of his stuff, I'm like,

what part of the screen doesn't have shit in it?

A skill that I...

I still live in there.

Yes.

Something that my brain, a feeling that I haven't felt since like Ikaruga, you know?

Just like get get to this part of the screen, invert the colors, right?

Um,

so that that was great.

Um,

I properly appreciate the feeling I'm getting off the first center, and another thing too is, um, so I've gone

a massive highlight of that game, and boys, it fucking hidden as shit, yeah, it's the fuck in there, it's way in there, and like the process of beginning that fight also properly feels like, is this the super boss?

Because there's all that buildup.

I know, but the fact that there's all that buildup and the fact that it spits you back out right in front to be like, hey, we know

is like, hey, I'll tell you who the fucking super boss of fucking Silk Salt is.

It's the fucking final boss.

Yeah, okay, okay.

Because I'm like, they're being really build-up-y,

like, you know, nice about this and warning, and I'm getting a big dramatic feeling about it.

But so far, it feels extremely sick and fair, you know?

But I want to say when it comes to the silk skills, so now that I got, I got, you know, you have your spear, you got your threadstorm, I got cross stitch, um, and the sharp dart now,

and

I was like, ooh, sharp dart looks like it's going to get me out of the situation that I don't want to be in and do some damage.

That sounds nice, but

you know, and then I did the parry for a while and that felt really good, but then the damage isn't amazing.

And I kind of was like,

I I don't think anything is going to beat Threadstorm for me.

I just went back to it because I realized that like there are many times in a boss fight where it's a fuck this button, right?

And I'm like,

I don't want to.

I don't want to.

So Threadstorm does the second most damage of any single hit in the entire game.

Okay.

It feels like it.

If you mash it out and you combine all the hits into like one damage number,

it's like super, super, super high.

Um, the parry is great because it's not as much damage as

you can mash, yeah, you can mash it.

Oh,

yeah, so the parry isn't as good as threadstorm damage-wise, but the parry is also free and is also defensive.

Like, you can hit the parry super, super fucking easy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There is

two more,

and one of those has very high damage and also will always hit what you're aiming at.

Okay.

Okay.

So that one is.

I was flip-flopping between the last silk skill and cross stitch, like back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

But I feel like the kit needs something that deals with mobs, right?

And a surrounded mob, Threadstorm is so good.

Especially.

The only problem I had with Threadstorm is that sometimes you do it and the fucking enemy just moves.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're like, oh.

But like, Threadstorm was the game changer for that super gauntlet when

the bot fly summoners come down and I'm just like, shut up, leave me alone.

Threatstorm deletes all the botflies and the character and the dude you're fighting, right?

And

Threadstorm was the difference between loss and victory against the Super Beastfly.

Because

Super Beastfly or Beastfly 2.

The moment I caught that a full threadstorm kills off one of the ads,

it became nothing

because chasing the ads down became the priority of that fight.

And they have they look small, but they take four hits or so, which is just like one too many to be annoying, you know?

And a threadstorm deletes them, and then that made it like a way more manageable.

So,

yeah, I'll see how it goes.

But for now, I'm just like, I'm relying on it for the leave me alone button.

Also, big,

I appreciate the, now I get the face you made, but like the fake out on Mount Fay was pretty solid.

Um, I'm like, I'm gonna come back here when I get my Various suit.

No,

no, you're gonna fucking do it.

You're gonna do it.

You're gonna do it.

Yeah.

You're not, you're not, you know, like, oh, there will, you will get, you will get one, but it's not going to be when you expect it, you know?

So that was like, oh, I misunderstood what the challenge was here.

And upon doing so, it's like, okay, this is actually a, this is a proper platforming challenge for the game.

So that is the hardest platforming challenge in the entire game.

I loved it.

There's one later that's pretty tough, but like it's it's nothing compared to like having the fucking being timed.

Yeah.

But it's crazy how much the harpoon saves you.

You know?

Yeah, well, that's what that shit's supposed to teach you.

That whole sequence is like, did you know that we put the harpoon in this game?

And it's fucking incredible.

It's crazy.

What's funny and stupid about platforming, though, unfortunately, is I had a build that involved the blade skirt.

And...

Yeah, I know, you gotta turn that off.

I also did that.

I also have to go back and turn it off.

It sucks because your blade skirt is activating the bounce flies that you need.

And like, the ones that blow up full of like piss and shit in the um bile water, like you can still bounce off of them while they're starting to explode.

So if your timing is right, then you can, but it just makes it harder because sometimes you miss and take damage instead, you know?

So you have to take off the blade skirt for that shit.

Yeah.

Um,

and it lets you do really cool combos, but not when platforming is necessary.

Um,

but that's, yeah, that's pretty much that's pretty much it, you know?

Um, That's that's where I'm at

Real real cool like the like the flow of this and you know some of those bigger enemies that you're running into that like

like there's those clockwork knights that are just like no, I'm just I got a shield up and I'm gonna be defensive and I'm gonna block everything really annoying.

I'm gonna be really annoying.

Find your way around it, you know.

Yeah, occasionally you have to take some of these little shits seriously.

And I still,

there is a disproportionately high amount of regular enemies in Hollow, sorry, in Silk Song, that you have to take seriously compared to almost any other video game.

Yeah, no, there are times where I'm on Final Pip and I'm like, let me just go kill a couple of regular grunts, and I see like the clock grunt that like slashes running forward, and I'm like, nah, fuck that thing, right?

That's not going to be easy life, you know.

And

a couple of them where I'm just like, nah, ah, fuck this.

I'm going back to the bench, you know.

Good stuff.

Good stuff on that.

I'll check back in.

That game's great.

And you know what?

I think that his difficulty is genuinely like,

I think it's perfect for me.

Man,

I think the single biggest difficulty thing they did to change that game, they already did, was they changed stage hazards from doing two pips of damage to one pip of damage.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's that's that's big.

That's big.

There are a weirdly high amount of situations in the game where an enemy hits you for two hearts or two masks into

a stage hazard, and then getting out of the stage hazard gets you hit again, and it's like that's six hearts.

Absolutely batch it.

Absolutely batch it, yeah.

Totally.

I'm gonna say that, like, no, the bile water stretch was like

that was obnoxious and like

i'm glad it only

took me three tries i'm really glad it only took me three tries um i don't know if that water method was intended or not but the fact that it's there is a like

absolutely nah go fuck yourself um with this fight

afterwards i i just i just did it the the

straightforward way okay because it feels like the kind of

because it feels like a fight where you'd want to almost like, maybe there's a room upstairs or you can drop something on him, or you know, like,

maybe there's a way to delete this bullshit.

Because the fact that you want to hit this entire zone up and it's the most annoying zone and you can barely traverse it,

and then healing is a problem, and the enemies are the worst ever.

God, man,

beyond obnoxious.

Just too much.

And mandatory.

So,

anyway.

I don't know how much of that game is mandatory, honestly.

It's actually fairly complex as to what is and is not mandatory.

Well, I did as much as I thought I could until I realized I'm like, the only place left that was obvious that I didn't scrape out

was

the cold area where I was like, my brain was waiting for the game to give me a warm vest somewhere elsewhere.

It will.

Yeah.

So, but that was the, that was when I, that was the, little, the thing I did last because I was like, wait, you're really not going to give me a thing to deal with this threat, you know?

So that's upon investigation, it made more sense.

Yeah.

Why would we give you something to deal with the cold when you got your fucking balls in your pants?

Like, that's what that game feels like when it talks to you.

It's like a big fat Italian guy telling you, why did you find your fucking balls?

I'm like, okay, Jesus, calm down.

Fuck.

Also,

stop yelling.

Shakra is

insanely beast.

So just so fucking just show, just like, yeah, I'm already here.

Don't worry about it.

You know, I can't.

And then when you meet her in bottle water, she's like, wow, this place sucks.

I'm like, what the fuck?

What the fuck, Shakra?

How?

Actually, how?

You know?

Yeah, good stuff on that.

Okay.

So then

did a little sponsored stream for Ghost of Yote.

And

I took a quick gander into that show, and I was like,

wow, that really is a motherfucking Ghost of Tsushima sequel.

Holy fucking shit.

Because like at a distance, that looks like the same fucking thing.

That is like a sequel-ass fucking sequel.

Well, don't call it that.

That's not supposed to be.

That's not what it's.

So, the follow-up to that is that I then immediately saw a fucking

news article that they were like, yeah, all the other Sony studios spent like $400 million.

Yeah, we spent like the same as we did on Tsushima.

It costs like $60 million.

And ah, they're fucking smart.

Yeah.

Because trees and grass look the fucking same.

Official, official,

officially, Ghost of Yote is the next chapter in the Ghost of Tsushima

world.

However, it is not a sequel,

and it is not to be referred to as such.

However,

okay, well, you can say that.

I understand that, and I respect it.

But me,

that is a sequel-ass motherfucking sequel.

That is a direct follow-up using the guts.

But then they're like, what have we made this nicer, this nicer, this better?

This up.

And like, I'll be down for that when it comes out on PC in 18 months.

So, first off,

Reggie came back over and came in and, you know, said hi to Baby and was immediately rewarded with unearned smiles and joy.

And it was like, yo, what the fuck, Reggie?

You didn't earn those smiles.

What do you do?

Why are you getting baby vibes?

Why are you getting all that glow?

That's that's crazy.

Unearned glow

immediately.

You know, right timing, right place, right vibes.

That's it, man.

You know, and I was like, that's, you know how hard we got to work to get one of those little coups, one of those little giggles?

That's labor.

The ideal scenario is that everybody gets the coups and giggles and smiles.

Like, I was at the grocery store this morning with my little dude in his stroller, and I had to get cat litter.

And so I rolled up to the cat litter, and you know what happened?

I'm like standing there with my hand on my chin, right?

Like, you know, like kind of leaning.

I'm trying to figure out what kind of cat litter I want to get for the cat.

And he looks at it, goes, hmm,

and starts tapping his finger to his cheek.

Hmm, hmm.

And then when a lady said, Well, aren't you a cute little shopper?

He went, Hi, and did a smile and a wave.

And there you go.

Join it out here, fucking killing it.

That's what you need.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Good stuff, good stuff.

Yep, yep.

But right now, right, right now it feels like joy is

the joy economy is scarce.

Stonks are extremely rare.

They're high.

Hey, you know what?

You know what?

After having a tiny little baby, I discovered that being a tiny little baby must actually

suck shit.

It's actually terrible.

Yeah.

No autonomy.

No.

Food appears to be random.

This site is terrible.

You've never done this before.

You don't even know that you have limbs.

You have to learn how to poop your own butt.

Your neck can't do anything.

Everything is loud.

Everything is bright.

Everything

sucks.

Also, beforehand, you could just get food instantly into your stomach and be fine.

And now you have to wait for it.

Now you're crushed by the existential weight of consciousness.

I don't think that's happening yet, though.

And then also you feel cold.

What is this cold that happens?

No,

existing is suffering.

And you can't even put words to the concepts that you're feeling.

You just know that it's unpleasant and it's happening.

100%.

It's hard being a baby.

So when you get a smile, it means that much more.

The smile economy is precious.

And

when a thief, when a swindler of joy walks in

and he gets some unearned smiles.

I'm like, how dare you?

Those are mine.

That's my joy.

Anyway, no,

he got the good vibes right off the bat.

And

yeah, well, I mean, shit.

I also assume that, you know,

the thought process.

was pretty on point in terms of like getting this YouTube streaming shit going because

I tried that out.

And as I discussed last week, it seemed like it was going okay until I discovered a problem, which was we streamed the first 20 minutes just fine.

And then starting out the pre-scheduled YouTube stream the second time, it didn't work.

And then I saw you ran into some similar troubles on your end.

So I want to talk about this.

So I've actually been like poking at this for months.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

So when you said, hey, I'm going to YouTube stream, that's why I was like, like, oh yeah, hi.

Okay.

So like this, because I was like, because I said that, and then I'm like, next day, next day, Pat is streaming live on YouTube.

And I'm like, I'm like, oh, is he then?

Oh, is that what's going on?

Is it?

No, no, no.

So

this part of the story is going to sound really, really familiar, right?

Okay, part of the story is going to sound really familiar.

Yeah.

So a couple of months ago, Paige was like, you should fucking stream on YouTube.

You're fucking dumb.

You don't stream on YouTube.

And I'm like, Jesus.

I don't know how.

She's like, you figure it out.

You're smart.

I'm like, thank you.

So I'm like, okay, I'll take a look at doing it because she's right.

I should be multi-streaming, right?

So I've been poking away at it, but I was like kind of anxious because it's like a lot of fucking technical fucking bullshit.

It gets a lot more complicated.

I'm going to go to the YouTube Studio Live thing.

I'm like, I don't know what the fuck is going on on this fucking thing.

And like, I remember like earlier this year where I couldn't fix my fucking YouTube channel's account and you had to send me like this fucking detailed guide how to fix it, which I really appreciate, by the way.

That was incredibly helpful.

No problem.

So I'm like, I don't know what I'm fucking doing.

So I'm poking at it and I'm looking at things, but I'm not like putting like a major serious effort, right?

It's just like boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, right?

And then you're like,

oh, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fucking stream on YouTube.

I'm like, well, fuck, okay,

wait, shit.

Okay.

Wooly knows what he's doing.

I'll try it.

And if it fucks up, I'll just ask you next week

how to fucking fix it.

But then the interim thing happened, which means that if you are getting into the technicalities of YouTube streaming, that means Dad Asana also now all of a sudden knows everything about YouTube streaming.

And the interim part

where it's like, Dad Asana, do you know anything?

And like, here comes screenshot after screenshot after screenshot.

Gotcha.

I got you.

I got you.

Gotcha.

And I'm like, oh, okay.

Yeah.

I mean, look, that was not requested.

That just automatically happened.

And that's cool.

That's appreciated, you know.

And

what really shows off the difference between our two personalities dramatically is Wooly's like, I'm going to start a YouTube stream on my sponsored show.

And I went, wow, I bet he really knows that it's going to work.

He must have tested the shit out of this to make sure that it goes like it goes super solid on the YouTube thing.

And then it fucking died.

I'm like, oh, man.

Okay.

So it's not.

So my opposite version of that, I'm going to break the subreddit robot by fucking turning it on and off again 15 fucking times and leading to a situation where people are like, what the fuck is he doing?

Twitch just keeps telling me he's streaming over and over and over and over.

Yeah.

Yeah, but now I know it works.

So it works for sure.

So I broke it the night before at 4 a.m.

You know, at one point, but then I figured out the public issue and then kind of went on to fix that part.

So the rest of my tests were private.

However, everything was, of course, working.

But what I discovered.

Of course, it fucking was.

Until it doesn't, until it doesn't, right?

And it turns out the one scenario that it doesn't, that it's not working under, which

was exactly what happened last time, is

when you start a stream on YouTube and then stop one and then start again fairly quickly, it doesn't know what to do.

Yeah, it does, yeah.

I did notice that, right?

And so that's where the YouTube stream was going to nothing, and nobody was able to.

I also have discovered that it really, like the thing that I'm using, it really doesn't like trying to hook into upcoming streams.

Yeah, oh, that's a problem.

Yeah, but like the upcoming streams part, it seems like, it seems like it's better if you didn't just stream something else, right?

Yeah, so my solution to that is just to fucking not do that.

Right.

And just start the fucking show once a day.

Okay.

So

I'm looking for

the ability to hook it in.

But I also wanted the ability to play my music and remove it from.

Yeah, that's a case use that I don't have to deal with because I don't do the.

Exactly.

So that was the problem because there's easier solutions that create other issues where now everything's going to get flagged on YouTube aggressively.

So I found a solution to that too.

But

in the end, it's just this whole new batch of problems

that you have less control over.

And you start to realize, oh, Twitch is actually better at a couple of things here.

Twitch is better at this, this, this, and that.

Yeah.

And YouTube is better at this, this, this, and that.

Yeah.

One of the weird ones was I set my fucking bit rate to like infinity.

Like my bit rate was because

I have better internet now and I have the ability to up you know, a much better, I have a much better upstream.

And I set my...

What's bit set, man?

What's bitrate?

I set it to 20,000.

yeah and for some reason people were still seeing tsushima in 720 you know why that is no because you didn't join the twitch broadcaster beta and get your account flagged

what

oh my god hold on let me send you that's crazy because I'm like People are going, yo, your Tsushima stream is in 720.

And I'm like, my bit rate is insane.

So here's what's happening with that.

Your bitrate is not actually broadcasting at that because that's way, way, way, way above the Twitch bitrate, right?

So when I joined the Twitch Enhanced Broadcaster beta and ran a tons of OBS beta shit for like a year, right, my account got flagged for, you know, whatever.

So in stream under OBS settings, if you have your Twitch account logged in, it will have multi, under multi-track video, it will say enhanced broadcasting.

It optimizes your settings.

You turn that on, and it just fucking deletes all of your bitrate settings.

Okay.

And just starts using the bitrate settings that it actually uses at the maximum.

So Paige's account, because she didn't join, it maxes out at 10K, which is higher than the 6K most people have.

Most people have, yes, yes, yes.

And here's the trick.

In order to get the 20K bitrate,

you might actually be in.

I think they might have democratized it.

In order to get the 20k bit rate, you have to put your export at 1440p.

If you're doing 1080p, it will give you 10k bit rate.

If you're doing 1440p and you're part of the enhanced shit and it allows the turning on the enhanced shit, it will give you 20 so that you can actually hit the 1440p.

And as I've been using 1440p for like four months now,

that's all you need.

Everything looks immaculate.

Everything is local.

It looks super fucking good.

Because the enhanced stuff, all the other steps you were talking about, I had those going.

But

it's put that fucking canvas to 1440 and it'll work.

There you go.

And turn on the enhance and then ignore the other settings.

They don't even matter anymore.

Right.

Here's the kicker, though.

On YouTube, if you want to stream at 1440p, you got to broadcast that shit with like a five-second delay.

And I'm like, yeah, okay.

I would rather have the video look 10 times better than

have the YouTube chat be a couple seconds closer to time.

You know, and then there's that whole other thing with like, hey, Twitch is like, you can't make your YouTube stream look better than ours.

That's why you're just doing out to both simultaneously.

Yeah.

And Twitch is also like, don't you dare fucking put up a combined chat on your fucking screen.

Yeah, yeah.

All these things are like, we have a combined chat feature.

And Twitch is like, I will literally fucking murder you.

Yeah.

Nope, nope, nope.

So,

in any case, in any case.

And then you go into the YouTube YouTube memberships part of your earn tab and you're like, I don't know how the fuck this thing works.

This is complicated.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

A whole other, a whole other thing going on there.

So, yeah, more to discover.

But anyways,

got that set up.

And then fortunately, it didn't matter.

I didn't mature you genuinely for giving me the confidence to give that a shot for real because I knew that if I horribly botched it, I would have somebody reliable to actually ask what the fuck I was doing.

Well, you got it going.

Even though that didn't end up happening, like you

getting your foot in the door, I'm like, okay, I know somebody who has a brain that has their foot in the door.

You got to go in.

And it's somebody I know I can rely on if I'm like, dude, I don't know how.

Thank you.

But

in the end, it didn't matter that it didn't work for me because the only thing officially that I needed was the Twitch stream.

The YouTube was a bonus, and then later on, an edited thing is going to go up.

So that was fine with the sponsored part of it.

Game itself.

I kind of was like, okay, it's been a while.

I'm down for some more tsushima.

But, you know, the idea of the feeling in those games, the feeling of Tsushima was certainly one where

you could hit a point towards the end of the open world where it could overstate its welcome and you'd be like, time for me to just beeline this story, right?

Absolutely.

And here I feel like they spend

very little time getting you into the meat and potatoes.

It's crazy how fast you get up and running with everything.

In fact,

in Tsushima, it was like two, two and a half hours.

Like, you were like four missions in before you got stealth kill.

So what was the recent

Team Ninja samurai game with the

flying?

What the fuck?

Fuck, I forgot what it was called.

But that was like an open world samurai game, but it was just like with the Neo flavor instead.

Rise of the Ronin.

Rise of the Rinan.

Okay, what's wrong with you?

Thank you.

So Rise of the Ronin is a pretty

close example because

when you start that out,

I got to the end of the session before the game felt like it was beginning to open up because it gave me the gliding.

It gave me the glider and it gave me a couple other objective places to go on the map.

And it took like, yeah, three to four hours to get to that point.

It was a really, it was ramping itself up.

But immediately after the tutorial

in Yote, you kind of get your story set up and then it's like okay cool now just go and you have a lot that you can do and you have a lot of um

freedom in your uh um abilities and and it's pretty open right off the bat um so i thought that was pretty cool because it's almost treating it like a sequel where you're like yeah we know that you're picking this up you know perhaps after the other one so don't worry too much about maybe you actually know what the fuck you're doing person who put a hundred let me even look let hold on let me even click the thing ghost Yeah.

Maybe you know what the fuck you're doing, guy who spent 53.1 hours in the last game.

Sure.

Hard sell on the concept because, yep, you get your classic tragic backstory and a bunch of fucking assholes that you write down over your kill bill list.

And I don't know if you saw the end of the intro, but I didn't see anything.

Okay.

I saw you like running around the open world.

I'm like, wow, that looks like a ghost of so light spoilers for the intro of Yotay.

You mark down the names of every one of the people that wronged you, right?

And the people you need to take your revenge against.

And you have, like, again, like a kill bill list.

It's like a strip on a band.

And the intro is you taking out the first one.

of the fucking, you know, of the group, the Yote Six, as they're called.

and upon taking out the first one you pick your sword up bloody from their corpse and you wipe their blood over the name you've written on the fucking classy that's classy style oh

it's the sickest shit you do the blood wipe off on their name and then put it away you know and i'm like ah you got me you got me in one concept it's the hardest shit it's the hardest shit right off the bat.

Beautiful.

And then,

yeah, it's doing stuff that I think like you're starting to see.

You mentioned like Ratchet and Clank, it's about time jumping back and forth between sequences.

There's a little bit of that where like you're time jumping while standing in the same place between a couple places to look at your memories.

That's pretty cool.

And, you know, beyond that, so far so good.

Nothing really to say except

I unlocked dual katanas and you use them for specific enemies so you're not going to be picking your weapons according to what you think is stylish but you'll be switching them up according to the thing you're fighting because everything has a counter so style switching is can I can I fight things that don't match the weapon because I actually really fucking hated the styles in the first game where I'm like why even have this whole fucking thing if I have to switch to match every single enemy you can but you dominate them when you rock paper scissors it okay because I'm just gonna pick the weapons I want and just fucking deal with that yes because i like dual wielding and i think dual wielding is super cool and as a mushroom fucking rock the odachi the whole fucking time as a as a musashi fan i think it's rad as shit right um that and this this is also the right era because we're talking about the battle of sekigahara so i'm like yeah dual wielding should be uh uh uh available to me in all circumstances same thing for i gotta go get a kasari gama which we can apparently get which that fucking lights my eyes up because that's a weapon we do not see enough of um shoutouts to Neo for being one of the only games that even bothered, you know?

But dual wielding is meant to beat spear users.

It's not meant for single katana users.

So you can use it to fight the wrong thing, but it's going to be harder because they're able to defend more and you have to wail on them.

And because this game's like poise,

you know, system is like, sometimes enemies are like, they're not really taking damage.

They're kind of just blocking everything according to what you're using at them.

It doesn't feel as satisfying.

However, you can overwhelm with one weapon, totally.

I just noticed that when you switch to this dual wielding for the spear, you absolutely overwhelm and destroy spear users.

And then similarly, going back to single sword fighters with your dual wield, they're like, no problem.

You're not getting any damage in on them.

So you're making it harder, you know?

I prefer when style switching is open-ended, ultimately, but I have to see how bad it gets when you start fighting other enemies.

Because for regular Grunts, that's one thing.

But for brutes, for example, when you're mismatched with the weapon or mismatched fighting against a really heavy enemy, it just takes long and it's annoying.

And there's archers that are...

They're not doshoing, but they're do showing because it's not the Mongolians anymore.

But, you know, you're like...

The Japanese.

You're fighting the Japanese.

Yeah, you're fighting assholes roaming the countryside.

Is that what's happening?

She's not Ainu.

Okay.

But she's hanging out with the Ainu, and the Ainu are really cool.

Because

Yote, in its historical thing, is like you're way up north, and it's like, wow, Japan fucking sucks.

They're rolling in.

Oh, it's like the total opposite of Ghost of Tsushima.

There's some northern assholes doing some shit, and there's some lords that are trying to get power, and you're trying to get your revenge.

And the Ainu are chilling, and you go sit and chill with them.

And I like that there's a lot of them as a part of this in the setting.

because, yeah, I knew our kind of like,

I feel underrepresented as a group in a lot of stuff.

And it's always.

There's a whole lot of them left, so that would be the reason.

And it's always cool to see this like completely parallel, different culture from Japan that doesn't look or have the same color, clothing, textures, shapes, sizes, or sounds, you know, but it's still Japanese and it was there

like ancient times, like first, you know.

I remember like one of the first times i i even encountered or saw any of that in media was samurai shampleu appropriately enough was you go there was an ainu character and that that it shows up towards the end you know um so that shit's cool um

and in uh speaking of shampoo you go hit those options and yeah

this time around it's so much better so kurosawa mode i could actually see myself playing with the fucking

phenomenal.

So for one, the right much better use of gray and much better use of blacks and whites.

The contrast is fixed.

It's not just desaturating the default color of the game.

Good.

It's the right, it's actually using, and maybe, maybe the, maybe it is, but the assets were more distinctly balanced against each other.

But for a game where colors in each, each boss gets introduced in a different color zone, because you know how beautiful the environments are, and that's a big part of it.

You want to feel like you're not missing out, you know.

Um, and yeah, they have a much better, better balance with the black and white this time around.

Also, the thing is, there's counters that are a glow of the enemy is going to glow a certain color, and then that's going to be a certain type of dodge, certain type of counter, or parry.

And now, they all, that's the thing, is like it's still too early, but I think they visibly look different because I think one glow has like

one glow has like a little X on it, the other glow is more smoky, so you have to recognize the texture of the glow type of thing um

but more to the point the sound changes

and all the audio gets put through a grainy ass 1950s filter the music sounds way more old timey and a lot of the pauses and audio shots like when they talk in a way that's more stilted it makes it feel like an old movie a lot.

I don't know if it was just La Luck or not, but like the moment I turned it on, I went and did a side mission, which involved

Atsu, the main character, walking into a bar with a bunch of tough assholes getting drunk, being shitty to her.

And the whole walking into the bar, and everyone's looking at you at the door, and you're taking your big, heavy footsteps, and then you look around the room, and everyone's like, ooh, who's she?

That all felt perfectly like an old movie.

And the sounds and noises playing were all like right on point.

And it feels like the game has been balanced around you using Kurosaro mode for the whole thing if you want to phenomenally better you know um

second to Kashimike mode um didn't notice a much difference with it but the main thing it does is makes their it puts more blood out it makes it gorier and kind of has the camera more zoomed in for uh action segments so it's a little more like in your face with the over-the-top um

gibbs and squibs and so on.

I, yeah, didn't notice it as much.

More blood and mud is what they say.

I'd have to play more to see, but that's what it says.

And then there's Watanabe mode for Shinichi Watanabe, which is straight up samurai shampoo vibes.

So as you're riding around the countryside, you got a little lo-fi hip-hop track.

And as soon as you get into fights with different samurai or whoever, whatever's going on, the whole thing is blessed with this Nujibes-like soundtrack that changes the mood entirely, but it's beautiful.

And for a game that's so like visually gorgeous, where everywhere you turn the camera, you're looking at a wallpaper,

having a vibe that adds this kind of like hip-hop track to the back of it is exactly what I want.

You could also combine, so you can combine Kurosawa mode with Watanabe mode and get the like Nujibes-like tracks over the black and white.

And that was incredible, too.

So really cool

yeah just off of the first session so far I'm saying like great job with that

and right and like some of the early abilities I'm seeing here too where

last time around I was making a big deal because you get to hang out with that fox, you chase him around and get to the little fox points, you know, and stuff.

This time around there's a wolf and that wolf is the main character and the wolf is like ready.

The wolf is not just a series of side quests, but like there is like wolf points.

And

wolf, like, like, do you mean like upgrades, or do you mean like location?

Okay, so you pause the game, and then you pull up a

character list because there's a bunch of allies you have, and you're called the wolf pack.

And the main character is standing there, and in front of her is the wolf.

And

you can have abilities where, for example,

there's a chance when you get downed that a wolf will come and pick you back up.

Are you fucking serious?

There's a chance that when the wolf picks you back up, it stays in the fight and fights with you.

We got second chance wolfing out here.

Second chance wolfing is a feature.

And the wolf is your co-op partner to stay in the fight.

It's super badass.

It's great.

You know, it's the

fantastic

Mr.

Fox Wolf, where every once in a while in the distance, the wolf just holds up a fist and goes back into the woods, you know, and you're like, I don't know when I'll see you again, but you do your own adventure, wolf.

You have your own game.

That's great.

I love that.

Yeah, yeah.

So, so

that vibe is immaculate too as well.

So great, great stuff right off the bat

on Tsushima.

Definitely, if you've

played, if you've played Tsushima, enjoyed it, and it's been enough time that you're ready

to jump back in,

this feels great so far.

So I played Tsushima on its PC release, which means it is actually too recent for me.

So I will play Yote on its PC release where it will be just right.

Also, do you know what Ghost of Yote feels like a game?

It feels like a game that is wildly incompatible with a moving child.

A stationary child, yes.

But a child that can move?

No.

Tricky.

Tricky.

I mean, I would say anything fairly large and open world, you know.

Unless you're willing to get bite-sized experiences that are less satisfying than you'd enjoy.

Like, I have been playing just a crazy amount of 2XKO in Hades 2, not just because they're new, not just because i love them but because when everybody in my house is asleep and i have 90 minutes yep i can i could get some games in yep um there was a point where in the middle of a 2xko match i had to uh attend to getting a pacifier back in and make sure baby was chill and just had to kind of stand still there and bro i i have about to encounter the most incredible type of ranking in fighting games

i i had a you were gonna get like, man, I'm playing matches.

I'm dominating.

And you know why you're dominating?

Because I had to get up and just walk away from my fighting.

Well, I have to say that the person I was fighting in that match, when they saw me standing still and it was the middle of the set, they waited.

They went, what's going on?

Punch, punch?

Okay.

And then I...

Got the baby settled and I put them in the bouncer and then I picked the controller back up and they were like, oh, and then I moved a little bit and they're like, oh, okay, cool.

Let's go.

and i was like yeah that happened a lot when i was

when i was like climbing to master with bison but like when i was in diamond four with m bison in street fighter six dude i was like definitely master rank Yeah, but I would just have to fucking get up and walk away from my matches all the time and just fucking lose.

So my lose rate was like 50-50.

But when I got to sat and complete a match, oh, dude, it was like 90-10.

It was crazy.

I love that there's still people that are like, the otters still out there, you know?

Absolutely.

The only problem is...

Sometimes you come back and you're fucking dead and you watch the replay and like, wow, they just went in.

They just saw you weren't moving.

They're like, yeah.

Now, the only thing is, because, yeah, because again, the points, right?

The only thing is that sometimes when you're in the same room, you can be like, hey, sorry, you know, dad breaker or whatever.

Baby, baby was fussing.

Or that, you know, you can get the message across.

But if you're not in the same lobby, then those ghosts are gone forever.

And you just, you know, no one will know, but I will know and I will appreciate it.

So that's cool.

But anyway,

that was Yotay.

That was Silk Song.

Yeah, we'll get into 2XKO proper because there's a bunch of stuff going on with that.

There's a bunch.

I did a lot of work this morning in getting a conversation ready for 2xKO.

Okay.

So we'll jump into that right after this.

But I will say,

yeah, I think what we're going to do is we're going to start back up slowly next week.

I was, I, man, I remember when I asked you like two weeks ago when you were going to come back and you were like, I don't know.

And I was like,

I want to know.

Like, I actually want to know, just like everybody else.

Like, I'm so curious.

What are you coming back with?

Well, so the thing is, the thing is, the answer is I legit was not sure because it's depending on how we're doing over here.

And, you know, some days are better than others, but like.

You're doing great is what you're doing.

But what I mean mean to say is thank you what i what i what i mean is so like i don't want to leave punch mom you know feeling particularly like overwhelmed if i can still jump in there with support for this this crucial period of time um

so i'm going to be starting back up uh slowly and i'll be coming back up uh next monday um we're just gonna do a chill stream So what is that?

That's the 13th?

Yeah, it's the 13th.

Yeah, we're just gonna be back next Monday.

We're just gonna do a chill stream.

We're just going to chill.

Chat.

So I, more than anybody you probably know, know exactly how you feel on that topic.

You have been blessed with a series of circumstances that most people are not, where you can go, oh, shit, and get up and just run away if you're absolutely actually required.

That is.

Most people don't work at home and so can't hear their wife go, oh, fuck, need a hand, and just go.

Yeah.

Right?

You are blessed in that respect.

Yes.

And depending on whether it's a yellow or red level of emergency poop,

then if it's a yellow, I can run off and like Reggie can chill.

If it's red, I'm going to hit that be right back button.

You know?

If it's filling up and just for some reason, there is more poop than there is baby.

Also, the the other thing is like, you know, you guys obviously split your baby to baby, like your baby-focused hours, yes.

And it's like, well, while you're streaming, those don't count, so just grab them as soon as you get off for four hours, you know, like just do what you figure out how to even it.

So, my brain is kind of mush when I'm done streaming, but like same here, but luckily, babies don't give a shit as long as you don't drop them.

Fortunately, yeah, hey, dude.

So

I had a conversation with someone recently who is a parent.

And I was talking to another parent.

And

there was a moment.

I don't know if you've had any of these, but.

Oh, I bet I have.

Let's see.

It was, it was, it was when basically we're talking about when to meet up and stuff.

And it was like, okay,

yeah, we can meet up at this point.

And, you know, this is going to go according to like,

you know, know what how we basically i described them like okay so when i get off the night shift you know and um punch mom tags in then we'll be able to make it over to at this time you know yeah and

then

the person was like

upon meeting up later was like so what do you mean by shifts exactly i was like you know when like like mom goes to sleep and then I'm on watch and then you're up yeah and I and I feed and I do that so that there can be an extended sleep and we can all stay sane you know and

they're like

well

okay like

I and then kind of turned to like mom was like I was around for like stuff right when

you know we were needed and and

mom was kind of like

oh no you've caused a fight you caused a and it was like it was like like what you mean you mean like you like you completely are like you're just the only one watching and i was like yes because that's okay hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on let's be fair let's all be fair let's all prep let's all prep for this okay most people don't work at home most people don't have yes shit yes dirtbag 100 cushy 100 jobs 100 go work in a fucking factory a million percent

and if you come back and you've been you've been fucking you come back from the coal mines and you're just you're done you're

totally.

I don't know everybody's family situation, but you actually do know this person's family situation.

Yes.

Were they working in the coal mines, Willie?

It was not the coal mines, but it, you know,

but yeah, all this to say that it was like, oh no,

I did not mean to cause an issue here, but just the simple concept of like, here, let me take over for a while was like

not

so.

I have not encountered that.

I have not personally encountered that.

Though I know Paige, for a fact, has encountered some variation of that.

And I know that she's encountered

like people talking about, like, I don't know what to do about birth control.

And they're a little, she's like, what do you mean?

He's like, ah, well, we already have the three kids, and I want to go on birth control, but my husband hates it.

And I was like, oh, that's a different, awkward conversation, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hey.

There's science.

There's options.

There's a lot of things you can do these days.

Do you want to know what one of the best shitty feelings you I don't know you might have had it already.

I've definitely had it a couple of times.

Show me where you're going.

Where are you going to find smug where there should be no smug?

It's like an evil joy in your heart because you've caused a problem, but you didn't do anything.

You're strollering, right?

Maybe grocery store.

Grocery store is a big one.

You're strollering and you have just the cutest little baby in the whole world.

And a couple in their early 20s walks by.

And the lady looks and goes, Oh my god, what a cute baby.

And the boyfriend's like, Whatever.

And you look at her reaction.

I have just caused a fucking

fight that is going to happen in like one hour.

Yeah.

Like, oh, man.

Yeah.

Now, here's the thing is

what I

feel.

So that shit's wild, and that is unfortunate.

That fucking dude's day.

That afternoon is probably toast.

However,

I have seen, I have seen

people

and friends like go from that energy

in their relationship to the sudden and complete 180

where dudes like,

actually, I changed my mind.

Let's go.

I want it now, right away.

And they kind of hit a mental time limit, or they do the math where they weren't doing the math before.

And yes,

yeah.

And

I went from one day to the next and I saw a cute kid in the grocery store and I went, oh, what a cute kid.

Exactly.

There you go.

There you go.

Right.

So, case in point.

here's another one that we both know,

right?

Just overnight, right?

That was a thought.

So, it's kind of like, you know, you see that energy change and you're like, oh, well, okay, that fight is potentially a day ruiner, but also there's a chance that, you know, fast forward, who knows, whatever a period of time, and someone might just be like, yeah, you know what?

Actually, never mind, you know?

And then I'd say, too, as well, that

there's always that big old study that we talked about where it's just like, what is your hap, what happens to your average happiness, you know?

And

I think I've quoted it a couple of, I think we've brought it up a couple times on the show, but like, it's the one where

on average, your immediate happiness shoots into the dirt the moment you have a kid because of the amount of stress and bullshit you have to go and deal up deal with and it's pretty it's tough it drops a little tough sometimes your happiness drops off monumentally and then each kid it's on a discount the second kid is like much less than the first in terms of happiness lost and then each one after that is like like negligible negligible uh however then it immediately grows as you get older and all of that turns into i'm mental much of a happier person than i was three years ago as so like it's not even close it's not even close so the study is more about the long term for like you know later in your life so to speak but that's there's a there's a there's a a mountain that grows there versus the maintaining your your your happiness without that drop-off point and then as you get older you start to regret it more right that's that's basically what the study showed um which i thought i was like huh interesting okay so yeah you eventually got to find your your your middle point on that intersection where it would drop off and where it would start to increase and go like right around here.

And I'm going to also calculate how old I want to be so that I'm not playing tag with a toddler and

my back is getting blown the fuck out and I can barely walk.

There's a lot of foresight considering that, like, most people are just like, I want to nut.

That's how most kids have it.

Sure.

And then, and

I want to nut, and then, oh, give me a Pokemon.

You know?

But yeah, it is a kind of insane

thing to just like walk by and see other couple dynamics

get lit up with, you know, like fucking blue, yellow, purple.

It's fascinating, you know, just by your sheer existence.

Anyways, so yeah, tune in over on Woolly vs.

next Monday, where we'll be starting back up.

And then the regular schedule is not returning just yet, but one day at a time, I'll let you guys know how it goes

week by week.

And yeah, the goal is to be multi-streaming there too.

So that'll be Wooly vs.

on Twitch and on YouTube.

And we'll

get Reggie back up in there and see if he can steal some more smiles.

I bet he can.

Hey, man, can we take a quick break?

All right, BRB.

All right.

You ever hear

just like a shotgun diaper-filling poop that jump scares you?

Nope.

Had one of those yesterday.

As far as I'm concerned, my baby doesn't even go to the bathroom.

Oh, oh, wow.

Okay.

Well, we got loud rips going on.

It's a perfect angel, and it just poops away into dust.

That's crazy.

We've got like fireworks happening localized in diapers down here and

literally had a jump scare of just a

like was like oh my god

and uh I will say that like you know as I've as I've described the ability to faultless defense and and you know use a diaper as a shield a couple times uh my heart has never raced more than

uh

during during bath time

I heard a little fart and I was like,

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I was the punisher in that one gift.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, please, please, please, please, no, no, no,

dude, what's the worst that could happen?

You're already in the bathtub,

right?

You're already there,

just

just,

it can get so much worse.

It can get so much worse, you know?

So, thankfully, false alarm, alarm, but boy.

Anyways,

yes.

So, speaking of

second chance wolf combos.

That's right.

How about that?

So, I apparently Brazil Riot.

So, apparently, the idea that it's all on purpose, the way they leak things, is kind of knee-capped by the fact that apparently, Riot Brazil just leaks like literally everything they ever do.

So yeah, it turns out, okay, so there's two things, right?

One, the official 2xKO reveal marketing strategy appears to be, yeah, we don't give a shit.

Just leak that shit.

And put shit out there and whoever sees it is going to go, wait, what?

And you're going to be like, yeah.

And that's it.

I texted you about this and was like, well, because people like us are following that shit, but most people aren't.

but i think most people just see the official story later but let it let it let it simmer amongst those who are keeping up with it moment to moment and i think that's great i think it's been really funny actually works yeah and i think they did a really good

warwick leaked out

right warwick werewolf leaked out and and it leaked out super hard and super fast like it was like definitive there's videos of the motherfucker like wow i'm looking at him i mean someone had a screenshot of his foot that just

went went out there.

The videos came out like six hours later.

It was right away.

And then, of course, of course, there was, like, prior to that, we talked about the data mining, you know, where they pulled the voice lines out.

But then there's just the, so that's the super unofficial, you know, we pulled the information from

the game files.

But then there's just the official Riot Brazil who's just going, I guess,

we're putting out shit that no one's supposed to see, and we don't give a fuck.

And apparently, this has been the case for all League of Legends basics.

For absolutely everything they do.

Yeah.

So I felt really bad for them.

Loose Cannon.

Loose Cannon Studio.

And then I felt really,

really fucking bad for them yesterday when Warwick is the fucking massive stinger of their very expensive CG animated intro.

And then I stopped feeling bad for them because they did manage to keep the important thing to do.

The biggest detail.

By the way, he's out tomorrow.

He's out tomorrow.

Secret Shadow dropped the character on launch.

And I'm like, oh, this actually worked out well for everybody.

Everybody got what they wanted.

So the leak confirmed his existence beforehand, and everyone was like, oh my God, we know who the next character is.

Exactly.

So we know who the beginning of the next five is going to be.

And then they're like, yep, yep.

And then you get the big intro, which dropped, which is pretty cool and proper expensive, which has to be expected because look at their music videos.

I was like, this better be cool.

And yeah, it was dope.

And then going on in that trailer that's really funny.

But yes, the big thing with this is Timo will be dropping as will Warwick.

So there'll be two new characters right off the bat.

So we're going straight to that.

That's three weirdos in a row.

Three freaks in a row.

Three freak picks in a row.

And we're

straight to 11 on launch with that.

So good job on that.

Plus a big detailed post.

The freak ratio, which I think we said was between 25 and 30% of your roster has to be freaks.

Hey, there we go.

That's 27% of the roster is freaks now.

And then the other bit is by giving you access to, you do the tutorials, you get one champ token, and then you do some of the missions, and you get a second one.

So by giving you...

So by giving you two champ tokens that are easily accessible, you can make a team of anyone you want right away.

So there's, there's, as a duo's game, you're not being restricted from any particular pair, which is a really smart thing mathematically, right?

So one, that big expensive trailer.

So we're just shipping Ari and Echo now?

They're homies or more?

A different game shipped Ari and Yasuo.

Oh,

interesting.

Okay.

And then I saw a comment where someone was just like,

lore accurate.

Yasuo jumps in,

tries 2v1ing, fails,

and then Warwick ganks and loses the round for this team.

Absolutely.

That is a pit-patient interaction.

So, what's the start?

Okay, Yasuo has been crazy fed, and he's a hypercarry.

And so

he is effortlessly 2v1ing a fucking fight.

Is Warwick a jungler?

No, Warwick is a jungler, yes.

Yeah, okay.

And so right when it turns,

Warwick tries to fucking gank from the lane,

and then they both just fuck it.

They both just fuck it completely because the two other people actually work together as a team.

Yeah, yeah.

Also, I find it like, so it's cool because you have like, you know, they're not willing to just do, I can see that they're not willing to just do an intro cinematic with cool music and showing off the characters going like, hey, fighting game, fighting game.

Yeah.

They want to have a little bit of a story going on, right?

They want to have an emotional thread.

Yeah.

So here it's.

And so they have like the definitive moment of both of those characters' backstories presented.

Yes.

And Echo's trauma and Ari's trauma and they're both, you know, they're leaning on each other and they both find common ground and they're able to make a friendship or more and come together as a team.

Yeah, and that's really cool because you're like, oh, that's great.

They're the official poster canon team for this game.

All right.

And now Yasuo, who I was not under the impression was this big asshole, is just coming for them and swinging and being not only lore accurate to League of Legends with the 2v1ing aspect, as you described, but also because he's such a shit at being the top-tier character in the game, I'm like, fucking get his ass.

Fuck Yasuo.

Did you see

the fucking

man about this?

I know.

First of all, I think Yasuo 2v1ing, the

opposing team, as he is like the most broken character in the game.

He's a fucked up.

It's fucked up that they put that in the cinematic.

He's a villain.

He's absolutely the villain from his balance.

But But also,

then the day that that video game came out, sorry, that game that video came out, he was hit with multiple pages of nerfs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He is like, this is, they took a bat to that dude.

Yeah.

So Echo is also incredibly strong and incredibly powerful and sitting on top of this list.

But the power gap

distance between the two is very notable because Echo is annoying and

is better than the rest of the cast, but Yasuo had no weaknesses.

He had no weakness.

Yasuo had no weakness.

He was a fully completed, kitted out character that could do everything.

So back to the cinematic, though,

and then at the end, you get Blitz and Alaoi jumping out.

Hey, we're weirdos.

Yeah, yeah, here they come.

Very cool, very nice cinematic, nice music.

When I see the ties that bind, which is the name of the song,

the first thing I think of is Street Fighter 4's shitty anime, right?

Because that's what it was called.

So, you know, a little flashback there.

But

I'm looking at this, like, the expensive, you know, music video for the game, and I'm immediately like, oh, there's no shot they're going to miss out on the cash that would come from putting all of KDA into this game and having the costumes available.

We'll have more to talk about that exact thing in just a second.

Because I did some math.

There's no way they're not going to sell Akali and then everybody else and then put the costumes out immediately.

That's crazy.

I don't know if Evelyn will get in, but Akali is kind of like a sure thing.

So what's the popularity like between Akali, Ahri, and then the other two?

Okay.

Akali's also more fun to play.

Are the other two more obtuse or are they super, super, super old?

And so is Evelyn, but I don't see a lot of love for Evelyn.

Okay.

Because, yeah,

that's free money.

You sell those outfits and you put the pack with them in the stage and some music or whatever the case is and just go, right?

That video has a lot of deep cuts.

It has one

super deep cut in particular.

There's a voice line between

Warwick and Echo in which he says, rewind too far and you'll end up in my teeth.

So in the fight, Echo rewinds to his earlier position and then Warwick instantly fucking grabs him.

And like he should not have rewound out of being fallen over because it fucked on him.

That shot with the trauma pass moment and then the fallen girl and then all the different reaching attempts

his league bio.

That shot of how many times I tried to save her, and it didn't work was super good.

He does get her

in his bio, but it takes 18 attempts.

So I don't know much beyond just the arcane bits, but like that was probably the coolest part of that.

I thought it was, I love, I love seeing that shit.

Some of those attempts are trash, too.

He's like way off.

Man,

It's so unfair because the titles they get, like you get Vi, who's the pilt over Enforcer, and Echo is the child that broke time.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

You're like, that's not the same, man.

Come on.

Some of those titles are way cooler than others.

You know, Vi should be called the fucking narc, but that a different character would also have that title.

That title works for someone else, too.

So that title would be Caitlin's title.

She's the biggest fucking narc around.

Hey, I'm satisfied because not only is Vi here, but then they showed off among all the cosmetics because you best believe they want that money.

They also showed off lesbian breakup.

Yeah, yeah, the fucking pit fighter outfit, baby.

Drag that mascara.

Like

the leaky goth breakup Vi.

And I'm like, that.

That's the vi I want.

The moment I...

It was half an episode in Arcane, and I'm like, oh, look at this costume they're selling.

it was such an obvious costume.

Into the arcane costumes and the monetization of this game because the arcane costumes that they are sending in that, selling in that bundle

are so much fucking better than the default costumes.

It's crazy.

They are like the quality.

They are like,

they should have been the defaults.

I don't give a shit.

Echo's mask and the pipe and all that and the color.

Oh, my fucking God, dude.

I didn't, so that's the thing: is I knew Echo as the arcane version first for before all the other stuff, so I thought that was just a look.

And I, this would be, I think it would be a huge mistake if they put the non-league versions of these characters out there as primary.

Same thing for Warwick, making the wolf instead of like the big dude or whatever, whatever the fuck that was.

But, um, no, but yeah, making those costumes look really, really good is very, very smart because the only way to make money with the game like this is to entice people with the cosmetics.

Yeah.

You know, and to throw some currency and tokens and so on in there.

Also, I so I like that like the drip feed of like, here's Timo, here's his stage, here's a couple of arcane costumes, and then here's Warwick's foot is now like, here's like another four sets of outfits.

Here's like crime city, here's another background you didn't see, um, here's the Warwick stage.

There is now like an entire humongous pipeline of like stages, outfits, and cosmetics that we've been previewed for.

That are like

KO effects, taunts.

I want to say like an entire season or four worth of stuff has been previewed.

Absolutely.

And they fixed the problem that we have with Street Fighter VI.

It's like, man, I would actually love to buy more costumes.

And they have figured out a way to fix that.

and that is charging three times as much for those costumes making the costumes a part of a big pack that's expensive

no

I so when I so I had to do this this morning obviously I had to do this clown shit so my time was highly limited right so when 2xko came out it immediately broke like that just fucking crashed its shit off and then I went well fuck and then I when I was able to log in all I did I didn't play even a single fucking round I went to the store and I went to the Battle Pass.

I took screenshots of everything.

Okay.

And then I ran the numbers on literally their entire monetization platform so I could compare it here.

Okay.

And how much of a fucking ripoff the game is or not.

Because the sticker shock on that arcane costume pack being $140 fucking dollars plus tax Canadian.

Oh, yeah, you didn't know.

You didn't know.

You didn't know.

Ah,

dude.

That shit costs $165.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

$40 times $114 is equal to.

It costs $160.

I thought.

Okay.

I thought less.

Did you?

What did you think?

And then

do we.

What did you think?

What did you think it was going to be?

No, I...

Yeah, I mean, I was...

I again, I thought you were talking about like, you know, 20 bucks for the skins and

or so.

But like, but

there's plenty here to talk about.

I saw that there was the like conversion of

this because there's you know points that you earn, there's the whatever, fight money,

and then there's like a three-week period before you spend

real bucks.

Let's just, let's just start this from the top, okay?

There are three currencies going on in the 2XKO video game.

There is real money dollars, which no one needs any explanation.

There are credits.

Credits are the free-to-play currency that you would earn from, I think you get 10 a match.

You get 250 for a daily challenge, and you get 750 for a weekly challenge, of which there are three.

If you were to do all of your dailies and all of your

weeklies every single week, you would earn approximately 750, 7,500 credits.

A character costs 10,000 credits.

So in a week and a half of free-to-play playing, you would earn enough to get a character.

However,

you cannot buy a new character with free-to-play currency for the first three weeks of their life.

Right.

You cannot do it.

They are sectioned off for paying customers only, which are for real money dollars, which includes buying the most expensive version of the Battle Pass,

or a token.

Or a token or

something called KO points, which is their fake money currency.

And KO points are

in U.S.

I mean, I have that all written down here.

In US currency,

a KO point is approximately $5 for 500 KO points.

Okay.

Yeah, so it would be $100 for $1,150.

Right.

So, and then tokens, character tokens are also parts of certain passes, certain battle passes or bundles.

Or certain bundles, exactly.

So, there's other ways to get those two.

Yeah, I think.

So, costumes cost 2,000 points, which means costumes cost 20 USD.

Right.

Straight up.

Colors cost approximately 5 USD.

Stages cost approximately 5 USD.

Characters cost approximately 10 US dollars, but are obviously the thing that you should spend your free-to-play shit on the most if you're not buying things because they're fucking characters.

So, so this

hold on, I got more.

I gotta go.

Sure, sure, sure, sure.

The battle pass has three versions.

The battle pass, sorry, four versions.

Fuck.

It has free, which includes basically nothing, but it does give you a Temo skin.

It has a one that's $10, one that's $20, and one that's $35.

These include the normal Battle Pass, your Battle Pass plus 10 levels, and the fanciest 35 battle pass includes a skin unique to itself

which is the warwick skin from arcane

okay

so it's expensive yeah yeah it's really expensive this is this is that your bundles include KO points and character unlock tokens to muddy the value, but then I mathed it out.

So the $140 starter ultra fuck pack or whatever comes with three costumes.

It comes with eight character unlock tokens and 5,000 fucking credits.

Okay, so that is basically a premium edition that is future of the game.

Okay, so you're buying the costumes there, but you're and you're getting eight future characters.

So I ran up the value of the character unlocks and I ran up the value of the KO points, and it makes the bundle, it makes the way that the math on it works is that if you buy the fancy $140 bundle, the costumes add up to negative $40.

Okay.

So buying the character passes cash and buying the KO points cash would come up to $180 Canadian.

But if you buy the super

bundle, it's $140 and they throw in the three costumes with it.

Right, right.

And eight character and eight tokens is, I mean, more than a year and a half.

That's a year and a half, exactly.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So you're, yeah, you're basically, so what it is, is that bundle is actually the season pass plus the exclusive

stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's separate from the

battle passing.

So created a situation here where if you're going to be spending, if you're going to be buying every character the day they come out because you don't want to wait the three weeks.

And if you like those costumes and you're going to be spending KO points on cosmetics that you want right now, that is actually, I'm going to use air quotes, the best value.

For somebody who is buying in on 2xKO,

that thing is the best value.

For a normal person,

that's why the battle passes are an enormous step down in cost for people who'd like to spend $20 or like $30 every couple of months.

They offer a bunch of costumes.

I didn't do do the value on it, but like you get four costumes in the Battle Pass for 10 bucks, which puts those at 250 compared to fucking 20.

So the Battle Pass is actually

10 to 15 times more valuable than any given costume in terms of the game's own in economy.

Also, costumes for Arcane you cannot get anywhere else other than the most expensive bundle.

And it is time-limited.

It will leave in January.

2026, I thought I saw December 31st, 2026.

Yeah.

Yeah.

26.

Oh, so it's next year.

It's a full year.

It's a year.

It's there for a year.

Okay.

Yeah.

So

sounds like the, yeah, so the monetization plan is ultimately what, are you somebody that wants to pick and choose an occasional purchase of,

you know, buying whatever, you know, small amount is?

Or do you want to hit one of the battle pass kind of gacha timelines?

Not gacha.

What's the word I'm looking for?

Well, anyway, but like, do you want to be the medium exact, like every what couple of months?

Are you spelling dolphining in dolphin plus or free?

Or minnow, you know, uh, or so.

Uh, or you can be the, I don't care, just give me it all and then give me all the future as well, type of thing.

Um, now, that's it sounds like if you are playing regularly and I guess like just interested in your character and, you know, some of the colors and or exclusive bits, you can keep up with that for the most part.

Oh, I actually ran the math on that also.

So for experience and for

the free tokens.

So

if you do all your weeklies and all your dailies, you get $7,500 of the free-to-play currency, which is enough that if you just start saving up on the second week of a season, when the character comes out, you will spend one day playing and immediately unlock them.

That is, of course,

if you're the type of person who can, in your heart, wait 21 days from the release of a new character to play them online.

Yeah.

So there's,

I guess, again,

this monetization plan is one that asks you to look in the mirror and decide what type of person you are, right?

Do you just care about, if you do you only care about the character you care about and that's it?

Do you want to focus in on that and the specifics you want for them?

Or are you somebody who likes the overall collection, you know?

Um,

I rem I was seeing how when I was playing um rivals, for example, I kind of was going like, oh, well, I don't use Venom, but I want that Marvel skin because that Marvel versus Capcom skin is cool, right?

I see myself being, in this case, this is the one where I'm like, oh, well, first of all, this is a fucking game that I really enjoy.

So I'm going to definitely highly lock in on the characters I care about the most.

And anything extra for like a character I don't really play.

Unless it's really, really, really pulling at me, I can probably avoid it and not give too much of a fuck.

So out of this entire thing, if I can actually make make my personal objective or subjective judgment, whatever,

by far, the biggest rip in this store is individual costumes.

They're like $20 to $25 fucking dollars for one costume for one character.

It's fucking nuts.

Buying it like two of the battle passes.

Right.

You want to fucking be like, I need Crime City Darius now in order to fucking fall for that.

Did you see what the top-up

amounts were?

Yeah, I have a picture of them.

Hold on.

When I say I went in to do this, I fucking meant it.

The top-up amounts are: this is CAD.

Okay, so I know most of our listening audience is from USD.

You're going to have to adjust these down 40%, but this is a CAD.

It's $500 for $7.

It's $1,000 for $14.

It's $2,200 for $28.

bucks it's forty five hundred for fifty six bucks it's sixty eight hundred for eighty four dollars and it's eleven five hundred for one forty okay so it's it's

seven dollars is the lowest uh seven canadian is the lowest which is probably five us

it's it's a hundred ko points is a buck forty

yep that's how it works yeah and then as you scale up higher and higher and higher um you it gives it says bonus Okay.

Okay.

Oh, someone in the chat says that the rotating shop is currently different for different people.

Hmm.

That's nefarious.

Hmm.

Interesting.

Okay.

That's

because what would happen with Fortnite is people would go to the subreddit and people go, oh my God, the alien skin is back out.

Come now.

What determines that?

No, you have to check.

It has to be you.

Valorant and League both do that.

Oh, that's fascinating.

So

is it just user random?

Like, not random?

Is it just what the term is?

Is it area?

Is it like...

I don't know.

Probably your user ID.

User ID.

Huh.

Yeah.

So, so

how does

the free-to-play fighting game, how does the heart feel about cosmetics, right?

What is the...

Why is cosmetics so trash?

Like, screw it up.

I mean, Beach Darius is not doing anything for anybody, as far as I I can tell.

I don't know.

Meh, maybe, you know.

Same thing for that weird Vi that I saw that was like, meh.

But then I saw the other Vis looked sick, and I think every Alawi costume I saw looked really sick.

Tech Elaui looked really cool.

Some characters just kind of can't have a bad costume because their base design's too sick.

I'm hoping that Tech Alawi has like metal tentacles, mecha tentacles.

Oh, that's great.

That's great.

Yeah, that's a cybernetic tentacles.

That's very cool.

Okay.

So I also, I checked in an earlier trailer that different costumes will alter the effects and visuals of some supers.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, already the

free

final color that you unlock, which is the green and black ones, make your effects also a green or different color.

Yeah, there's vise like punches change from the regular blue or so into like a special color.

So yeah, this is just like

we didn't have a true look at what the free

freemium kind of fighting game would look like.

I would say, you know, you got these multiverse kind of previews, multiversus previews, or we talked about like, you know, fucking Tekken Revolution or whatever.

But in this case, you're getting the pricing.

I would also say you're getting the pricing after years of development, you know,

where this is showing up later.

You know, I wouldn't even say that.

This is actually fairly similar to League and Valorant's pricing stuff.

Is Is it?

Yeah?

Okay.

I also ran some more math because let's compare it to Street Fighter VI, which is the easiest possible comparison point because people are looking at that bundle and going, what the fuck?

Okay, 100 USD for the Arcane Starter bundle is the equivalent of buying two years of Street Fighter VI character passes because you get...

you get eight characters, eight tokens for it, right?

So it's like buying year three and year four.

That's 30 bucks twice in USD for Street Fighter, so you're up to 60.

And getting enough currency for two and a half costumes in Street Fighter VI, that'd be about $20.

And getting three costumes

for free, which is about $20.

So that particular bundle with the things you get in it evens out to the equivalent in Street Fighter VI, but only once.

And then you get to go, but

I got Arcane.

I just tried to fucking call a game car Arcane.

I got 2XCO for free, but I had to pay $60 for Street Fighter up front, which is basically how I think they arrived at those prices.

So that bundle was designed to hit that exact math of it's the same as Street Fighter, but the game was free.

So the wild part about, so not the wild part, the part about this that I guess is ultimately,

you know, what we're looking at is this is a standardized model that is in other Riot games and other genres for a while.

Which has proved successful.

But

it is not like other fighting games, right?

And so the reason for that is because other fighting games aren't completely free.

So we're looking at really adopting non-fighting game models of monetization completely for the in this particular case and seeing if it's going to work.

You know, so it's how much does your heart yearn for the cosmetic?

How much

does you,

you know?

The problem with this is that

Riot did in fact

go for a way cheaper, way less mentally manipulative pricing model on one of their games, and that was Legend of Rune Terra, their card game.

Oh, true.

That ran it straight into the fucking ground.

Everything was free, and everything was like given.

Everything of value was free and could easily be acquired.

And then the skins were

like pricier than you'd think, but they were nice.

But no one bought them because who gives a shit?

I just want the cards, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um,

and like, they were too generous,

so it's this one thing where it's like, hey, you know what, let's let's be good.

Oh, we're broke, okay, so let's not be good anymore, and I

fucking

okay.

Uh, there's another part of this that, well, this is I think this is more me, so I'm you know, prepare for incoming woollyisms.

Um,

I've described in the past how when I see a new game of some kind and the camera is zoomed out third person with a tiny little character and little colored bullets are coming out of them, there's a level of fuck that I just don't give immediately.

Like you see the little purple lines next to my head go

like, eh.

Right.

And it's just because no matter what the genre is, no matter how fun the game is, I wish I could see shit up close and really appreciate the art, right?

I just, you know, and so, um,

and this is in the best of cases.

I fucking love me some Hades.

What a great game.

But in a lot of cases, when I look at a League of Legends, I'm like, it's so tiny.

It's so far away.

I know it's the game, but it's based on whatever.

So when a cosmetic in a game like that comes out, I can easily see myself giving way less of a shit because it's a tiny little guy versus a cosmetic in Rivals or Overwatch or whatever, where it's up in your fucking face.

You're staring at it.

More so it's third person.

You're looking at your cool costume the whole time.

I think if every skin in the world was the same value, that fighting games would have the most valuable skins objectively, because in a first-person shooter, you don't actually see your character, and in a MOBO, you barely see your character.

Right?

Third-person action or third-person game like Rivals, you can see it the whole time.

And in a game like a fighting game, there's nothing to do but look at that skin.

So I really do like care about that aspect of it.

And yes, I know it's a me issue, and I'm okay with that.

I like the cool art.

I like the cool designs.

I don't care as much when I can't appreciate that.

Now, if the genre is one that's like still super addictive to me regardless, then that's going to be a part of it.

But it's also, you know, there's an element too where I'm like,

when card games have cool effects on the cards and stuff, that's dope.

But I'm also somebody who doesn't have like a strong memory for playing magic and Pokemon and other stuff with other people, other people might.

Therefore, the actual interface of playing with cards is not a special to me versus seeing two characters doing shit on screen.

So, the value of seeing those skins and what they're worth in a game where they're much smaller makes me give way less of a fuck.

And I would even say there's a smaller version of that where in multiverses, the characters are much smaller because it's a Smashlight game and you don't, you still can't appreciate it as much as you could in a larger fighting game context or a third-person action game, you know?

Um,

so weirdly, I feel like the genre changes the value

for these types of things.

A skin in a Call of Duty game or so where I'm never going to see it except on a replay feels really, really low desirability to me.

So, I mean, at the end of the day, I don't know if that's relatable at all, but like after running all my maths, I'm like, to anyone who actually wants to play and enjoy this game, I'll play it free-to-play entirely.

And then if you feel like grabbing one of the battle passes, maybe grab one of those because everything else is complete insanity.

Yeah.

Well, so the way I always feel when it comes to anything I'm playing that's free and,

you know, where

the grip of FOMO has not been pulled and I'm not feeling like an addictive call.

Although in this case, I was definitely like, ah, man, I could go for some matches online right now, right?

When it was in the downtime.

But regardless, anytime that that's been the case, I think my

thing is like, if I'm enjoying the game game and I'm really and I'm liking it, I have no problem giving it money because I would have been willing to spend on the full purchase if this were available to me.

There's a lot of cases where

if a game is like here, you can buy a retail version of this, but it's essentially like a retail bundle of things for what is ultimately a freemium game.

I'm happy to support that if I want more of it, if I want it to continue existing.

So, you know, there's a part of me that's always like, yeah, it depends on what I'm, what my willingness is over whatever period of time is, you know, that I'm playing it.

And if time passes and I'm like not playing it as much or whatever the case is, then I'm like, yeah, I don't really feel like investing this much anymore.

But I do also feel myself able to mostly resist the call of the cosmetics, you know?

I mean, we'll see.

Cause

to their credit, if they're going to charge $20 for these cosmetics, they better look really good.

And some of them look really, really good.

That Timo, the Gorilla Timo, the one where he's a little soldier that one looks fantastic

that's great cool i i don't have outside of teemo being a troll character i don't feel like i need to i don't care that much about collecting teemo skins or whatever probably not going to play him that much not a big you know i don't have any desire in me there um when i see there's an oh yeah hey look there's a sentinel color for um blitz crank uh i'm like i want to fucking buy that color for blitz crank that's really cool even if i don't play blitz crank you know um that's not going to cost too too much or take too much time, but there it is.

So it's just.

Somebody in the chat said that, by the way, it's weird there's no $60 version that equates to like a regular game that you can buy of the starter bundles.

There totally is.

There's a $60 bundle that gives you eight character unlocks.

The retail quote-unquote version.

But it doesn't get you those hot ass arcane skins.

Okay.

Well,

that I think is is a good idea.

I generally am like, yeah,

if a game is free, but it gives you what is the equivalent of purchasing it if you wanted to.

It does give you the owl echo and in fact actually shows a picture of regular Jinx and Echo on the picture.

And the picture is slightly smaller than the really expensive one.

So in doing all this math,

is you doing the math also,

you calculating your heart?

No, I actually just want to know.

Okay.

Okay.

I, I, like, I, so, so, this being the first fucking free-to-play fighting game, the thing that we've been talking about forever and ever and ever, and as the sequel to Riot's game that didn't use fucked-up monetization, the one that I cared about, Legend of Terra, I was so, I'm way, I'm more interested in how the economics of this game works than I am playing it.

And I really like playing it.

This is fascinating to me.

I think it's going to work.

Oh, yeah.

I think it's going to work.

I think it's going to work.

It's 100% going to work.

I think that sticker shock wears off, and then you just go

people who want to play fucking gold Warwick have already bought that fucking skin.

If you're telling me.

I don't think I don't give a fuck.

I'm just going to play Warwick all day.

If you're telling me it already worked in League and it already worked in Valorant and it didn't work in Rune Terra, then I think it's going to work here.

The other thing I will say, and this is to their credit,

I ran the math on it.

And

if you play the game regularly, right,

you can get

about 30,000 of the free credits a month, right?

And a character costs 10.

But you're capped at 12.

Yeah, you're capped at 12.

So they want you to spend it, right?

They want you to spend it on colors and stages and shit like that, which can't all be purchased with free-to-play currency.

So if you are a person who's like, I would like to play this game and never spend a dime on it, that is absolutely, completely viable.

But you got to play.

But you have to play.

Which is the same.

And when fucking Pike

or fucking Nautilus or Tom Kench or fucking Talon or whoever the fuck you're simping for super hard forever comes out or bard or, you know, and and you go, oh, fuck, I don't want to wait fucking three weeks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You just got to be strong.

You got to be strong.

And so, and this, I saw this as well with like Punishing Grey Raven and so on, games where it's like all these types of games where you're effectively like, you can get the thing, but you got to fucking play, and you got to play, you got to jump in there and stay on, and so on.

Like, Dante was free in Punishing Grey Raven if you got to a certain level of

the monthly event.

And the missions that they have make it actually really easy for anybody that plays somewhat regularly fighting games to get a free character episode every month.

I was not expecting to see that many missions.

There's like 22 per character or so.

By the way, I said there's 30k free credits a month.

A character only comes out every 10 weeks.

So by the time the free character rolls around,

you'll actually have about 75,000 credits.

So you actually had time to spend it on a dozen costumes, sorry, a dozen colors in all the stages by the time the free character comes out.

Yeah.

The reason the cap exists, by the way, is because league players got so much of the free currency that everybody who played league during the first couple of years will never have to buy a cap.

I remember again, as long as they fucking live.

I remember it, yeah.

And Valorant

and Valorant went too hard the other way, and then they changed it to this with the slightly, with the remainder.

Yeah.

They've had years of data to put this all together and see what'll work best on the plan.

So

this is kind of, it's fucked in the sense that it's like, know I know these moments because I remember the moment when we talked about the Mona Lisa photo of like the difference between Brood War as an expansion pack and DLC that was made as part of the base game being sold to you.

And over time, the slow cooking of the frog pot turned up, and we just got used to it.

And now you're like, please, okay, we know this is what's normal, and we've all gotten used to it.

Please don't be abusive about it.

And if you're telling me here now that you're like, um,

the version of events where things are too nice on people leads to a dead game and the version where it's ridiculous up top leads to a living game but you have to choose within yourself to not give in to that but it'll ensure its survival then it's like

it's a we're on the cusp of other free-to-play fighting games that want to kick in to this type of model that are IPs that are less popular than League of Legends will need to be even more egregious and abusive and pricey on this shit.

And the data is apparently that this is the way it works if you want your game to survive.

You can't get away with that fucking $100 USD thing is because Arcane works.

Arcane is attached to it.

And Arcane is what people that, yeah, non-league fans.

This might as well be the fucking arcane fighting game, too.

Exactly.

It's nuts.

And I'm somebody who knows Arcane more than League.

So I'm like, yeah, I see it the person who's like a fan of that netflix show that's like oh yeah this thing cool you know so it's it's this really complicated thing it's a really excellent break it's a really excellent um view of exactly all the costs and benefits and pluses and minuses of a free-to-play game in general um they have made it absolutely reasonable to play this game forever and never spend a dime like genuinely i i've done the math.

I've looked at the missions.

I've played the beta for weeks about how the missions work.

If all you want to do is get every new character and always be able to play, wait a little bit, save up the currency, it's super easy, blah, blah, blah.

However, however,

as you do that, the game will be actively manipulating you

every time you log on.

By showing you everybody else with their cool ass fancy costumes and hit effects and special KOs and taunts and shit like that.

And then

they'll have the little piece of the little baby crack, which is the free Battle Pass, which is going to give you a skin every three months.

And then they're going to be like, well, it's only $10 for the real Battle Pass, which gives you four skins and all these.

I don't know.

You can put your credit card information into the game.

I don't know where the limits are between giving a fuck

with cosmetics versus just playing base game and sticking with it and enjoying that, right?

I don't, it's because it's personal, it changes for everybody.

I know that

you can make it especially exploitive

in certain ways.

One of the ones that comes to mind, which always I find is bullshit no matter what, is if you cannot buy a specific thing that you are looking at.

The only way.

What do you mean like the Arcane Warwick skin, which is exclusive to the $35 battle pass?

No, what I mean is a loot box.

What I mean is a loot box.

Oh, yeah, no, there's no loot.

I mean a thing where,

I mean a thing where you have to roll multiple times to gamble to get the thing you're interested in.

Yeah, no, I find

crazy high prices than the fucking dice roll.

So that's what I'm saying, right?

Is when that was part of the Overwatch thing and a bunch of these other games and so on, that was way more upsetting and abusive to me because it's like you're...

You're not just tapping on FOMO, you're also tapping on gambling addiction with people and getting into this whole realm of like, go fuck yourself.

You can't specifically, you can't even be the person who says, I intend to just spend on one thing, and I'm otherwise going to stick with just playing the game for free.

I find that to be bullshit.

So, when I'm looking at this and you're going, like, okay, you can, you can target the specific thing, or whatever the fuck, it's like,

is it copium where you're like, yeah, I guess it could be worse in this way, but then also, I don't know how bad it gets in

the league sense.

I don't know how often rotations come out where you're like, this exclusive skin for this league character is also going away in like four weeks.

So fuck you, get in there, do it now.

Otherwise, never.

I also don't know.

As skins get added to the game, that rotation, which is personal to you, is going to get, if you miss it, it might be

months.

So

is there that thing where it's vaulted forever and you're like, yeah, like it's going to take you three years to get a chance at it again or whatever?

Easy solution is to to put a really, really, really hard line in the sand and don't buy costumes.

Only buy the battle pass or, you know, like

just don't buy costumes.

Costumes are the rip on that.

And that's where they're going to make most of their money by far.

Yeah,

I think you gotta, you gotta, you gotta do right by you on it, ultimately, you know, if this is the way it goes and this is the way that

the genre

plus free-to-play works here, and it's been doing this for a while, and it's just

an evil that is

profitable enough to keep things going.

It feels bad for that to just become the regular.

But I also know that I,

how much do I like this fighting game and how much do I want to, how much would I pay for it and how much to support it?

This is one of my favorites.

This is, this is big.

I'm happy to pay

for a deluxe edition of this game and enjoy it because it's one of of my favorite.

But you personally, Wooly.

This discussion is actually worth more than you would ever be able to pay them.

Because we're providing them free advertising.

Well, there's that element.

Which means that it should be noted, by the way, that while I think the team behind Project L slash

2XKO is a nice group of guys, and they seem really cool.

I found out yesterday that Combo Fiend designed Warwick.

Ah, cool.

Okay.

Which means he must have a lot of cool functions.

That Riot is insanely evil and super horrible.

But as we said, I think last week or the week before, I can't get into the I can't buy products from Nestle discussion every time we talk about a game.

At some point, I have to pull back to a degree.

It's infinite.

It's infinite.

It's crazy.

And we're going to talk about,

there's this exact discussion in the difference between the dev team and the people in charge of pricing and marketing.

Let's talk about that.

The Street Fighter VI comparisons you've been making are pretty active.

It's such a good comparison, isn't it?

There's a lot to be said there, you know?

Yeah.

But I will say that I think in terms of putting out the content, showing you what the, quote-unquote, what the cosmetic roadmap looks like, and also going, surprise, the next character is here for free or rather rather the next character is out right now is a really good move in terms of um

getting the roster back up which was the biggest part of the discussion you know what okay good stuff

in in in january and being really cavalier about leaks and just being like yeah who gives a shit this is what we're working on shit post of a teemo trailer is uh yeah cool good stuff i like that i think that's a good way to to to win back you know um players and people with that and to get things up faster to the state that they want to be at with this game.

We're never ever going to see the data, but damn, it would be really interesting to see the metrics on the money, you know.

I mean, you might see the data.

Well,

you might actually see the data.

I see that.

But then you'll pretend that you didn't.

I bet you the fucking devs don't get to see that shit.

No, they have to.

They have to see the data because they need to know what characters to make more skins for.

Oh, you don't think that's a person in a boardroom pointing at an iPad going, this is what you're doing this month?

No, it's not.

Lee has shown that

certain characters get wildly preferential treatment and it's because people buy them, just like Chun Lee.

But

there are many studios and deals where basically the actual

back-end numbers are kept secret from the people making the thing.

And leveraging power is always in the hand of the publisher making the numbers.

I think

the canons are looking at a spreadsheet on one monitor

and a

network activity graph on the other monitor.

And they know

right now whether or not the game is cooked or successful.

Okay.

I think that conversation is happening right now.

This special premium skin gives you access to Rollback 3.

Your character, when using this skin, can connect to special servers that are even better.

Hey, did you know that if you spend $250 on this bundle and use this costume, it'll commonly match you up with people a full rank below yours.

Oh, fuck.

Yep.

Yep.

There we go.

So all that's interesting.

And in the downtime as well, there were some offline tournaments because the client was still playable offline

while they were updating.

So some people were doing some locals.

And all the characters are playable in training mode, even if you don't have them.

So, you know, we got to see the logistics of what does this look like when four people are sitting at a station, you know, everybody shaking everybody's hands or a cross or this or that or whatever.

And yeah, it seems like it works.

The, you know, the profiles that you have on your

start.gg account are not going to be necessarily linked in a team.

You'll just have to forego those stats.

But, you know, for the most part,

four chairs around the setup means

you can roll roll through that bracket and do your thing uh i'm curious i don't know if you can switch off though from one to another and be like okay next i'm going solo juggernaut get out of here you know as uh as the um

from match to match or whatever the case is you know i gotta go to the bathroom you start do the play the first round and juggernaut solo i'll be back in a bit

wow we'll see

um

Okay,

and was there anything else on your side?

Yeah, Yeah, Silent Hill F, I'm going through New Game Plus.

It is absolutely stellar.

The New Game Plus additions are, like,

subtle, but important.

And diving deeper and deeper into that game's combat loop is actually really fascinating because the post-game charms you get are super fucking busted.

Like, ridiculously action-game-busted.

And

the New Game Plus quest lines that are added in New Game Plus are excellent and fascinating and really interesting.

And the ending changes.

The game starts to change at about the 70, 80% mark.

So would you call this, is this Zero Escape?

Is this a

mandatory New Game Plus?

I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's definitely mandatory.

And you could just like, I haven't gotten there yet, but you could probably just watch the endings and be like, oh, yeah.

No, there's way more that changes on route to route.

Okay.

It's like It starts to subtly change in the beginning, and then it starts to change more and more and more as you get further in.

Also, to every.

I said this like last week, and I think the week before.

It's not even Silent Hill has nothing to do with Silent Hill.

I have now found three

definitive, important links to Silent Hill 1 in this game

that

make it very clear that this definitely fits into the core canon of Silent Hill.

Hmm.

Okay.

In a way that is, I'm going to guess, not upsetting or bullshit.

No, it's very, very obvious.

And it's like, ah, yeah.

Okay, that's a good dynamic.

Dahlia Gillespie does not fly over to meet Daria Gisky.

Okay.

Jeruben

You know,

it's a million times more subtle than that.

It's not that bad.

But if you know, you see it, and you're like, I know what that is.

Yes.

But yeah, that's what's

going on.

Over at twitch.tv/slash patstares at and youtube.com, Pat Stares at.

I'm going to be streaming Absalom on Thursday.

That's a sponsored stream.

As well as

I'll be taking a look at Timo and Warwick that day.

And then Friday, I'm busy getting my hair dyed.

And

then Saturday and Sunday, I'll be back with Silent Hill F and Lisa.

Okay.

How are you liking Lisa so far?

It's miserable, but really funny.

I think it's too funny.

I think it's way funnier than it is emotionally arresting.

Are you having those parts where you're like, I can't tell if this is a punchline or just sad?

No, I think there's stuff that's really sad or very moving and that it hits.

I think the game is overwhelmingly hilarious.

I think the art style goes a lot, goes a long way with it, too.

And

the kind of like

there's an energy to when things are goofy and earthbound, where it's also goofy because

you're watching a little sprite

with a really weird shape convey this whatever emotion, you know?

And like, yeah, Lisa does the same thing, I'd say.

Okay.

Cool.

Hopefully there's not too much news this week, because I do have a hard ass.

I was just looking.

So that is.

Because I got to watch this shit off my face and get things done.

And that's a whole process.

Okay.

I'm doing the math on that.

Okay, so we got about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool.

What

is going on sponsors-wise?

Give us a second.

We've got a couple sponsors this week.

Shout outs.

Do they want clown sponsor?

Not much choice.

I mean, if we

get a fucking note for

a make good because we did not endorse a clown.

That'd be really fucking funny.

That'd be really funny.

Listen,

it doesn't matter if you've got clown makeup or not.

The real clown are the people out there that are...

Wait, hold on a minute.

Guys, sorry.

Okay.

Are you alright, buddy?

Yeah,

just there was a mistake in which

seconds before,

hey,

putting competing things within the same thing.

You don't do that.

You're not supposed to do that, guys.

Oh, they hate that.

It's your job is to make sure that that doesn't be the thing on the same thing

because that's really silly.

Okay, all right.

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Yeah, my preferred headset when I'm over gaming on the couch and when Roulette's playing.

Shout outs.

Thank you, Turtle Beach.

Thanks, Turtle Beach.

And this week,

the podcast is sponsored by the Ridge Wallet.

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A quick note to myself.

And

yes.

Okay, so

last week we talked about

the

really

goofy, stupid decision that Capcom made to

charge for Capcom Cup to make it a pay-per-view event.

And we more or less discovered that their reasoning was because esports in Japan is making tons of money.

They're doing gangbusters.

They don't really care how people feel.

They are just satisfied to deal with the Japanese clientele that are willing to pay because Street Fighter League proved that they're down for that.

And

never mind, fuck you, rest of the world.

Everybody hated that.

Everybody came out and explained why that sucks because one, it's a pay-per-view event.

Two, you could have celebrated, I said you could have celebrated this by going into the battle hub of the game, by having a big in-game event where people could go watch the thing.

You could have sold colors like you did with Street Fighter V and Cosmetics to support the Capcom Cup costs as well over the years.

There's been lots of ways.

I've done a lot of shit.

Lots of ways to do this.

And then, furthermore, I want to say other people pointed out some really great observations about this, which I didn't even think of at the time.

Which

a huge one being that, how do you get to Capcom Cup?

You have to win qualifying events.

What are these qualifying events?

These are community-run events across the world that different local communities host, run, and put on.

And these online World Wire World Warrior qualifying events are all being done for free by local communities.

I was able to put in the groundwork for free so that you could charge people for the results of my labor.

And the winners then go on to these larger qualifiers and they all run through.

So the whole system of getting the people that are the competitors that are in the Capcom Cup is relying on the community and relying on the grassroots foundation of people just donating their time because they want a TO, because they like the games and think it's cool, and they like the community and want the FGCs to grow.

So people that are volunteering their time and effort are now.

basically offering up and showing and providing the means by which Capcom Cup can happen.

And then, nah, fuck you, we're going to charge and just make bank on that.

Thanks for your free work, everybody.

Good job.

Bye.

That's the extra part of it that's like, oh, yeah, you're double fucking the community because this is not even like you're showing up to fund or share any of that with the community

organizers, tournament organizers, or any of that part in part.

The whole thing is just an insanely greedy step.

So,

as this has

been a humongous, stupid thing that everyone has been upset about,

Nakayama over on the dev team, one of the two

that are directing Street Fighter VI,

started tweeting.

And he put out

a tweet of some concept art for Street Fighter VI that never got used.

And it was the whole gang assembled, and he was kind of just musing into the air.

You know, it's almost like he just walked up and said, hey, you know, just randomly talking about nothing.

Look at this cool piece of Street Fighter VI art.

I really, I really hope, I really like this art.

I'd love to see it turned into some merch.

You know,

to see it turned into merch, it would have to be decided by the esports division, which is a completely separate unit from the development team.

Look at this cool piece of art.

Isn't it kind of crazy?

Yeah, the esports division and the dev team are not at all the same team.

So if you guys want to see that turned into merch too,

hey, esports caps on, hey, please, please let them know.

You know, these are different divisions.

And so

people were like,

okay.

And I believe Diaphone is the one who bit

and,

oh, excuse me, it was Brian F.

Excuse me, not Diaphone.

Brian F was basically like, I see what you're doing here and you are fishing.

So let me ask you some questions that you can publicly answer.

And so Brian F was like, doesn't it seem strange that the esports division and the dev team are so disconnected?

Perhaps monetization strategies could have resulted in collaboration rather than just charging such a high price for streaming Capcom Cup.

To which Tatnakayama went, it sounds strange, but it's true.

Revenue targets and assigned tasks differ fundamentally by department.

Even the development team was surprised by this announcement.

At least Matsumoto and I were shocked at the venue.

That said, this matter occurred within the same company, so we're currently discussing it.

Apologies for any concerns this may have caused.

If I get scolded at work, I will delete the above comment.

And

the conversation just kind of went on, but essentially...

He explained that, like, yeah, I'm just making observations out here into the air.

And if anyone's asking me about them, I will reflect on the fact that I was shocked at this news about the esports team handling this side of the

Street Fighter 6 um and we are talking internally about it and in the past yeah there were some pretty cool initiatives like the um

buying cosmetics and stages that support capcom cup that was the dev team initiative on street fighter 5 that's crazy

because everybody loved that shit yeah

like the game they made you know um so he basically spells out that this is another case of you've got the people making the game and then the people responsible for monetizing and they had no idea and were just as blindsided watching this ignorant fucking move play out and the greed that they don't get a say in is part of why we're seeing this happen, you know?

Um, I'm imagining, hopefully, that if we're seeing that, like, it's not just a

users versus um

Street Fighter VI case, but this is also internal developers also upset at this.

There's a bigger chance that there's pushback here that they might have to respond to or do something about.

But it's,

I appreciate that Yanakayama is effectively going, I can only say so much, but yeah, I agree.

This is some dog shit.

Please ask me about it.

It's crazy that we're like doing a podcast where we have to talk about Riot putting out $20 skins, but then we still segue into like, man, Capcom's fucking it up with Street street fighter like guys you could could you have just waited like fucking three weeks to do this so you didn't have such like a dire comparison point no because the eat sports division is not paying attention nor does it give a fuck about what anyone that's playing the game or part of the community is saying or doing they're not paying any attention at all they're just looking at the numbers rolling in on street fighter 6 japan videos and live streams with vtubers and deciding their polit their policy based on that.

Completely oblivious and give no shits.

And again, esports in Japan has been fucked from day one, you know, as Momochi was warning everybody about.

It's just been this corrupt, evil, shitty thing,

you know, with the Jesu and all that.

So

I'm not surprised.

You remember when I said that I don't think anybody in esports has ever figured out how to make a single dollar?

Somebody quoted me on fucking Blue Sky with that.

And I'm like, oh, I wonder who.

And they had like a sad face.

Like, oh, oh, you're, you're a guy in esports.

Yeah.

I was like, oh, you seem cool.

Follow you.

Yeah.

You know, you have to wonder if it's like, hey, welcome to Capcom Japan.

Here's the Monster Hunter offices.

And you see, like, someone with the little, the little, the little cat ears and the muscular chef, and they're like, yeah, and here's the Street Fighter guys.

And they're doing their own little dev bracket internally with each other.

And then here is the esports team.

And it's just a thick purple miasma coming out of a cave, you know, and

this guy's still alive.

Like, nobody, no one,

don't go down that hallway.

No one talks about going down there.

You know, that's the fucking esports crew.

Yeah.

And to show up now, multiple years in to this game also and like be like, thanks for all your hard work.

We're going to take it from here is fucking just the absolute audacity, you know?

So yeah, full blame, of course, to

everybody

that is on that side of the team and the higher ups above them that are allowing them to make this decision for the product.

Batshit.

What's your quote here?

It feels to me after watching esports exist for 30 years that no one can, no one in the corporate side of esports has literally known how to make even a single dollar.

I was like, oh, man.

Wow.

Every time they make a dollar, they fuck up their product.

Every time they crash it.

That's fucking crazy.

Well, you know, I'll tell you who I have confidence in.

You know, who.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I bet this is a real statement.

Oh, yeah.

I think Microsoft has what it takes.

Yeah.

So what?

To make some profit.

Yeah.

What do they got profit?

Why?

What?

Big profit coming.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, is it?

Yeah.

You know?

Have you seen Game Pass?

Wait, that was this week?

Bro, I thought that was last week.

I mean, there's a lot going on, and

it seems to all kind of cycle around the same same event, the same story.

That same story we talked about, where all the employees are going, yo, this AI shit at Microsoft is kind of fucked.

And they're forcing everyone to be followed by a little droid that's there to try and steal their soul.

Yeah, so it seems like it's just extending out in every direction.

So

a bunch of Game Pass-related shit rolled out and was announced.

In particular,

what did we discover?

We see an announcement here

about,

oh, I should start by saying this.

The existing Game Pass

prior to this 50%

increase in costs and price and all these other plans that rolled out here was considered profitable, by the way.

Took in $5 billion in revenue last fiscal year.

So

according to TGS 2025, Game Pass, as it was, was making money.

All right?

Just keep it.

They have to hit the targets for 100 million users.

And upcoming costs of all kinds of other new

initiatives that we're running, right?

So things were fine, but hey,

here comes AI and everything else.

So

one.

Some of the changes in addition to the 50%

increase is some details on tiers and streaming.

So, different

Xbox Game Pass tiers, including Essential, Premium, and Ultimate, are being rolled out,

which include access to Xbox Cloud Gaming.

And if you look at the little breakdown of what the pricing or what the features of each tier are, if you get the Essential tier, you're allowed to play your games and stream them in up to 1080p.

Bro,

I'm paying $30

a month for Game Pass, so I can play every game that comes out this year, but I don't have an Xbox to play it on.

If you get the premium.

Who is that fucking for?

If you get the premium, you can also stream up to 1080p, but you can stream your own game.

Yeah, my own game, dude?

And if you get ultimate, then you can get up to 1440p, the highest quality with reduced artifacts, shortest wait times, support for select games,

and day one releases and more.

So, you know, getting priority on the servers, getting priority on the

load time.

and so on such as you cloud game.

This is all going to be up to the type of game pass tier that you're purchasing.

Imagine you're making games.

Imagine you're going through trying to to get your shit looking crispy at every resolution possible.

And then

a big chunk of one console's market is like, actually, we're selling the resolutions back to people at different streaming rates.

So

fuck off with that.

This is definitely worth $400 a year.

Definitely.

Here comes the bro, this is the fucking video game equivalent of Netflix telling you to make shows that people can follow without looking at the screen.

Without looking at the screen, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hey, well, there's always the ad-free, the ad version that you can also get, the free Xbox Cloud Gaming,

in which you get two minutes of pre-roll ads before the game is available and up to five hours of game time a month.

Five a month.

Yep.

So, you know.

Get that speed running tech out.

Who the fuck is streaming?

Who the the fuck is...

Well, no, you pre-watch.

Streaming a game for five hours a month.

You pre-watch all your long plays.

You get the rundown in your head.

You make your notes.

And then, as soon as you start, you speedrun that shit.

And then you get it all done in five hours, clean.

Hopefully, you hit credits at $4.59.

Who is playing video games on a console?

No, wait.

Who is playing video games streamed from a console for five hours a month

instead of just playing Uma Musume?

Yeah.

And to say nothing.

What the fuck is that even for?

To say nothing of whatever resolutions you're limited or capped to, by the way.

Five hours a month, more than enough stream gaming for you, young man.

This is so weird.

This is like

a fucking complete loss of understanding of how a normal person works, which is appropriate for Microsoft.

I know you're thinking, well, that's confusing.

That's silly.

I'm just going to head on down to Costco and buy my Xbox.

And I don't have to worry about it.

They don't sell that shit anymore.

No.

And according to someone that works there, there's rumors going on about

Xbox Insider saying that

future hardware, Costco is not the only retailer pulling Xbox.

There will be more.

Future Xbox hardware is up in the air air and might not happen despite announcements.

More massive layoffs incoming, more price hikes coming.

Full third-party software company is the potential future of Xbox.

So the plan is that you're going to have to stream Xbox games because you're not going to be able to find one to buy because retailers hate them?

So everything's in Xbox except an actual Xbox console.

I find it

the fact that.

So GameStops, Twitter is now dunking on

all these Xbox announcements

just with a funny with a series of like, well, that's dumb.

Just come buy it here.

And

it's insane that they're right.

You know?

Yeah, no, just

again,

you'd think you'd be the one with the clown makeup, but it turns out that a perfectly profitable thing.

That's fucking stupid.

That was...

was working, but bro, what is the plan, dog?

What is the fucking plan?

The plan is we've got some upcoming expenses and we don't know how to deal with them.

So everybody panic and change everything about the thing that was already working.

Service to a console place is already willing to fucking sell.

Xbox Division.

Zoni's gonna get so shitty.

It sucks.

It sucks, dude.

it sucks

you need someone

even the appearance of of controlled opposition is necessary to keep these companies in line to not just become the most annoying shitty garbage fucking hardware manufacturers you need competition

They fuck it up so hard and they dry it up and now Sony gets to just take it and waltz and do anything they want.

It sucks, dude.

And this is meanwhile outside of of the Xbox division is just, yeah, the march of the fucking AI just at large as they invest in this heavily to try and recoup costs or thinking that this bubble is not going to burst.

Fucking headline.

What was it?

Just zooming out from Microsoft in this context.

Wall Street Journal.

Consultants at Bain ⁇ Co., AI infrastructure spending will require $2 trillion in annual AI revenue by 2030.

By comparison, that is more than the combined 2024 revenue of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and NVIDIA, and more than five times the size of the entire global subscription software market.

Morgan Stanley estimates that last year there was around 45 billion of revenue for AI products.

The sector makes money from a combination of subscription fees for chatbots and so on.

However, the tech sector is going to have to cover a gap

somehow is a trillion dollar question.

Consumers must spend $800 billion on AI within a few years to justify investment

from the last few.

Woolly, listen, I need

$500 billion

in order to finish the puts everybody out of work machine so that they can all spend more money than exists in the world in a single year on it.

Well, like,

how am I supposed to make a trillion dollars on the puts everybody out of work machine

without you giving me $500 billion right now?

Well, because if I'm not mistaken, the estimates are that by 2030 is the timing when everybody's going to be out of work, and it'll be, quote-unquote, a painful few years before you can just wait for life to get better as AI does everything for you.

And that's an inevitability that no one can avoid.

And we're heading for it.

So just hang out.

It can't be avoided.

So just hang on till 2030.

Yeah,

so I was doing some economics looking into, and apparently

above 80%.

of like the U.S.

GDP right now is like tech spending for companies on this shit.

Oh my God, man.

It's just infinite investment in a thing that doesn't make any money.

And so when China comes out and goes, here's this one that does it cheaper and the level of pant shitting can be heard.

Or nothing.

Or nothing.

Or just nothing.

Or just nothing.

Yeah.

Did you see?

Who the fuck was it?

It was like

NVIDIA is investing in Open AI

so that Open AI has the money to give to NVIDIA to get their orders.

So that they don't fucking implode?

That's a check scam.

That's a check scam.

Oh my god.

Okay, guys, ATM trick.

ATM trick, I'm telling you, you write a number down and you deposit it, and then you get the money in your account right away.

It's crazy.

It's all passing the float.

It's where they're using the money in between the deposit process to give themselves their own orders.

Can we just go back to complaining about rollback every week?

I would love to fucking do that, but 2xKO is here and it costs too much money.

Because now the fact that the mind-numbing conversation that everyone has to listen to is the weekly AI fucking shitstir is deeply upsetting.

And unlike rollback, which eventually does

reach some sort of conclusion,

this feels like it's just forever.

And I think, and whereas, you know, the person who hears the word rollback and goes, oh God, they're doing it again and rips the headphones off, like, fair enough.

This doesn't concern or give a, you don't give a fuck about it.

And you can just comfortably be like, yeah, who knows?

This thing is unavoidable because there's also a level of frustration I have with it where you're like,

there's a bunch of folks that are like, I don't get it.

What's the problem?

This is fine.

This is, there's no issue here.

No, No,

I'm not going to engage with the conversation about when you talk to somebody about a concern, about a large, about any issue that's larger than your front yard.

And they go, ah, fucking don't care.

Who gives a shit?

So it's actually going to affect you like really fast, bro.

So not even that, but like just the misplaced vibes.

So for example, one of the prescient stories I feel relevant to some of this is Zelda Williams, Robin Williams' daughter, basically telling people, can you please stop sending me AI videos of my dad?

That's so disgusting.

It's not what he'd want, and it's pretty fucking gross.

It should be criminal, genuinely.

Yeah.

And she kind of is, and she, she, there's a long thing where she's more or less explaining, please stop.

I don't want to see this.

This is not what I want or what he'd want.

And she's like, I know that people are like, there's people that are trying to troll and like be shitty and stuff.

And she's like, I'm used to that, right?

That's fine.

That's almost like its own thing where it's like, oh, you're, you're trying to be a piece of shit and that's whatever.

You can just block the person and move on.

But she's basically going, no, it's people who are actually fans of him that think they're doing something that I would like that are the worst here because they are.

They're doing this like out of a place where they think it's good.

So she's saying, please, if you've got any decency, stop doing this.

Stop sending it to him to meet to everyone.

Full stop.

It's dumb.

It's a waste of time and energy.

It's not what he'd want.

It's gross.

You're not making art.

You're making disgusting, over-processed hot dogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and shoving them down someone else's throat, hoping that they'll give you a little like and a thumbs up.

You know, it's like, yeah, like there's a bunch of people that are going, don't you think this is so cool?

Look, look, it's the memory of your dad.

Look, don't you think it's cool?

Oh, isn't this great?

Like, that's the part that's worse because they're not even just trolls and beam and pieces of shit.

They think it's a good, genuine thing.

You know?

fucking depressing man

that's the part of it that i'm like yeah that sucks because yeah zelda williams is all right you don't know how to get across to

you know again person scrolling seeing the facebook generated movie poster going wow expendable zait that's crazy i should say

Look at this video.

Like, wow, look at Robin.

I should send this to his daughter.

She would love this.

She would be so touched by it.

That fucking insane dystopian step that we're already fully in, you know?

Alright.

Let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send him a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Jigsaw says, Hello, there's a bomb under your chair.

To disarm it, you must defeat my challenge.

All right.

Name a single character from Concord.

It's only been a year, after all.

Fucking bye.

I love you, wife and son.

I am dead.

I am so dead.

I'm going to throw the dog as far as I can.

Hopefully, he escapes the blast.

I am FaceTiming my wife and child right now, and I am kissing them goodbye.

It's over.

I'm going to make some money.

But I'm dead now.

I'm dead.

I'm sorry.

Sorry.

You know?

Blame toxic

fucking trash robot named like fuck ass

death

Hold on.

Death due to junk bot.

I'm going to go junk bot.

Fuck it.

Death due to toxic positivity.

Write that on my tombstone.

Oh, I'm dead.

Oh, hold on.

Let me see.

I can't even find it.

John Concord.

John Cord?

Was John Cord one of the characters?

Okay, the John Fott's name was

one-off.

Oh, there's a fucking character named Baz, dude.

Shitty goggles.

Did I have a chance?

Doctor Lady.

I didn't have a shit.

I didn't have a chance.

No.

Not even close.

Not even close.

No, never.

I never would have gotten it.

I'm dead.

I'm so dead.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jigsaw.

Sorry.

Fucking rip me.

Okay.

So, let's see.

Ambrose from Albuquerque says, hey, like a dragon mini-game completionists.

I'm a competitive, reachy Mahjong player from

Albuquerque, New Mexico, where there's effectively no community around the game.

Been trying to increase local interest to have players I can have matches or tournaments with, but the game is daunting in person to most.

Best way to play Mahjong now is a Guner Girl Gacha game that I've been getting friends to play so that they'll learn and they'll be willing to play in person.

Is it wrong to put players into a Gooner gambling app in order to get people to play Mahjong with me?

Well, considering Mahjong is also gambling, I don't know.

Maybe?

Like,

I...

Like, just because you're not playing it as gambling doesn't change the fact that Mahjong is gambling.

So you are looking past their addictions to get to

a means to the ends, and the ends is a noble goal, which is playing with your friends and creating a community.

And I understand and respect that.

I think that you can perhaps give a warning that the Guner gambling app

is simply a stepping stone to your ultimate.

Good question.

Yeah,

I think as long as you can explain that the Guner gambling game is a stepping stone to your ultimate final goal, and they're aware of that,

then they can go in knowing what they're in for, and if they fall to it, then it's their fault.

Is it this this this this question is like it's like the it's missing its own question because like it it like this this dude's not gambling mahjong, but mahjong is gambling.

It's as much gambling as poker is gambling.

You can play poker for funsies, but it's gambling, right?

So, like,

like there's like the actual question is like,

is it wrong to like

tickle my friends' balls while they practice gambling?

Like, is it wrong to send my friends to practice gambling and get their dicks hard?

Or should I just

fucking weird?

Like, it's such a strange situation.

Yeah, I mean, look.

You probably skip a couple steps in this process.

I'm just saying.

If you really want to play Mahjong, you can skip a couple steps.

Guys, I want to hang out and have a fun time with my friends.

And when you come over,

just part of,

you're going to need to take the spoon and,

you know, peat this up and grab this belt and just

need to sample a little bit.

I thought you were going to say something different.

I thought you were going to go on like a totally different tangent.

No, no, no, no.

You're going to need to sample a little bit of the heroin

to see,

you know, to just get in there a little bit.

And then you're not going to be, you're not going to be addicted.

You'll be fine.

I thought you were going to say, like, bro, if you want to get in here and play Mahjong, you got to turn the knob with your knob.

I mean, it's a no-flastid Mahjong zone.

Look, just

call Richie by hitting the table from underneath.

Ah, there we go.

Okay.

Good, good.

The four wins.

And such.

Yeah, that's.

It's fine.

Just one hit, one hit of the meth pipe, you know, and

then we can.

You know they got super fent now?

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Invisible doses that are like

a pin of a needle are lethal.

Dudes just can't get high enough.

I can't believe it.

Listen, it's the gaycation, isn't it?

It really is.

You just need to give yourself over to it.

I respect the fact that that Ambrose from Albuquerque just wants to get together with some friends and participate in some good old-fashioned communal mahjong.

You know, no problem there.

If they get addicted, it's their fault.

If they start gooning too hard, it's their fault.

They should be able to see the truth that is pure mahjong camaraderie on the other side of this journey.

Isn't Mahjong like super vicious?

Oh, yeah, it's brutal.

It is selling the skin off your back and your family on the table brutal.

All right, and let's take one over here.

Chris from California.

Hey, Lord Fathers and Castle Super Dads.

As someone whose job was retail and I now work in a warehouse, I've grown accustomed to people ignoring signage and doing whatever they want.

Rather, they get angry when people blatantly ignore signs because it inconveniences them.

And I've devised a new strategy.

I assume everyone is illiterate until proven otherwise.

Now instead of getting mad

dude, he's

he's right.

He's super right.

Now instead of getting mad, I just feel bad for them.

After all, they can't read.

It's crazy

how many people

will not internalize signage if it disagrees with what they want to do.

It's absolutely nuts.

If a sign is shown to people and it's something they don't want to do or tells them to not do something they want to do, their brain will delete it.

Like, like they never saw it.

So, I used to live near a street where

there were like the cones up and the detour signs

to not turn, to not go down this street, connecting to another major street.

But

the inconvenience and the fact that your ways map told you to go this way made a lot of people just go,

right and you can and and i would walk by an intersection and see that exact moment of processing where sometimes for example the passenger seat person would get out and stand there and kind of look and they're watching as the blocked street has a promenade of people on foot walking by where it's like the reason why this is blocked is because pedestrians are crossing right they're not and they're staying in the street and they're kind of doing the math over like could i just could i just drop can i just can i just barrel through the pedestrians and it'll be okay i'm thinking about it and honestly about 50 of them do yeah

and like there was a there's a thing where i would sometimes be like i'd see it and i and like as i'm sometimes too far away up the street to see the pot to see the the the turn happen and i've caught people getting out and moving the signs out of the way to make room to go through into the pedestrian thing.

And if I'm there, I'd be like, hey, it's fucking closed because there's people walking.

What are you doing?

And more often than not, is that, oh, it said because the GPS, I didn't, I didn't, I, oh, you know,

I'll get one.

I'll do one.

You want better.

I'll give you the single most useful sign that is the most commonly ignored sign in all of human society on foot.

that is the wet floor sign.

The amount of people that I saw see me mopping a floor,

see them look down at the sign

and just go, fuck it.

I'm going to walk through and then fall and then get mad, to which I just point with my hand going,

but I'm holding a mop.

I'm standing next to a bucket.

There's a sign.

Oh, I understand the risks, but it won't happen.

It won't happen to me.

I got better balance than that.

That's that's you know.

No, no, no.

I see them see the sign, and then I see them see the sign again

after they fell, like the sign tripped them.

Like the scenario, like

manifested post-trip.

The thing, like, it's, it's, there's always, because I always feel there's always the slip and fall version of that, too, where you're kind of like, ooh, dollar signs in their eyes, right?

But with the fucking, with the street traffic moving the pylon out of the way to get into the place where people are walking and roll people over thing, you can see the math where they're like,

I understand,

but the inconvenience is just not worth it.

And also, I'm used to going through life not actually giving a fuck about other people.

Like, that's what you're really seeing is the person who goes, yeah, but it's not me.

So it's not a problem.

Like, it's, it's a very simple.

That's that science for other people.

That's it, right?

Like, that's like, I'd say in your case, you're looking at somebody who's risking themselves being really dumb making that decision.

And here, you're looking at someone risking other people being like,

but

it's not me, so who cares?

Well, you remember, you remember when I lived

in my apartment

and next to that overpass, and there was the Tim Hortons on the corner?

So, those lights,

people in that neighborhood, were just like,

I don't care for these lights.

Optional.

Yeah.

These lights.

And there were cops that would hang out at that Tim Hortons

all the fucking time.

And they would get their fucking quota like no problem.

They didn't have to bullshit speeding tickets or nothing because every single night, someone would blow through that fucking light

full red.

No, I can't turn right on a red light, but Tabagnaka can go right through it.

Yeah, amazing.

Amazing when those calculations happen.

You know, you just,

um,

and well, anyway, the amount too, I will say that, like, from just, you know, getting the, getting the, from doing the, the driving stuff I've been doing and trying to get that going, and looking at the level of insane selfishness kicking in with some people's driving decisions and aggression, where you're just like, like, what was your thought process here?

And many a time, the thought process is that

there is.

Well, the thought pro it didn't have one

slash

other people will just have to move for me.

And other people's driving skills will have to be so that they'll have to avoid me because I'm just going to play chicken and not care.

And I'm going to rely on society to accommodate me being an asshole because that's how I've been rolling so far.

So I've been in my aunt's, my mother's sister, my aunt's car one time in my life.

And my mom was in the car with me and it was me, my aunt, and

me, my aunt, my mom.

And we were in Toronto.

And my aunt was in, we're in downtown Toronto in one of those big, gigantic intersections next to that big mall.

And she was at the furthest

rightmost lane.

Of a, I think it was like four lane road.

Like it was four or four.

And she went, oh, fuck, I missed the turn.

And during the green, just pulled a full U-turn all the way to the end of the other furthest most lane as we're going, what are you doing?

She's like, oh, they'll stop.

They'll stop.

Yeah.

And

people had to slam on their brakes to not kill us.

And she's like, see, they stopped.

And my mom was like, we're going to go have your dad pick us up.

We're not going to leave with your fucking Christ, the decision-making prowess.

Oh my god, I've been in a car with a driver who missed an exit, and I went, Oh shit, we missed the exit.

Back up, back, just back up.

Not even the

person just had,

excuse me, a really, really low like the person

not good under pressure, panic, and went, oh, oh, God, and turned midway into

through the median and basically right down between the exit and the road into a snowbank.

Great.

Right through a sign.

And I'm just sitting there like, okay.

We're alive.

You shouldn't be driving.

No damage.

Everything's okay.

Like that.

After missing an exit, you should not drive.

We're all safe.

I will never ever point out to you when you've missed a turn ever again.

I will simply wait for us to miss it and then say, By the way, our turn was back there.

So

next time around, let's make it the next exit.

And that was it.

Because,

yep, I saw you under pressure and our lives were in danger because you couldn't handle it.

And that fucking sucks.

Okay, update.

Update your profile.

Alrighty.

Have a good week, everybody.

Take care.