CSB346: Funko Haters, Lend Me Your Hate

Speaker 0 Oh,

Speaker 0 yeah,

Speaker 0 chill.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Welcome to how's your shirt? Welcome to Castle Shill Beasts.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What's up? Not much.

Speaker 1 Have we mandated our necessary amount of shilling? There we go. Hey,

Speaker 1 How are you doing?

Speaker 1 I'm doing great. Hey, Caboose, do you want to kiss Wooly?

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 he's allowed.

Speaker 1 There you go. The kiss.
The kiss now. That's that's.

Speaker 1 I mean, I am not white, but I will accept that.

Speaker 1 Oh, you thought that dog was really cute when you were here.

Speaker 1 You were sweet on him. Yeah, I know.
Just

Speaker 1 little legs. Y'all aren't beating those allegations, whatever they are.
Whatever they may be.

Speaker 1 He's just a little baby. Hey, man, my toddler the other day, I was like, hey, buddy, can I get a hug? He's like, no, I do not want to hug that dad right now.

Speaker 1 And I was like, oh, I'm going to go hug the dog.

Speaker 1 Excuse me.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 Oh, hey, I want to try something cool. I want to try something cool on the technical end of the podcast today.
Okay. I'm going to do it.
I'm going to do it without telling you first.

Speaker 1 Let's see if this works. It does.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 Wait.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 That's in two hours, bitch.

Speaker 1 It's going to be simultaneous to news.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 this footage might get flagged aggressively.

Speaker 1 No, no. I just wanted to see if I could do it.
No, I'm just going to keep it in a different place. Yes.
No,

Speaker 1 I did have on the docket that, yeah, there's a state of play that's going to be happening.

Speaker 1 So you're going to have up now in token news oh

Speaker 1 that guy just got announced is is is uh is that to be expected state of play japan yeah it's going to be a token uh bandai namco which could be from software stuff um

Speaker 1 this is a this is one to watch okay

Speaker 1 bro

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 where was it i saw i had it open okay so it's uh i got a YouTube link. I just send you that.
No, well, it's not that. Just the

Speaker 1 list of confirmed topics.

Speaker 1 RE stuff,

Speaker 1 Tokon stuff, Bamco stuff.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Hmm. Let me see.
Let me ask you, how's the shirt feel on your boobies? It feels nice? Feel soft? Yeah, the material is soft.

Speaker 1 It's,

Speaker 1 I always get worried about the sizes on these things.

Speaker 1 Because it's always different. Every single place is a different size.
Exactly. And sometimes it's just lies, and I get it, and I'm like, absolutely go fuck yourself.

Speaker 1 This is a good plush, by the way. This is a good.

Speaker 1 The quality is good.

Speaker 1 The quality. It's very high quality.
The very, very high quality shirt, very high-quality plush.

Speaker 1 Good, good quality all around.

Speaker 1 I was quite satisfied with, yes, everything they did on that. Oh, I didn't realize it said getting the the fighting games on the back.
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, they got the details in there and everything. Fantastic.
You know,

Speaker 1 it,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 they did like the Dokopon King as well, and they did like a little Potemkin back in the day.

Speaker 1 They did some cool shit. Like, no,

Speaker 1 they pulled it out.

Speaker 1 Someone in the chat asks, is the shirts over? That shirt is over forever. Wooly's shirt that he is wearing with his my goofy face as a clown.
That shirt is over forever.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry to FOMO all of you. I believe this doll is also over.

Speaker 1 The doll is over forever. Um, I believe there was a like threshold for, like, you know, if it does like super crazy good, then like you can bring it back.

Speaker 1 Um, and I think the next time we do a merch run, you guys should really hop on that stuff because once it's gone, it's just gone forever.

Speaker 1 Um, yeah, I think there's like this. It sounds like there's hoops, but like for

Speaker 1 now,

Speaker 1 as far as I know, gone forever, ever, ever.

Speaker 1 Unless we bring back a merch battle pass. I was about to really

Speaker 1 suggest a merch loot box, you know, a specific merch currency. And, you know, you could lock in the type of shirt you want to hunt for, and you get better odds, you know, overall.

Speaker 1 So that if you, if you. You're just doing low-grade rip-off laboo boo.
Yeah, well, you know, if you if you if you buy 10 shirt pulls and you don't get the shirt you want,

Speaker 1 then we got to have a pity shirt system. Nine plain white tees.
Someone will find a way.

Speaker 1 Like like we joke now, but fast forward a couple years, someone will find a way to like turn real life gacha mechanics and pity system shit into

Speaker 1 a monetization.

Speaker 1 I saw the most violently depressing gatchification of anything I've ever seen in my life the other day, I saw a website that you could input your bills into

Speaker 1 and then run a slot machine and then the payout would be that they pay your bills. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's for the gatchification. I thought for a second you were going to talk about the new Desidia because I just saw like one story about that, which was like,

Speaker 1 it's the most pay-to-win thing that's ever existed. Oh, yeah.
And I remember people on my timeline were like, oh, it's so they can sell the costumes.

Speaker 1 That's why they're turning into like, you know, cool hip Japanese people in Japan and Tokyo. And then it's like, nah.
Yeah. So that's why it was like, like,

Speaker 1 you, you start to boot the game up, you pick cloud, and then you swing, and everything you do is super weak and useless. And you lose every battle.
You can't do shit.

Speaker 1 And then you pull, and then eventually you pull for fucking Clim Hazard. And now you act, now it's OP and busted and kills everything in one shots at all.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so you go from being unable to win to now dominating everything. And that's all based on what you.
And it's just like, cool, all right. Well, that's the goal of the game.
You know, you did it.

Speaker 1 Insidia Duodecim is like such a good game. And for them to just follow it up over and over and over.

Speaker 1 I mean, you could just release like a P, like Duodecim with like two extra characters. Like, how about, hey, fuck it.
Just release that game. Like, in general.
Just re-release it.

Speaker 1 But we have a a team that has

Speaker 1 boiled beakers and stared at tubes and realized exactly how much FOMO they can attack in your brain.

Speaker 1 You know, it's way more effective to make you feel bad about not playing a game than it is to make you enjoy playing one.

Speaker 1 I think it is a genuine, like, horrible thing that you're taking these beloved characters and in order to make you feel good, you have to like force them into like this FOMO or like timed gambling thing.

Speaker 1 By the way, I'm really enjoying my woolly doll a lot.

Speaker 1 I'm really enjoying it a lot. I think you are enjoying my t-shirt a lot.
I think it looks really good on you. It's warming, it's squirming the cockles.
Where is his stick?

Speaker 1 His little accessory arcade stick. Oh, it's right here.
It's just, it's like, when I'm like, you know, moving him around,

Speaker 1 you know, he can't have it in his hands because it doesn't stick. So when he's sitting on the little thing here, then he has a stick.
Horrible business practices. Hey, um,

Speaker 1 uh, you wanna, do you want to like do a

Speaker 1 okay? So, you know how

Speaker 1 okay, I can tell I'm going into a long conversation when you're figuring out how to ask the question. All right, let's do it.

Speaker 1 You know how Vinny created one of the best moments ever on the frontcast where we were like, literally, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 What is a battleground? It's the trajectory of my life to keep that from happening again.

Speaker 1 I played League of Legends so that I know what the fuck people are talking about.

Speaker 1 Okay, so would you like to collectively hear with the audience all together now, and they're probably fine because, you know, they're gamers, capital G, but we're out here being fucking weird.

Speaker 1 So would you like to collectively together discover what exactly an Arc Raider is? Oh, I know what an Arc Raider is. Okay.
I mean, I know exactly what it is.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, besides watching some footage of it and seeing it. I played it.
Oh, you actually tried it? Okay, Because I watched some footage of it and I was like, okay, this is the hot shit.

Speaker 1 This just dropped

Speaker 1 right on Halloween. And

Speaker 1 I like the little graphic design thing with the logo with the rainbows. That's a nice little logo.
That's fun.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I'm seeing all the PvPVE stuff and all that.

Speaker 1 And there's parts of it where, okay, so I was talking about it, you know, on the show stream yesterday, for example. And

Speaker 1 the big final

Speaker 1 conversation point is like, and here's the AI voice acting, right? Yes, which is quite poor. And it's like, that's just, that's lame.
That sucks that that has to be.

Speaker 1 All right, I can give you a breakdown, a synopsis. I can give you my personal history.
I can go for it. Well, it's more.
Where do you want to start?

Speaker 1 No, well, it's more so just like, I, and I, and I don't want to like get this off if I'm completely like, you know, maybe I have to like look in touch and actually interact with the thing to, you know, draw the conclusions.

Speaker 1 But I guess I'm like looking at the soldiers and I'm looking at the tech and I'm looking at the robots they're fighting. And I'm not seeing anything that seems particularly like

Speaker 1 designed in a super interesting way artistically, I guess. It feels not generic, but it does feel kind of like, you know, a strong vision for a sci-fi

Speaker 1 concept art, you know, design would like make bolder things kind of stand out, I guess. And so there's nothing about it that's really grabbing me visually or like setting-wise.
And Ark Raiders,

Speaker 1 for the level of hype,

Speaker 1 it's attracting, it doesn't seem reflective of that. But maybe that's because the gunplay is really tight or something.
Okay, so

Speaker 1 I can solve this for you. So first of all, Ark Raiders is visual aesthetic is the halfway point between

Speaker 1 nothing, and by nothing, I mean modern military, like your PUBG, your Call of Duty,

Speaker 1 just realistic military stuff, and

Speaker 1 Starfield's like NASA punk, right? So it's NASA punk. That's a first.
That's what they called it. And that's like, I actually dug the Starfield art style.
I like that.

Speaker 1 That's shame they didn't do more with it. Okay.

Speaker 1 But it's just like, it's modern plus

Speaker 1 with a little Mad Max. It is not.
It is not fantastical. It is not.

Speaker 1 It is not, what do you call it? Striking. See, the problem with the problem.
It is intentional that it looks normal for for appeal yes it looks normal for appeal because

Speaker 1 not like anything really interesting

Speaker 1 would

Speaker 1 put off people in some direction it's it can be polarizing to go extreme with your visuals uh something i always wonder about is like when it comes to guns right are the guns closer to reality are they like future reality

Speaker 1 okay they're not they're not going into because obviously like a game like destiny can make guns their identity and go into the the the abs the extremes right yeah it's you're having an i i can't remember but it's either you have an ak-47 or you have a bay k 48 yeah um and you know and then there's the the the world of like uh um

Speaker 1 titanfall slash um

Speaker 1 fucking um

Speaker 1 whatchamacallit

Speaker 1 whatever the 3v3

Speaker 1 and uh you

Speaker 1 apex where guns are like, yeah, if you're into guns, like these are still fictional, but like there's enough going on here simulation-wise. I don't.
Well,

Speaker 1 it's got a weird like sidebar to that, where it's like, there's people who love guns, and there's people who know a lot about guns, and then there's the video game depiction of guns, and then there's

Speaker 1 emulating not the real gun, but emulating

Speaker 1 a

Speaker 1 video game depiction of a a gun.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay.

Speaker 1 So, like, you'll get a gun that has nothing to do with, like, the M16 or M14 in real life at all, and there's no design elements at all about it in any way, but it's emulating what the M16 felt like in Call of Duty.

Speaker 1 Right, right. Which, if you're familiar, you feel that and go, ooh, you know?

Speaker 1 Like, I was playing Tormented Souls 2, and the fucking nail gun, which is a pistol, has like the M1 Garren ping when you fucking run out of ammo in your clip. Okay.

Speaker 1 Like, what? Now. For a nail gun? Now, I say this as somebody who, if I remember correctly, I played Halo 2 and picked up the battle rifle and immediately enjoyed the feeling of that immensely.

Speaker 1 So I'm like, I... The battle rifle in Halo 2 is one of the guns that people go, I want the gun to feel like whatever the fuck the battle rifle is supposed to feel like.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 that was a moment of like, oh i get it i get this in specific you know speaking of the battle rifle in fucking halo reminds me the most of the m16 in call of duty okay okay so and so on and so forth so i think when i look at a game like tarkov or so it's like it's modern day it's it's fairly realistic so like overall the aesthetic is understood that like you're not really trying to do anything besides just simulate realism and a military look and that's it but the moment like they want to have robots and non- You get a little sci-fi.

Speaker 1 so they have to do it a little bit more. Yeah, and so

Speaker 1 and the moment you put your toe into the sci-fi thing, I go, oh, well, now I'm comparing you to sci-fi,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 And I go, like, ah, I am not seeing anything that is not, that's particularly inspired about, about the robot designs or the way that looks, you know, little spider tanks and the fights they're getting into and stuff, you know?

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 yeah, and so it was kind of it just, it was a bit of a, of a, like I was, I was going to be like, hmm, like, what is it in particular that people are latching onto with it, you know?

Speaker 1 And I, okay, I, I, I can tell you. The loop.

Speaker 1 I can tell you.

Speaker 1 Okay, so, uh, there's a lot. So I played about an hour of the playtest.
And then what happened was, is I put it on my stream schedule. I was like, oh, this looks like a cool hot noon game.

Speaker 1 I am going to go cover it today later on my stream.

Speaker 1 And then I was then informed, hey, go back and read the Steam page a little more carefully, which I did, and discovered that it's one, the same people who made the finals, and two, in both games, they use artificial intelligence generative voice acting.

Speaker 1 Um, and they specifically do it in a really strange way where they exclusively pay voice actors to feed their voices into the robot so that they can then use the robot.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, why not just use the voice actors you're fucking paying? It's super weird. What a weird

Speaker 1 weird future, okay.

Speaker 1 Um, and I'm like, oh, no, I'm out. But in the hour that I played it, that silence would be better.
Anyway. Yeah,

Speaker 1 I totally agree.

Speaker 1 Before I found that out, in the hour that I played it, what it was, was a slick, well-produced controller support extraction game with like well-thought-out like controls and like a focus on like being able to play the game solo.

Speaker 1 So basically, it would be the first extraction game that is like a real video game for human beings.

Speaker 1 That's how I would describe it.

Speaker 1 So, multi-platform, and I'm seeing lots of conversation about, yeah, it's not, people are not necessarily getting into fights, and that, and yeah, the fact that I guess controller supporters thing means it's not automatically mouse and keyboard as well.

Speaker 1 So, it has a broad appeal. Yeah, and you can okay, okay.
It has a extremely broad appeal. Specifically, Ark Raiders is interesting because we're going to talk later about Marathon a little bit.

Speaker 1 Ark Raiders was the game that when people were playing the Marathon Alpha, they'd be like, Well, the fucking Ark Raiders Alpha just happened.

Speaker 1 Why the fuck don't you have X, Y, and Z that the Ark Raiders alpha has?

Speaker 1 And then the response from Bungie would be like, Well, we're not doing it like that. And the response to that would be, but why? It's better.

Speaker 1 It is kind of weird how new extraction games can't escape plagiarism,

Speaker 1 just can't.

Speaker 1 Uh, I'm of the opinion that if they were willing to jump through all these hoops to get AI voice acting in their game, that they definitely use generative AI in other places.

Speaker 1 Oh, absolutely, just they're not going to get caught as easily. Absolutely.
So, that's why the voice acting part is the part on the Steam page that they admit to.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, this is this is there's a bit of a litmus test there, I'm sure.

Speaker 1 And again, with the previous game, um, I think I was seeing as well, like uh, the recent, like Hoyo was like hiring like, you know, they're actually hiring AI developers on the team.

Speaker 1 And then oh yeah, Mihoyo's way into AI. And that there's like, there's cat, there's NPCs that have like, that are AI generated dialogue that are talking to you in

Speaker 1 one of the games.

Speaker 1 I remember talking,

Speaker 1 I remember I followed little Karibo. You remember, yeah, yeah, Karibo, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I follow him on, yeah, he's reporting on the Hoyo stuff, and he's super, super intense on all that voice acting stuff. And as a result, I've been able to keep like a lot better informed on it.

Speaker 1 And the long long and short of it is that mihoyo was like super crazy anti-union anti-voice actor and just really nuts about it and people said well they never well just because they rip off their voice actors and break up their unions doesn't mean that they'd use ai i'm like of course that's what that means oh my gosh that is the next logical step that is the next step it's right there it's it it's the the number one thing you want to do when you're any of these companies that are just embracing and talking about the potential in the future and yada yada is like you're trying to just fire as many as possible.

Speaker 1 I want to make the thing without any labor. I just want to put money in and get all the money out.
That's it. Come on.

Speaker 1 Okay. So that's kind of.
But yeah, the appeal is that it is it is the fortnight to all other extraction games' PUBG.

Speaker 1 Where it's like, hey, look, it's well put together and it's like a regular fucking video game for people. And kids can play it on a hacked-together pile of shit.

Speaker 1 And kids can play it with controllers on their consoles, and you can play it cross-platform as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 1 For all intents and purposes, from my personal experience, well, the way I see people talk about it and its own reviews, it appears to be a fun, well-put-together, quality-made game.

Speaker 1 Except for the part that it uses like wildly unethical processes to actually build it. So it's a hard pass for me.

Speaker 1 And one of the things that's getting increasingly frustrating as I watch the scroll here is that when people go, oh, it's got AI, okay, hard pass.

Speaker 1 To which some folks will say, well, the millions of people enjoying it, they don't care. I'm like, you seem like you care.
You seem like you're invested in everyone giving you the free pass.

Speaker 1 You can enjoy anything you want. I'm not even telling anyone.
I almost never tell anybody to enjoy or not enjoy or whatever. Everybody's personal buying decisions are their own.

Speaker 1 But there seems to be like this personal investment in people who do things that they know maybe they shouldn't do or maybe shouldn't support.

Speaker 1 And they're desperate, desperate to get you to admit, well,

Speaker 1 you would do it too if it wasn't. No, I wouldn't.
No,

Speaker 1 they doth protest too much. You know, like it's a preemptive defensive thing against the

Speaker 1 argument they know is coming, slash they feel already. I saw that with the Hoyo stuff, there's been a turn.

Speaker 1 Apparently, initially, a lot of the fan base was like against it. But when it got introduced into, let me get this correct.
Is it

Speaker 1 Petit Planet?

Speaker 1 Right? Petit Planet.

Speaker 1 Then it became like, yeah, according to the Karibo Suite there, it's like, this is a good, the defense of it is, this is a good use of it. You can't stop it at this point.
You might as well embrace.

Speaker 1 And it's like, yeah, no, I don't have have to do nothing. But that's that.
I had to do shit.

Speaker 1 I mean, that, but, and you're kind of just like, this is, but this is this little like, like, the you can't stop it part of it is like, yeah, that, that, that is going to roll forward.

Speaker 1 But yeah, you can still point that out.

Speaker 1 And I can still tell my mom, hey, when you Google something, um, you can type minus AI in this Google search to not see that thing up front or click the link at the end of the Google, of the AI thing to at least see the source on what you're reading, please.

Speaker 1 That's one of the things that I've picked up over all these years. And it's like, it's something like when people go, it's just the future.
You're just going to have to deal with it.

Speaker 1 If it was just the future and I'm just going to have to deal with it, you would not be spending so much of your mental energy trying to convince me that it's the future and I just have to deal with it.

Speaker 1 It just would be.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 Like this, this constant, like, well, you have to start now.

Speaker 1 It's going to be like this anyway. There's no point.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Fuck you.

Speaker 1 So, so when it's it would just naturally migrate that way, and then I won't have changed anything. Okay,

Speaker 1 it's it's this doomer fucking attitude to get people to just not do anything. I don't like well, I have a lot to talk about, you know.
I'm just a roll right through.

Speaker 1 I have gotten a weirdly insane amount of blowback for me going, hey, when is the final patch for this game so I can start playing it?

Speaker 1 I have had people blow up my fucking DMs and social media going, you can just play it right now. You can just play it right now.
It's fine. It's fine.
It's fine. Don't worry about it.
It's

Speaker 1 like anger at me going, oh no, I'll wait like six more months until it's fun. And all I can feel is somebody going, I wish I had waited, but I didn't.

Speaker 1 And now I want you to say that I was right to not wait and just go for it. I had another game fucking fall apart on me this week.
I played Tormented Souls 2. I've been streaming it.

Speaker 1 I really enjoy that game. There was a patch that came out Monday morning that put a soft lock into the game and I encountered it during the stream.

Speaker 1 That put

Speaker 1 a soft lock into the game, Wooly. Oh fuck.
Okay. And they're like, well,

Speaker 1 if you run into the soft lock, redo this section over about an hour or roll the patch back.

Speaker 1 I'm like, I'm not going to take three shots at this hour and a half long sequence because you put a soft lock into the game. They're like, well, this patch fixes other stuff.

Speaker 1 And but, you know, maybe we've put a soft lock in the cemetery. Yes, you did.
You did put a soft lock in the cemetery. Well, I want you to read, you've done a million.
You're the QA fucking genius.

Speaker 1 I would like you to read this fucking

Speaker 1 this fucking note that came out with this fucking patch.

Speaker 1 It's fucking ridiculous. During the beta period, we were made aware of two instances of persisting soft locks in 1.32.

Speaker 1 Sometimes the main cemetery tomb dials puzzles do not trigger correctly after it's completed.

Speaker 1 Ensure that you save the cemetery in the cemetery office immediately after entering the cemetery area for the first time.

Speaker 1 If you encounter the soft lock issue, reloading the cemetery should clear the bug. Okay.
That section's like an hour long. Yeah.
That save point is like an hour away. No.

Speaker 1 What do you fucking want from me? How do you put out a patch that has this kind of note on it?

Speaker 1 Not to mention that, well, okay, in a console world of like, you know, saving after

Speaker 1 something that is unavoidable happens, then you have an unintentional loss of data, and that's a flag anyway. So this would have to, you couldn't put that out there.

Speaker 1 Points in that game are used like increments. Yeah.
You have limited set. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 1 This would be a guideline violation, depending on the console. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Crazy. Now, and I guess it always comes down to just like you know, also, do you feel the FOMO or are you patient? Are you down to weight? Are you okay? I feel the FOMO for Arc Raiders.

Speaker 1 I kind of was looking forward to it, it looked cool, but I'm like, oh, fuck it. I got a million other fucking things I can play.
That's also the current state of things.

Speaker 1 There's no shortage, drowning in fucking games at all times.

Speaker 1 There is certainly no shortage, so that, yeah, every time you come across one or two of these little things, where you're like, ah, this is a sketchy detail. Why'd they have to do this or that?

Speaker 1 Then, so Kingdom Come Deliverance 2's final DLC, and it's like probably second second to last patch came out today this morning the game's on sale for 40

Speaker 1 off

Speaker 1 so in canadian dollars you could have bought the gold edition or whatever for 120 ish or today now that it's gotten a year's worth of patches and functions correctly for 60 bucks it's it's gotten like out of control and this is kind of off topic but yeah no you

Speaker 1 i can't stand oh well you're gonna have to eventually Well, that means I don't have to now. So to take a step back there, I will say that like, you know, while the while the thought is that

Speaker 1 right now, every time, you know, these kind of stories are discovered, somebody,

Speaker 1 somewhere reports on it or you hear about it or so, people are, devs are just going to get better at completely hiding any usage, you know, of generative AI anywhere in the games.

Speaker 1 They're just going to mask it completely. Like

Speaker 1 that other game with the clones there that we're talking about, you know,

Speaker 1 that you were playing the other day, or things where they, the, the subtitles, the translator stuff was off. And they're going to.
Oh, the altar. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Stuff is just going to generally be more and more hidden. And it's like, we're not stopping the thing that's going to let us fire everybody and save all the money just because you feel bad about it.

Speaker 1 We're just going to get better at making sure you don't find out. You know, that's the thing I expect.

Speaker 1 So in the sense that it's inevitable, you will 100% be encountering, you know, this in the future, just like completely masked.

Speaker 1 You know, yeah, also, like, it's this, it's so frustrating because, like, I see folks say, oh, I'm not going to buy this because of X, Y, or Z. Your reasons for not buying something could be myriad.

Speaker 1 It could be it's too expensive. It could be

Speaker 1 you hate one of the developers that is working on it, like personally.

Speaker 1 It could be that you don't like the color palette. It could be a moral issue with the generative, like, whatever.

Speaker 1 Nobody is owed

Speaker 1 your disposable income ever.

Speaker 1 Ever.

Speaker 1 It's disposable. I look forward to the eventual

Speaker 1 Mihoyo message that says, please stop thanking this NPC every time it talks to you.

Speaker 1 We would really appreciate if you kept the conversations brief and to the point.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyways.

Speaker 1 But yeah, that's what's going on with Arc Writers. Oh, the other thing is that Arc Writers sold 4 million copies, and I think there's like 700 million.

Speaker 1 Shit's gangbusters.

Speaker 1 It's popping off to which people go, see?

Speaker 1 See? It's like that. I don't play things because they're popular.
I don't watch movies because they're popular. I mean, that's.

Speaker 1 I do so because I think they look good. I think anyone sitting here listening to this is well aware that that is not a guiding principle.
You know what? It reminds me of. It reminds me of

Speaker 1 when I was in high school and you'd get like NPD numbers in a game magazine. And some people would be like, well, obviously Smash Brothers is the best fighting game of all time.

Speaker 1 Look how many more copies it sold than Street Fighter. Oh, my Mortal Kombat, the best.
Always sells the and like

Speaker 1 they want to use like popularity metrics there to fucking do that. The saddest, the saddest posters are the online, the active players, the Steam Spy posters for fighting games, and literally

Speaker 1 the subgroup in the FGC of people that they go to find how many active players of fucking, I don't know, KOF13 are on right now and use that to fight against people who are currently on UniL, you know?

Speaker 1 You know what my favorite? You know what my favorite of that is? They'll be like, I'll just pick a random thing. Witcher 3 player counts down 80% since launch.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a single-player game, and it came out four months ago. People bought it and they beat it, and then they stopped playing.
What the fuck? Not everything has to be fucking forever.

Speaker 1 Fucking fucking concurrent players, man. Just like jerking off to the number of concurrent players is crazy.
It's such a sad existence.

Speaker 1 I've totally disconnected myself from every sentence of in-person community in the place that I live because my personality is so vitriolic and disgusting.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to pretend I'm part of a fucking hive mine because I like big budget Call of Duty, and that means that I'm part of the in-group.

Speaker 1 Imagine if the console warrior versions of us in elementary school could have gone back and saw the exact numbers

Speaker 1 of Mario players versus Sonic players at any moment and take that into your recess fights. Toxic information.
That, dude, that, oh man, that's awesome.

Speaker 1 That's awesome.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. You know what? Somebody in chat pointed out? Helldivers 2 is like the absolute funniest one of like dead game and we're so back.
Dead game, we're so back.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like, I don't know, you see the Helldivers numbers? They're like a fucking sound wave. Like, they are up and going.
I'm guessing they release content that people want to check out.

Speaker 1 you know and then they come back and a lot of big bursts of people play it and then they they fucking get tired of it or the game gets broken or something and oh it's so over okay okay all right so there you go that's that's that's the that's the the that's the end of the the magnifying glass on Arc Raiders.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, Wooly, Vinny has caused me, like, has completely reoriented the way that I viewed it. Yeah, that was wild.
That was a big one. Like, that will never happen to me again.

Speaker 1 So it'll keep happening to me, but the, but the difference is, I'll go, why all this noise about Arc Raiders? What's going on over here? You know,

Speaker 1 I'll tap my stick and ask the kids what's going on.

Speaker 1 Hello, fellow children. What is What is going on? See, here's the thing, Wills.
You don't have to do that for that much longer

Speaker 1 because you have a child now.

Speaker 1 So soon you just get to skip that.

Speaker 1 It'll take about like, I don't know, seven, eight years. And then she brings it to you.
She's going to skip that process.

Speaker 1 Like, hey, little baby Woolly, what is up with this?

Speaker 1 And then they'll just tell you. Yeah, okay.
And they'll roll you their eyes. Right? And they'll be like, oh,

Speaker 1 what I okay. So.
Little zeitgeist machine. There you go.
Because you'll be like, is it skibbity? And then they'll just throw up on the floor from embarrassment. Like, dad, God, dad.

Speaker 1 Skibity's from before I was born. Oh, my God.
6'7. Duh.

Speaker 1 That's also from before they were born. And well before.

Speaker 1 Needs to be Sway.

Speaker 1 Fetch. Good old Sway.
I prefer Fetch, you know.

Speaker 1 But yeah.

Speaker 1 I saw, I saw, I saw a funny meme. I was like making Fetch happen.

Speaker 1 I saw a meme that was like, it was a picture of,

Speaker 1 it just said, like, I've created the ultimate meme that multiple generations can never understand.

Speaker 1 And it's a picture of the character six from Blossom

Speaker 1 and then the character seven of nine just next to each other.

Speaker 1 There is. There has to be a winner.
And you're like, you're like, oh,

Speaker 1 this is indecipherable.

Speaker 1 You will never know.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 In any case. Yeah, that's what's up with Arc Raiders.
And there's a big controversy amongst

Speaker 1 mouth breathers that New York Gamer gave it a bad score because they think it's a morally repugnant game.

Speaker 1 Oh. That's it.
Okay.

Speaker 1 That's just another version of. How could they give?

Speaker 1 What was it? Was it Skyward Sword? Which one got an 8.8 at GameSpot? Was it Skyward Sword?

Speaker 1 It was Twilight.

Speaker 1 It was Twilight. It was Twilight.
How can you give it sounds a GameSpot? 8.8 out of 8.8.

Speaker 1 Fucking stop it.

Speaker 1 The weirdest thing was, like,

Speaker 1 I haven't heard.

Speaker 1 When I first heard 6-7 mentioned, I heard about it in reference to Skrilla the rapper,

Speaker 1 as in

Speaker 1 from the song that uh it originated from and uh

Speaker 1 you know I thought that like

Speaker 1 that would come up more but it seems like it's just evolved past its origin points and is just it's become I don't think it has an origin point

Speaker 1 I'm I'm I think we're past that I'm

Speaker 1 I'm pretty sure it does but it I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter anymore there's I think I think memes now are are stripped of their meaning by end of day. Okay.

Speaker 1 Like before they become at this point, yes. Because

Speaker 1 there is a rapper named Skrilla,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 he's from Philly, and he has a song called Doot, Doot. And in that song,

Speaker 1 he starts the 6'7 thing. And I'm pretty sure it took off from there.

Speaker 1 But I don't think that the generation that's using it is aware of the fact that that's where it started to begin with. Hey, Wooly.

Speaker 1 You don't have TikTok on your phone, do you? I don't. Okay, so I have a, you know, this is, this is tangentially related because TikTok is how I learned about the 6.7.

Speaker 1 And the reason I learned about it is because I'm on teacher TikTok where I see teachers complaining about the kids and how they don't.

Speaker 1 As you begin to raise your tiny baby into a tiny toddler, into a child, you're going to have moments of that where you're like, could I be doing a better job?

Speaker 1 And the answer is like, maybe, maybe you're not perfect because you're a human being.

Speaker 1 Now then you need to go on to teacher TikTok and have them break down how their group of sixth graders don't know how to tie their fucking shit. Oh, God.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And just like, just send yourself and like, oh, yeah, you know what? Doing fine. Doing fine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 No, there are going to be, there's going to be things in life where you're going to be that version of the dad that's like, all right, grab the wrench, we're going to the garage, you know, and for me, that'll probably be like, we're opening up this PC, you know,

Speaker 1 just just to know,

Speaker 1 just in case you might have to, hey, look, you're not doing much building of PCs these days, but you might buy a new video card, right? That's a realistic thing that'll happen.

Speaker 1 So wouldn't you like to know how to put that in? You know, so like, let me show you how to, clear the static off, sit down and safely do this, you know, at the very least.

Speaker 1 I feel like there's going to be those moments coming up.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 as opposed to teaching you how to change a tire or some useless shit like that.

Speaker 1 Uh, yo, box jam.

Speaker 1 Box jam is over. So, so it occurred on Saturday.

Speaker 1 Uh,

Speaker 1 primary objectives complete.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the primary objective was to

Speaker 1 remove Kenny from the tournament. There we go.
I got to do myself

Speaker 1 personally. No coaches involved.
No. Good shit.
Well done.

Speaker 1 When we went up against K7's team, me and Shumi,

Speaker 1 Javi and Shimada, and me and Shumi and Shimada took a 3-0. Coach didn't get involved.
The third match was me and Shumi versus Peter Park and

Speaker 1 Kenny.

Speaker 1 Stomped them out. Like, fucking get out.
Fucking leave. Sick.
Go home.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No, there are a couple of those, couple of those moments in particular, the

Speaker 1 cloud giving you advice and just no.

Speaker 1 No. No, I got this.

Speaker 1 But those two, absolutely. So, also, I don't know Peter Park from Adam.
I'm sure he's a good guy. I don't think we ever actually spoke during the entire thing.

Speaker 1 But I am also glad that my match is up against him because Peter Park in that general chat was the most violent Teemo hater

Speaker 1 of anyone in the whole tournament.

Speaker 1 He was posting, he was like crashing out like the day before posting photos of like Minetta from Hero Aka being like, losing the fucking Timo feels like getting beat from this motherfucker.

Speaker 1 And then I grabbed that photo and then put my face on it and went, get ready for tomorrow.

Speaker 1 So it was Kismet. It was Kismet.
Yeah. No, and then the tertiary objective of, you know, fucking win is, is, yeah.
Unfortunately, was not successful.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 uh, there was a back and forth. Uh, it was not a live back and forth, but uh, I started off the Sejan, sorry, the box jam slam going, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing in C2.

Speaker 1 I'm just a little guy, I'm just a little birthday boy, I don't even know how to fucking play fighting games. I don't know what the hell Sajam's doing.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, I'm going to get killed. And to which Sajam then responded on his show.
You are the top-placed seed two player. What the fuck are you talking about?

Speaker 1 To which I respond, then why didn't we win, Sajam?

Speaker 1 Obviously, your seeding needs work. Because you're a good fighting game player that just doesn't care about learning it.
You just want to, you go in. Oh, Wooly, I got.
That's it.

Speaker 1 So everybody, everybody in in team cloud got way

Speaker 1 way stronger over the course of one week in fact almost everybody in the slam did like

Speaker 1 I would say everybody jumped at least two full ranks

Speaker 1 and not like Emerald one to two but like from like I'm in master now there you go

Speaker 1 which is a big jump from me scrubbing it up in Emerald yeah

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 a little optimization here and there and tightening up recognition you know, I still have to fill out my feedback form

Speaker 1 about like how I think. And it's like, I think

Speaker 1 this is going to be controversial. I think you should only allow one fighting game streamer per team.

Speaker 1 Okay. Okay.

Speaker 1 Because some teams

Speaker 1 had five, and the argument was, well, they play Smash and Tekken. It's totally different.
But they're still career fighting games, streamers and professional players.

Speaker 1 So I thought the original slam kind of thing was like going for general streamers and FGC coaches as the pair. And I believe that kind of was the spirit of sort of how it started.

Speaker 1 But at a certain level, you are appealing broadly to a lot of different folks out there. And, you know, you got to pull in a mixed bag.

Speaker 1 And there's a lot of FGC streamers out there that are not necessarily like competitive players, but they're, they got followings and they're more casual and they're in there, but they kind kind of know what they're doing as opposed to this is week one at touching a stick, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But what I will say is

Speaker 1 the brilliance of the slam format, and you know, of course you know this because you've been in this experience before. It's been a long time since, but

Speaker 1 you guys in the room hanging out while each other's playing and chatting and talking over your matches, that is the homies hanging out at the event while your friend is playing in their set.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And you're standing behind them, right? And you're encouraging them and you're having that social event and that fun.

Speaker 1 And showing that off online to people on a stream is so fucking brilliant because it's an amazing part of fighting games that is not seen at all by the general population. And never, never.

Speaker 1 So like we streamed practice sets and we also streamed just hanging out after.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 1 we got eliminated in about three hours. Me and Javi and Cloud just like hung out on fucking voice watching the rest of the tournament for like four and a half hours.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just shooting the shit and talking about like

Speaker 1 the game's balance and whatnot. And now we're in a big old group chat and we're going to have a peak stream later this week.
There you go. With the team Yappers.

Speaker 1 I will say Sejan was right about one thing. That group of people had like

Speaker 1 more than twice as much chatting

Speaker 1 compared to all the other teams

Speaker 1 combined. Okay, okay.

Speaker 1 Like most people's comms were like, that's good. Go in.
No, stay out.

Speaker 1 Go for the super.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, we were just like fucking yapping the whole fucking time during all of this.

Speaker 1 So you do that thing, which I've seen you do a million times when we walk into a party where you're just like, I've got a Rolodex of ridiculous stories and I'm going to fill every blank moment of dead air with that.

Speaker 1 Every single moment.

Speaker 1 Let's just go.

Speaker 1 When I run out, then I'll breathe. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 to let people know, like that, you know,

Speaker 1 if a tournament is happening and it's like a two-day event and it's like a Saturday and a Sunday or whatever,

Speaker 1 you're playing and your friends are playing for, you know,

Speaker 1 maybe half an hour or an hour total, but so much of that time is the hang. So much of that time is just like watching and, you know, talking about tech and playing and shooting the shit, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, some of that is like, did you see Leffin's new video? Oh my God, I hate him. There's, there's people talking, people getting into all kinds of shit.

Speaker 1 You know, it's, it's literally like that social aspect of it is huge. And

Speaker 1 that's why I was talking about how my number one feature I want for the next generation of fighting games is like, so one, 2x KO has the plus invite your buddy button right there but i want a game that like really is like get into a comms group with multiple friends and find a way to play online together while you watch each other rank up you you you lab you just chill because this is effectively people are looking for the hang when they jump onto extraction shooters when they jump onto any other genre it's yo friday night we're home let's let's fucking kill some time let's show who's who's where we drop it i'm playing peak twice this week for this exact reason that's it, you know?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 that's a brilliant aspect of the slam that comes through. Oh, I think the slam is like the most entertaining tournament from every perspective possible, all variations of it.
I think it's fascinating.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 bringing in people who don't know boo

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 1 a given game and seeing like, all right. Let's see how fast these coaches can bring these people up.

Speaker 1 The answer is pretty far, pretty fast. God, imagine thinking

Speaker 1 your game is above this. Imagine thinking your company and your game is above this tournament in format, and

Speaker 1 you don't need the help. You don't need the fucking whatever.

Speaker 1 Anyway. Also, I got to say,

Speaker 1 one of the most positive things I've ever thought in my brain about other people in a while, I was getting ready. I was like percolating in my mind about like

Speaker 1 who to give like the special shout out to for like MVP, right? Like, oh, who really? And I'm like, nah, man. Like, Cloud is an excellent coach.

Speaker 1 He is a really chill vibe, and he is an absolutely excellent coach. He knew exactly what to focus on with each person.
Simple, clear, direct changes that you can see immediately that would improve it.

Speaker 1 Javi over at iHeartJustice, he is an excellent mid-match hype man.

Speaker 1 Absolutely fantastic. And not too hype that'll scramble your brain.

Speaker 1 But like

Speaker 1 when he realizes you have the combo locked in and you're not going to drop it, that's when he goes incredible. Cloud also, we were like, oh, sorry, coach.
You did great.

Speaker 1 And his response was, I could always have carried harder.

Speaker 1 As the coach on the team, you can always carry harder. And I mean, look, you know, there were those moments where like, ah, ah, like sometimes an errant push block or,

Speaker 1 you know, a bad burst would happen. Or even.
Oh, it'll kill you. It'll kill you.
You'll kill your opponent. Or even.

Speaker 1 Or even, or even like a bad double-down super or something, you know? But like, it's like, and I would say that in each of those instances, it was like, okay, cool.

Speaker 1 That's not what we wanted, but improvise. We'll work around it, you know? And you just, you just, you don't, you don't dwell on it.

Speaker 1 No, I have to, I have to give a big shout out to Shima the Tiger,

Speaker 1 which we started calling her because she came in at seed three with yasuo and i feel like she exited after beating like seed ones like professional fighting game people in 1v1s with dead assists like absolutely meteoric increase like amazing like had the most like upward momentum of anybody and i have to give a massive shout out to shumi as the only person in the tournament who played blitz and made it work

Speaker 1 Like, she learned her Blitz shit great. That's it.

Speaker 1 Assist grabs perfect. Like, Shima is better than Brian F, who I discovered over the weekend because you texted me back that Brian F is not a black man.

Speaker 1 Evidently not.

Speaker 1 Because as it would turn out. You were sitting there as Brian F loaded in with the default character.
And I went, I don't know if Brian's black.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm pretty sure on all of his thumbnails,

Speaker 1 that is a white gentleman with

Speaker 1 and not like, and he's got, you know, he's got the coffee hair and everything.

Speaker 1 He's quite white,

Speaker 1 as far as I can tell.

Speaker 1 He does the

Speaker 1 face on all this shit. So anyway,

Speaker 1 yeah, no, Brian Four.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Brian Four. Brian Four.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 What a great experience. Absolutely fantastic.
A little disappointed we didn't do a lot better.

Speaker 1 There are two takeaways. One,

Speaker 1 man, fighting game players can't be seated correctly. Like,

Speaker 1 in general, like anybody that has old experience, they will transfer it into the new one.

Speaker 1 And the second thing is, after playing hundreds of matches of 2XKO over the past week, I really like that game. That game's balance is bad.

Speaker 1 That game's balance is fucking terrible. The four horsemen at the top rule over everything.

Speaker 1 It is crazy. It is nuts how free those four characters get things compared.
And I play Timo. I know.

Speaker 1 I stole wins. I did not deserve.
So, so it's quite interesting because you got to watch the full spectrum of skill, right? With this, with this event.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And yeah, the lower skill level play you're looking at, the more viable every character is, right?

Speaker 1 Every character is winning at low level, and then as you climb, the differences start to start to become apparent. And at the top, 100%, it is the four heavenly kings.
There's no ways about it.

Speaker 1 So one of the things that comes up is like, whenever, are you even good enough to care about tears, right?

Speaker 1 Because like in a lot of games, like top tier doesn't matter until you're in the 90th percentile of players, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that is valid in some, because there are times where, and this is, it's funny because you will see complaints about things, about characters that admittedly the people, sometimes people are like, you're not.

Speaker 1 You're not dealing with this right here. So for example, like the 2xKO.
Yeah, the burrito doesn't exist in every. Exactly.
I was about to say you're not dealing with the burrito setup, right?

Speaker 1 Like there's a, there's, and, and the 2xKO subreddit will sometimes like show you, because it's an interesting peer peek into low-level discourse based on high-level discourse on YouTube videos and tournaments.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 you're seeing this weird, like, you're not encountering this tech.

Speaker 1 Bro, I love the 2XKO subreddit because there are some fighting game people there, but like most of the people on that subreddit are like league players.

Speaker 1 And like it is a subreddit of people who like legitimately don't know what they're talking about and are getting mad about it. And it fucking rules.
It's so sick.

Speaker 1 It's so sick how no one on that subreddit knows what they're talking about.

Speaker 1 And so when a topic becomes like solidified there and it is right, it's like, okay, even beginners, even people who don't really play fighting games, right? So like, let's take Echo, right?

Speaker 1 At top tier, Echo has everything a character could ever want. He has everything.
Yep.

Speaker 1 But even in that tournament, you know what I got to see? That shit manifests at the bottom tier too, because TimeWinder is a fucked up movie. It's the strongest movie in fighting game history.

Speaker 1 It is. Right? And so, like, I think a good example of how balanced is your fighting game isn't how close individual tiers are in the spread.

Speaker 1 It's how fast do you notice these differences at low skill levels all the way up to top skill levels.

Speaker 1 Like, Yasuo and Echo and Ari and Timo are relatively high execution, but the reward you get at low execution from Echo is crazy compared to what you get at low execution for like Brawler Blitz.

Speaker 1 It's nuts.

Speaker 1 I always love to when it's like, you know, like that moment, like these moments where in the middle of the post on the Reddit, as we mentioned, it's like the person refers to, should I spend more time in the practice range?

Speaker 1 You know, and you're just like,

Speaker 1 yeah, like, okay, like the counting meme. You're counting with your thumb versus counting like this

Speaker 1 in Glorious Bastards, you know. um no it really like it is it is quite interesting to see like

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 1 the the vibe around the character because like again temo's another character where like he's annoying but like

Speaker 1 at If you're not doing some of those insane extended loops and like the mushroom,

Speaker 1 double mushroom combos and shit like that, you're not seeing all the crazy damage. If you're not seeing the double down super tag, you're not seeing this.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 But like, so I went from being middle player to like good player,

Speaker 1 right? Above average. And like, I played Timo the whole way through, and I also play Blitz.
So I get to live at the fucking edges of the fucking spectrum on both ends of it, right?

Speaker 1 I'm playing a character that is so bad, they're like legitimately busted, like parts of their moves don't work. And the other character who might be the best in the game, right?

Speaker 1 You could argue, you make the argument, right?

Speaker 1 The amount of

Speaker 1 free shit and conversion and payoff and damage and ease of use and neutral I get from one of them compared to the other is like it's like they're from different fighting games.

Speaker 1 It's like one's from alpha and the other's from third strike.

Speaker 1 It's it's crazy. Um, there's something too that like really affects uh the this this discourse too, which is like perception around things.

Speaker 1 So literally before we started this, just this morning, I saw on the subreddit

Speaker 1 someone saying,

Speaker 1 Change my mind. Combos in fighting games are stupid and a waste of time.
And unless you're a high-level player that can do this stuff,

Speaker 1 these should just be automatic. What's the point?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the long and the short of it was: this was someone who's playing Vi and basically was like, this is really annoying because it's required when you use her to do these perfectly timed dash electric uppercuts.

Speaker 1 Extremely long combos. Dash electric uppercuts.
And if you can't do them, then what's the point? And I read that and I was like,

Speaker 1 those are extremely optional combos that are not required at all. In fact, because of the timing of that uppercut, I don't do them.

Speaker 1 I literally do light, medium, heavy, or out, out, raw, launch, one, two, three, down, super. Like, I do not do them whatsoever.

Speaker 1 I could learn Timo mushroom loops if I wanted to spend all the time, but instead, I chose to learn a much, much easier, like, ground bounce loop that brings brings them all the way to the corner.

Speaker 1 And you know what? I'm happy with that. It does similar amounts of damage.
I don't get the mushroom pops from it. But like now, I have you in the motherfucking corner, which I like to put people that

Speaker 1 the perception that this is a required thing for this character and this is just what you've been told from looking at other people's combos or from you just you just or you see other people doing the combos until you just internalize that and you went down a path of already doomering you know about like this thing that you can't do and it's like you're, you're doing the advanced combos here that you, that are completely unnecessary, and the damage difference is negligible, you know?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's weird when you're putting these extra chains on yourself at any skill level that are, that you don't need to worry about, you know. Now, I'll tell you what, though.
Uh,

Speaker 1 I, you know, hey, you know, balancing is hard. They really got to take their time.

Speaker 1 Nah.

Speaker 1 Nah.

Speaker 1 Like, like, you, you, hey, listen, we have met, you know, and I have met and hung out with some people on this game's balance team, right? They're smart people, and they're part of the community.

Speaker 1 They're part of the culture, right? You, you motherfuckers can't look me in the eye and tell me that, yeah, no, TimeWinder's fair.

Speaker 1 Like, you, you absolutely fucking know better. And don't you even pretend.
And FYI, for anybody that's like, you're seeing people echo

Speaker 1 echo memeing when going, my time, my time. Uh, the my time stuff is not the time winder.
That's a different move.

Speaker 1 My time is his forward assist where he just comes at you insanely quickly, which is the best assist.

Speaker 1 So, that is like that is right, privileged for multiple reasons, mind you, you know.

Speaker 1 Um, so I've said this a couple times, and like, you know, I would love that, like, because yeah, it does certainly feel like Marlon Pai cooked his characters a lot longer than Marlon.

Speaker 1 How come you put out Timo and Yasuo? And they, like,

Speaker 1 Yasuo got nerfed nerfed massively, still like top two. Because his nerfs made him find alternate routes that did more damage in the end.

Speaker 1 He had so much combo freedom, you know. Despite the fact that this game has been in development on and off for six to nine years, I don't know how much, whatever.

Speaker 1 Some of these characters are dramatically more complete than others. Yes, yes, cooked, absolutely.
Top to bottom.

Speaker 1 Like, like, Wooly, I would like you to tell me when I am supposed to use Blitz's spinning arm move forward.

Speaker 1 When your assist is on screen covering you, right? And then when you do a million other things when my assist is on screen,

Speaker 1 and then when you can do a mix. So, if you have the

Speaker 1 thing going, then you're tagging to your other character and keeping the

Speaker 1 opponent busy and mixed, you know. Like, I have never seen another Blitz use that

Speaker 1 except by accident. Yeah, it really is just good luck, you know.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 yeah, I think what it, what I'm, I'm going to go back to what I was, I said a couple times on this, where these super privileged characters, I am, because people like are having fun with the, the, doing all the moves and the character identity and everything, let them do all the things they want, just make them die faster, right?

Speaker 1 You get make them die faster, and you know what?

Speaker 1 Don't like you get less

Speaker 1 mistakes by himself should not be able to do 80%. That's it.
That's it. Like, like, not by himself.
Come on. Give Yasuo everything.
Give him more

Speaker 1 and make him make he gets one mistake. That's it.
You know, um, Timo's got the low life, you know. He's, yeah.
So that's that's there on him. He dies faster.
But

Speaker 1 you want your gods to be gods? Let them be gods that fucking are glass cannons. Um,

Speaker 1 Akuma, it.

Speaker 1 That being said, this, this all kind of boils down to again game doesn't have enough characters if there was like twice the roster yep that like like the top tier problem looks way worse because you can have all four top tiers in one match

Speaker 1 yes and also and this is the other this is the the other um kind of like the fucking concurrent players posting um

Speaker 1 top eight posting where you see a top eight and it's all one character

Speaker 1 and you know echo and five of of them are Echo Yes. Echo Yes, and occasionally an Echo Ary or a Teemo.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then the distribution of Challenger players over, like, you see how many are Echo Yes. Half of all Challenger players are Echo Yes.

Speaker 1 You get down to 50 and below, and you're like, okay, now we're starting to see some of those other characters work into the pairs.

Speaker 1 You need to do something. It's really bad.
Now, granted, games in earlier Arcsos,

Speaker 1 whatever. But it's incredibly fun.

Speaker 1 And so, speaking of Challenger, we had Hayate, who is on that top 100 list, pop over. This is a

Speaker 1 champion Netherrealm player. So he's fucking...

Speaker 1 He's used to... This gentleman plays a fighting game or two.
It's fighting gamer two, and he's used to the shit.

Speaker 1 He grew up in the injustice zoning wars, you know, like he's

Speaker 1 right. The games where fighting or fireballs don't clash into each other.

Speaker 1 That's so

Speaker 1 upsetting. It upsets me deeply, like spiritually.
It makes me mad

Speaker 1 when fireballs just go past each other.

Speaker 1 That's weird. Anyway, so he's super good.
And yeah, he's looking to compete in this.

Speaker 1 And so he came over, played some sets, and we just got to see a touch of, a taste of like, oh yeah, this is what like top eight is really going to look like.

Speaker 1 You know, um, I've seen some crazy matches online and some, we've seen some grand finals and stuff, but just doing a long set and kind of getting a feel for how insanely oppressive he plays Yasuo Ari.

Speaker 1 And she is currently like we know she's good, but no one's really complaining about her that much. Like, if you, people who invest in Ari right now, stonks are going to be fucking high because

Speaker 1 she's not going to get touched. She's under the radar, right? So we're going to go from the four horsemen to Ari and her disciples.

Speaker 1 She is obnoxious in a lot of ways, but not as bad as the other three, loudly, because the other three are loudly more annoying. You know, dude, I can't believe I watched the whole whole tournament.

Speaker 1 I cannot believe how many sets were decided over Yasuo jumps one foot off the ground and hits down a little bit. Oh,

Speaker 1 fucking spin. The fact he can get like every move in his arsenal off of that, off of like an instant double overhead.

Speaker 1 Like, what the fuck were you fucking thinking? I mean, like, Marlin.

Speaker 1 What are you thinking? And people have to understand that, like, we have

Speaker 1 30 years of conditioning where if someone jumps at you and you block their jumping attack, you assume they're going to land and then you try to block a low attack right after that. You know?

Speaker 1 What chance? Like, bro, if you taught, like, a person day one, hey, do Yasuo and jump and hit down H, like it'll hit like 99%.

Speaker 1 What fucking shot in this earth do people in gold have against that? Like, no, seriously. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, uh, it's oppressive. Yeah, Reggie, I see you popping off.
Enjoy your, your, your Yasuo while you have him.

Speaker 1 Uh, he, he won't, he won't be here for long, but we'll see, we'll see what they do, how aggressive they get.

Speaker 1 I gotta say, though, 2xko has a fucking like underneath problem of their balancing that is fucking unique because it's all like, like, like translated characters.

Speaker 1 So, like, hey, can they nerf Time Winder? They can only knife Time Winder so much before they make that fancy cinematic cutscene make no sense.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And on top of that, it's like, why can Yasuo just do level one into level three for fucking? Well, he can do it in League. It's it's pure.
Well, they, well, they can do it in League.

Speaker 1 It's 100% accurate. That's it.
You know, and yeah, let that be a guiding principle, you know?

Speaker 1 But there's no canon reason why the samurai and the child shouldn't die faster when I when I fucking hit them because it takes work to get in there. Okay, listen.

Speaker 1 Yaso has an Akuma color palette as part of his default costume. You know.

Speaker 1 What are we talking about? He has demon flip hops. Like, you knew what you were doing.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, no, I will say though. So

Speaker 1 fighting the Hayate and stuff, I kind of, that's where I looked and saw, okay, the comforts I've had in the way I've been playing and the little differences where I'm like,

Speaker 1 this is optimized, but it's too hard. So I'm not going to do it.
It's like, no, no, no. That's the difference between winning and losing.

Speaker 1 So if you want to improve, you probably need to switch that up. And I probably need to change my views, you know?

Speaker 1 And so I'm kind of like going back to the drawing board a little bit and trying to figure things out. But

Speaker 1 I'm running into an issue now where I've gotten comfortable playing on pad.

Speaker 1 And it is, there is a thing. There is, this hasn't been relevant in a long time.
Fighting games have been omni, you could play on any controller. It doesn't matter for a while now in this generation.

Speaker 1 But there is a thing to

Speaker 1 tagging and pressing special buttons and holding them, and that is just it is easier if they're all right underneath your fingers.

Speaker 1 I've made the brave decision to say no,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, not gonna do it. So, what what I what I saw was

Speaker 1 Hayate, he put his tag button on R1 or L1 and put his special button on X. And I'm like, yeah.
Yeah, that's the left and move setup.

Speaker 1 I think it makes sense because it's going to be too hard to try to bend your thumb to hit triangle and X at the same time for certain setups. And, you know, like,

Speaker 1 no.

Speaker 1 Or just. I'm not going to do it.
Or just don't do it. Yeah.
Or just don't do it. You know.

Speaker 1 We'll see. But, and the other thing, too, of course, is like,

Speaker 1 I do want Juggernaut and Sidewinder and Sidekick to be viable.

Speaker 1 They're super busted and crazy at low levels, and then they become useless at high levels because assists are so good.

Speaker 1 But I do like the idea that somebody that wants to just come in as one character and play a Street Fighter character in an insane Marvel game can do so if they're sick enough.

Speaker 1 I have, this is very unlike me talking about games. I do not usually subscribe to this.
I am very much, hey, let's buff some of the weak people and have an unbalanced fucking Marvel ass shit show.

Speaker 1 Dude, I want them to nerf fucking everything.

Speaker 1 I want the

Speaker 1 houses nerfed. I want the fucking top four nerfed.
You want it down. Everybody.
Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Everything in this game is too strong. Absolutely.
Every good option is an incredible option.

Speaker 1 Super tag is so fucked up. Freestyle-based like burstbaiting is fucked up.
These are super super tags.

Speaker 1 This is a controversial opinion because I'll tell you right now that what people are eating, what the FGC is eating up and what people want is they're like, I want to find a way to make you block seven mix-ups in four seconds.

Speaker 1 Guess what? I can't.

Speaker 1 They want the freedom to express themselves, to go back to the player expression term. Guess what?

Speaker 1 And most of you can't either like guy working on a diabolical mix-up you're probably also going to get mixed up by the same thing you created it's a lie okay well and to be fair then the that player can just pick darius and go ah

Speaker 1 down down dp get off me you know and you can do that right there is a character who's there who just says i don't want a guest shut up leave me alone and and then they have to play around getting baited for that.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 that game's great. And I do think that the 2XKO team is brave to say the phrase, the game right now is the worst it'll ever be, which I understand why you would say that.

Speaker 1 That is the wrong way to say that.

Speaker 1 You should say this game's always going to improve or whatever. Well, okay, so an official team.
Also, it's not necessarily true.

Speaker 1 We know lots of games that were absolutely at their peak during their launch period.

Speaker 1 So, first of all, the fucking trolls also in their news announcement said, hey, Backdashers.

Speaker 1 Right? Like, so they're embracing it. But

Speaker 1 no, I think the thing, an official news update is not going to say, hey, guys, remember how Marvel 3 launched? Remember how every Street Fighter game's first version felt?

Speaker 1 Remember version one of every game ever? It's always fucking wack. I'm going to play Street Fighter 4

Speaker 1 Release, release.

Speaker 1 You know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just like, that's the thing is

Speaker 1 you're always thinking about, don't think about Ultimate Marvel versus Capcom 3. Think about the one with Sentinel, right? Think about that insane batshit vanilla release of the game.

Speaker 1 That's what you're kind of comparing this to. And when you look at those games, you're like, oh, we're doing a lot better by comparison.
You know? I got to say, though,

Speaker 1 there's like

Speaker 1 not to be a shit, and we're now theory crafting a fake discussion, right?

Speaker 1 I don't think that sentiment is even valid for the devs to feel themselves.

Speaker 1 Okay. No, I'm sorry.
Okay, okay. Because they're like, remember how fucked up Marvel 3 was? Yeah.
To my brain goes, well, yeah, it's hard to balance 30, 40 characters.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay, okay. The Marvel 2 thing.
It's tough to balance a list of 16 to 25 characters.

Speaker 1 Luckily,

Speaker 1 luckily,

Speaker 1 you guys only had to balance a list.

Speaker 1 Right. Marvel 2, nobody says shit because why would you try? Right.
Why would anyone in this world complain about Marvel 2's balance? What are you stupid? Did you just want Jill to not exist?

Speaker 1 Yeah, she sucks, but look, she's in the game.

Speaker 1 There is a reality, though, that like, unlike every other genre of video game, fighting games have this, like,

Speaker 1 they have

Speaker 1 a loss where

Speaker 1 back in the day, you put the game out and then the arcades were balancing the game for you, and then you would tweak according to the results from the machines, and then get your final version eventually.

Speaker 1 And now you don't have that, so you don't get to gather that data. You know, location testing is no longer a thing.

Speaker 1 You got to just get a bunch of, you know, good players involved in the studio beforehand and hope that they can find stuff and help you balance and tweak.

Speaker 1 But, like, it used to be a communal effort in the arcades beforehand, you know, that that's completely absent.

Speaker 1 The world of the game right now is essentially arcade testing the balance of the game right now. Essentially, essentially.
And to add on top of that, like, man, fuses are hard to balance.

Speaker 1 I mean, look at CVS2. They had six fuse equivalents.
They had six grooves. They also had

Speaker 1 like fucking 70 characters. I don't know how many it had, but it was like

Speaker 1 hard to balance the fucking CVS2 roster across the fucking grooves.

Speaker 1 I bet that was tough.

Speaker 1 Roll canceling gets discovered, and like half the players are like, thank God the game is fair again.

Speaker 1 Because otherwise, without it, K-groove was too busted. You know? Anyway.

Speaker 1 i am watching the november 18th patch with rapt attention i really love 2xko i think it is a great fucking fighting game and i'm having a blast but the the changes they make as a response to the four horsemen situation in the near term will give the expectation of what kinds of changes you can expect across what timelines.

Speaker 1 Yes. And based on the way they described it, they're like, you know,

Speaker 1 they've talked about their patching philosophy, which,

Speaker 1 you know, I generally do support. It is annoying when a game keeps drastically changing too quickly as soon as it comes out, right? That doesn't feel obviously a balancing act, right?

Speaker 1 Because games have ruined themselves doing that, but then we also got like multiple years of vanilla saga. Yeah.
You don't want exactly.

Speaker 1 So Netherrealm is the example of going too far too fast, where every 30 days it was a different game, balancing wise. And then you don't want to have exactly years of that.

Speaker 1 And now, old OGs are used to

Speaker 1 letting a game cook for a fucking half a decade, you know, before a version change happens, but that's not the world we live in anymore. It just doesn't apply.

Speaker 1 I have to point a finger. So I recently watched Leffen's discussion about the upcoming balance changes, to which he goes on this long fucking spiel about how, if anything,

Speaker 1 they're balancing balancing the game too fast.

Speaker 1 And like, we don't, we don't know if these characters are actually the best. Maybe they're not.

Speaker 1 Maybe, maybe, you know, maybe it's like Wesker, where everyone thought he was top tier, but actually Wesker's not even good.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, I think retconning that to Wesker's not even good is insane, but whatever. But I'm like, I don't want to hear.
Any word.

Speaker 1 Okay, remember last week or two weeks ago, I was like, I don't want to hear anybody just criticize Silent Hill F unless they've actually beaten the whole game.

Speaker 1 I don't want to hear discussions about balance timelines from people who came from Smash Brothers. Okay.

Speaker 1 Don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear what you think is reasonable.
Guy who comes from the community that gets a new game every five years that acts as a balance update and goes, nah.

Speaker 1 No, I want the old busted one still.

Speaker 1 Don't want to hear that.

Speaker 1 I think there is a reason. There's a reasonable amount of time to let a game cook and find counterplay for things.

Speaker 1 But I think everybody with eyeballs can look at backdash, jump back, fucking TimeWinder and go, nah, man, come on. That's right.

Speaker 1 And also, like, okay, I'll take it a different thing. I've played Echo in League, right? And I like what Echo does in Arcane, right?

Speaker 1 Running away to TimeWinder people is not part of Echo's life. No way.

Speaker 1 game fantasy

Speaker 1 echo is supposed to be zip zap zoop time shit mix up god he's not supposed to be a fucking long-range zoner

Speaker 1 he's a better zoner than janks man And like, there's stuff that like, it's like, okay, you could deal with, like, you could deal with this by, like, dash Parry, but it's really tricky on the timing.

Speaker 1 But Parry's already strong, so you can't really adjust that. Whatever the case is, what I will say is, do you remember Rising Thunder? I sure do.

Speaker 1 I really liked Rising Thunder, and I remember loving how they handled patches, their balancing, and how they went forward with things, and explaining every note and why.

Speaker 1 I gave it a patchy award back in the day, you know. Yeah, I remember.

Speaker 1 So, uh, this, if they follow suit, which is the same people, if they follow with the same balancing and the same approach they took to Rising Thunder, I think they're, I think it's in good hands, you know?

Speaker 1 Um, I think that as long as they don't engage in what I I call league or Rainbow Six Siege style balancing, that they're going to be okay.

Speaker 1 Are you familiar with the overwhelming deciding metric on balance changes in league and sieges? Please don't tell me it's DLC is OP.

Speaker 1 No. Because that's a fighting game classic now.

Speaker 1 No. DLC is OP.
Ever since Yun and Yang, DLC is top tier, and then we'll deal with it later. But for now, fucking spend that shit.
So that's not the overriding

Speaker 1 principle, but it's a factor, right? No, it is pick rates. Oh, win rates.
Oh,

Speaker 1 pick rates.

Speaker 1 So League

Speaker 1 will see people with high pick rates and high win rates, and they will burf them until those rates go down.

Speaker 1 And they will see characters with bad pick rates and bad win rates, and they will buff them until those numbers go up. Wow.

Speaker 1 Regardless of whether or not they have things or what they're doing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 It's they're just they just have two levers and they're looking at a fucking popularity meter going

Speaker 1 that's hilarious because

Speaker 1 that's hilarious because meanwhile over here is Ryu like struggling for his life each time and then at some point later on getting juiced the fuck up. You know

Speaker 1 wow just going off of popularity. Ugh.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Please, please, please. That's that's that's horrendous.
And

Speaker 1 I mean, I have to imagine, too, that the fact that you have 100 and whatever fuck characters where there's hard counters to everything means you can let bad balance kind of stink a little bit longer because you can be like, well, we'll just use the item system that you can work around it a little bit.

Speaker 1 Right, right. So it's just like, oh, well, just pick the hard counter.
Yeah, it sucks and it's

Speaker 1 unfair or whatever, but there's a rock, paper, scissors system in place. So just lean more to that, you know?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 the other thing, and this is one of my favorite parts about League that's the funniest, is that I remember even a couple of years ago watching some videos by some League of Legends content creators.

Speaker 1 I don't remember them.

Speaker 1 It was a long time ago, but they were like, I, as a professional, as a permanent league streamer, literally cannot keep up with the balance changes because they do like minor changes across like 170 characters, like every two weeks.

Speaker 1 And they're like, I can't keep track of it.

Speaker 1 It's too much and it's too fast and it's too granular. And changes get rolled back two weeks later.
It's crazy. It's nuts.

Speaker 1 The experimental live patch system they talked about is going to be interesting too, because it's like, we're going to find ways to push live patches without the game server going down. Great.

Speaker 1 Great. You know what I want? You know what I want?

Speaker 1 I want a social media update every single day. Change the properties of Yaswos, fucking whatever.
Blitzes

Speaker 1 between round one and two.

Speaker 1 Every single day. I want the Smash Brothers picture of the day for changes in a fighting game.
I want every morning. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Every single fucking day.

Speaker 1 Keep it interesting. I used to work with a dude who was a competitive player in

Speaker 1 Dawn of War.

Speaker 1 And like, I was getting him into third strike and he was showing me Dawn of War tech and stuff. And like the lists they would put out are just these encyclopedias.

Speaker 1 And like if you're a competitive player, like it was, yeah, it's the kind of thing where no strategy is ever going to last longer than a couple weeks' tops, you know? And

Speaker 1 you, you.

Speaker 1 The idea of effectively just letting the whims of

Speaker 1 what a couple people are doing with the best, Whoever's winning is currently displaying the best tech or whatever. But like, what's undiscovered is almost like not considered.

Speaker 1 It's like, it's like, if it's undiscovered, then it doesn't matter. And in fighting games, they don't really usually think about it that way.

Speaker 1 They go, oh, well, someone might eventually discover that, hey, Morrigan is really fucking obnoxious if you learn how to do her soul fist a whole bunch and you can lock down anyone, no matter who you're fighting.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. But

Speaker 1 I'm trying to find the quote of somebody on the the dev team in the patch notes saying Yasuo's offense is just too honest, so we're going to have to work for it.

Speaker 1 And do you know what I fucking found out?

Speaker 1 I found out an archived fucking thread from December of 2013 on the League of Legends fandom titled Yasuo is Disgusting. Yasuo is overpower when played a certain way.

Speaker 1 The fact that he is mana-less and has a free shield makes him incredibly difficult to kill in lane. See, there they nailed it.
They

Speaker 1 nailed it, man.

Speaker 1 Like 100% accurate renditions of these league characters. At least with Timo, all I've heard is he's annoying as fuck, but he gets his team killed.
So,

Speaker 1 anyways, all right.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 moving on,

Speaker 1 uh, let's take a quick break. Yeah, I gotta use the rester, and we'll be our B.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Quick word from our sponsors. I love sponsor.

Speaker 1 This week, Castle Super Beast is brought to you by

Speaker 1 Hero Forge.

Speaker 1 Oh, man, I love Hero Forge. So, okay, I saw, so first of all,

Speaker 1 if you're getting into, if you're setting up your tabletop game and you want original,

Speaker 1 really cool, customizable miniatures for your tabletop games and whatever

Speaker 1 your customization needs are, Hero Forge is the perfect place for that because it's basically like a create a character in the browser that lets you choose from thousands of parts, dozens of fantasy species, and all these little details you can go into.

Speaker 1 print customizable minis in different materials like bronze, color standees, color plastic options, 3D printed.

Speaker 1 I've printed out the cool little woolly monk over here that is like a pretty sick example of their quality.

Speaker 1 And a custom D20 as well, which has a little dwarf head inside of it, you know. So if you have a custom character, you can show that off too.

Speaker 1 Did you see? So I saw a post. I did, man.
I did. So shout out to Prawnzone, who made this amazing castle super beast collection of uh you and I in Hero Forged

Speaker 1 and Caboose with boosts

Speaker 1 and like uh you got even got his arms right, which is crazy. Got the dog, right? The face is pretty solid, got the piercings accurate, got the hat, you know, doing a little kick in a parry pose.

Speaker 1 Looks incredible, right? You've got a little buff dwarf body. Uh, I've got a sword, the dreads are in play.
Just like real life.

Speaker 1 It's super sick.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I thought it was dope as hell. And

Speaker 1 let me see if I can pull this up

Speaker 1 in a cool way.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 check this shit out.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 yo. How sick is that? It's super sick.
That's so cool. Right? So thank you very much to Prawn

Speaker 1 for that.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's the kind of details you can make. If you

Speaker 1 are like me and you want to spend

Speaker 1 a lot of time in a character creator and you like the details, it's perfect for you because HeroForge lets you go in and

Speaker 1 you can even get.

Speaker 1 So they have an expanding catalog of customization options, new parts every week, major features, new species joining. So

Speaker 1 different poses, different races. If you're making your monsters to fight,

Speaker 1 if you have different versions of your characters you want to go through,

Speaker 1 you can also just get the files if you want the 3D files yourself to handle using them in whatever way or printing them on your own

Speaker 1 options and your own 3D printing too.

Speaker 1 You've got super incredible detail made of clear one quarter inch thick acrylic and front and back printing. You got custom acrylic keychains as well.

Speaker 1 So you can have a one-to-one match and a 30 millimeter scale of your favorite miniatures as well.

Speaker 1 And with the pro subscription, you can go in and use a lot of extra features, including the kit bashing mode, which lets you get up to 20 accessories that you can stick on the characters.

Speaker 1 So if you have a character that's really elaborate with

Speaker 1 tons of parts or multiple arms or floating stuff around them, any kind of really elaborate scene, you can get that going with the kit bash mode.

Speaker 1 Not to mention,

Speaker 1 you get digital credits, five digital credits per month. So if you've got

Speaker 1 home printing needs, VTTs and STLs are available for you as well. So

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 it's just awesome. I particularly love the idea of having a customizable quick

Speaker 1 solution for this. And,

Speaker 1 you know, there's a fun to it as well, where if you want to paint your own miniatures, you you can print something that's a little more grayscale or, you know, just leaves the color off and then handle that detail yourself.

Speaker 1 As far in as you want to go, it's all right there. I love a good creative character, and this is the ultimate one.
So

Speaker 1 be sure to check out HeroForge. Visit heroforge.com to start designing your custom miniature dice or dice today.
Check back often. There's new content added every week.

Speaker 1 So once again, that's heroforge.com to get your custom miniatures for your tabletop games or custom dice and whatever other needs as well. Check them out.

Speaker 1 Thank you, HeroForge.

Speaker 1 This week, the podcast is sponsored by Shopify.

Speaker 1 That is the go-to.

Speaker 1 So, if you've got like a t-shirt, for example, you're trying to figure out how to sell and you're not too sure how to get that off the ground, or I don't know, or a plush, or any other type of merch that is you know something that you didn't initially plan to get into business the

Speaker 1 shipping to people but then it becomes a part of your your your your store Shopify is is the answer to that they've got

Speaker 1 They've got the backs of millions of businesses around the world.

Speaker 1 Mattel and Gymshark and two are particular brands that they're behind as well. And if you've got your social media that you want to plug in your shop to, they're perfect for getting set up there.

Speaker 1 They can accelerate your content creation. You can get your store set up with descriptive headlines and details, photography, etc.
It's basically like you have a marketing team behind you.

Speaker 1 In addition to creating an email campaign or social media campaigns where your customers are scrolling and wherever they're checking your products out, you can keep track of all that information.

Speaker 1 You can find out where and how and why and what they're buying. And if you're processing

Speaker 1 world international shipping, if you're processing returns, inventory, all that complicated stuff,

Speaker 1 Shopify is right there to help you make that easy. So, if you're expecting to make your first or your millionth sale, Shopify is the place to go.
Set them up.

Speaker 1 Turn your big business idea into cash with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling at shopify.com/slash Superbeast.

Speaker 1 Go to Shopify.com/slash Superbeast. That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y.com/slash Superbeast.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Shopify. Thanks, Shopify.

Speaker 1 Express VPN.

Speaker 1 My favorite VPN service. It's not even close.
So simple, so easy. You click the button, you're online, and just like that, they can't find you.
You know?

Speaker 1 You know, animal predators aim for the slowest prey.

Speaker 1 Hackers target people with the weakest security. Oh, man, I thought.
And if

Speaker 1 you're not using Express VPN, you're prey.

Speaker 1 Oh my goodness.

Speaker 1 I'm just a tired little antelope at the watering hole, man. You will die.
Steal my data. If you do not use Express VPN, the lions will get you.

Speaker 1 The digital lions will collect your information, Antelope, and they will store it and sell it back to

Speaker 1 the hyenas

Speaker 1 who are laughing in the shadows trying to get all that information about you and your antelope family. You know, it's sketchy and it's weird.
You can't trust them.

Speaker 1 Hyenas are going to try and sell me car insurance. It's just, it's just, it's really annoying.

Speaker 1 And, and, um, you know, when you, if you're just like taking the risk of connecting to a hotel Wi-Fi or an airport Wi-Fi, you know, just know that all your passwords, bank logins, credit card information, and all that can be ripped out of the air by a 12-year-old with some cheap hardware.

Speaker 1 So hackers can make up to $1,000 per person if they sell personal info on the dark web.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, there's the everyday use that I enjoy, which is simply, I want to watch this YouTube channel. You can't watch that.
You're in Canada. Am I?

Speaker 1 Am I, though? Click. Am I?

Speaker 1 You can't see me.

Speaker 1 I'm out of here.

Speaker 1 So, yeah,

Speaker 1 it's real simple. And you can, of course, fire it up with just one button.
And it works on your phone, your laptop, your tablet, and more. Stay connected on the go.

Speaker 1 It can cover all the devices that you use.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's, yeah, it would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get pressed.

Speaker 1 12-year-olds don't have that. They don't have a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption.
So

Speaker 1 start securing your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com/slash superbeast. That's expressvpn.com slash superbeast to find out how you can get up to four extra months.

Speaker 1 Expressvpn.com slash superbeast. Particularly, I enjoyed that time when it was like, you can't buy this game yet.
And I was like, click, I'm in New Zealand. Yeah, I can.
Now what?

Speaker 1 Thanks, ExpressVPN.

Speaker 1 Thanks, ExpressVPN.

Speaker 1 And this week, the podcast is sponsored by HelloFresh. And

Speaker 1 look,

Speaker 1 it's a service that is quite simple. In life, the first thing you need to do is eat.
You need to survive. That's true.
Food keeps you alive.

Speaker 1 Eventually, mom's not going to hit you with the boob anymore. You're going to have to get real food.

Speaker 1 We're looking at that right now and we're trying to figure it out. Well, you know, while my baby's not yet there with the solids,

Speaker 1 HelloFresh has a service where they bring the food to you, right? Getting food to keep you alive is the number one thing that our ancestors needed to do. I'm a big fan of eating food to stay alive.

Speaker 1 It's crazy. We really had a big struggle staying alive in the past because we couldn't figure out how to get the food, you know? And now we can get the food, but it's really annoying.
It's annoying.

Speaker 1 I got to decide what I want for dinner every night. Why don't I just give up and eat crackers? And it takes time and it's expensive.

Speaker 1 And then by the time you actually do it, the thing you're eating doesn't even taste that great. So, So, you know,

Speaker 1 why not just get them to bring it to you? And it's also going to be healthy because they've got dietitian-approved meals and you've got your choices of all your preferences.

Speaker 1 So, whether you want to go with high-protein recipes or if you're looking for, you know, greener veggies or whatever it is, if you want two or more veggies per dish, you get the veggie-packed recipes.

Speaker 1 You can get grass-fed ribeyes or lamb chops.

Speaker 1 You get steak and seafoods. I mean, if the ribeye was was grass-fed, that counts as a vegetable, right? That is grass inside of the meat.

Speaker 1 And you got steak and seafood recipes you can get delivered each week with no extra cost, with three times the seafood options delivered available as well. So HelloFresh has doubled their menu.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just, you know, if you're going to get... If you're going to get the hassle out of staying alive by having HelloFresh deliver the meal to you, you know, why not enjoy the convenience of

Speaker 1 not having to deal with the groceries. And also, also, it's delivered in the cool tech box that you open it up and it's cold because things are never frozen.
They're always delivered fresh.

Speaker 1 And they got the cool temperature regulation system going on inside. Incredible.

Speaker 1 Definitely enjoy me some honey glazed pork tenderloin.

Speaker 1 Once upon a time, that was a no-go.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 as somebody who can now enjoy pork tenderloin,

Speaker 1 give me. I'll take all of it.
Please.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the best way to cook just got better. Go to hellofresh.com slash superbeast10fm

Speaker 1 to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. One per box with active subscription.
Free meals applied as discount on first box, new subscribers only, varies by plan.

Speaker 1 So that's hellofresh.com slash superbeast10fm, and you'll get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. A ridiculous deal, if I would say so myself.

Speaker 1 You know, if I was the ones that was deciding how many free meals to give out, perhaps I was on the board, I would say maybe not that much, but that's what they're doing. I can't stop them.

Speaker 1 I'm just doing what they say right here. So get in there.
Thank you, HelloFresh.

Speaker 1 Thanks, HelloFresh.

Speaker 1 Alrighty,

Speaker 1 what's our ETA here to stay to play? We're about six minutes out.

Speaker 1 This fucking music they got on this pre-show is killer. Yeah.
It's fucking awesome. Oh, yeah, it's awesome.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 They're going. It's just been going for like 25 fucking minutes.
It's great. Every time I see that little PlayStation cat, I just think of the Nenderoid.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then I think of Street Fighter Cross Tekken.
We're just doing a quick check here. All right.
Still works. So Bloodborne shows up.
Or there we are. Or Tokan.
There we are.

Speaker 1 Tokan's going to be there. That's been a guarantee.
Okay.

Speaker 1 All right. So I guess we should start talking about my week because I had a week.
I did things aside from the slam. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I did not.

Speaker 1 I have a human experience for you that you won't experience. It's not going to happen to you.
Okay. I can guarantee it.
Okay. So, Toddler sleeps in our bed with us, right?

Speaker 1 So does the dog.

Speaker 1 Two, three nights ago, the dog woke up and then vomited all over the kid's feet. Oh, okay.
The feet's not bad. Yeah.
Except the kid didn't wake up.

Speaker 1 So now, now we get to play the fucking game of, all right, I'll get the dog out. I'll wipe up the dog.
Oh, no, the dog barfed in the hallway again. Okay, I'm cleaning that up.
Okay, you get the baby.

Speaker 1 Pick up the baby. Don't let the baby drip the dog barf on the floor.
The baby's waking up. He's very upset.
He doesn't like to be woken up. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, okay.
No, don't worry, baby.

Speaker 1 We're cleaning your feet. The wipes are cold.
Oh, this sucks. This actually sucks.
Okay, well, you're hand. Okay, the dog is fine.
Now you're handling the baby. The baby is upset.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's grab the sheets. Changing your sheets at fucking 1 a.m.

Speaker 1 Rules. It's fucking good.
It's a chore. That's the right time for that chore.
Okay. Okay.

Speaker 1 Back on. All right.
Okay. Now the sheets are back on.
We'll deal with the dirty sheets later. We'll put them in the laundry, right? Okay, now

Speaker 1 let's get the baby back to sleep.

Speaker 1 Is it worse if the dog barfs on the kid or if the kid barfs on the dog? Oh, yeah, I can just watch that dog in like two seconds. It's not a problem.
It's way, way worse. The dog barfs on the child.

Speaker 1 And then it's like, do we let the dog sleep with us again? Yes, we do.

Speaker 1 He has to be there.

Speaker 1 And then it's like, then the kid is just like, caboose, barf on my feet. Like, yeah, dude.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Good, good word use.

Speaker 1 Excellent use of your words. Yeah, I was just thinking, I was like, like, dog might kind of not even let you know that he got barfed on because that might be gone by the time you check.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he doesn't, he doesn't care. Damn.

Speaker 1 So that was a fun experience. Okay.

Speaker 1 We're also

Speaker 1 in the prelude. We're in step one of potty training right now.

Speaker 1 Step one of potty training is, hey, do you feel that feeling? Go sit on the potty fully clothed with your diaper on, but like, okay, go do it, right?

Speaker 1 And so what happens when the child sits on the potty and does a shit on the potty, whether or not it goes in the potty or not? That's not what's important, right? What's important is getting there.

Speaker 1 Yep. All right, here you go.
Here's some MMs.

Speaker 1 Straight up. Oh, just bribe.

Speaker 1 Candy reinforcement. That's new.
I didn't know about that. Okay, but get this.
We're like, is it working?

Speaker 1 This morning, one of the first things my son said to me was, I want to go downstairs so I can poop on the potty so I can eat a chocolate MM.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 I'm like, okay, first of all, your language

Speaker 1 is really advanced. You are talking a lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Second of all, the deal has been cemented very strongly right away.
Incentives can make all kinds of progress steps leap. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Which has now led to the hilarious side effect of him running to the potty, sitting on it, going,

Speaker 1 running up to me, going, I did it. I pooped on the potty.
Can I have a chocolate M ⁇ M? And I'm like,

Speaker 1 pick him up.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
No.

Speaker 1 All no.

Speaker 1 Lie.

Speaker 1 Lie. Can't fool me.
And he,

Speaker 1 I did it, though. No.
No, you didn't. You lie.
You lie, little child. Oh, man.

Speaker 1 Just every time. Kids are so funny.

Speaker 1 Everything about kids is is the funniest thing that's ever happened to anyone I mean every time like she get like she she gives a big burp and we're like yeah Because she's like she

Speaker 1 learned how to do it herself now So she's able to like pull off and be like brrr and we're like

Speaker 1 Let's go, you know baby burps like an adult. It's like whoa yeah

Speaker 1 and like it also sounds like it feels good, you know? Yeah. Well, I mean when you do a big burp it feels great.

Speaker 1 So no, I'm just like I just a time in your life when burping and farting and shitting were things where everyone around you would applaud.

Speaker 1 Go, go, go.

Speaker 1 Dude, it's awesome.

Speaker 1 Incredible. What a time.
You know, it's this. This is the good stuff.
That being said, I am kind of afraid of his language development. It's really high.

Speaker 1 It's really, really high. He's conjugating verbs correctly.

Speaker 1 As long as chocolate's involved.

Speaker 1 So, no, no, in general. Like, say, mom goes into a different room, right? And you would expect a two-year-old to go, where mommy?

Speaker 1 Right? Like, that's like the assumption. No, I get where is mommy.
I don't see her. I don't know where she went.

Speaker 1 Let's go. Like, okay.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Also, do you know what he's? He,

Speaker 1 he asked if he could go to the PARK

Speaker 1 Uh-huh? And I'm not saying he said, I want to go to the park. He spelt it out because he knows that you want to go to the park.

Speaker 1 Because you spell it out because you're using the tech where you don't want to say the word because too much excitement comes from that.

Speaker 1 But now he knows how to put that together. Parts of this shit are already falling apart.
Like

Speaker 1 all the tricks and lies.

Speaker 1 Oh, man.

Speaker 1 It's all cooked. Damn.
Oh, it's tough. This is scary.
This child thing is tough.

Speaker 1 They're so strong. And he's not just like honing in on language.
He's honing in on your language. Yeah.
He's about to start. He started page or yappers, right? So like.

Speaker 1 He's about to start calling shit egregious.

Speaker 1 I don't do that. No, you don't.

Speaker 1 But once upon a time,

Speaker 1 that was a parodied word and it was assigned to you and then you've stopped saying it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 When's the last time I said dreadnought or showinga? A long time ago.

Speaker 1 10 years ago.

Speaker 1 You know what he has started to do? And it's definitely me and Paige. Like, it's, he stole it.
Like, where else, right? But he'll be like upset. And you'll be like, hey, man, don't worry.
It's okay.

Speaker 1 And he'll go, it's not okay. Damn.
No. Damn.
No, it's not okay. I don't like this.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Okay. All right.

Speaker 1 You're right. It's not okay.
And he goes, yeah.

Speaker 1 Man, that between

Speaker 1 the problem is teaching the power phrases too early. Like, like, too bad is a wild one to grasp the context of.

Speaker 1 That was a lot. Because that is so applicable to so many things.

Speaker 1 Oh, all right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's that's parenting update. I'm afraid of my child.
He is too intelligent.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Again, yeah, not much going on over here except for like, you know, we jumped up diaper sizes and holy shit, do you rip through these things?

Speaker 1 You can never buy enough. And anyone, any like in-laws or family or friends coming to visit, and sometimes some people have been nice and been like, oh, is there anything we can get or whatever?

Speaker 1 Diapers. Yeah.
They've shown me

Speaker 1 like I saw like

Speaker 1 You know, like one of the in-laws was coming and I was like, oh, here's like a little like pack of different parental things.

Speaker 1 Like here's some cute onesies, mom-themed and dad-themed, and some boots, and then some stuff and special soaps for mom. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Fuck all that.

Speaker 1 Just size one diapers, please. That's it.
Don't even worry about it. We're good on literally everything else.

Speaker 1 Now, luckily, the way it works is that as you go through sizes, you will be doing it less and less.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 So now I think we're doing like, he's on the verge of potty training. So it's like

Speaker 1 six usually on average a day, depending, right?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 But like that first batch, it's like 14 to 20.

Speaker 1 Okay, I got a question.

Speaker 1 So you know that like, you know that like baby dance where they just do this

Speaker 1 automatically about infants. It's the best shit ever.
So that's just inherently automatic, right? Every baby just has that baked in. It's the the most adorable shit ever.

Speaker 1 They don't see that and learn that. No one teaches it.
They just, babies just know how to do this thing where they crouch and have their hands.

Speaker 1 Well, it's because it's an easy muscle contraction to do. And like, they don't know nothing.
Yeah, okay. Right?

Speaker 1 It's our default. It's our default dance.

Speaker 1 One of the weirdest things is that when my boy started to dance and he was like, and I said, let's dance. Let's do a dance.

Speaker 1 Instead of bouncing up and down like almost every other baby does, he does the twist. Oh, shit.
He like he

Speaker 1 tips and

Speaker 1 arms back and forth. There you go.
I'm like, okay, all right. Not Flossen, though, right? No, not yet.
Okay. Flossen's going to be old and dead.
Oh, super, like, annihilated.

Speaker 1 Well, it might come back around by that point. You know, like, that's the bit.
It might come back around. It's true.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, speaking of old and dead, fucking. Us.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 make no mistake that my soul, soul, you know, as I as I shuffle off this Mortal Coil, the last thing I'll do is check to see whether or not Funko Pops are still alive.

Speaker 1 Because it sounds like, and I wish I had some champagne to fucking pop on this. It sounds like Funko Pops might not last another year.

Speaker 1 It's possible.

Speaker 1 It's possible. They're in serious trouble with massive debt.
No.

Speaker 1 And then you look at the numbers and the numbers are bad. The reports are coming in.
Funko Pop is dealing with massive losses, reporting of up to $1 million in net losses.

Speaker 1 And you're like, wait, that's it? Like, what?

Speaker 1 Funko Pop $1 million. That's the only kind of thing where they're basically the costs of the licensing and production and shipping are so high that their margins are like razor thin.

Speaker 1 Well, because the whole bit is we're going to use Tony Stark to also be fucking Doctor Strange, and that's also going to be Dante from Clerks, and shut the fuck up. It costs nothing.
Buy it.

Speaker 1 I kind of am amazed that they bullied people into thinking they were relevant just by buying shelf space in GameStops. Yeah, well, I mean, perception is reality in terms of marketing, right?

Speaker 1 If you keep seeing it everywhere, then you're going to assume that, like, no, this is cool and this is, everyone wants this. Um,

Speaker 1 all right, distracted viewing, Team Ninja. Anything interesting here? No, it's, it's a Fatal Frame 2 or 3? All right.
It's a Fatal Frame 3. All right, great.

Speaker 1 No, I'll let you know. I'll let you know.
Okay, okay.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Yeah, like, like, what always amazes me, like I said, is just like you shove it in people's face long enough.

Speaker 1 And then eventually I do remember when, yeah, people back at the offices would be like, oh, I got my, you know, you got your favorite, or you got your, your one thing.

Speaker 1 And then you just put them in your mental catalog of Rube.

Speaker 1 Did those games ever come out? Did

Speaker 1 Funko Gears of War? And. Yeah, it did.
I think it did anyway. Didn't it? So they.
I actually, you asking me that makes me go, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Because, like, they tried to make video games, and I have an emoji or an emote dedicated to it, but I don't know if it ever actually was a thing.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 Funko Gears,

Speaker 1 you know what? I don't care anymore, anyways. Yeah, I'm shocked you cared at all.
I just, I just, I'm like, I'm waiting for them to die, so like, we'll, we'll,

Speaker 1 this will have a, you know, a follow-up story, but in the meantime, I appreciate the report on the losses.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 and then uh, uh, continuing, speaking of L's, um,

Speaker 1 there are some, well, you know what? This one, I guess we'll have to wait and see. But

Speaker 1 there are some leaks about the new Steam controller.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there is a, let's see, there's a report coming in here. So somebody who saw it and had images of it is...

Speaker 1 not able to show those images, but they are able to AI slop them up. So they basically went, yeah, it's an AI slop photo, but it's trained on the image of the real controller so that I could.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's exactly this. This slop photo is exactly what I would have expected from the Steam controller, too.

Speaker 1 Now, let's see if they learned their lesson. Last time around.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So, have you used a Steam Deck? I've used a Steam Deck and I see those thumbpacks.

Speaker 1 I've used a Steam Deck, and I remember holding the Steam Deck going, like, I'm probably not going to use this in its portable form a lot, but they should make a controller that is literally just this without all the fucking guns.

Speaker 1 So it seems to be. And like...
There's a million fucking games I would love to play that are mouse and keyboard only that you could totally play with the Steam, the new Steam controller.

Speaker 1 The difference between that and the original fucking two-circle thing that they put out is night and day.

Speaker 1 And yeah, well, you know. Abject piece of fucking shit.
Terrible buttons, terrible build, terrible plastic.

Speaker 1 But at the same time, I'm also like, okay, I can see that they want to put this out there because they want to have a game that they want to have a controller where you can have a cursor in addition to all your standard twin stick, you know, normal functions and stuff.

Speaker 1 I see myself likely just sticking to a dual sense regardless. Like, I'm...
Oh, absolutely. This is so you can play games that don't have controller support of any kind.

Speaker 1 It's a sub- It's a sub-optimal controller, but it has the extra mouse feature for you.

Speaker 1 In any case, we'll...

Speaker 1 And like, those touchpads as mice are excellent. I, yeah, yeah, well, they're they're they're accurate, but I just

Speaker 1 don't enjoy using them if I have the option of using d-pad stick, anything else, etc. But when you don't,

Speaker 1 it this is for your options: are this thing or a mouse and keyboard on your lap on your couch?

Speaker 1 And but the other bit with the Steam Deck is the touch screen itself is also a mouse if you want it to be, right? So you don't even have to engage with that, you can just tap the screen. Um,

Speaker 1 but yeah, we'll see.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 then alongside that came

Speaker 1 the weird, like, so you know, we've been talking, hey, how's Hi-Fi Rush been blighted this week? Well, it's an oh, it's fucking god-awful.

Speaker 1 Its entire soundtrack has been ripped off of everything it was on.

Speaker 1 But why? Well, the update has been they contacted JoJo about it and director John. Apparently, he does not like that nickname.
Oh, really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, as a JoJo fan?

Speaker 1 Yeah, damn.

Speaker 1 Well, that sucks. Okay, I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 That's what someone told me, and they seemed legit, but okay. Now I'm doubting it.
Well, noted. That's why I said apparently, right? Yeah, exactly.
At the start of that, all right, I'm good. I'm good.

Speaker 1 Notable JoJo fan director John Johannes

Speaker 1 said that

Speaker 1 FYI, this is likely the publisher trend, publisher transition or publisher transition related, and it'll be back on services soon. Not sure when.
So

Speaker 1 don't panic. They got a transfer from Bethesda to Krafton.

Speaker 1 So this is not, as much as you see this and go, I don't know what's happening, but I'm sure it's AI-related and we can blame it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, it's

Speaker 1 it's it's he's saying, Don't panic. It should pop back up soon.
Which I use those songs for my loading screens. So that's important.
They're incredible.

Speaker 1 All right. We also got to see

Speaker 1 the new

Speaker 1 reveal, Rogue and Gambit's wedding happening in Marvel Rivals. And they showed off Gambit's gameplay trailer.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And also Cyclops is in there.
He's in the lore trailer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And then they got some shipping going on as well.

Speaker 1 Gabbit's sick. Gabbitt's always cool.
I'm shocked that Gambit is cool. I feel like Gabbett's hard to fuck up because, yeah, he's always dope.

Speaker 1 I didn't see anything. I was kind of hoping there'd be a cool, like, I saw the four cards on his UI, and then he kind of like, you know, has a bunch of like support, like, zoning things he's doing.

Speaker 1 Not zoning, whatever, arranged things he's doing. I was kind of hoping that there'd be some sort of system where like you're pulling out decks of cards and you have to hold like a hand, a poker hand.

Speaker 1 You're nuts.

Speaker 1 It would be something

Speaker 1 it didn't have to be super important. It could just be a background thing where, like, oh, on the chances that you got a royal flush, like some dope extra thing could happen, you know? And

Speaker 1 cards don't matter to Gambit. No, no, they don't.
They're just projectiles. They are.
I'm just thinking of fun gameplay things. It doesn't actually matter.
I'm not saying build Aska R. Chris.

Speaker 1 I don't want. I'm going to say something

Speaker 1 fucking controversial.

Speaker 1 That's not fun.

Speaker 1 That is not a fun idea. If there were some.
No. If there were a, if they were a minor element of his gameplay that was affected by the hand of cards you pulled out, I think that'd be cool.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, there is. It's whether or not he pulled out one or two or three or four

Speaker 1 and how many of them he shot. I'm assuming that when he does his Royal Flush super in marvel vs capcom he's actually holding a royal flush

Speaker 1 and throwing it at you um how many how many cards are in a royal flush tops

Speaker 1 12 yeah well no the last no but the last the last five he's holding you know i mean that's that's all you need

Speaker 1 He throws the whole deck at you. No, he holds the last bit.
He holds it afterwards. And he goes, see a mocha.

Speaker 1 But then he empties the rest of it, you know?

Speaker 1 Oswald is well anyway

Speaker 1 characters that throw cards are cool that's true yeah um

Speaker 1 i'm wondering how much they're gonna commit to rogue because like rogue in any video game it's like do you go the hard way hard do you go the hard ways marvel or do you do i've got your power like you can go like big punchy strong flyer or you can do the oh my god she actually takes and steals your abilities one by one

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 her alt should just be she can steal other people, Kirby. She can just Kirby you.
Well, that's Loki, though, right? Oh, yeah, Loki can also. So you got to do something to differentiate her from Loki.

Speaker 1 Damn it. Loki stole her shit.
Yeah. She's got to have a more interesting kit.

Speaker 1 We'll see. But that's cool.
She's hotter than Loki.

Speaker 1 Says you.

Speaker 1 Is that part of her kit? I am saying that.

Speaker 1 How quickly do they introduce X-Men Evolution Rogue as an outfit? And how much

Speaker 1 do you have to spend on that shit?

Speaker 1 You want to sell cosmetics? You immediately know what's number one on the fucking list.

Speaker 1 I don't think that is.

Speaker 1 Okay. I think X-Men.
I think that's number one on one Woolly Madden's list.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 I think X-Men Evolution Rogue haircut is big on many a list, and I bet you it shows up. It would be batshit, stupid, crazy for them to not make it.
It'd be insane.

Speaker 1 It's the number one thing any fan of Rogue wants, besides Rogue herself in her normal outfit.

Speaker 1 All right, what else is going on?

Speaker 1 The world is shifting, and everyone is diving out of the way of November 19th, 2026.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 GTA 6 delayed itself for a couple of months, ruining everyone's plans once again.

Speaker 1 Every developer's plans once again.

Speaker 1 And the reason they did this is to supposedly make sure the game is really, really good. But what it actually is, is they just fired a shitload of staff who were trying to organize a union.

Speaker 1 And those staff were, in some cases, in important positions. So they actually will have to take longer to make the game.
Correct.

Speaker 1 In fact, there are insider reports about, you know, what's been happening with the staff, and they basically confirmed in short that, like, yeah, everyone singled out were everyone that were a part of a union Discord

Speaker 1 that was discussing

Speaker 1 how to get that going. So now, apparently, it's not because they're a part of a union.

Speaker 1 It just so happens that every single member of the would-be union was also leaking classified information about the game's development. So actually, we're going to double down and imply

Speaker 1 that everyone who wants to join a union is also a criminal.

Speaker 1 That's how untrustworthy they are.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I heard, hey, look, Pac-Man is in Sonic. How about that? Oh, you're way behind doing a Digimon DLC.
Oh, there it is.

Speaker 1 What

Speaker 1 I heard someone say that

Speaker 1 Grand Theft Auto is the most successful franchise of anything of all time.

Speaker 1 Like, in terms of... It's Pokemon.

Speaker 1 It's Pokemon with a bullet. Oh, yeah?

Speaker 1 Pokemon's the most successful media idea that's ever existed.

Speaker 1 Huh. It's in the trillions.

Speaker 1 Pokemon is so far ahead of everything else.

Speaker 1 Shut your fucking mouth. The Big O is back in Super Robot Wars, as is Kevin Ryder's Skull, and that is hot shit.
That's cool. That's hot shit.
It's not a robot, but I don't give a shit.

Speaker 1 That's hot shit. That's fucking hot shit.
Damn. That's good.
I like that. Yo.
Oh.

Speaker 1 Count up your sins. That's good stuff.
Okay, that's dope. Ah, doubles there, too.
And of course, they're hanging out together. Yeah, right.
That's sick.

Speaker 1 Well, that's very cool.

Speaker 1 GTA versus Pokemon. Hold on a second.
What are we looking at here?

Speaker 1 Wooly, if you wiki like entertainment properties, Pokemon is the number one entertainment property of all time in human history. It's bigger than the Bible.

Speaker 1 I guess if there's more of them and each one is massive, but

Speaker 1 I don't imagine that GTA is like averaging out each entry per

Speaker 1 no, man. Dude, they make like billions on everything.
Just the value of the IP as a whole, as a total. Okay.

Speaker 1 One GTA is bigger than one Pokemon, but there's like 12 Pokemon every year.

Speaker 1 It's so hard. Think about Pikachu dolls by themselves.

Speaker 1 No, but it's just so hard when there's multiple entries of a franchise that's forever versus there is a nuclear bomb that drops and every title that drops is an industry clearing event.

Speaker 1 You know, the impact feels massive because it's like the big number game is dropping and you're not getting spin-offs and other things. So impact feel.

Speaker 1 How many movies does Grand Theft Auto have? Right, right.

Speaker 1 It actually has a ton that they sculpt for. They also, I mean, they certainly could have.

Speaker 1 I imagine they could have turned GTA into like a super multi-year annualized nonsense franchise.

Speaker 1 And they just hire Michael Bay and put The Rock in it, and it would just be like, it'd just be like one of those fucking things.

Speaker 1 But I guess there's a limit to what you can do once per generation.

Speaker 1 GTA is closing in on Pokemon in terms of total games sold from... How old is this article? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
For game sales, but GTA doesn't have merch and the brand. The brand, brand, brand.

Speaker 1 Sure. Shit.
Sure, sure.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 What else? It doesn't have GTA Go. Actually, they should put out a phone app called Grand Theft Auto Go.

Speaker 1 I think that would be really fun.

Speaker 1 Head out to real locations. Head out to real locations and pretend to steal people's cars.
Just see what happens.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What is going on with Marathon? Apparently.

Speaker 1 Apparently. There are things I can't tell you.
I wouldn't even know.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't even know what's going on

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 even if I did, I couldn't tell you. Well, should we call it an extraction shooter?

Speaker 1 Sure. Call it an extraction shooter.

Speaker 1 Apparently, they hate the term.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Are you fucking stupid? Former marathon director hates calling them extraction shooters. Bungie's forging on with the dumb term.

Speaker 1 That's the name. That's the fuck.
What? Called a Tarkov-like? Is that what you want? You call your fucking game?

Speaker 1 Wanted to rename the extraction

Speaker 1 shooter label for Marathon. The genre doesn't even know what it is.

Speaker 1 You don't know what your game is.

Speaker 1 Okay, so remember, Woolly, I want you to lock in for this. This is the same development team that has refused to call Destiny an MMO to this day.

Speaker 1 To this day.

Speaker 1 No, we're an online shooter content experience, whatever the fuck they say. Maybe perhaps a hunt showdown-like.

Speaker 1 What do you want to call it? What do you want to fucking call it? Like, okay, what's the new term?

Speaker 1 Do they even offer a new term? I don't think so.

Speaker 1 I think they were trying to figure it out. This is like some fucking Xbox all-in-one entertainment system, one fucking nonsense.

Speaker 1 Fucking

Speaker 1 I do know they haven't pulled out the art yet.

Speaker 1 That's why the new Marathon Alpha is under such strict NDA because

Speaker 1 you can't show it because that shit's still there. Okay.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 Sides says

Speaker 1 the genre name is so bad.

Speaker 1 I hate the genre name extraction shooter. When I was working on Marathon, I was working with marketing, dying to be like, can we create a different name for the genre?

Speaker 1 Because Extraction Shooter is so dumb. It's the only genre where its name is a mechanic.
He suggests. That's not.

Speaker 1 He suggests comparing Helldivers 2 to Escape from Tarkov. They're clearly very different games, but fall into the same Extraction Shooter category.
It's just a problem. I cannot stand the name of it.

Speaker 1 So when you say Extraction genre, it should hit your spot. I think it's really the fact that the genre doesn't even know what it is.
You as a player,

Speaker 1 how do you know what you're going to get? I think that's one of the real issues with the genre itself.

Speaker 1 That is. So, video game genres are terrible.
That is the new worst take in video game genre discussions.

Speaker 1 Extraction shooter is the only game

Speaker 1 genre in which the title is a mechanic, is

Speaker 1 the worst-person shooter is a mechanic. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, are you, have you lost your fucking mind?

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 like, there is a broadness to genre.

Speaker 1 As we said, game genres can get stupid, and there is a broadness where, like, what encompasses a soul's like, does it have to have a corpse run, or does it have to have really hard bosses?

Speaker 1 You know, does it have to have slow

Speaker 1 builds that you can combat and builds and stats that you build up in that way, or, you know, bod fires and so on? Platformer, Platformer, fighter, racing game. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Every

Speaker 1 genre

Speaker 1 is named after a mechanic. No, I just, as I'm scrolling up and down here, I'm seeing that like there was no replacement name proposed.
Oh, so it's the same thing.

Speaker 1 I was like, we should do something different. Okay, what do you have in mind? You should think something different.

Speaker 1 It's like when your wife says, well, we should really get on the dishes. And you go, okay.

Speaker 1 Passive language. I got this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go.
That's what we, you know what we should do? Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I'm like, I was like, would is this, is there any extraction in Night Rain?

Speaker 1 Hmm.

Speaker 1 I guess. Not really.
No.

Speaker 1 You just survive. Yeah.
Night Rain's a Battle Royale.

Speaker 1 It's just a PvE Battle Royale. At the end, you get extracted back to the

Speaker 1 castle, though.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 there's DLC coming in quarter one, 2026,

Speaker 1 they said.

Speaker 1 And I kind of was surprised that I thought they were going to have a... constant drop of cool shit for this game the moment we saw it.

Speaker 1 It's really surprising that it's been dead quiet, and they're kind of wasting the opportunity to put a bunch of shit everybody would love to see frequently into the game, you know?

Speaker 1 So that would require

Speaker 1 things to be put into the game. It would.

Speaker 1 I'm suggesting they put things into the game. That is,

Speaker 1 I don't know if that's fair to talk that way about a company that their own stockholders just described as an impairment loss due to loss of value.

Speaker 1 Did you pull that one up today? I didn't. I pulled up the.
There's a Sony stockholder meeting where they described the acquisition of Bungie as an impairment loss. Oh, no, no.

Speaker 1 I said Night Rain. I'm talking about Fromsoft.

Speaker 1 My mistake. No, no, no, no.
Night Rain's forever. No, no, no, I was.
From soft, might as well shit gold in your mouth. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yes.
No, not the impairment loss. Although, let's hit that before moving on.

Speaker 1 What is

Speaker 1 Destiny 2 selling worse than expected, forcing Sony to record an impairment loss of $204 million?

Speaker 1 So that's very, very conservative. It is,

Speaker 1 they're going to upgrade that as the company disintegrates.

Speaker 1 They fired like half their staff.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is

Speaker 1 the acquisition was in 2022.

Speaker 1 $3.7 billion. Is this the fastest it's ever fucking just evaporated?

Speaker 1 Oh, it started immediately. The very first thing that happened was Sony gave them money to retain staff, and then they fired half their staff so that they could give themselves bonuses.

Speaker 1 And Pete Parsons literally said, Yeah, I used it to buy cars.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 like, we don't

Speaker 1 and like, like, this is all just talking about current products without even discussing the state of marathon launch and what the fuck that's going to look like.

Speaker 1 Um, that's um, that game's gonna get delayed again. Well, yeah, because the entire company's existence rides on it.
Like, it is literally if that thing does not immediately do something for them.

Speaker 1 The only reason it's still being valued at $3 billion is the Sony copium of, well, this is the really important live service game that's going to make us Fortnite money.

Speaker 1 And it's like, bro, this thing is going to make fucking anti-dollars.

Speaker 1 I mean, okay, so what's the clock got to run to after launch before you're not morally obligated to give everyone their money back when it shuts down? Well, luckily, it's a free-to-play game.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay. No, it's not.
What about, what about, what about per... No, but hold on.
There's microtransactions.

Speaker 1 Every time I fucking think about it, I remember that they're going to charge money for this thing.

Speaker 1 Oh, my god,

Speaker 1 is it not free to play? No, it's a full price. Every single person has the same conversation about this game.

Speaker 1 Everyone assumes it'll be free to play, and then they go, no, it's a fully functional purchased retail game. It's $40 or whatever.
And people go, I'm not going to fucking. It's $70? It's $70.

Speaker 1 No, no, it's not. It is not $70.
You lie, chat. There's no way.

Speaker 1 Anyway, the game's fucking cooked. It's fucking cooked.
It's it's

Speaker 1 put it back 68.94 USD.

Speaker 1 That's crazy. That's absolutely unbelievable.
That's absolutely outrageous.

Speaker 1 And then you got your season passes.

Speaker 1 All right. Well,

Speaker 1 okay.

Speaker 1 Season passes for a game defined by losing your equipment.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Anything going on we should be checking out? No, not yet. All right.

Speaker 1 Interviewing the Tokan gang, but not showing anything yet. Okey-doke.
I have my finger on the button.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, in the meantime,

Speaker 1 I was talking about Night Rain and Fromsoft, and I was saying they announced Night Rain DLC coming in at the beginning of next year, Q1. I'm fucking shocked.
But I'm also.

Speaker 1 I can't fucking believe it, motherfucker. Oh, my God.
But I expected a drip feed of more stuff over time.

Speaker 1 That's not how from software does their shit. But they did do drip feed stuff, right? They did have the super bosses and the patch that updated the first player mode.

Speaker 1 And there was another thing.

Speaker 1 They released a patch that also added more quests in the game. So that has been going, but it's been fairly modern.

Speaker 1 This is not how they do their stuff, but this is also the first time they're trying a full-on live service, you know, know, like

Speaker 1 thing. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot of firsts for them.
So

Speaker 1 apparently, uh, in an interview, uh,

Speaker 1 uh, Shuhe Yoshida revealed that, uh, I didn't know this from soft. Oh, tokan trailer.
Tokan trailer. All right.
Let's see what's going on. This is for the closed beta.

Speaker 1 Uh, it'll

Speaker 1 this time around will include Ghost Rider and Spidey Man. Which nobody got into because it's the PlayStation beta system.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 they should just give me the beta. Oh my god, did you see Spider-Man's Time Winder?

Speaker 1 Cool stages. Yep, yep.
And now you can do a DP into tag and continue your combos. So yeah, they heard a lot of people.
Maximilian spoke about this a good bunch, but combo variety was not

Speaker 1 as open-ended as people were hoping. It was a little too stiff.
Ooh, the X-Mansion looks pretty cool. That's a cool stage.
All right. That's a bunch of characters we'd want to be able to play as.

Speaker 1 I saw Psylock and wearing classic costumes. Cool.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Nice. And then your online lobby as well.

Speaker 1 Which everybody loves.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the ability to tag more frequently and get combos going off of quick pickups

Speaker 1 is a big help, as well as not waiting till the end of the assist for you to be able to take control of the character.

Speaker 1 Because it is true that, like, you kind of think in most games, when you see them on screen, tag and you go to them, but then in Tokan, it was limited to that window. So that's good.

Speaker 1 All right. Looking cool.
Does that deconfirm every background character now? Does that mean

Speaker 1 for now?

Speaker 1 Because Timo is in his own background if he's not there. Guile is in his own background if he's not there.
It doesn't do it, but like, you know,

Speaker 1 I don't think you'll see

Speaker 1 Skylock, Iceman, Colossus, or Gambit soon if they're in the background of the stage. I mean, or Beast or Angel.
I mean, X-Men Next Dimension made Professor X playable as a fighting character.

Speaker 1 They should put Professor X in this fucking game. They're not cowards.
And they should have... He should have...

Speaker 1 It should be the new Professor X with the Cerebro helmet because everyone will be like, who the fuck is that?

Speaker 1 Sure. It's Professor X.
But just, yeah, I just commit to it. Just put him in there.
I fought an amazing, I forgot who it was. Somebody

Speaker 1 came in as an amazing Professor X in the Street Fighter VI fucking freak match

Speaker 1 world tour shit.

Speaker 1 I want a full-on bedman ass character. Have the balls to put Professor X in a game and have one of his supers fuck up the opponent's controls.

Speaker 1 Well, but we've

Speaker 1 got to do it. Fucking up your controls isn't that novel anymore, though.
Like Valentine does that in Skullgirls. You know?

Speaker 1 We can go wilder than that. You're right, Wooly.
One character did it. No, no, no.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. Mixed controls.
That also happens in Darkstalkers. Like,

Speaker 1 there's a couple examples of characters where your shit gets fucked up. Inverted buttons and all that stuff.

Speaker 1 I would like

Speaker 1 something, I would like more devious things like your health is now a lie, actually.

Speaker 1 Or

Speaker 1 your meter is incorrect. You thought you had a meter, but you didn't.

Speaker 1 something about your resources or changes and you don't know what it is. You know, some just some shit.

Speaker 1 Get up into the metal mine.

Speaker 1 I was going to say,

Speaker 1 yeah. So

Speaker 1 they sat down with Yoshida. And

Speaker 1 apparently, Fromsoft was a

Speaker 1 a business software company,

Speaker 1 which

Speaker 1 their name makes way more sense. Yeah.
Oh, hey,

Speaker 1 straight up. The fucking

Speaker 1 the Night Rain DLC you were talking about. Oh, well, there we go.
It's getting showed off right now. Right now.
Okay, let's see what we got. Okay.

Speaker 1 It's got to be more characters. Obviously.
Yep. Yep.
Show some bosses.

Speaker 1 Man, I can't wait to start playing that game.

Speaker 1 It was, yeah, no, no. It was cool.
It'll still be there. Yeah, yeah.
Now you can play it solo. It'll be there when I feel like it.
And I I heard,

Speaker 1 I did talk to some friends who said, like, there are some cool, like, spoiler things if you continue through it. You know, like, some cool.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 Well, that's a rad. You got the Dreg Lords out here, dog.
That's a rad-looking tree. Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, audio podcast, but we're just watching the fucking.

Speaker 1 The Night Rain trailer. What's that freak alien bug? STEL.
There we go.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know. This is the kind of game that they can just keep adding fucking model rips to it for years.
It's just Dark Souls All-Stars.

Speaker 1 There's so much they could rip to put in there. And to be honest, the modding community has been doing this.

Speaker 1 Hey,

Speaker 1 it's that boy.

Speaker 1 Let's go.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 1 Nice. Yeah, okay.
Oh, wow. It's called the Forsaken Hollows.
Wow, that is Dark Souls All-Stars, isn't it? It fucking is.

Speaker 1 Soon. It's in like three weeks.
You have to put, that's it. Like, each time it drops, there, there needs to be a...
That's the wrong.

Speaker 1 There needs to be a boss that is like, or a character that is the. All right, that's the show.
It's the leader of the pack. So, yes, Artoria showing up is 100% that.

Speaker 1 If there's no Sif, it's going to be pretty sad.

Speaker 1 That's going to be a SIF. Or even like a little, little, little summonable SIF, maybe, you know, in the area.

Speaker 1 Um, that's hot.

Speaker 1 I, I, uh,

Speaker 1 I feel like this is a very clear case. Like, we know that, like, it's the team that, you know, started doing

Speaker 1 side stuff during an Elden Ring, and they wanted to try out a bunch of different experimental stuff. But watching the modders just drop fucking Slave Knight versus,

Speaker 1 you know, Ornstein and Smog matches, and you know, and then now dropping those into

Speaker 1 versus Orphan of Costs and seeing what happens and so on. It's like,

Speaker 1 this is where that came from. Like, you have to

Speaker 1 imagine that a lot of mods dropping bosses and nonsense into

Speaker 1 each game and whatever just kind of went like, well, why don't we just sell that?

Speaker 1 Anyway.

Speaker 1 Is it over?

Speaker 1 It is over. It is over.
You're telling us how great the PS5 is now.

Speaker 1 How about that? It's so great. It's so great.
Is it great enough for you to go out and buy the fucking handheld little streaming thing that lets you stream your games now?

Speaker 1 Because they just announced you can stream your things now.

Speaker 1 Whatever. Okay.

Speaker 1 Wait, they can stream what?

Speaker 1 I saw an announcement about the... I don't even remember what it's called.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's the PlayStation Remote Player.

Speaker 1 It's the thing that's showing on the screen right now.

Speaker 1 And there's a new feature that lets you stream some games, and it's like you couldn't do that before or something i i don't know i i didn't i thought you could stream it to your video i didn't look at it i have to say i forgot it existed the portal the playstation portal

Speaker 1 oh you can buy a special tv to work with your portal

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 it's fucking stupid

Speaker 1 PlayStation Portal is the most widely used device for remote play. Cap!

Speaker 1 fucking

Speaker 1 cap.

Speaker 1 Humongously. The cap 2 is the most.

Speaker 1 Anyways.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was pretty much it. And then there was whatever was going to happen off of state of play.
So.

Speaker 1 Yeah, very little.

Speaker 1 Nothing shocking. Okay.
Let's take some emails. Hey, if you want to send in an email, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.
That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Speaker 1 Also, Wooly, this is a great podcast. We do a good podcast.
I'm feeling really good about this podcast. Good, good, yeah.

Speaker 1 I was pissing earlier, and as the as my stream was going, I'm like, it's a good podcast. It's a good podcast, good podcast.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 you're doing good work here. Thank you.
It's good. You're good.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 let's see what we got going on.

Speaker 1 Who dat?

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Kevin, aka Cooper Prez, what's up? Says, dear awesome dads one and two. A couple weeks ago,

Speaker 1 Willie talked about how the multiplayer in Symphonia failed to deliver on the vision and he was super right. I wanted to point out that it took forever, but in a later...
What a great, hold on.

Speaker 1 What a great way to fucking do an email. Remember when you talked about that? First of all, dead on.
100% really smart. Moving on.
Good way to start your email. Moving on.
We're not even dwelling.

Speaker 1 We're just we're getting into the meat that's all preamble um yeah yeah uh i want to point out that it took forever but a later entry tales of zillia absolutely delivered on the co-op multiplayer gameplay with symphonia style real-time battles not only did they fix everything wrong with symphonia system but they even added stuff like combo tech super moves that is cool to know i didn't know they did that uh it was so cool to sit on the couch and call out to my siblings uh who need to pop their alts depending on the situation Do you have other instances of promises that were delivered way later?

Speaker 1 Way later?

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I played some MMOs and like

Speaker 1 FF14 is a really good example of like they'll say something in like

Speaker 1 2012.

Speaker 1 and be like, we'll get around to it when we have time.

Speaker 1 And then like,

Speaker 1 it'll fucking do it in, like, Year of Our Lord 2025.

Speaker 1 Like, they literally just announced in the next patch for 14, you're going to be able to glamour, like, items from tanks onto healers and healers onto tanks.

Speaker 1 And that has been, like, a technical slash, maybe we'll do it. Literally since the fucking beginning of the game.

Speaker 1 Like, since almost day one.

Speaker 1 The two best answers just popped up. So, yes, the entirety of No Man's Sky.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's correct. It delivered.
It delivered way the fuck later, but it got there. Makes me actually super excited for Light No Fire.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yes, Dante's Motorcycle.

Speaker 1 Cavalier. That, you know, that was a crazy one.
Because

Speaker 1 I remember reading the interview. with

Speaker 1 Itsuno, and he was talking about how when when they gave the cutscene direction to

Speaker 1 what's his name?

Speaker 1 Kitamura? No, that's the director of versus

Speaker 1 the cutscene director. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They were like, we want every single thing that Dante does in these cutscenes to be something he can do in the game.

Speaker 1 And there are only two things that he does in those cutscenes he can't do in the game. And that's one, one is ride a rocket,

Speaker 1 which Nero can do

Speaker 1 in five, and fight with a motorcycle, which is something he can do in five. Like, it took them like a decade, but they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, those promises

Speaker 1 are the only unfulfilled promises. Yeah, like, like, very rarely

Speaker 1 do people do the like, you know, surfing on the on the enemy fucking setup, but it's there. That you can do that shit.

Speaker 1 Or, like, situational, you know, spinning on the stripper pole stuff in the area until you get a weapon that'll do it.

Speaker 1 But yeah, Cavalier is the delivery of a dream that was meant to be from a decade earlier.

Speaker 1 That is the ultimate, I'd say.

Speaker 1 All right, let's see here.

Speaker 1 The title screen for Night Reigns DLC makes it look like there's like a full batch of new characters coming.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's not like... If it's bosses, they should be dropping them 10 at a fucking time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, no, but I mean playable characters.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no, sorry. Those are the existing characters.
So then it should be just primarily bosses. I don't have like

Speaker 1 an info sheet on this. Night Rain should be a game with a billion playable and a billion characters and a billion bosses.

Speaker 1 Like it should just have insane content because it's just like every every yearly expansion should add 30% more.

Speaker 1 You know, you're making original new characters that have just unique builds from everyone else. They have fairly simplified systems compared to a regular build in the game, in the original game.

Speaker 1 Like, there should be stuff.

Speaker 1 You know what's fun for from software, and I feel really good for them, and I'm really happy for them. This shit comes out in three weeks, and it's being announced today.

Speaker 1 And it's a DLC that adds more bosses and

Speaker 1 characters. There's likely going to be no information about this at all, other than like the review cycle.
And they don't give a fuck because it says from software on the box.

Speaker 1 Or, you know, it's it's it's part of the

Speaker 1 product that says from software on the box. Like, no, we're good.
We're good. They might not.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's probably shit that they're not going to spoil in any of the things until you actually encounter it. Oh, I didn't even.
You need to fight a fucking armored core.

Speaker 1 You need to fight fucking white Glint in this shit. I didn't even get to the point of the story I brought up earlier, but they were a software company.
And

Speaker 1 when Sony announced that their main medium was going to be the CD-ROM and not the cartridge, the thing that ultimately fucked over the FF7

Speaker 1 situation for Nintendo Nintendo was

Speaker 1 the thing that made Fromsoft go, oh, we make CD-ROMs for software all the time. We can make games and publish them really easy because we're already set up for that.

Speaker 1 That's the start. Why don't we just become a game developer instead? And we can...

Speaker 1 That's such a weird way to think about that. And we can make games easy because cartridges are expensive and hard.
You know, straight up.

Speaker 1 That's so weird. The existence.
I have all this canvas around my house. I guess I ought to start.
I might as well become an artist. Yeah, that's it.
They had

Speaker 1 the ability to print CDs, you know, easily. So they said, all right, fuck it.
Let's do that. You know, there's only one company I can think of that has anything close to that story, and it's BioWare.

Speaker 1 Right. Because the doctors ran a biotech company.
Yeah. And they're like, well, we know how to do technical stuff.
And I love Dungeons and Dragons.

Speaker 1 I wish we could just stop being doctors and make RPGs

Speaker 1 I mean and to be fair it's like we don't know what software fromsoft made

Speaker 1 you know

Speaker 1 get the fuck out of that hannah future card business as soon as possible

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 that's that's some crazy shit but i hear it here it was is like the the switch to the cd-rom

Speaker 1 was not only it didn't only bring FF7 to the table, but in the future, it created the existence of the entire Souls bit.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, by the way, there was one piece of news from the Sony thing that I didn't mention. They are releasing a Japanese language only region-locked PS5 that is a significant price cut down to 350.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I want to say we did they hint at that or was that a this was this I'm not certain. I feel like during tariff time,

Speaker 1 there was a discussion about like Sony releasing a Japan only.

Speaker 1 I mean, hey man, it makes perfect sense that you know who they don't have to fucking fuck with on economic trade? Themselves. Right.
They don't have to. Yeah, Nintendo did that.
Yes. Okay.

Speaker 1 So we did, we talked about it when Nintendo announced it.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Let's see.

Speaker 1 From PK.

Speaker 1 Hello, old men I've been listening to since high school. What are some of the worst feeling buttons to ever whiff?

Speaker 1 I've been feeling this recently. A lot of the characters

Speaker 1 I mean in these games in games have pretty poor anti-air options. For example, Jamie's DP in Street Fighter VI, Gold Lewis, 6P.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I think,

Speaker 1 like, outside of the genre as well, not just fighting games, but the worst feeling whiffs.

Speaker 1 Anytime you hit a heavy slash button in Samurai Showdown, that is awful. Your character stands there and goes, oh,

Speaker 1 fuck.

Speaker 1 It takes forever. There's no satisfying crunch.

Speaker 1 But I'm going to say

Speaker 1 when this is the like when you take, when you get the hammer Kirby ability and you risk it all on a hammer toss, which gets rid of the hammer entirely, and then you completely miss the boss, it feels dog shit terrible.

Speaker 1 I'm going to say

Speaker 1 every single attack or jump

Speaker 1 on the Dreamcast

Speaker 1 every single one. Oh boy.

Speaker 1 Also, just okay, that's not fair to vary it up. Also,

Speaker 1 moving your character

Speaker 1 on the dreamcast.

Speaker 1 It wasn't perfect.

Speaker 1 It was fine.

Speaker 1 Duh,

Speaker 1 this is the fucking siren song of Cope.

Speaker 1 Not fuck you, it was great. It's like, wow, you know.

Speaker 1 It had the best possible library and the worst controller for it. That's the thing.
I love going to a restaurant with great reviews to eat off a dirty kid with half a four.

Speaker 1 And that's why I also bought the PlayStation to Dreamcast controller converter. Yeah, no, that was a, that was the.

Speaker 1 I brought that.

Speaker 1 I brought two of those out and plugged them in and shut you guys the fuck up for once. That's crazy.
You were like,

Speaker 1 and I was like, shut the fuck up. Here's a PlayStation controller.
Here's a DualShock 2. Shut the fuck up.
You know, and it worked. It did its job.
I know it's a bit topical, but I'm going to say

Speaker 1 Blitz Cranks down H anti-air is God awful.

Speaker 1 I watched that character's fist clip all the way over enemies and miss. Doesn't even get blocked.
It just misses.

Speaker 1 Gave him two anti-airs. They're both terrible.
What the fuck?

Speaker 1 By the way, doom and gloom about 2XKO's balance. Once again, I said that game sucks unless you can play Blitz Temo.
If they make Blitz good, that game's balance is great.

Speaker 1 Okay. In a vacuum.
That's all you need. In a vacuum.
If Blitz Crank comes out on November 18th as a good character, that's all that matters. That game's balance is great.

Speaker 1 And I don't want to hear any discussion otherwise. No matter what happens to Yasuo, no matter

Speaker 1 if they buff him.

Speaker 1 What happens? Okay.

Speaker 1 There we go.

Speaker 1 Honorable mention to really painful whiffs when you charge up a Kamehamehameha in Elden Ring

Speaker 1 and you just fucking horf it.

Speaker 1 That's bad. I'll actually go a little further.

Speaker 1 From Software has this problem a lot, but there's a lot of games that don't let your character actually look straight up and then you have to deal with enemies that are like high.

Speaker 1 Oh, and it looks like you should be able to tilt the camera high enough,

Speaker 1 but you can only actually vertically aim like fucking 40 degrees or something like that. That feels god-awful.

Speaker 1 Lock-odd that flies over your head and fucks with

Speaker 1 the camera.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 let's take one over here from Cam, who says, Dear Pink and Green, story-driven games often have lore dumps where a bunch of

Speaker 1 exposition is dropped on the player once. Both good and bad games do this.
What makes a difference for me me is how the information is presented.

Speaker 1 For example, I enjoy listening to NPCs complaining about the world they're in. A couple of basic examples are Mass Effect 1, the famous argument between the Elcore and the Volus,

Speaker 1 and Elden Ring, Kenneth Haidt straight up trashing Godric for being a punk-ass loser.

Speaker 1 I feel NPCs being honest about who they are and the world they live in.

Speaker 1 I love that when they're whining about something. What are some of the best ways lore dumps can be presented that have grabbed your attention?

Speaker 1 I mean, a lot of

Speaker 1 the lore dumps, so like, okay, you've obviously got the Xenogears Disc 2 shit going on.

Speaker 1 But like, as infamous examples go,

Speaker 1 I love...

Speaker 1 I'm going to... Like,

Speaker 1 Indivisible starts with an

Speaker 1 a flashback to using the ancestors of the characters

Speaker 1 and you get to use them for this one kind of flashback fight and and see what they were like in combat and i think that shit is dope i like that as a mechanic and um

Speaker 1 if that whatever that's a thing you know like a brief moment where you get a special playable character for like this kind of thing um the calm flashback where sephiroth is on the team for one second you know in the context of them going and having that moment of sitting down and and talking through the moment the the the talking through the story, and then you get into a fight and Sephiroth is standing next to you.

Speaker 1 The first time that happens, you're like, oh, fuck.

Speaker 1 I love that mechanic of just like, yeah, like

Speaker 1 the situationally limited character for the lore,

Speaker 1 especially in Invisible's case, like they were particularly cool, like

Speaker 1 busted with their powers and shit. That's dope.

Speaker 1 There is a series, like nothing, nothing in fiction and nothing in media and nothing in art is ever like hard and fast rules, but there's like a series of like really quick cliff notes that you can do to not fuck up your lore dump.

Speaker 1 The first of which is your lore dump should recontextualize things that you already had a chance to try and parse together.

Speaker 1 One of the worst lore dumps I have ever seen is from the Silent Hill movie, where two-thirds through the movie, they realize that they haven't actually provided any meaningful information to the viewer whatsoever.

Speaker 1 So they have Alessa just break down the entire backstory of the film in like a 12-minute, like, montage. God-awful.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 God-awful, right?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 it's not recontextualizing anything. It's not working off of anything.
It's just going, here's the story.

Speaker 1 Here's what the story is. Ideally, you would have something like Metal Gear.

Speaker 1 When a character in Metal Gear lore dumps, they're actually giving you the background details for like what was actually going on during events that were in and of themselves interesting, and they just add more.

Speaker 1 Also, something Metal Gear does all the time is they set you up with a system where they go

Speaker 1 mini surprise,

Speaker 1 mini twist, right? Right. Like the start of the lower dump recontextualizes something and reverses on it.
Then you get all the back.

Speaker 1 And then the end of the lower dump hits you with larger twist. Right, right, right, right.
It sandwiches

Speaker 1 excitement with the meat being exposition. On top of that,

Speaker 1 I'm thinking of Shadowbringers, FF14, where you get lore dumps from a character who doesn't enjoy talking to you and is tired of having to explain things to you.

Speaker 1 And is like just like, yeah, whatever, it's like this. And it gives you like a little enough information that you actually get like a big reveal.
But you go, wait, fucking what?

Speaker 1 What do you fucking mean by that? But it's a character who's like disinterested.

Speaker 1 Oh, Okay, interesting. Interesting.
Okay.

Speaker 1 There's a character in Shadowbringers who basically explains to you in like about 10 sentences why they don't believe your life has any value and how murdering you isn't even a big deal.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 like you get a little back and forth on like why that is and then they get tired of explaining it to you because they don't think you have any value and just drop the conversation.

Speaker 1 So you got like a really, really big

Speaker 1 dump, but like it left you wanting more. Yeah, and not stopping.
Instead of being bored. That's pretty good.

Speaker 1 I wish

Speaker 1 Kojima has his directing style has changed, you know, and the new stuff with Death Stranding is very different and much more cinematic than it used to be with the old Metal Gear games.

Speaker 1 I would love if he directed something in the old style one more time, you know? So it would be really sad

Speaker 1 I think Metal Gear and Death Stranding are really pitch perfect things of where it works incredibly well in Metal Gear and it works incredibly poorly in Death Stranding. The telling itself,

Speaker 1 like the actual speech and discussion and dialogue, has to be interesting in and of itself.

Speaker 1 When Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, or 3.

Speaker 1 goes on a JoJo's Bazaar Adventure style tirade about the state of world geopolitics. It's the state of world geopolitics that is directly or literally applicable to today.
Yes.

Speaker 1 So it's like an interesting conversation. You're thinking of the real world and

Speaker 1 bouncing off of it.

Speaker 1 When the same thing happens in Death Stranding, it's about something that is so fucking pie in the sky out there that unless it's ramping up the novelty, every single sentence, it kind of runs together because it's about a society that you have difficulty connecting with.

Speaker 1 Right, right. And it's and it's also a collapsed setting, so everything being different is not a surprise, you know.
Um,

Speaker 1 I had a thought the other day, randomly, but um, remember the old um artwork of uh so before

Speaker 1 Snake Eater came out, there was just a bunch of um concept art of characters for like hypothetical future Metal Gear stuff. And one of them was Ryden with the baby.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember that. do you think and like and and i and do you remember um

Speaker 1 there's the dude we went to college with who literally every word out of his mouth was a lie and he was like oh the cojam with the konami guys came here and told me all about the future game where raiden had to protect the baby and uh it was every single thing out of that guy it was batshit it was completely batshit that being said i've never seen anything like it before or since it's fascinating really it's like how do you get through life where you you are incapable of telling the truth i don't know well what happened What we discovered is that you get through life by burning every bridge you ever cross.

Speaker 1 Oh, oh, okay, okay. No, not that guy.

Speaker 1 Not that guy. Not not not the guy, not the guy I killed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you killed him. No, no, no.
The other dude that you didn't know as well, but

Speaker 1 he everything out of PlayStation guy. No, no, no.
This guy.

Speaker 1 I don't know who that is. Oh, shit.
Okay. I straight up don't know who that is.
Oh, you weren't around for that. Okay, there was a dude from the.

Speaker 1 Well, that's really weird, actually. There's a dude from the comic book Club Spaces that was like, every single word out of his mouth was a lie.
And that's crazy. He went on this.

Speaker 1 You knew two of those guys? Multiple. Oh, my.
Oh, my God. Must have been insane.
And every single word, it was insane because, like,

Speaker 1 okay, one, oh my god, okay. So, one, he told this insane thing about how, um, yeah, some Kojima productions employees like came to Montreal and were in a class, and he spoke to them,

Speaker 1 of course,

Speaker 1 you know, and he said he told the story about how, like, this, they told him what was going to happen in the next Metal Gear game, and it was going to be all about Raiden protecting this baby.

Speaker 1 And I'm just like, did you just look at the artwork of Raiden holding the baby and just go, oh, that's, that's, you just, anyway, um,

Speaker 1 and funny enough, I mean, this is so, this is the person as well who I, I, who introduced, I didn't know about Vagabond. He showed me that book.
So I'm like, okay, kudos on that.

Speaker 1 But then also believed that he was a true samurai. And when they would have the martial arts exhibitions, he always talked about how he had his insane sword skills.
And

Speaker 1 they were like, they were like, okay, yeah, sure, dude, whatever. And then one day he was like, I want to join in the exhibitions because people, they want to get people to join the martial arts club.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, there was like a couple people in different styles, and he came with his Bocan, and they're like, Okay, he says he does stuff, so let's let's go. And he went up and he just

Speaker 1 swung the Bocan around, and everyone cringed to the floor for five minutes, and were like, All right, and thank you.

Speaker 1 And like, the thing that he always lied, but he never had to like ever confront the results. Everyone just kind of gave him the leeway, and in this case, he did that.
And

Speaker 1 like, you kind of realized oh

Speaker 1 he

Speaker 1 truly just lets reality be whatever he thinks it is he's not just he he he's it's not a lie because he believes that's it he's not just saying it and then hoping that you believe it and then hoping for the the the kudos or the social credit that he gets from the lie he's saying it and it's manifesting in his brain so he's like no i do have skills in uh uh uh you know whatever fucking sort you know different sword styles and training then went up and just did nothing.

Speaker 1 And it was crazy. Anyway, wild.
You are like describing the the the archetype of guy who is currently brain damaging himself with AI psychosis. Uh, oh, oh.

Speaker 1 Like the personality type that is just like, like built for it. Immune to reality.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. No.
Um

Speaker 1 anyway, so

Speaker 1 all this to say that uh that artwork of riding holding the baby, do you think that was just an idea that then got shelved and reshelved and then reused as Death Stranding?

Speaker 1 Because it feels like a Kojima bit.

Speaker 1 You know, Willie, I got to tell you, I got to tell you,

Speaker 1 it's so weird when

Speaker 1 I think back to these types of people who...

Speaker 1 Yeah, so

Speaker 1 I ran into a guy from Konami. He told me all the stuff.
They joined the Seizap class in French Canada.

Speaker 1 The reason why that's so nuts to me is because you and I, depending on the social situation, will do that because that did happen.

Speaker 1 I'll be like, hey, Wooly, I was talking to a guy from Capcom this morning or from Bethesda, and you want to hear this shit? And you'll be like, sure.

Speaker 1 Yes. Now, yes.
It's real. Yes.
And the difference, the difference in the way it's presented is now

Speaker 1 so obvious in hindsight.

Speaker 1 I mean, he literally described, and I would ask the follow-ups, and it was like, yeah, no, they were in my class. They were learning, they were learning English.
There were a bunch of

Speaker 1 team people from the Kojima productions team. They happened to be in Montreal.
I was like, why are you here? I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 1 And anyway, I ended up talking to them about Metal Gear and about the next game. And they told me what it's going to be about.
And it was just like.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm not, I'm not going to, I'm not going to go into how you can tell super easily because that will just empower people to fake it harder.

Speaker 1 But like, there's so many markers of this dude is so fucking full of shit that you and I could just tell at a distance from 20 years ago. Just like, wow, this is a completely fake fucking story.

Speaker 1 Like, right off, like, we're two sentences in. We are two sentences in.
And I'm just kicking my feet up going, wow, this is a, I can't wait to hear this bullshit.

Speaker 1 It just, it felt like, you know, recess playground lies. My cousin works at Nintendo.
My uncle works at Nintendo. Right.
It felt like that. But the dude was like, we were in college.

Speaker 1 We were like in our early 20s and he was like late 30s at the time. He was like as old as we are now.
Like he was older and going back to college or whatever and was just

Speaker 1 still in recess lie mode. It was crazy.
It was bad shit, dude.

Speaker 1 You'd You'd probably recognize the face or the look or if anything.

Speaker 1 I'm surprised you didn't know the name, but yeah.

Speaker 1 No, Peak, like you can call it Choonie, right? You can call it Chuni. It is.
It is. But when you're 40, I don't know if the term Chuni applies anymore.

Speaker 1 It's... I thought you had to be in middle school.
Middle schooler syndrome.

Speaker 1 You know, we're older now. Right.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you think about people that you used to know, and maybe you see them on social media, and you're like, wow, you just completely cashed out all your growing up points like a week and a half before I met you.

Speaker 1 You have literally not changed your maturity level at all. It's fucking freaking me out.
That was 20 years ago, and you're still like the exact same dumbass that you were back then.

Speaker 1 Fuck, that's crazy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, anyway, I'm just, I didn't. I'm thinking back now.
I'm imagining, imagining being as where you're at now in life and being like, I'm going to go to Dawson College, actually.

Speaker 1 I'm going to go sign up.

Speaker 1 I remember that guy, the guy whose name started with F.

Speaker 1 You remember him?

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 No, I didn't know him. Oh, you didn't know that guy? I didn't know that guy.
I didn't know that guy. Okay.
That guy was like 35 years old.

Speaker 1 He's like, just got to get another undergraduate degree so I can go down to, you know, engineering.

Speaker 1 Well, okay, but like, if you're somebody who's like, I'm changing up in life, I'm going back to school later in life and I want to get a change in my career or whatever.

Speaker 1 Sure, that's not even what I'm on about. I'm just on about the idea of I'm going to go join the anime club near my 40s and just hang out with and lie to the anime club kids.

Speaker 1 That is what I am describing.

Speaker 1 I'm going to skip all my

Speaker 1 classes. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to hang out in the club spaces so I can hit on 18-year-olds.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm describing. I see.

Speaker 1 No, no, I'm here to get another engineering credit. Okay.

Speaker 1 20 years too late. Okay.
15 years too late.

Speaker 1 What's that spicoli line?

Speaker 1 You know, I keep getting older, but these college girls, they stay the same age.

Speaker 1 Oh, wonderful. Okay, good stuff.
There you go. That'll do.
That'll do.

Speaker 1 That's a pod. Have a good week, everybody.

Speaker 1 Bye-bye.