CSB349: Our Timeline Begins With Horse Armour

Not too bad. How are we feeling? I would like to throw someone under the bus right now.
Immediately. Frame one.

Frame one bus.

This,

for those of you watching the video version, or maybe you can hear some little dog noises, this is Caboose the Dog.

What did Caboose do? Caboose the dog had a vet appointment today. He got his nails trimmed.
He got his butt expressed, which is really nasty as hell. And then he had a nice bath.

So he is in tip-top, pretty dog, sweet-smelling, good guy state.

At 11.59,

as I was standing up to come over to this podcast, Caboose decided to barf his entire morning all over my fucking couch, which has led to today's podcast delay because he decided that that would be not the fucking floor, not the fucking floor where I could just fucking clean it up in like two seconds.

No, right on the couch cushions.

Look at the guilt. Look at the guilt.
Are you guilty? Or are you just baby? I don't think he even understood that he did. Because

his first reaction was, I gotta eat it. I gotta eat it.
Oh, there's food there. Oh, I gotta eat it as fast as so it's back inside him mostly.
Oh, it's cool. Oh, no.

I mean, you know, as Punch Kid is, you know, correctly teaching me parallel lessons here, you know, sometimes just existing and it means that things are going to come out of your body and you have no control over those things.

So why think twice about them? Yeah. Like

the complex social

framework that we build as scaffolding around ourselves to feel shame is truly just an after effect of what is is essentially just existing and spewing liquid out of your body,

the most natural way of being. So, like, dogs don't like to poop where they live, so they like to poop outside.
So, that makes sense, right? But, like, barf, man, barf's whatever. Barf wherever.

Oh, oh, you mean lunch?

I know why you barfed, you freak.

Because you broke into Elmo's room and ate all that cat food. Oh,

damn. Last Last night

he did a mission impossible secret mission and got to the cat food. Okay, but to be fair, Boose would be really good at doing the entrapment laser scene, the Catherine Zeta Jones.

Really, do you remember? Under the lasers with the booty up?

That would be pretty good. Perfect, actually.
So yeah, that was that. That's yeah, that's good.
So,

shame on you. I love him.
He doesn't even understand. He didn't even understand to be guilty.
Like, you know, dogs are like, oh, no, I just, he was like, ha ha, I ate. I found some food to eat.

Like, you dumb idiot. Oh, I love him.
Oh, he's so cute. What's up with you, man? Who would win? Tens of millions of dollars in anti-theft equipment at the Louvre or one boosie boy? Oh, man.

Wasn't the fucking password to Louvre just the Louvre?

I mean, was admin admin? I don't know.

I'm serious. I think it actually was Louvre with their security cameras.
Oh, cool. I just assumed it might have been pass one, two, three.
No,

that heist was they accessed the publicly available website for the security cameras, typed in the word Louvre on a goof. That's hot.

Saw they could turn the cameras off and then just rolled up with a van and a ladder and just climbed in through a window and just took you. Yep.
Yep.

Ladder undefeated. High-viz, vests, and ladder completely still undefeated to this day.
Yeah, these paintings are going

cleaning.

I got deadlines to meet.

I do have to say that, like, you know, with a heist like that, and they left the shit on the ground that they found as well and whatever.

Every once in a while, you need a big movie-ass caper to just kind of like brighten everyone's day and just be like, wait, what? Some Clown Shoes Oceans 11 shit is happening? Okay, was anyone killed?

No, that's fucking hilarious. Let's go.

I feel like we need to actually apologize to like a wide variety of fiction writers. The past couple of years have been this eye-opening fucking experience of like three things.

One.

Man, this graffiti is so ridiculous. Who the fuck would write the end is coming, blah, blah, blah.

My name's Jeff on the side of a fucking bit. Oh, oh, we just watched that happen for like a couple years during COVID when everyone just lost their fucking mind.
Oh, okay. All right.

No one would write write down their evil plan in plain text language about how to go do the evil plan. They'd like obfuscate it and have code words in the Enigma machine.

Nah, bro. Do you want to do crimes at my house?

Come to my TED Talk about the Antichrist. It's pretty sick, actually.
Yeah. And my favorite is like we were talking about that guy last week of like,

there was a thread about it on the summer, like, cartoonishly evil is now like a compliment in compared to like the real evil motivations that we're dealing with with some of the people in our society.

They're like, like, Max, what was his name? Mel Blanc in fucking Bugs Bunny, just going, I'll steal it, and no one will ever know

with like peeking his microphone. That's like, like, cartoon villain.
That's the realest shit ever.

So, so, when we get our news feeds interrupted with an arsenal lupe-ass caper,

You know, a caper is what I would call this. No, man.

You want to call this a heist? You want to call this a caper? They rolled up with a van and broke through a window with a ladder and just

but that's the other thing is it's not as sophisticated or anywhere near as like secure and nothing is as secure as we thought, right?

You went into the world thinking that there was tons of high-tech and lazy.

In fact, how many, by show of hands, how many people right now listening to this, I don't don't know if you heard about the Louvre caper, but how many of you thought that the jewels on display were probably fake and they had the real ones somewhere else and they just showed you the fake ones and then

the real ones because what's the point of showing the real ones when we're gonna keep them secure and this is just in case as a dummy, right? That's a real thought.

That's a real thought a lot of people had. So the idea that you walk in with a fucking ladder and then peace out, it's like, oh Nothing is real or secure guardrails don't exist.

How'd you how'd you get away with your big heist? Oh, I wore a mask and then I drove really far away. Yeah, and then I hid the money like

Like I feel like like I've been existing in a world where like you look at the the movie interpretation of like heat or or a bank robbery a payday ass walk in with a gun going everybody on the ground.

And then that's so ridiculous. It's so insane.

Just a guy with his hand in his pocket like, come on, give me a bunch of money in the bag, please. And like, and then like, you're, hey, everybody down.
I'm going into the vault.

I'm going to stuff this big burlap sack and I'm going to run out and jump in my car. And we're hightailing it out of here and they'll never catch us, right?

But are we really in a world where that's so far from the truth? Would is there not a like?

Because I feel like there's a million silent security systems and things in place to mean that would never work.

Furthermore, right, if we remember correctly, to history, there was the, I want to say the invention of the SWAT team was because of the massive LA

bank heist where the dudes in body armor rolled up. No, that's not why SWAT was invented.
Oh, no, it was the shooter. SWAT was invented because that guy went up in the clock tower.

It was the clock tower. Excuse me.
Yeah, yeah. Okay.
So I fucked up the history on that.

Excuse me at the fuck depository yes that's what that was um the but the result of the body armor like bank robbers that like the two dudes that went down with the with that were basically just like heavy armed yeah it was a blocking cool movies that was the result of it and then after that they went nuts with like um overgun security and like we need regular uh cops to have tanks in the city type of shit right um

so that creates a thought

of that shit so that I remember that, that, that whole story when that went down and everything and the idea that like, yo, like dudes standing behind their cop car doors getting shot in the feet is not a great way to deal with motherfuckers in body armor, right?

Um, that are just bulletproof walking forward.

So I'm thinking then, okay, so clearly there's always a level of tech that's beyond what we know or some planning in the infrastructure of a building where.

Hey, hey, Wooly, hey, hey, Wooly, here's my my plan. What if I just walked into the building and put it in my pocket?

Yeah, well, no, because clearly when the bank teller takes the cash from you and they put it in the little thing, the little thing is connected to a tube that shoots it a million miles away immediately, right?

Right? There's a billion things that totally are secure in an underground bunker that you can't even nuke to get at, right? I got one for you. I got one for you.
Okay, okay. I'm in charge.

I'm in charge of giving away all the prizes for the Monopoly Monopoly thing. What if

I just gave it to my friends for like decades?

What if I just gave it to my friends and no one ever checked? Oh, God. Hey, Tony, I hate Tate T.
I hate to bother you.

I know you're enjoying your new vacation and all that, but it turns out there's a law that we got to do a commercial to show off that this whole thing's not a scam.

So we got to have you in the commercial just smiling and giving the thumbs up that you want, okay? All right, everybody, here's the McDonald's commercial. Here's all the winners: Tony Soprano, Syl,

Big Pussy, hey,

just everyone that happens to live on Long Island, all the winners, all of them. You know what? One of my favorite.
Oh, and Carmine from New York. Don't forget about Carmine.

One of my favorite threads that I see on the internet every now and then was like, hey, you, yes, you.

You live in a town probably.

What business in your town is obviously a money laundering scheme and like people will post like restaurants that have just stupid prices that are owned as a like a family restaurant and you're like it's a really good restaurant how how the fuck do they make this shit with these prices oh because it's a fucking front you hey you know I don't mean to call anybody out specifically, but there's like a fucking cell phone accessory store that was on Dakari for like fucking 15 years that literally, I never saw it open once.

It was just a bunch of fucking self iPhone cases on the wall that were like years out of date and it had listed hours, but it was never open. Oh, the best.

I mean, it's so blatant and obvious and beautiful because I have, I have, I've told this story before.

Back in college, I took a class on business and professional practice and it was the best class I ever took. Super awesome.
Stupid class. It was great.
It was incredible.

Class on how to fucking waste money. It was literally

because in a program where everything else was like, okay Here's illustration Here's design here's fine art graphics Technical drawing all these things.

Here's a class on how to be somebody that can go get a job and and if you have to sell yourself and your art How do you price that? How do you negotiate? How do you go work somewhere?

It was super useful useful incredible stuff and our teacher Don was the best.

It was amazing, but One of the funniest things in this class was one of the first assignments was, okay, so pretend you want to go work somewhere.

It can be any business. So you're, what you got to do is this week, go in the phone book and pull up a business, random business.
And I want you to call them.

I want you to do a profile on like, you know, essentially, like if you were to go apply there, what it would take and come back in and report on the information that you got.

And we can talk about like, hypothetically, if you were going to go pitch them something or if you were going to go apply there, right? It was just literally phone book drawing. And he goes, Right.

And he goes, by the way, you might, you know, you might not get an answer. That's okay.
Bring me back that information too. And then, yeah, we come back the next week.
And it's like,

a bunch of the places I called never answered. Ones that did were like, who the fuck are you? Why are you calling? What is this? Right.
And it's like,

aggro right off the bat. A million, a million percent aggro on the phone.
Like, how are you calling this number?

Yeah. And straight up, and the teacher is like, oh, yeah.
So 50-50 shot every number you're calling is a laundering or a front for some shit going on that's shady.

So make no mistake, all these businesses, like half of them, are not real, but that that's part of this world. That's what you need to know.
I don't, so like, I

so old Montreal has a couple of these where I'm sure you you went in, but you didn't probably play this like mental game. And the mental game that I like to play is: is this a front?

Because no one's ever in here and no one ever buys anything, or

is this someone's family member or spouse's novelty pursuit? Oh,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fake business for funsies.

Do you sell little rubber duckies that are Ferrari-themed?

Well, it turns out that your father is a multi-millionaire and your little business ducky store is a fun thing that you do as

a reward. Keep you out of the real business, so you shut the fuck up.
Exactly.

There was a little rubber ducky store that it turns out is 100% just a nepotism business, you know?

My sister worked at some, a long time ago, she worked at like this, this

like luxury goods, like bag, like, you know, coach.

And there was, she was the only employee and there was just the owner. And it was, it was a young woman that was like, my sister was like 18.

She was like 25 and she owned this like luxury goods store. And my sister would go there and she just wouldn't show up to unlock the place.

And my sister would be like, what about my shift? She's like, oh, don't worry about it. It's just money.

And it's like, What? What the fuck is this?

You have a fucking storefront on Old Montreal, one of the most valuable fucking pieces of real estate on this continent, and you don't come to work at your luxury store. Ah, whatever.

This is just fucking money. Oh my God, you're play acting being a store owner.

But it's like, if you're going to take up a piece of real estate to not run a business, to do some no-shows, you should go to jail.

Yes. But why pick the place where there's actual lots of foot traffic for tourism? Why not pick a fucking factory in the corner in the middle of nowhere out in Lachine?

You know, you know, do you know why? Because on your three and a half-hour lunch break, you can go down to a nice restaurant. Oh, there's some cool places nearby.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, something funny, too, that's happened recently is talking about corruption and shit.

So, the construction mafia stories have been a long standing history with the city.

but something that recently has occurred is a fuck ton of construction has occurred and a bunch of digging up of streets and and pipes and stuff is going on surprise surprise right um

but this time around

like looking into it it turns out that it's like okay so no i know all the previous big construction delay jobs that were all over the island were were bullshit but this one's real there was some pipes that needed replacing and some lead stuff that needed uh to be taken out.

But previous governments just kept passing the buck because nobody wanted to do it because it would take a whole lot.

You'd have to shut down a bunch of main streets for a while, and everyone just kept going, ah, delay it to the next government or so.

And now it's finally a real, like, it's actual construction happening, but people are just like, fucking mafia, fucking bullshit every time.

Boy who cried wolf shit shit, you know, but it's real.

I don't know if you know this, but a while back,

those pipes that had to be repaired that get putting off, like, I think it was like two winters ago, like 10 of them just exploded. Right.
Right. And flooded a bunch of neighborhoods.
Yeah. So

we turn on the news and we're looking at the front of the place we used to live. Damn.

I remember getting the fucking paper in the mail saying, your pipes might have,

you know, not a lot of people loaded them. The city might come down and repair them.
And I I was like, that's weird that they never came up. They never, ever, ever showed up.
Nobody ever did.

And so we sold the place and done and dusted, right? We're gone. And then fucking

flooding in Montreal. And I'm like, I'm looking.
I'm looking at my basement like

fucking that. So I'm looking at it.
I'm like, that

stream room was like four feet underwater. Oh my God.

Like a year and a half after we moved away. No.
Bro, my life would have been over. I would have lost my fucking mind.

The actual

real jobs now are happening to fix a lot of this stuff, but nobody believes it because we've just been conditioned to look for Tony Soprano around the corner.

It's amazing.

I mean, I also believe I told the story about the dude who invented the quick pothole filler

and was like, let's experiment out in my neighborhood.

And then kept coming out and finding potholes that he filled with his quick pothole filler that can basically in 48 hours fill a pothole just contaminated and full of shit and fucked up. That's crazy.

And then suddenly threatening letters coming to his house. That's crazy.
Dude's like, I got a family. I'm out.
And you're like, okay, I see.

I get it. I see what's going on here.
Anyway,

so that's all fun. Um, shout outs to again scrolling past uh a cartoonish caper

on the on the news. Bro, I'm just saying the powers that be want everyone to think that they have to be Ocean's 11 to rob the most famous museum in the world.

Nah, you need a van and like an shy with the computer,

a shy, a ladder, and just you know, the Wi-Fi passwords.

Um,

Hey, hey, big company. Oh, you got all you guys are so hacked.
You're so hacked. You're going to need to give me your password so that I can see how hacked your banking is.
Okay, cool. Thank you.

And you know what? Can you also get send me 400 iTunes gift cards that you bought with a company account? Cool, sick. Bye.
So, so to be fair, I feel like going back years into the 90s and shit,

we would hear about social engineering and like,

I guess, freaking was the term. This is way better than hacking, dude.
It's way better.

But I remember when there was these examples of like crimes where people would

call up a store and they would just use their authoritative voice to sound like they're calling from

headquarters. And they just make everyone in the store just fucking

transfer money and do all kinds of bullshit. It's insane.

There were some proper crimes where people pretended to be the FBI and were like, you need to start strip searching your employees. The McDonald's one.
Yep. There was that was a famous one.
Yep.

The McDonald's employee strip search shit, of course. And just, yeah, and like, and people that are just like using authoritative voice on the phone well before computer shit was going on, you know?

Don't do anything anyone tells you to do on the phone.

If it's for real, they'll send you something in the mail.

And then there was also like the two dudes that took a photo of themselves eating McDonald's and they printed it and on a laminated board and walked in again, I think with high-viz and just hung it on the wall.

And everyone in the McDonald's was like, Yeah, that looks like a new

that's how this works. Okay, that's them.
And then they just sat by there and waited to see

if anyone would notice you always have to remember, right? Let's say I'm working at a McDonald's, right?

And I've worked at a McDonald's for let's say one year at McDonald's and two guys come in with high-viz and start drilling fucking holes into the wall. I don't give a fuck if they're real or not.

Why though? They're burning this fucking place down like I give a fucking shit.

Are you paid enough to even raise an eyebrow, much less ask a question?

That was the strangest thing about working at the grocery store.

There were two types of people there, right? Like, and I'm talking about guys, like specifically bros, right? There was guys that would see a guy like,

you know, palm a fucking 40 who go, that guy's fucking stiff, get up, ah, and like just like they want to be the hero for like tackling a homeless guy, stealing alcohol. Your current look.

Then there was me who was like, I don't give a fucking shit. He might bite me.
I know that because he bit the other people.

Your current look looks like the first guy, by the way. Yeah, I know, I know, right?

Although, it's like, yeah, they don't pay you guys extra for catching homeless people. If they did, now we'd,

right? There was an incentive. Now we're talking.
But like, I saw a crazy man bite my supervisor because she tried to take a fucking beer away from him.

And that was all the lesson I needed because she got to be stressed out for months. Oh, the bite.
The bite, dude.

Human bite. It's the worst thing that can happen to you.
It is the worst thing that could ever happen to you.

Do you

have to go through the Milwaukee protocol if a human bites you? Like, I feel like

I feel like the anti-rabies

shit might be reasonable depending on

how bad or how bath-salted the person that bit you looks, you know?

You know what the worst part is, Wolves?

You,

as a, as a, I'd say, well-to-do, clean, adult gentleman with no outstanding health problems, your bite is still terrifying because the human mouth is disgusting. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah. No, we got

fucking, what's it? The Komodo dragon ass bacterias going on up in there.

If we just bit our prey and followed them for two weeks, you could watch them collapse the same way. Yeah.
It's a decent try.

Anyways,

people in the chat are surprised. No, the human mouth is like one of the worst in nature in terms of bacteria and like poison.
It's very bad.

It's not good. There's even a specific boxing injury called a fight bite where you punch someone in the mouth and you can die from

you forcing them to bite your fist.

I saw a video like a day or two ago of like someone. like

out i think someone in russia that's like they see a fox that's just like rush that's getting aggro and they're like what the fuck get Get out of here, fox.

And then it runs up and it bites them, and they're like, okay, whatever. And then it cuts to later where they're climbing up a tower and the fox is still coming after them.

And they're like, oh, fuck, it's rabid. And like, it goes for another bite.
And that get the fuck out of here attitude goes to full on like,

because

when you get bit by the, the full-on rabies thing, um, that is one of the worst deaths you could possibly have. Yeah.

Hey, do you, hey, on the, on the, on, do do you happen to know the rabies survival statistic

on top of your head?

So I was reading, so again, I think it's like nothing as soon as symptoms are

showing. And then the first only people that survived went through this insane process of flushing the body out for two weeks and putting you into a medically induced coma.

It's 0%.

Yeah. Okay.
So there was one person. 0%.

No, there was one person who survived by putting them into a medically induced coma. That's true.
There have been a couple. And running the Milwaukee protocol, as I mentioned, it's this whole thing.

Yeah.

I think there's been two or three, but they came out really bad. Oh, for sure.

Over the course of rabies symptoms,

statistically, you would round down to zero. Yes, yes, absolutely.
If you can see the symptom, it's too late.

And in addition to that,

those symptoms are like you become afraid of water but your body needs water but you are deathly unable to to drink it or and and yeah it is horrendous suffering reasons you get so aggressive because it screws up your brain um don't get rabies by the way if you get the rabies shot after you get bitten by something suspicious your survival rate is a hundred percent as long as symptoms don't show up as long as symptoms don't show up just don't let the symptoms happen yeah don't if you get a casual bite of something just to be just to be safe um

anyway what's going on bunch of stuff bunch of stuff um

i think it's uh a little bit a little bit packed so uh

this week

um

i guess i've been playing a good amount of ball pit

I literally streamed that

a week or two ago. Yeah.

We briefly talked about ball pit. Saw the trailer for ball pit at the same time as Slots and Daggers, and I was like, that looks pretty cool.
This looks like a proper time waster.

And I was like, let's see what's going on. And yeah, it like takes zero seconds to just go like, oh, okay, it's a combination of a bunch of things I've played before and an addictive format.

Okay, let's go.

It's interesting how like, At first, because I was trying to figure out the one thing it doesn't really, it doesn't really say much, and I guess you can learn this on your own or so, but like, how much should you focus on, like, aggressive angles of attack versus going to catch your ball and playing

Blakeout, you know? But, um, depends on who you're playing.

But for anyone who doesn't know, Ball Pit or Ball X Pit is, uh, yeah, it's just a, it's a game where you're basically playing a combination of like vampire survivors and breakout.

You know, you are spitting out a bunch of pinballs

that are, they they have powers on them and they hit the enemies and they and everything in your way is descending from the top of the screen and you get to dodge bullet patterns while breaking through everything is fast enough.

And

what I didn't expect when playing it is you unlock extra characters, you unlock levels as you progress and stuff.

And then your little farmstead. Yeah, you create a little town.

Your little town game. I'm like, oh, oh, this is a fun little secondary thing happening in between stages.
It's a cute little way to like gussy up like the upgrade process. That's it.

It's the same upgrade process you would expect in any other game where you're like, yeah, I want to get extra HP on every run. I want to get faster balls on every run.

Okay, well here you got to gather some reat with some wheat and some stone and wood and then you put that together to build a building that can then do those upgrades for you.

And the way that you gather things or the way that you upgrade buildings is your little town that you place

everything everything in which is like attache case style town building you then shoot out like pinball um villagers to bounce off yeah it's your dudes the to bounce off of the buildings and or the crops to harvest them you know so that's a little fun bit um

and uh and then i would say i don't know uh how far you got

um

But like a couple's levels in, you start unlocking some buildings that really, really change things up.

And there's one in particular where i would say the game does not actually begin until maybe four or five levels in

when you get a building that lets you pick two expeditioners instead of one

how does that work do they stand next to each other yes okay um that explains a lot i stopped my my stream and i saw a comment that was really strange was like once again pat finishes a quick look stream 10 minutes before unlocking the real game.

The real game, the real game does not start until you get this building. And the building is you pick two characters and you use both of their abilities combined.
Now you're actually playing.

Because it's like the stages are meant to be fought with a combination of the guy who can shoot things from the back of the screen and the guy who can make the balls go through enemies.

Or the couple that can split so that things are bouncing in both directions, but each ball is half strength.

So you're shooting at two weaker balls instead of one strong one, but now they're also coming from the back of the screen. I was watching a video of this, and it's fucking

okay. Yeah,

so I mean, I mean, go back to fucking ball pit, man.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's fun enough on its own with the single character abilities that you're using like vampire survivor characters, you know?

Oh, this person is stronger, but slower this person like they don't get mini balls but they only shoot out big ones that do damage on area of effect attacks whatever the case is but um when you start those combos now and then you start doing the whole like evolution synergy you know oh wow i'm looking at some nonsense i'm looking at a character that fires from the back of the screen

um yeah exactly okay all right exactly okay it's crazy and that it changes so much of the game right Levels and bosses and things that would otherwise be a problem are suddenly now huge problems or not problems at all, depending on how your build is going, you know?

There's a there's a

character you get that has a shield that is a walking forward, just actual breakout. Like bouncing off of the shield makes the ball stronger.
Oh, cool.

And now you're playing a real Arkanoid ass game, you know?

But can you keep up with the flow of monsters walking to the beat of the music?

You know, that shit's pretty cool, and they're bouncing to it. I love that little juice that the game has going for it as well.

It really does have like the vampire survivors thing of just like,

as I was, I played it for about three and a half hours, and every like 30 minutes, like part of the game turned on.

Like, you know?

It's also like overtly just like Vampire Survivors. Very much so.
And as you get your upgrades,

there is a casualness to the prompts where you unlock an ability and the prompt is just whoa.

You know, like no punctuation. Like,

okay, cool.

Like, literally, the window,

the okay button at the bottom of the window is whoa.

That's cool. And then you get a level up thing for a building or whatever, and then

the button at the bottom is cool. You know, so I like that.
Yep. I like that chill.
You know, I don't like it when Microsoft. When Windows, I was about to say, what about when Xbox is telling you?

You know, how about you go fuck yourself? Oh, man. This shit's cooked, says Xbox.

Windows is like, damn, cap.

Don't tell me, Cap, Windows.

Don't you fucking tell me. Ah, shit.

No, but

it's cool. And then, yeah,

you start obviously going through these blank evolutions and then these fusions and fissions as well.

And then you actually have to proper think well about with each upgrade or with each level up.

Not with each level up, rather. Because you have the Evampire Survivors.
Do you banish things to get more consistent?

This is a little bit of that classic, like, you know, negative deck for consistency for abilities you want to find

playing with luck.

And then you also get like, is it, should I fuse these two abilities early or should I

level them up to max first and then go for an evolution?

Or like sometimes, you know, it's sometimes just objectively worse decisions where you think fusing two things is always going to be better, but sometimes it's not, you know?

But like, yeah, there's a ton of variety to the game. And

you do, unlike vampire survivors, you do have to engage with your twin stick. You cannot just use one hand.
You do have to aim and walk around. But that's okay.

That's okay with ball pit.

Yeah, it's fine. It's totally fine.
No, but like we played a bunch of other games in which we decried it is not okay to have to use a button or an analog stick.

And when I was playing ball pit, I was like, I am using my analog stick, but it's okay. Why is it okay here? But it wasn't okay in Till Dusk, Till Dawn.
uh because i'm progressing i'm progressing uh

vertically

because you've removed a full axis yes i'm just going in a straight line there was x and y earlier now there is only y

now now hold on a minute uh astute uh holo cure fans will be saying but the holo live game was also only was also removing one axis too but you could go in both directions you could go forward or backwards here you're just going up.

Yes, it makes a difference. It actually does.

And then you can hit auto-fire because it's like press RT to fire. I think that astute Holo Cure fans can tell me that within the vicinity of a school zone.

They thankfully put a button immediately after telling you how to fire that is auto-fire because I'm like, I'm not going to mash and hold this shit. What are you talking about? Stop it.

Oh, it was so fun to say. Oh, my chest.
Oh, I love it.

So, so, so, um,

yeah, I, I basically now, though, uh, after, you know, spending a bit of time with the whole like village and everything and expanded it a good bit, now you're like, oh, shit.

Scrap your whole village layout and go back to the basics and start from scratch because you didn't build optimally.

There's a more optimal placement you can put for that farm or for that forest, you know. I really, I just really love uh being able to move around the stuff with absolutely no downside.
Nope.

Um, and especially, and the thing is, you have to place people in those buildings to farm, but then you start unlocking things like, oh, you've upgraded this building enough, it'll auto-farm for you with nobody in there.

So now you can start really thinking, well, I better fucking put some gold carts next to each other.

And let's see if, is it more worth it for me to send out a a bunch of guys to retrieve all the wheat and stone?

Or should I just make a little corner here where the motherfuckers are bouncing in a small diamond going

and each time they hit a block, I get cash?

How about that? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And then there's like, oh, you want to send them out again? It'll cost you.

And I'm like, how much is it going to cost you? And it's like $250. And I'm like,

okay. How much are are they gonna make by bouncing off of these cash circles oh a thousand

run it

you know so um

in any case it is a uh it is a proper like yeah it's a proper little subsection to it and then you get to build out your your your town your it's a fun little little extra you know but um this is a brain off you know

time waster, but the juice is good. The characters are fun.
It's a great game. It's a hypamine in my brain.

I want to hit the bo, I want the

button to go

sparkles.

And then there are things where there are combinations of characters where I'm like, oh, what if I took this with that? That would be busted. And the game's like, nah, that doesn't work.

You can't do that. And I was like, oh, okay, fine.
Well,

what if you forsook all these like little mini shots and pellets for big boy damage on your your big balls only,

but also

everything

you hit has a crit from a specific direction. But also, if you're in the same line as it, it's extra high crit, but also there's a damage bonus on top of that crit.

And you're just like, Yeah, I'm gonna just walk on the left side, and everything that my ball touches is melting, and it's just going through shit. It's great, it's very satisfying.
It's it's um

it feels like it's using some of the same things that make pachinko ball Plinkoing goo, but it's using it for good.

It makes me think like I don't remember a long time ago I feel like we had this conversation on the podcast and maybe it was an email and it was like what's the minimum percentile buff that you will accept as worth a fucking shit and I think we were like 30%

Right like getting getting like a 10% buff is just like fucking whatever like no I for me it was double digits anything that's anything that's like

3% increase on critical fuck yourself.

And, like, you usually it's a trick because there's like five levels of the thing, and at the fifth level, it's like 20%. Well, whatever, right?

But, like, I think Vampire Survivors taught us, and Expedition 33 taught us, and now Ball Pit is teaching us. It's like, you can have 10%, 20%, but you know what's good? The multiply symbol instead of

Balatro, X Malt.

What if we gave you reasonable statistical increases, but instead of adding them together for a reasonable total, we just fucking multiplied them to infinity.

Depending on where you are, though, sometimes a hard number is really solid, too.

So, for example, I'm at the bottom of the stage, the entire stage is a wall of enemies, and everything is pushing me up against the bottom, and I'm about to die, and the only thing I can do is just move back and forth to try to kill whatever's slightly further ahead than others.

And then you get a level up, and that level up says, Every one of your baby balls now does an extra 20 to 30 damage.

And my bottom of my screen is full of baby balls, but they're barely holding shit back.

You press OK, and you watch the wave evaporate because that exact number increase was just enough to beat the speed of their walking. It's this really fun thing.

Bellatro shows it off the most clearly. Like it shows it to you.

But like whenever you play a game that has like all these numbers flying around with buffs,

it is pretty interesting to be like, okay, well,

for this,

is a flat number better?

Or is a multiply better? Because sometimes it can, like, there's games that have like static defense. It's like, well, if, if you do 40 damage and the enemy has 40 defense, you do zero.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And that thing, yeah, no, I want the most, I want the flattest fucking bonuses ever.
Give me the flat, right?

Or like, you know what's a, you know what's an underrated increase is increase to minimum damage over many damages. Like the one you just described.
Yes, yes.

It's like, well, you know, what if I increased my, my weakest hit from five to 30? Like, that's one of the buffs in Hades too, where one of the Zeus like synergies is you cannot do under 50 damage.

Okay. So if you have something that just spams a million goddamn fucking hits, all of a sudden you're just milking it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's one of the one of the things you get where it's like,

this ball doesn't do shit, but then when it hits the back wall, it comes back devastating everything.

You know, and you're just, and that's fantastic. Always hit the back wall.
Always got to hit the back walls, you know? Are you even playing the game if you don't?

You know, like I love the way that Expedition 33 did it, but then I'll also turn around and have like an hour-long discussion about how the difficulty range in that game is massively fucked up because they just said multiply anything.

I do not care. Just do the multiplication and it will work.

Expedition 33 is lucky that its system for combat is so complex and good because nobody could talk about the game otherwise because spoilers is everything. And it's one of those games where...

It's going to have, you know, how certain things you just give it extra spoiler reverence for an extra period because the whole game relies on these, like

13 sentinels it doesn't matter how long it's been you can't properly just talk about that game openly ever because it's the whole linchpin of the of the experience and this is one of those games as well it's beautiful but we can't fucking actually really talk about it without a million

you know warnings so

let's talk about these multipliers i think the best spoiler etiquette that i have ever seen for anything in my entire life as a community thing people are saying outer wilds people would say e33 et cetera.

It is definitely, definitely the second dream.

The second dream came out in December of 2015.

It is a Warframe quest.

I have never seen anyone talk about it ever.

Ever. Yeah, okay, okay.
I feel like, yeah, you've talked,

you've said it's good. I can't say anything about it.

Yeah.

And nobody else has ruined it either. I've never seen anyone talk about it in game ever.

Like, it's crazy.

It's very appreciated. So, this is, yeah, it's good that there's other things to talk about.
Oh, yeah, Warframe, you got a ton.

Did you get Mag Prime? No? Good. Who cares? Fuck Mag Prime.

But still,

Mag.

She's a Banshee girl. What am I talking about? She hated Mag.
That's right.

Yeah. So something else that's good about Ball Pit is they also do the thing where you get a lot of characters real quickly.

They give you a bunch of shit front-loaded. Progressing to each next level isn't too much.
It doesn't take too long.

Or so going back for secrets and grinding on the previous levels is how you get better buildings for your little town. So like going back and repeating doesn't feel too bad.

But also it's just generally very satisfying, even if you don't actually make all that much progress. That's it.

You can go back and pick up a blueprint, and if you don't finish the run, you still keep that blueprint, you know?

And then there's also, and this is where I'm like, I don't know how, okay, it's not bothering me in this case, in this game, but I don't know if it's a good design element or not.

But so the collection of resources is linked to real-time passing. Yeah.
Every eight minutes, you're going to, it's going to reap this thing.

So I'm i'm gonna tell you that that's actually a really good feature okay tell you why okay because i am actually really bad at the ping pong little mini game for the for the houses like i'm terrible

okay so i was like hey what if i load into the fucking game and kill myself immediately and then i can just get back and have another shot at it and i totally can but all the resources are are not there anymore yes because otherwise that would be the way you would do that shit And it would be fucking terrible.

But if you died in under six minutes, it would not queue back up because that's what's really making the next

resource gather possible. It has to be six minute intervals.
So if you sit on the farm for six minutes,

it'll become available again.

So you go and you do a run,

you last longer than that, and then you can come back to the town or so. Right.
I think it's fine.

But yeah, i mean i will say that like you eventually get buildings that like really minimize the necessity of

harvard suite okay so that's that's one that's going right yeah then i uh you get i get a building that is like when you're not paying attention sends a dude in a direction that you predetermine every

every 10 or whatever right and then ultimately And this is kind of where you're like, all right, thank you because now I can just not think about this part.

You got a marketplace where you can exchange currency for currency, right? So yeah, it does very quickly make it not that much of an issue.

But, you know, this, but like the whole real-time thing, when abused in real life, obviously, can make a game annoying and you can use it for like fucking cookie clicker games and shit like that.

So I, you know, I always am like, how much are you going to, you know, do this here? But

it ended up being more or less fine. I haven't seen it increase to any point where you haven't had any things where it's like you can farm this amazing resource once per hour.

You know, like that's the shit that makes me get upset if a game decides to do that. But I haven't seen anything like that yet.
The longest time frame I think I've seen was 10 minutes.

So, yeah, ball pit. Super sick.
Also, it's doing really well.

I sold it just announced that they're going to do like a full year of DLC content. I believe it's free.
Sold a million copies.

So they just announced three free dlc uh packs coming next year

um the the trailers are all just kind of like keep buying but give money give money now more ball pit you keep buying we make stuff we give when you make more stuff you have to give out the free stuff go buy now

it's just you know yeah okay i respect the marketing gibbs Yeah,

when I was streaming it, I was asking people, and it's like, it has a Switch version, and it also has cross-play.

So I'm like, I'm probably going to grab that again on the Switch, and my Switch can become a fucking vampire survivor's ball pit, fucking dopamine blasting portable fuck shit.

All I need is to ruin my brain. Just get it as close to my face as possible.
I just need to know, like, you know, when, again, when talking about this game,

do you just ignore the X entirely? And if so, does that make it more difficult for people to know what you're talking about?

Hopefully not.

Do get mad now that you say ball X pit?

Now you can tell me there's multiple characters that you can combine. I understand why it's ball X Pit.
X Pit, X cross.

Fuck that. Fuck that.

I'm not saying that.

Yeah.

The real.

It's pronounced cross. It's pronounced go shit in a bucket and throw it on.
Fuck you.

The apostrophe is pronounced dash. Thank you very much.
I hate it. I hate that so much.
It never made any sense at all.

Oh, God. That guy's name is K-postrophe.

I don't know why the fuck it's K-Dash. That's stupid.
And that game is Street Fighter 2 Apostrophe.

Possessive.

Yeah.

Is that like...

Did Japan just get that from an old antiquated English rule or something? Who could know? Who could say?

Who could say? Yeah.

Well, anyway.

Let me see.

Apostrophe pronounced dash.

Does that come from any place? No. All right.

Comes from nonsense land.

Bullshit.

Ballpit sick.

What else? It really is. It's so pleasant, too.

Beyond Survivors is doing good for the world by just

existing.

Existing and showing everybody up the hey, hey, games can be good, but also simple for baby. Well, so this is, and that's, I think, like, legit, that's an important thing because,

like,

I want to say that there was a time when, especially at the beginning of, like, mobile games, you know,

getting pushed and being pretty much all garbage and also being like the nightmare of where my job would go if you, you know, looked at you looked at the manager, gave him the stink eye, you might get stuck on mobile games for the rest of your summer.

So all this was just a time where I'm like, any games that are just small and simple like this are almost always going to be associated with some bullshit, catch-scrab shit.

And it's nice that there are games like that that came along to be like, no, they can just be fun.

And it's important to like get to remind and show, hey, simple arcade-y fun games can just be a thing now, and it doesn't have to be attached to something predatory and awful, you know?

But it will be.

Yeah,

but you should have enough examples of it fighting back at least that can be like, yo, ball pits out, it sold a million. That's great.

Let's go. It's such a disaster.

It's still such a disaster. Of course.
It's crazy. Because it's low effort.

And if you, you know, you do something really you could, you, for very, very low effort, you can cash out and get lucky and it's worth the lack of effort, right?

Anyway, anyway.

But just as you say that, I'm like,

I think it's cool that a game like Vampire Survivors was one that looked like something that would have been one of those, but instead it's just a legit fun game.

And thus, people are like, yeah, let's make some cool, simple, fun,

you know, time wasters.

Beyond that,

what else is going on? The

yeah, checked out, it took me a minute, but I checked out some Street Fighter VI with Sea Viper in particular.

Didn't get a chance to really dig in.

But

she's very cool. And

I think, in particular, it's crazy how solid the newest characters' classic costumes look by comparison to everything else in the game, which was already pretty good looking.

But like, Elena's classic and Viper's classic are like the best things.

It's unprecedentedly better looking than a lot of the other costs. Unbelievably high quality.
Incredible stuff. Like, just, it actually looks like their artwork designs fully realized in 3D.

And there's always been a little bit of something lost, right? Every iteration of Ryu in 3D, there's a little something that respects the Acuman art style.

There's a little bit of something that respects the bulky proportions, but you lose a little something. And I think that like Ken's eyebrows in each game are a great example.
It's a varometer.

It's a good variometer, yeah. It's so hard.

It's so hard to nail it because weirdo fucking banana ken, right, with the goofy ass big eyebrows, looked totally fine as sprite art back in the day and looks totally fine as original sketches and then translated to the actual game.

In his default costume, it's fine. But as soon as you cut that hair short, it's the ugliest shit you've ever seen.
You know? It's crazy.

It's so crazy. It's such a delicate balance and it's very difficult.
It's a good

It's so bad. Right.
Chun Li's face, all these things, there's such a delicate balance to like keeping it accurate, faithful, but also just generally pleasing to the eye aesthetically.

And when I look at those characters specifically, like the new Elena classic and the new Viper classic, Sagat's fine too. Sagat's fine too.

The main thing they did there, I can see is they kind of made him look like the skinny old Sagat from Street Fighter 2.

But those two in particular, the girls in particular, are like the best looking. Oh, you look exactly like the artwork envisioned you should.

I got to say, though,

I'm not following Street Fighter VI super closely. So the C Viper releasing kind of caught me off guard.
And

I received, it was a massive downer for me to see that C Viper had come out.

Because along with it came a Rufelmonger video that reminded me that Alex is now five and a half months away. And I'm like, oh, cool.

I'm just not even going to boot Street Fighter VI for five fucking months.

Uh, didn't Rufel's thing because there basically was a Capcom email that implied early 26, so it seemed like it was actually

not that. It was going to be like February or something like that.
I feel like he got delayed. Oh,

I okay. The thing I saw was an int an email that went around, which you and I may have gotten.
I'm not sure, but it makes

okay, but it mentions the idea, it mentions something implying that Alex is going to be expected early next year, so like possibly February or so.

If that's not the case, then damn, that sucks. Far away, and it's like, that's the character I want to play out of this season.
Pass.

There are going to be perhaps two to three 2xKO characters in that time.

There will be three 2XKO characters by then. Yeah.

So, so,

yeah, the pacing of character drops is crucial. And they're doing amazing jobs with them, but

although the real wait begins after Alex drops, and then you have to wait for two character lengths for something you can do. That's right, for a real character show.
That's right.

Yeah, you gotta wait like a year. That's gonna be really brutal.
Brutal. Oh, man.

But back to Viper, though.

I tried something out for fun. I'm like, you know what? Let's go Modern Viper.
Let's see what the fuck this is.

Right? Couldn't play her.

I wanted to play her from day one on Street Fighter 4, and my hands and brain were like, what the fuck are you talking about? Get out of here. You're not there yet.

You're actually, like, back in the, was that 2009? 2009. Okay, you were 15 years too early in your fighting game career to play fucking C Viper.

That was the beginning of me taking a fighting game like really seriously.

And there was just no chance in hell that fucking mashing on third strike and CVS2 asked me had the ability to do a fierce faint fierce

now. So I'm like, let's see what's going on with this, right?

And like the simplified Viper, it is fun how like it is funny how they've done things so that you can do, you still have to, you can do a lot of the shit that she does much easier, classic or modern

but something they've been doing like in the background in Street Fighter VI has been

They've been improving and adding more to modern mode to make it more like

to make it better right to let you do a bit more and for people that have that have committed to playing the game that way less modern yeah, they've they've done some some some some things like um

you know that are character specific where they've given you access to more moves like holding down the um the combo button in the air gives you access to more aerial moves um in some cases like with uh i don't know if this was always the case but like with viper for example if you crouch and press like light light light um the first attack she does is a low kick and then the next ones are punches you know so it kind of like tries to create the the chain for you um which is something again like you'd you'd want to have access to one or the other for different scenarios but here it's like you know what's actually optimal is having you do a kick first and then punch so that's part of her thing.

And I thought this was pretty cool. So like the ground pound with Viper,

it's a big, it's a big staple, right? So what you do on modern is down back and special is to do the pound near you. Down neutral is to do it medium distance.

And down forward is to do it long distance. So it still lets you pick which range, you know?

And thus then you can do her classic pressure string, which is ground pound, cancel, ground pound, cancel, ground pound, you know, and you have to, that's always been

dragon punch, down up really fast, dragon punch to the next strength, down up really fast, dragon punch again. And now you do it, and it still takes timing.

It's easier to not do the dragon punch input, but you can't just get it for free, you know?

So there's a like, there's a like, there's a bit of a thing where you're like, oh, you've committed to modern. Okay, well, can you be a modern player with higher execution?

You know, in a way, it's getting, it's kind of asking you to do more in this alternate path, which is strange, but it's, it's, it's, it's cool that they're supporting and continuing down that, you know.

Um,

in the end, though, my brain just can't handle it.

I'm like, I'm, I've got too many decades of experience burnt in here when I'm playing a game that looks like Street Fighter that I just can't rewrite.

You can do easy operation stuff into XKO because it's always been like that. That's it.
That's it.

But fighting to unlearn your instincts on a bunch of shit you want to do in this game is it's brutal, man.

It truly is a mode that is like for somebody who has no data to begin with, you can thrive with this. And I would argue that the same goes for hitboxes, you know?

Like pressing my thumb to jump is just so unnatural to me.

Unless you're a keyboard player who's pressed spacebar for years, you know? So

I've like switched my buttons around to 2xKO where I was like, both specials are on R1, R2, because I made it like a Street Fighter-like kind of thing. Ah, interesting.

And then L1 was Dash, and then L2 is Perry, right? And that's what I played in the alpha. And then I watched like a bunch of videos from pro players being like, you might want to put tag on L1, right?

Yes. And, you know, stuff like that.
So I'm like, okay. And I tried it.
And I played like three matches. And I was like, oh, no,

no, no, it's too late. It's too late for me.
And it's, and it's only we, and it's season zero, and it's already too late. Right? It's way too late.

I might as well have been playing with the fucking controller upside down. So

I had that exact experience.

So Hayate, who's

a challenger, came over, played, and he showed me on his controller, he plays with tag on L1, right?

So then he puts his first special button on X. Yep, that's the layout.

That's the pro layout, right?

Because

you can do tag and like

medium at the same time, or you can hold it, or you can do dashing simultaneous with medium and it's it's it's it like complex and advanced combos in 2xko are going to be moves where you're holding down the special button then you're hitting tag and you're taking and while you're still holding the special button down you're doing combos with your second character using the rest of the the stick or controller so it's way harder to do that when you have to hold a face button down and then tap another face button and do combos you're totally right and you you know what

Like,

when you tell me, hey, man, in order to do these really complicated control combos, you might have to do all this stuff. And I'll say,

okay,

I'm not going to fuck.

Yes, I'm not doing that combo. And I'm going to do some more basic baby shit because I don't want to.
Exactly, right? And so that's what I did.

I switched it, played a few games, and I went, can't, can't do it, won't do it. What's the limit of.

Yeah, what's what's the limit of what my brain can do with the same fucking X to tag button? We're going to do that then.

And if it gets harder, then so be it.

And what I will say is, fortunately, the way a lot of combos work into XKO is the damage you're getting for doing some of that stuff, in some cases, it's like, it's a little bit more, but it's not insanely more.

I mean, if you're only going to win two interactions, you actually only need to do 50%.

As long as you clear that threshold, right? That's it.

And so, there's some cases where you're doing stuff where it's optimized and it's way harder, but you're getting like 40 to 30 more damage on something, which is can be significant,

you know. But, like, I'm like, until you get to that point, we can simplify.
And like, with Vi, I've been doing that as well, you know. Um, yeah,

so so anyway, that's that, that was cool. Um,

uh, what else happened? Uh, I, I want to take the opportunity to, um, since the,

I have re-broached the topic of the horse girl,

talked about Umamusume on the latest versus wolves, and going back into this horse girl shit, all I have to say is

there have always been qualifiers and what not playing these games and so on when I took a look on the stream, et cetera. I just want to put out there, there is a movie.

It's called Umamusume Beginning of a New Era,

and it is just sick-ass sports red line horse racing that's the trick willie that there's no qualifiers

there's no qualifiers but to it it's a good movie you should watch it that's they tricked on you they got you

if this is how they're getting you by making good shit

then i'll be got then i will be got um it seems like basically like there's cygames making their own stuff and then there's the hyper marketed stuff that's not cy games production and uh the the stuff they've made made themselves is pretty high quality and not prioritizing the idle kind of cutesy stuff, which is there,

but really, really

minimalized.

So, no, I was just like, yo, that's a really good racing movie. That was sick.

Incredible Sakuga, high-quality animation. Love it.

And it does a bunch of. I've seen clips from that where the horse girls are running very fast and they're just like smearing out into complete speed lines.
Yes, they're speed line crushing.

They're absolutely redlining. They're absolutely redlining.
At some points, they're gurren lagging.

There's

like literally chasing the speed of light. And like you're watching grit and drool and like dirt getting on their faces.
And they're like, ah, it's like it's a super visceral, ugly horse girl race.

They're not pretty idols in those moments.

They're heaving and screaming and their faces are getting warped as they're running as fast as possible. And I'm like, that shit's fucking sick.
It's super cool.

I feel like I'm not smart enough to write this or edit it, but I feel like there's a YouTube video in here about like the in the constant, complete like Japanese anime cultural domination over like traditional American pastimes, where like you are describing stock car racing, but because it is being made in Japan and it's cute horse girls instead of a stock stock car.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, and, you know, and then there's the charm of taking a real life horse girls story where it's like, it really was a real horse that has a history and then they're interpreting it into this, you know.

And, uh, and there's some fun to like how they interpret that shit. Like, there's a character in that movie I'm describing, Agnes Tachyon, that's fucking dope as shit.
That is a.

Somebody in my chat that always goes off.

Keeps talking about it. It's a really cool character that essentially is.
So Atachion, you would know this from Star Trek is the hypothetical particle that

goes faster than the speed of light. And so if that's a name for, and that became a real.
It was a real particle. It became real because from Star Trek.

I believe it became real because of Star Trek.

Oh, then my English teacher taught us wrong.

I learned in school from my English teacher that this was a word that was invented by Star Trek and then used in real life afterwards.

That

you

weren't hosed, bro. I literally was told that in school, which is the only reason why I know that word.
That your English. So I want to stop you for a second.

That was your English teacher, not your science teacher. No.

English/slash drama.

Yeah, no. That,

no. That word existed beforehand.
They had full-time scientists on

the Star Trek writing staff specifically to extrapolate existing concepts for technical details.

Okay.

Yeah, it comes from a 1967 paper

about

quantum fields. Ah, okay.
And I would like you to know that the reason why I know this with such clarity is not because

I'm a smart science person. It's because,

as we have discussed in the past, I may enjoy myself a Star Trek from time to time.

Okay. So you

can say this came from Star Trek. I feel very confident that I can tell you yes or no.
Gotcha, gotcha. Okay.

See, I thought it was a word like Cromulant where it became real after coming out of the fiction.

No, that is, that is, Imbigan and Cromulant are both from that episode, which is really crazy. Crazy.

I thought tachyon was one of those words based on what, you know, my teacher

said. All right.
Well. Did you think when you were watching

the Godzilla cartoon, and they were like, Godzilla's emitting tachyons,

that they were taking that from Star Trek? Do you remember when that Godzilla cartoon aired? The MIB one?

Yeah, I do remember. And they had Jean Ganon's character in there, not voiced by Jean Gannot.
Yeah, so the one

the one that was animated by the men in black cartoon guys and the big guy and Rusty stuff. That was so much better than oh, yeah, that was on Saturday morning.
Yeah, it was. That was what, 98?

Something around then? I don't know, but it was the Sabbath. Oh, right.

That's what you mean by what time? You don't mean the year? No,

it aired on Saturday, aka Shabbat morning.

I heard that Jesus invented the word tachyon in the Bible. Well, that would explain a lot.
That would explain a lot.

You know? I mean, light speed communication to heaven. How else are we doing this, right?

So I always thought that was a really cool word from science fiction. Turns out it's not.
Okay. Well, anyways, the character.

Popularized in science fiction. Gotcha.
Because who the fuck knows obscure particle physics terms? You know? No.

When the name came up, I thought back to that class and I was like, oh, shit, that's cool that they named the horse in real life after that. That's dope.

Anyways, I mean, you got to name horses all about a bunch of shit because there's a lot of horses to go through. Did you know that the Higgs Boson

naming convention actually comes from Hideo Kojima? I did know that.

Did you notice Kojima

Pizza Delivery Man?

So anyways,

it's cool because it's a horse that basically has a tragic story, but ultimately is one that is like with a name like that, they then interpret that as a character that is a more of a scientist than a racing horse girl,

that only cares about hypothetically breaking the speed of light and or achieving the optimal possible speed that a horse can run and is

not at all interested in the training or the rivalry or any of that shit that the rest of the characters are on about.

And does the thing that I need, that I wish happens in more fiction, which is like, you know, there's these anime moments of like, you know, the like, I'm going to beat you.

I'm going to prove myself next time. And it's just like, nah, but you already lost, though.
What's the point of having the spirit to talk about what you're going to do next time? I already beat you.

We're done here. Like, this is one of those things.
It's such a fucking fire ass.

I feel like sports anime and sports film and racing.

Like, I feel like I'm too stupid or I'm too ignorant to enjoy them the way that they want to be enjoyed. So, one of the things that I was

thinking about when I was

fucking playing Uma Musame

was that there's an enormous amount of dialogue about

how they're going to train up and what their strategy is and all this shit. And I'm just sitting there going,

you should just run faster. Yeah.

If you ran faster, you would win the race. That would be it.
You should just run faster than you do now and run faster than the opponent. That's what you should do.

They, they, and then, of course, there's the technique that you can get into like how you lean forward when you run and how you, you, how you, whether you're a mutter or your fodder was a mutter.

Yeah.

And then there's other little moments where you get a glimpse at like this other character that's a big deal from the other movies called TM Opera O.

And they go, they go, What is what's popping off over here with like the fucking

the all might of this world or of this era?

And you just see this character that is like, again, sketch lines bleeding off of them, racing down the track, and everyone around them is like, there's an aura, there's a cave that there's a zone that is like, I'm so good at racing that while we're running, I'm popping off and giving a monologue that is hyping up everyone around me to run as hard as possible.

And you're and all of you being your at your possible best will make my legacy greater, you know. And

literally wins the race and pops off in a Kamina pointing at the heavens, Gurren Lagan pose with the Cape Billow Wing.

And you're like, and while the while the text Overlord of Centuries End pops up because that horse literally was dominating the end of the century into the year 2000,

so you're like, yeah, sometimes I get it. I'm in genetic freaks, man.
Let's go, TM opera. Oh, for life.
So sick.

No, I appreciate that level of grit and pop-off and people standing up and like the characters that in

the games that would like wave in their victory and go like, yay, I did it. In this case, you have protagonists just going,

after winning a race. And I'm like, that, I want that.
Give me more of that, please. Good shit.

Beginning of a new era is just a great sports movie.

I fucking love that.

And it would be great to see

if ever they were not cowards

the way these models look being not perfect and not so like pristine and idle like you know behind the glass to see if the game would ever allow costumes or like cosmetics that look like that to show up you know i doubt it that's it's a cat a lot of work oh i mean it funds everything but you you would imagine with the amount of money it makes that they could be like, here's the version of the character that's already there, but with a different look to them that looks a bit more like you see in these other things, you know?

Anyway,

that's that.

So, beyond that, this week,

keep an eye out. We're going to be playing a little more Expedition 33 tomorrow.

Act 2 continues.

Then on Thursday, a little bit of a birthday stream, I'm going to jump on and play some dispatch because I've been told it's very short and sweet.

It's hot. So we're jumping on.

It's you bang that out in two goes. There we go.

So I'm going to do some quick, quick dispatching on Thursday.

This is like the first time in a while that I'm like, I want to see everybody I know's choice break down.

Like, you remember when you had that feeling when you were playing like The Walking Dead, and you'd be like, Oh man, how'd you deal with this fucking guy?

And you were just like fascinated by how the people in your vicinity would react to certain things.

Like, I am absolutely fascinated by like what you and like Paige would pick in any particular like example. Unfortunately, though, I will say I have seen the jokes where like,

here's a cool-looking little tomboy that's one of your options, but then Carlak over here is not.

That's correct.

I saw that exact, exact fucking tweet. I've seen it.
And I'm like,

fuck. Okay.
Yeah, there's no, no, too

bad for you. All right.
For me, too bad for you. Too bad for everyone.
Yep. Yep.
Yep. Life's just not fair.
So we'll see what's going on what that's about. But yeah, that'll be on Thursday.

And

also, so on Saturday, I'm going to be trying something special. A couple folks are, so Tokan, the beta's going down this weekend.
That's right. And

the

Air Dashers here.

Everyone got in this time. The Air Dashers here are having a little local meetup.

So I want to head on down and they're going to basically have like a couple of consoles set up to play like local Tokan.

Will it work?

I think so. Depends on if you, if they have, if you can only queue up with randoms, randoms, then no.

But if it's like other betas where you can find a room or some sort of way to coordinate being in the same space, then you can.

So then, yeah, I'm going to go to a little local and walk around and see, you know, and I've also wanted to like show a little bit more off of like what the local experience is like is too.

So I'm going to have the camera with me and we're going to just go get that vibe. So come hang out on

Saturday as well for a Toka and locals stream, a special Get into fighting games. Uh, I don't know, call it like get into locals or something like that.
Um,

becoming more and more important as events. That sounds like a fucking Passport Bro video.
Oh, local XY XY local singles are looking for you. How to get into the locals.
Oh,

man.

Oh, gross. Yeah, no, we can't get these.
These

you gotta, you gotta go for the locals because the fighting games from back home were too stuck up. What

no, no, it's it's uh

ever ever important. So

gonna be checking all that out as well.

Um

and

oh yes, if you would like to submit a video for slop, the slop stream submissions are open. I've posted, so you can go check.
There's a submission form up on my socials.

You can go get this up on Blue Sky and Twitter. Or if you're on the Reddit, you can submit there as well.

And then they're going to go into the respective forms and there will be the continuing race down to the bottom as we can go into 2026. So if you have Slop to suggest,

now is the time.

Yeah, and beyond that, I don't know. I guess the only other thing to say say is, AO Pat,

talk to your mans.

Talk to your boy. Bricky's out here saying some wild shit.
Oh, did you see the

end of that quote? I did.

And he messaged me and was like, It was perfectly cut. Yeah, yeah, he's like, he's like,

yeah, yeah, yeah. He messaged me and he's like, dude, dude, got set up.
We got set up. He did.
He did get set up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't see the full context. But regardless, I say, talk to your mans.

Talk to your boy your boy's out of control and you need to hold him back and let him know what's up

people out here getting

hurt in these streets if he needs to

people are getting hurt in these streets over gundam seed can't be throwing out that shit no no it is kind of ridiculous how um

Specifically, you have to find,

if you are trying to stir up shit, you have to find streamers in their own world, peripherally around, like you're like just on the scraping edges of oomphies and mutuals.

And then you're like, you say some shit about this person, and then I clip that out of context. And then you say this.

And even if you lead in with a joke or without it, you just make sure that it stops right before context is given. And then you go, hey, have you seen what they said about you?

And you click play and you're like, what?

It is

quite the bait. It is quite the bait.

Anyway,

yeah, that's everything over on Woolly versus on Twitch and on YouTube.

What's going on?

Well, all right. Well, aside from my dog barfing all over my couch, which is the newest news,

I

had a fucking experience yesterday. So the long and short of it is that we have a minivan for the family, and it is on its last legs.
It is in the process of becoming too old to use.

So yesterday we went down to a dealership and went through

the process of getting a new car, right? Okay. Okay.
Now,

very important question.

Just right off the bat. You have the option to have that car up on bricks that you can always use.

For light. Right?

And the boy can see you knocking around a little bit. I don't know what I'm doing, but you could just, you know, you always got the car up on bricks in the garage.
You're working on something.

So

the details aren't super important.

What is important

is that, you know, you talk to, you talk to the fakest piece of shit you've ever met in your life who is going to try and sell you the thing you literally came in to get.

What can I do to have you driving out of here in a new Honda today?

And then they fake laugh at everything you say, literally anything you say. And you're like, I want to put a gun in my mouth.
I hate you. I hate you.
I hate you.

But we're going to be polite because that's how you do these kinds of things.

And then they kick you down to the guy who discusses

how to actually pay for the goddamn thing. And of note here is that we encountered the most divorced person we've ever met.
Oh,

no, not the divorced car salesman.

Dude,

that is the type that is a type of dude that is never going extinct man okay bro bro like we're like literally holding hand like grip like

each other to keep from like screaming out loud because

the dude is like you know because every

we gotta go through all the fucking paper you know it takes for it takes like hours right

and so

We're sitting there and they oh, how's how's the family and oh you guys are out here and you know the fucking the endless fucking tick the the endless fucking chit chat with a person that you don't want to talk to and

as he's telling us we're like oh you know we've been together for such and such a time right he goes yeah

you know i'm living on my own now due to the divorce is like like unprompted like he asked the question and then we responded and then he respond and so we're like oh so we're talking about like screen screen time for the kids.

And he's like, well, it's really hard for me to monitor all of my kids' screen time because they're with their mom most of the time because of the divorce that I'm going through.

And we're like,

cool.

And

we're talking about like, she's like making a gag at my expense.

She's like, oh, when I met this guy, he was eating too many cookies, but now, you know, he's, he's better, you know, you know, he's healthier now and blah, blah, blah.

And he's like, well, I'm an unsupervised adult now, so I can eat as many cookies as I want because I'm getting divorced right now.

Okay. And now,

is it coming out from a place of old Gil and the wolves are at his door? So please, please help or is it just coming out as like this is what the guy has? This is my nightmare every day.

In my personal relatable story bag,

everything has to be prefaced with because I'm getting divorced, because every answer he gives is like weird until he says, I'm getting divorced. Right.
Okay, that's it.

So this, it's not, please help me. It's I live, I get to sleep in a race car and I'm eating my chef boy RD.
Right. Do you get to sleep in a race car?

The moment that we knew it was like inescapable is like we're chit-chatting about like the neighborhood that we're in right now. And we're like, oh, cool.
So you're over there, right? Oh, that's cool.

And he's like, well,

I'm only, I'm actually, I'm not actually there now. I'm actually in this neighborhood because I'm renting.
And then, like, we're literally like holding our breath

because the fan, well, the family home is over here, and I'm renting over here

because I'm getting divorced. Yeah.

And it was, we couldn't fucking believe it. We couldn't believe it.

So

I will, to offer old Gil here

just the most charitable of desperate car salesman takes

reads here. There is somebody who has moved into our neighborhood.
Yeah.

You know, of the people that we're meeting and stuff. And someone you moved in.
And so, you know, we're kind of like getting to know them and such. And it is,

yeah, it is a

mom that has moved in that has a couple kids and there was a divorce. And for sure,

every single combination, every conversation,

yeah, every single thing has to come back to it because it's the biggest, most all-encompassing

only thing going on.

And there's just a baby recently, right? Yep. So every conversation somehow, somehow leads back to the fact that you have a baby now, right? That's it.

Because it's this wide, overarching thing, right? But if you got divorced, the divorce now affects everything Everything else. You never have about the baby.
It's now actually about the divorce.

Exactly. And so I'm like, okay,

this is going to be just the regular discussion point. And I can understand because of how all-encompassing it is.
But yes, what you're describing, I have witnessed recently for myself.

It's, it's like, and so we're like, like, you know, you're holding, you know, when you hold your wife's hand, you're like,

because you're both trying to keep each other from just like losing it in somebody's face, just laughing. So, this is happening.
This, this scenario is happening, but

he's we sit down and they we start going over like details of like you know, insurance and stuff like that. And Paige picks up a car, like a toy car off his desk and starts going vroom,

vroom, vroom, and is like leaves,

like just leaves mentally completely.

And I have to be like,

Paige, he's, he's, he wants to you to, he wants to ask you if you need life insurance on me for the car if I die.

And she's literally going,

vroom. Like, no, no, no, you should have taken your Adderall today.

No.

Oh, big, big adult conversations are happening. These are.

Yeah, you're doing it

good stuff

that's this is uh this exchange is going great and then and then my personal favorite we've we you know we go through all the paperwork go through all this and i'm like all right i'm ready to put a down payment on this car he goes cool where's your check and i'm like it is 2025 sir i'm gonna carry a checkbook yeah yeah yeah he's like i will wire transfer you and he's like oh we don't we don't do wire transfer here are you you Okay.

I'll use my credit card. Well, we don't do credit card payments over like $1,000 here.

Okay.

It's like, so how do you want me to do this? He's like, call your bank and tell them to okay a debit. And I'm like, they're not going to do that.
He's like, they do it all the time.

So I call my bank and they're like, no.

We're not going to let you debit a down payment on a car.

Are you crazy? This is not how they sounded. This is how they meant.
So, okay, we'll go to a fucking bank before it closes and get a fucking bank draft.

And then I'm at the bank.

I know. I'm at the bank.
I'm at the nearest bank getting a bank draft. And the guy at the thing is like, oh, yeah, what dealership is that? I'm like, this one.
Oh, yeah, we do that all the time.

For those guys.

I'm like, they didn't tell me I should come in with a bank draft. They didn't?

No.

Why not? And I'm like, I don't know why not. Why are you asking me why they didn't tell me something?

Well, they wouldn't. And then I call the reception because I need to get the name of the dealership perfect on the draft, right?

To make sure it goes through. And the reception goes, oh, yeah, just make it out to so-and-so, so-and-so.
We do those all the time.

What the fuck is going? I had to listen to you talk about how divorced you are for a year and a half, and you couldn't tell me that I needed a fucking bank draft to put it down.

What the fuck is happening? Because of the divorce, you see.

That's why.

Oh, man.

And I'm like, what do you what? And I, at one point, I'm like, what did you expect me to do?

Did you want me to walk past like an envelope full of cash? He's like, some people do that. Yeah.
Like,

no. Cash purchase.
You know, how else you gotta. Do you know how expensive these lawyers are? Do you guys have any idea? You know, yeah.

Wow. Okay.
That was crazy. Anyway.
I mean, look, I understand, of course,

there's the necessity of needing to go look at the and then test drive the car and everything.

The idea of the

CD car salesman still being a thing that you have to deal with is just like... Why is cars the only product that's like this? That every single person there is like a criminal?

So here's the thing, right? Here's the thing.

Like for all the fucking,

the infinite list of dumb shit talking about Elon and Tesla,

one thing about the thing was you can buy a car and then it would drive up to your place or whatever. And it's like, yeah, no, that's not happening, obviously.

But the idea that you could buy a car and that it would show up like a package from a store you've ordered from is ideal and preferable to having to go down and dealing with the dealer.

Like, I wish you could get it like that. You know,

buying a house is similar where like your realtor is a is a criminal.

It's just it's got, it's been this way forever and it'll continue to be this way, you know, and and you gotta, you gotta get, you gotta get a greasy handshake done to drive off with your car.

There's no way getting around it. And I wish you could just boop, boop, buy it, cash, money, transfer, whatever, et cetera, and then get it, get it showing up at your place.

So like the other thing is that like that, you know, you call the dealer and like, okay, we're going to come in and we're going to do the paperwork and all this stuff.

And we're like, oh, you know, how long is that going to take? 90 minutes, tops.

It's like, every time I have ever had to do any paperwork with a car, it is not 90 minutes tops. It's literally until they close the dealership down.
Like,

it literally takes you the entire fucking day.

So thank God we got a babysitter. We're like, well, we shouldn't have the little guy with us.
It might run long. It did.
It took us like five hours.

I mean, and, you know, these jobs run on commission. So

this whole process is going to be, there's a bunch of upsells and extra questions and a bunch of extra paperwork and bullshit that takes extra long, but that's the sale for the day.

And then you can afford one more week of lawyer negotiations. Oh, my God.
So, you know, you know, you know what my favorite part about talking to divorced carman was my favorite part. So we mentioned

death stranding. Yeah, divorced car man.

We end up talking to him

and

we chit-chat about, we're chit-chatting about screen time and YouTube and, and, you know, because he's got kids, right? And he doesn't see them as often as he should because he's divorced. But,

you know, and he monitors their, you know, what they're seeing on YouTube and stuff like that. And we're talking about, oh, you know, you know, we're, we're private.

We don't let put our kids on Facebook. And he's like, yeah, no, I don't, I don't do that either.

You know, I mean, I, I mean, I can only do so much because I'm like, literally, it's fucking every single fucking response.

But we get to the part where we're talking about new technology because streaming is like a tech adjacent industry. I'm like, hey, man, just a piece of advice.

Don't put your financial information into ChatGPT.

And then he didn't say anything. I'm like, also, don't ask JatGPT any legal questions.
It's not a lawyer. They can subpoena it.
And he looks me dead in my eyes and goes, huh?

Really?

They can subpoena that shit?

I'm like, yeah, dude, it's not a lawyer. And he went, huh, cool.

And I'm just sitting there going,

yeah.

Also, it'll just lie and give you the wrong answer. And then when called out, be like, Yeah, I lied.

Hey, and after hey, this spreadsheet is bullshit. None of the things that I sent you were in that.
Yeah, I couldn't actually read the spreadsheet, so I just made it up.

Like, the little pieces are like fucking falling in place. It's fucking, oh my god, wow, wow,

you can tell that my warning was way too late,

like way

too late,

but whatever. That's why I'm not sure.

Well, so the question is,

is chat GPT being asked how to process the legal aspects? Or is Chat GPT, if you go far enough back, is it being asked how to get the spark back?

Right? Where does the line of questioning begin?

This is depressing. This is really,

so like me and Paige blew a whole day. We got a car out of it, so that's nice.
But like we're having dinner, I'm like,

it's okay because we got a story. Sure.

It was a miserable fucking experience, but it's a win because we're laughing about the story. Like that, that's, you know, that's, that's our positive outlook.

Yeah.

Anyway, there's something cool about having that car up on bricks in the, in the garage. There kind of is, but like, at the same time, it is, it is trashy.
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.
Well, here's the thing: if I was either of my neighbors who are like

tall, fit, handy men,

having it up on bricks in the front yard would be like,

yeah, we're working on it. Yeah.
But like, not for me, man.

Not for me. A couple of winters and fucking rust claiming it into nature goes by and you're like, yeah, I'm working on it.
It's like there's a garden growing out of the front seat.

What are you talking about? Yeah,

anyway, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

So that happened. That was fun.

Family is over the flu. We're over, we're out.
We're on the other side. We're dealing with a little bit of fatigue, but we are clearly on the way out.
So that's good.

Aside from that and stuff that I watched and played this week, it was not a lot.

I took a look at a game called Kingdoms of the Dump.

Have you seen this?

No.

So, Kingdoms of the Dump is a

Super Nintendo game about a bunch of trash people.

And by trash people, I mean you play a character who's a fucking trash can.

Literal trash can. And his name is Dustin Binsley.

And his rival is an absolute piece of shit recycling bin

who has a fucking like like a fancy hat and a rapier who thinks he's better. He's smug.
The smug recycling bin.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

Really good start. Really good start.

And

it is about the lands of Phil.

It is a story written by two janitors.

It is trashed up. Like, you know, the hero of the trash kingdom is Receptocles.
Made by one of those fucking trash bins that has like the oval flapping thing okay um

this is the most

this game is the most game pretending to have come out in between chrono trigger and final fantasy six of any game i have ever played in my life okay

there is it is in this razor thin edge of having released before Chrono Trigger and after Final Fantasy VI.

So there are a couple of

games like that that were Chrono Trigger likes and FF6 likes that came out. Sea of Stars, I believe, was one of them.

There was that DS game that I always forget the name of. There's at least five, you know? Yeah.
This is the most

time. The music sounds like both.

Which is excellent, by the way. It uses the Paper Mario style, like, you know, hit A when somebody attacks you

kind of thing.

Okay.

It's really good.

It looks perfect, like of its era. It's very charming.
The trash gimmick is really, really, really well thought out and consistent and clean.

It plays well, and it has a special, um,

It has a special guest artist for some of the enemies that has a really excellent

use case. So, most of the enemies have like the trash aesthetic, right?

Um, the unknowable eldritch horror in that game is radiation, it's radioactive ooze.

Um, and radioactive monsters are not drawn by the primary artist, they are drawn by uh Francis Columb, who did uh Look Outside.

Oh, nice, okay, okay. Um,

so those things look like nightmares.

So it's kind of like

adventure time and then the lich shows up. Cool.
Where like they they're they're weird freak monsters that don't fit in with the setting and they look like they don't fit in with the setting.

Nice, nice. Yeah.
They're like a completely different art style from the rest of the game. I've heard excellent things about Look Outside.
Yeah. It's done now, by the way.

Okay, look outside is done now

So feel free to go for it

So that game's really cool. It's very charming.
Okay, so throw this on the I guess so yeah the the chrono trigger like list kingdoms of dump you said kingdoms of

the dump

You can just type in kingdom dump. Yeah, yeah, no, because I was just like I'm like, what is this list that's in my brain all the time? And it's like, okay, black sigil for the DS, right?

Blade of the Exiled.

Then you get,

was it Threads of Time?

Another game that was like a Chrono Trigger-like from some time.

Or, okay, this is what is this?

You need to add chained echoes. Chained echoes.
Chained echoes? Yep.

A hundred for chained echoes? That game's great. Chained echoes, right? Your FF6 Chrono Trigger likes.

Yeah.

And then.

Oh, shit. I just had another one.
Radio Historia?

Because that game's great. That game's just really good.

I wasn't thinking that, but isn't that just like on its own fucking good ass? Like, without even... Radiant Historia is just fantastic.
Yeah, but like...

Radiating Historia is one of the best games that ever came out on the Nintendo DS. But is it also considered like a Chrono Trigger slash FF6 like, or is it just doing its own thing?

RPG. Okay.
I just I always interpreted that as like it's doing its own, it's just a good RPG doing its own thing.

It is a good RPG and it's doing its own thing and it is it is a mix of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. You're time traveling, but you're also swapping between two primary timelines.
Okay.

Radiant Historia is fucking great.

That game fucking kicks ass and you can emulate the

3DS version really easily. Okay.

And just

the one I was thinking of was C of Stars by the Messenger phone. See, CF Stars looks way too good to be from that era.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. From Sabotage.
Sea of Stars is the other one. Sea of Stars is like a really cool RPG, which I have not even booted up yet.
I should get to it at some point.

But Sea of Stars looks way too good

to even pretend it's from that era.

Yeah. Way too good.

And

I would also say that, like, I feel like when looking at I am, yeah, some people are saying I am Setsuna. I remember that looking way too pretty as well, actually, sprite-wise, to

fit in. But still, that's, yeah, there is a list of we fucking love,

we love Lavos and

Kefka, and we're going to just, we're doing it.

Here's some pretty sprites. Go enjoy.

But

it was always weird because I just remember

the earliest one was like Black Sigil, which was like when we were in college. That was a thing getting announced.

Long time ago.

Anyways,

cool. So, yeah, Kingdoms of the Dump is fucking cool.
It's super awesome. Everybody should check it out.

I also have been playing a lot of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Now, the Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is completely finished.

In fact, they actually put out a patch this morning that fixed all the remaining critical bugs for quests.

And

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is like a triumph of a bunch of design elements that I didn't know existed.

So to anybody who doesn't know, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is your peasant RPG. Takes place in 15th century Bohemia.

It is Oblivion 2. Sorry, no, it's Oblivion 3 because KCD 1 was Oblivion 2.

And

I got taken for a ride on

that main quest list and like had this really fascinating interaction. So did I talk to you about a quest called For Whom the Bell Tolls? You mentioned it.

So For Whom the Bell Tolls, I'll just do a quick recap. They give you a very strict time limit.
I think it's about 35 minutes. And they just dump you in this extraordinarily complex

old-time castle called Trotsky Castle, which is based off a real castle, which still exists. You can still visit it.

And has a really complicated

layout between two towers.

And they want you to do a fairly complex task where you're ping-ponging between the areas and you're trying to basically hitman your way through it by getting permission to be in certain places and doing off-jobs.

Wait, this is not the Citadel

quest you mentioned? Okay, I think I'm mixing something up. It's okay.
Go ahead. Okay.
Anyway, so

you're broke. They take all your equipment away.
I mentioned that.

And you just have to skill your way and talk your way and stealth your way through everything, right?

And then

a lot of people hated that fucking quest. I thought it was awesome.
I thought it was the shit.

And then later on, they gave you a side quest called Demons of Trotsky, which is like the busy workest fucking quest I have done in a while. It is a quest in which

the chamberlain and a bunch of the maids are like, there's demons infesting the fucking castle. You need to sprinkle fucking holy water on all the fireplaces.

Go collect squirrel asses yeah and you're you're fucking even henry's like it's fucking this rats man it's fucking i don't give a shit but whatever it'll make them happy so you have to like crawl your ass around all through damn near every single room of the fucking castle to find the because there's no like marker there's just the big you know the big circle it's like find the fireplaces so you do it And you have to do it on 10 fireplaces to get it.

And you end up doing it and you're like, all right, fuck it. Here you go.
I did it. And they go, wow, good job getting rid of the demons.
Ooh, we're Christian.

And you're like, fine.

Okay.

And then later,

they fuck your shit up and make you do a stealth section through the castle in the middle of the night.

And this shit would be impossible if I didn't know this confusing layout like the back of my hand.

Like, they trick you into

learning the layout,

Just like tons

of quests that run you through the whole area over and over and over and over and over and over. So that when they drop you in and go fucking do it.
Yeah.

All of a sudden you're like, well, I know this place. I know exactly how to get to this spot without being seen.
I know exactly like where guards are posted.

Because they yell out at me every single time I go through a fucking doorway.

So when they do that well, when you recon something, inadvertently learning it, and then get challenged to like go put that knowledge to the test, and it's done great. I love that.

When it sucks, you get the fucking Silk Song food quests, right?

Now that you've learned the map, now go do it on a time limit and run through like five areas to get on whatever. Fuck that.

And I feel like some Spider-Man games do a bit of that too, where it's like, hey, now that you know this area of town a little bit, get here from here to here and

swing efficiently and so on.

so uh,

you got to implement that well, yeah, like really, really genuinely impressed. Also, last week, I said that I had spent 50-ish hours getting everything ready for the wedding.
That quest,

because the wedding is approximately the halfway point of that game. That is the wrongest I have been on this show in a while.

That is the wrongest I have been in this show in a while.

The wedding is not

approximately 50%

through the game.

The wedding is

fucking,

I think it's like quest one, two, three, four, five. It's the fifth of 32 main quests

in KCD2.

It's the fifth one.

So

um,

I did the wedding, and then I spent like 10 or 15 more hours just do. Like, it's this strange thing where you're like, oh, I did all the side quests now to bang out three or four main missions.

Oh, no, this is like a full game of just main missions.

And then, when I did that and I unlocked the

second region of the game, because there's two maps,

they hit me with an Okami.

So

the sequel begins. So the way that the first act of KCD2 ends could be the end of a video game.

In fact, I would say it's a more definitive ending to that arc than the first game is to its own full game.

God damn it. What an unfortunate disservice to Okami that this is how we bring it up every time.
What a good game that otherwise just has this fucking flaw.

So, okay.

I'm going to send you an image here.

So,

you know, you basically,

no, I'm not going to bother sending images.

So, you basically finish your first map, which is called Trotsky.

And it's like, it's a little smaller than the KCD one map, but hey, that's fine. And then you get to the second map, which is Kutenberg, which is a very large city in the Czech Republic.

And that map is so large that

you can't, the map screen can't handle it.

My computer has slowdown going through the map screen because

you can only see like one quarter of the map at any given time because it can't zoom out far enough.

The second part of KCD2 is larger than the first part of KCD2 and the entire first game combined.

And

it has like, I decided, oh,

I'm going to ride over to Kutenberg, the main city. The main city is actually like multiple kilometers wide and is like a real approximation of the city in the 15th century.
And

is just, it's like, you know, when you zoom out and it's like, it's like icon vomit? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's, it's icon vomit of only the things you walked past.

So the way that icons pop up on your map in the Kingdom Come series is you have to come within 10 feet of them before they show up.

Okay. So like I walk down the main street and armor, grocer, quest, quest, quest, bar, etc.

And I have yet to actually even start doing any of the content because the past couple of days, I will just walk around town and I'm trying to find out where all the fucking shops are.

And then I found an inn that let me sneak there and I tried to rob their basement.

And when I robbed their basement, I found out they had a heavily locked door and I opened the heavily locked door and discovered a tunnel system that links dozens of buildings underground that I got lost in

because there's only the city map. So you just have to fucking ballpark it.
And then I exited the fucking tunnels like a kilometer west of the city in general.

And I'm like, I'm probably going to have to do a quest where I have to sneak in.

And I just skipped the part where I have to figure it it out because I have a fucking sewer entrance from outside the town that I can just walk into and go to any of these fucking shops.

It's it's a loss. So that feeling, like once upon a time, back in the day when we were growing up playing our fucking, you know, PS1, PS2 era shit, you'd have your Midgar moment, right?

And then you'd see things go

and it was universally good because it was like, oh my God, my sense of adventure and exploration, everything is so much bigger than I thought, right?

Exiting the fucking the Deku tree and leaving the forest in Ocarina of Time and hitting Hyrule Field, right? Whoa, big, open, crazy, you know, all of that. I can't believe how big this video game is.

Yes, that was a universally awesome feeling. Now it is not always guaranteed a good feeling.

It is a, um, do I trust this game that this big open thing is actually going to be good though? Or is it going to be a big and nothing? Is this going to be just cause too?

Is this going to is this going to be mortal shell? I don't know.

I have

this exact feeling. So, I'm going to send you the map of just the city that I'm describing.
It's a city called Kutenberg.

Um,

this is the actual layout

of this location. Okay, all of those streets are real.

Okay,

It's quite large.

That's a real city. That is, yeah.

And I had an experience with this town where I was like, okay,

I need to ascertain my level of sanity.

Here's my level of sanity. I'm going to walk up to a random door

and I'm going to see if it, like an unmarked door that's not a shop.

And I'm going to, it's going to, whether or not that opens will determine my sanity level level or not, right? Okay, it's a fake door. Okay.

Okay, okay, okay, yeah. Fake doors, two fake buildings.
Good, good, good, good, good. And then I went to the next unmarked door and I opened it.
And I was like, oh, my God.

There's interiors as well. Yeah.
There are about 50% of the buildings on a map that I sent you have interiors and half of those link to the underground system.

Because the process of playing video games is truly, of many things, one of the things it is, is an exercise in creating rules and understanding limitations.

You know, so you go, oh, okay, I don't have to worry about this because that's not real. The game doesn't go that far.
There's not that much. You put a wall up, you put a wall up.

There's no interiors. Okay.
Oh, fuck. There are.

Yeah, you learn these little rules of like when you're playing Demon Souls and you're in the second level and you look over, there's a city in the distance. You're like, that's a fake city.

That's a background city. That doesn't count.

Oh my God. Okay.
And so, like, my first order of business would be like, well, I got to rob a lot of these people.

That's, I have to, I have to really get my feet wet with that. And I did, and I got a lot of money.
And that's great. Because when you hit that second map,

all the gear that you built up, like your endgame character with maxed out skills and maxed out equipment is like a child. It's like a fucking baby.

It's like you fucking fucking rube.

You know, the other thing, too, I guess I'm just thinking, like, the idea of that moment of that feeling of infinite scale, it's like

there's fucking no man's sky that exists as a product that is literally the whole. The man's sky isn't real scale.
But that's what I'm saying.

The whole game is like, it's that sense of holy shit adventure, but it's not designed adventure. It's just, it's generated.
Oh, you know what? Here. But

as long as you're enjoying the process, then you can do that.

But there's eventually a point you hit where you're like, okay, well, as long as I see the the end of what is designed, you know, then seeing another version of the same assets or something that I've kind of experienced before is not that compelling.

What the fuck is this? I sent you the actual map, and if you see the circle on the right side, oh my god, I sent you. Oh, Jesus Christ,

fuck, and every named location is its own town. Oh,

okay.

We're like, we're like talking like MMO scale, like, like, countryside

I you know, I just yeah, I there's there's okay,

if it were if we were not in a situation where you're like, hey, man, I'm an adult, I have a kid, I have responsibilities, time, et cetera, taking that apart from it and just looking at it for what it is,

there's still just this level of like,

the more that I know that, like, okay, because I guess how much of that is also going to be like mandatory, how much of it is optional, and if it is, is it Ubisoft optional where it's like, we just sprinkled the same quest type 50 times?

Pretty much unique. They're doing it, huh? They're doing it for a while.
Like, I did a, I did

on, I did, I did an unmarked quest yesterday that was about

cleaning up the bones in a mortuary and stacking them into little pyramids. And then I fell through the, into the crypt and found like a fucking preserved monk.

And then I had to fucking go scrape up more bones and clean it up and then stack them in a nice pyramid.

And then when I told the gravedigger, they screamed at me for fucking going in there, only to tell me the guy who gave me the quest was dead a hundred years ago.

And then when he sees my cool little pyramid of bones, go, wow, this is actually super cool. I bet people will come far and wide to see this.

And then the codex entry unlocks in your fucking thing, in which the devs write out that this quest is based off of the Settless Monastery ossuary, where there's a complicated set of bone

pyramids in real life that you can go to and visit and it's like ah

quest designed by junji ito

sure

um

yeah no i i um i saw just now um um

question like why why uh uh uh complain when Okami did it and celebrate it when Nier Atomata did it. You know, we don't complain when Okami did it.

I'm just I love Okami 2 and I love Okami 1, and I think Okami 3 is pretty good.

I was tired by the time Okami 3 came around.

Well, that's because Okami 3 is the worst of the three Okami 3. I was so tired by that point.
And the reality of the situation when I think back on those experiences is

when Near Automata kept going, I was thoroughly compelled the whole way through, and I was engaged and just loved what it was doing.

So each time a new ending popped and everything was going on, I was like, damn, this is great. I'm here.

And like at the last minute, shit with like fucking Devila and Poppola was popping off and it was, it was incredible all the way through.

And I feel like Okami had some slups that I was not as engaged for. So it just felt like forever.
Hey, Willie, have you ever used a website called Map Genie?

No. Okay, so Map Genie is a website for open world games where they ping every single item of note on the map.

And it's a good use to actually like look at whatever game you're playing and like vomit Because you when you load it up you get something that looks like this

Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay.
You get every icon overlaid on top of it, and you just go,

yeah, yeah, yeah. So,

one of the Souls wikis had one of these going for like Bloodborne, I forgot.

Yeah, one of the, like, whether I want either Fextra Life or the other one was like,

like, here's a map of like a billion. No, it was Elden Ring's map on

one of the wikis was like, just it's a, it is a, you cannot see the, the, the actual landmass because the icons are blotting it out like the sun there's way too many icons

uh okay

so yeah's pretty good um it's it's really intimidating it's it's like the most intimidating like map i have ever seen in anything

because like my map right now i haven't gone anywhere but in the fog of war there'll be like an exclamation point

Like 10 in-game real kilometers away, they'll be like, there's a guy you could talk to over there. Probably,

you know, it's a lot. It's a lot.
It's crazy.

That's where I've been putting most of my free time. That.

And have you played 2xKO recently?

I saw the patch notes, but I didn't actually play. I booted up to just go check the fucking random store.

They killed my boy. Yeah.

Well, we don't know about killed yet, but they certainly.

They put a little fucking muzzle at the very least on Timo for man, he's like so they nerfed Timo this week. And

to be fair, to be fair,

the first response on the 2XKO subreddit was a picture of World War II soldiers reading newspapers and say, Hitler's dead.

And it had like a crazy amount of upvotes.

Hitler is dead.

However, however, you know what? I admit, If you get nerfed from top tier to top tier, what the fuck are we talking about?

He did not get nerfed from top tier to top tier. That's the, it seems like probably still going to be top three, if not top four.
You know,

he is, he's still good.

He hasn't been made bad. And he's definitely still good.
And the other thing, I think, I think, because listen, the user bias is always in play. It feels

magnified when you're the person playing the character. From the outside, I assure you, the kit is still ridiculous.
The main thing, though, is

it's not... A lot of characters, you know, like, so for stuff with like Timo, with Yasuo and Echo, they were like, they got patched.
Timo, there were bug fixes that were never meant to be there.

There were bugs that let him in. It was significantly stronger.
Extra damage.

Exactly, right?

The ability to OTG into tag launch, no matter what level, no matter how scaled the the combo was, the ability to hard tag into mushroom and stuff like that, or even the ability to like throw a mushroom out, and for the first half of its animation, you just can't touch it until it's on the ground and hit, you know?

So like they fixed bugs that were never meant to be there, and like some of that has, you know,

normalized, quote unquote, him. But I think

I still think him and the other two will dominate the meta. And I think Ari's up there as well, but she needed to get touched and she did.
So Tauri got damaged by the system change more than anything.

They made it that like, because people don't know, but like, or you would, but like, normal people wouldn't realize that the change to a super generation during combos that have supers

really, really harms Ari and Yasuo and Echo. Hey, because they do their supers really early in the combo.

So for some reason, literally every single fighting game has this problem, especially like early versions on launch or so.

There's always a character that's really good that can use a super as a utility to do something in the middle of their combo. And while they're doing it, they're building back more meter to do it.

They get like 70% of their meter back by the end of the combo. Right.
Every time a level two in Street Fighter VI goes off and while it's on, they're building back more meter.

You know, going back to rows and fucking Street Fighter 4 even, there's always this problem of like, when somebody uses it mid-combo, you have to scale that back. And so here, that's what they did.

You can't be doing a super mid-combo, and then by the time the combo is done, you're halfway or more to the next one. You know, so young originally in third strike, of course, get agent forever.

So, they made my boy Timo way worse. And you know what?

I'm actually really happy with that change. Yeah.

It actually fits

his existence in league a lot more closely.

Timo is not good or great in league. He's what he is is somebody that you hate to play against.
Yes, yes, yes, yeah. Apparently, so um,

and I know I think I think like his ability to continue to annoy is totally needs to be in check, and he should he should be an annoying character to fight against. The idea that

besides the bugs, it was like, okay, you can throw a slingshot out, and then now you can't just do whatever you want on the way down.

You have to kind of commit to that makes sense because also in general in the game jumping jump back time winder right ari's jumping projectile as well everyone's ability to jump and throw shit out you know and uh cover their their options afterwards is is like something that should not be universal you know in the same way that yasuo can do his spinning thing and if he if he blocks if you block his spinning uh uh i guess h or whatever he can't just be like hey you you guessed right the second time well now you got to guess the third and fourth time or whatever, you know?

But Timo, as long as Timo's annoying, mission accomplished. Yeah,

my main actual complaint is that I have to relearn a bunch of combos because the combos I use don't work anymore. And Diaphone was properly, this is a complaint he was making in one of his videos.

And it's fair too, which is like... People are going to take any time you change the combo routes on a character, they're just going to take longer and they're going to find another one.

And it's going to be annoying, but they'll just find the different route. So instead of doing that, let them continue to do what they've learned, but just make it do less damage, you know?

Make it so that they have to either confirm it more or they take more damage, whatever the case is, but don't make it so that something someone's been learning becomes worthless now, you know?

So I kind of agree with that, other than the fact that this is like a fucking beta period for this game, and it's called season zero. Of course, of course.

While we're on it, I'll just take the opportunity to continue to be really upset about this random store bullshit because you're just like, great.

Now now i go see and it says uh what's my rotation it's the same three costumes i've been staring at from day one and then now i can buy the ko crime thing

or whatever funny and then you gotta wait another week i keep getting all the costumes i want and i don't buy them

it's like omega squad teemo and uh the blitz like hoodie costume and the Braum yeah Luchador costume. They've been in my store for like two weeks now.
Yeah.

And I go, I'm not spending fucking $28 on that fucking thing. Are you fucking crazy?

It's literally nuts. I'm just like, I want the one thing.

And then yeah, this the whole the whole, you know, like anyway, the randomized system, again, I'm sure there's metrics and data that show that this works, but it feels like it's just an annoyance for me.

Yeah, so that's, so that's the thing, though. It's supposed to annoy you.
It's supposed to make you so annoyed that you go, I just want this one costume. So when it shows up, I don't

think

that it costs $30.

Right, right. You just build up frustration.
Like,

that is the league. That is the Valorant.
That is the fucking 2XKO-like system. And it's super effective.
Free to play with negative reinforcement. Bro, I play

so many matches and you can see how much money people have spent in the course of a set.

Going back to character select to change costumes

well no not even did they change characters and like oh they have another costume for this oh yeah and then the ko explain and then you're like okay well and like so over the course of a match like a two out of three you can see if somebody spent up to like 200 canadian dollars right

yeah um i mean look ultimately too i think like if you

are

going to

If you're gonna play, like, depends on how much you're enjoying or playing the game or whatever. I've always said that for me, if I'm playing a free-to-play game, then

I have a threshold for here's how much enjoyment you know I'm willing to spend on

depending on whatever that might be.

I certainly do I mean again we'll see what happens when when the next season comes but like I certainly hope stages becomes a thing too that is more that there's more of as well.

It wasn't as mentioned. I don't think it

did they save their I think there's one stage per season or something like that. Yeah, there's going to be one stage.
Probably

next season you'll be able to buy the last season of one with with points or some shit okay yeah it would be nice if there was more of that too as well but um in any case i just i i fucking loathe this the the randomized if it was randomized but like everyone was on the same

chart or whatever then sure

but the the the user to user different stores thing is like

God

that's the point it's the point I know

they don't want the fortnight thing of you just follow a Twitter account that says, Hey,

the good skin you want online today. No, they want you to check every week.

Because when you check every week, then you say, Oh man, I got like 500.

Yeah, yeah.

You know,

every

time you have, again, negative and positive reinforcement. We've talked about this a million times.
So, what I'm interested in is next week when I beat season zero,

I am one week away from beating season zero of 2xko

because I have finished the battle pass and got everything in it.

I have bought every single blitz color other than the pink one, which I would never use.

And Timo's costume that he gets from the Battle Pass is the best Timo costume. And I bought the stages as well.
You got the content.

So I'm going to hit 12k credits

and then be like,

I beat it.

Show me a new character to buy now.

So, my guess is, you know how they put out the bot beatdown thing for like extra colors?

My guess is, here's some more ways to

get stuff.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, there's an echo color that they screwed up and put in the game that is on a, you can't buy, even though it's like a free-to-play color.
It's, it's listed on his thing.

And there's a bunch of all the colors from the alphas aren't in the game. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a bunch of colors that were in the, in the, yeah, in the early version that weren't there.

I noticed that too.

And somebody says, oh, Solidus says, but I can't buy that character for three weeks. Not true, because I never used up my free character tokens from the Box Jam Slam.

Oh,

I have three character token unlocks just sitting there. Wait, the Slam gave you extra.

Yeah, they gave out unlock tokens so people didn't have to grind them out. Oh, shit.
Okay. So besides the, oh, how about that? Okay.
Okay, right. So, I've got

10 weeks, 10 weeks, 10 weeks. I won't have to buy a character in that game until fucking Evo.

Yeah, I got

what I can do is see if Catherine comes out in fucking January, I will just get that bitch with fucking credits because screw her. Yeah, I have the

next year of content

there, so I have five.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Let's say we'll see me.

If you guys want to check out my crap this week, you know what's coming out? Metroid.

Metroid's coming out on Thursday. So I'm going to play Metroid and the Tokan beta.

So go down to twitch.tv slash patstairs at and youtube.com slash patstairs at.

All right. Let's take a quick break.
Yeah, I got to feed this dog. Oh, hold on.

Huh.

Caboose, are you hungry? Are you hungry? Yeah, look at that. Look at that tail go.
Ah.

Aim for the couch.

No. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors.
Dude, I love our sponsors. Caboose, do you love our sponsors?

Yes.

Yes, he does.

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That's not the right one. Where am I? There I am.

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my favorite of those holiday gifts that are coming up around the corner, the Aura frame.

These things...

They're super cool.

I've said it many a time, and it's really straightforward. It is a digital picture frame.

It has a very

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upload fake baby photos and see if they notice, and then call them out. Uh,

okay, but like, I mean, AI can do anything, dude. Like, no, no, no, get get, no, not AI.
No. Oh, just like other babies.

Like, just clearly, completely different babies. Okay, so, I mean, Punch Mom did send a photo to the family that was just like Punch Girl, Punch Kid, just going like, ah, and then like a speech bubble

was coming out and just like, hey, look, her first words. And it was just, I forgot what she wrote him.
It might have been something like, you know, Merry Christmas or something like that.

I don't remember. just like you should put like full-on stock photos of completely wrong families in there and see if they notice.
That would be good. That would be good.

I do like the idea of, again, like someone seeing the speech bubble on the photo and thinking for a second that, oh my God, that's actually her first words. How'd they capture that? That's crazy.

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All right.

Okay, so

what's going on?

At least one

story. Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you what.
Like, how about

I know you just said you wanted a wallet, but how about some fish?

I haven't had fish in a bit. I could go for a fish.
Go for fish. Banana fish?

A what? Does banana fish sound good?

It actually sounds like shit.

What if I told you it was AI generated? I'd be wildly unshocked.

Banana fish is an anime, and

they, over at Amazon Prime, they have decided to release a

AI English dub.

And

surprise, surprise, it is unwatchably terrible. And everyone has hilariously managed to upload all of their reaction content before it was taken down.
Good job to all those people.

I was

under the impression that people came out and were saying, hey, this is literally the decision of like one or two people that are above everyone's pay grade. Everyone hates it.
Please get mad.

Shame them. And then that post went out yesterday.
Today they fucking

put them down. So this happened at the same time.
It's too fast for this podcast. Yeah, the whole thing.
But it wasn't just Banana Fish. It happened with No Game, No Life

as well.

And

what was the third one? There were three shows. Oh,

Vinland Saga, right? And the Vinland Saga.

That's what's fucking crazy: the Vinland Saga has two dubs that are good that were done, one by Netflix,

one by Sentai, and they ignored that and made their own

because it's cheaper, I'm sure, and you can just try to run this and see if it fucking flies. And thankfully,

well enough, people were upset enough, and people were canceling their prime subscriptions and making it very, very much a stink about it. And they went

and pulled back on the

watch our stuff anymore. The Spanish dub for beneficiaries is apparently still up.

But here's the thing, right? And this is important because, you know, guess what? From now on, every fucking new segment that we talk about is going to be dedicated

to this exhausting thing, right? It's just going to keep happening. And now we're doing the AI thing and the layoff thing.
Yeah. So it's just, this is it forever, right? Okay.

I've talked

at least for 18 more months anyway.

I have even, well, yeah, I mean, you'd be surprised how far the needle can go into this bubble sometimes, you know? But

here's what I'm saying. I've talked in the past before about how when it comes to like visuals and seeing like a art, for example, that gets stolen and shit like that.

And even people, you know, you're seeing like the weird finger count that used to be an issue that gets improved over time and all these things where um all the flaws you know they looked stupid stupid and shitty and hilarious for now but i'm like keep in mind that's not always going to be the case right i've said this i've said this a couple times right so here we have the situation where uh they're now basically being like fuck the actors entirely we're just going to ai the entire show and and have that in multiple languages fuck you this is what we're doing rolling it out and seeing how it's going to go um it goes horribly it's also hilarious because uh when you go watch the clips there is like,

it's as shitty as you would expect with no annunciation or understanding of any of the context for why this character should sound a certain way emotionally and so on.

I think when it comes to this stuff and when we're talking about it, it's very important to

when people are like explaining that this is bullshit, we don't support this and fuck that, it's important to make sure that you're doing this divorced from the quality of the actual output because it's it's hilarious that banana fish is sounds terrible but

if it sounded good that wouldn't be any better exactly and i don't want people to then be like oh shit it actually sounds great or amazing because that could eventually happen because it's always possible because it's taking from real people so it can always copy people and eventually land it and do a really good job and be like wow holy shit this sounds like an amazing job of voice acting digitally that's always within grasp.

And just like with art, what I was saying before is just like, don't get it twisted and be like,

well, okay, the problem is, look how shitty it sounds. Therefore, ha ha, fuck this thing.
You know, it's important to be like, no, no, no, regardless of the quality that's output.

The problem is the usage of it and not actually obviously hiring the actors and so on.

And I think that when it comes to a broad conversation that, you know, stories like this tend to break out a little bit further because it's not just like it's not Arc Raiders, for example, a specific instance in a specific game.

You know, things like this are

going to travel faster and wider. And there are people that are only thinking about the quality of how shitty the dub was and not necessarily

it being a problem if the dub were perfectly done. So keep that in mind, I'd say.
So there's a lot of the little pieces here to

kind of pick at. One of which is like, let's just start this by, I'm of the belief that at least 20% of people resent having to think at all.

Like,

resent.

Yeah, no, they resent having to use their brain. And you've run into these people.
They're everyone that you can think of when I say that. It's called Gen Z.
Oh,

no. No, it's

like

teachers on the front lines are talking about how cooked shit is, and they're kind of warning that things are going to be rough, but it's across the board. It's in all directions.
It's us.

It's not Gen Z anymore. That's Gen Z.
No, but regardless. No,

and X is cooked and boomers are cooked and we're cooked. and it's just funny.
Millennials are the only ones who aren't cooked, but we got fucked over. So, hey, isn't that funny? Nope, we're worse.

We're dumb. Yeah, anyway, point being, well, because millennials are the ones who gave Gen C all their iPads.

So, like, even if, even if we're not cooked, like, it's still that, that one's our fault for sure. But it was all my fault personally.

Yeah, but, but, but, that, but, but, like, going into the tech market and inventing these iPads were the only opportunities we had because the entire market for getting a normal house and family and shit were destroyed by the X's and boomers are above above us.

Inherit the bullshit. Pass it on.
Anyway, point being,

about 20% of 25, 30%, whatever people are just like fucking morons and resent being able to

having to read. You know, so like, these people will never be reached.
And so there's no point even discussing with them.

And like, those are the exact types of people who go, who would be absolutely fucking bamboozled by like, oh, the AI sounds good? Cool. Why would we ever need anything else?

It's like, well, do you want to live in a fucking world in which no artistic pursuit can make any money and there's no longer any art at all other than slop or from the rich who have the free time?

Whatever. The human being has been removed and the concept of, yeah.

Right.

So, like, one of the things that really jumps out at me, though, about the

actual quality of the banana fish stub

is that this shit didn't even pass like a glance test.

Right? Like, like, the quality quality doesn't matter, but it's like crazy that anyone saw it and signed off on it.

Because, like, so one of the things about human beings is that you tend to think of your sight as your primary, um, your primary sense, right?

Because it's, I mean, so fucking useful all the time, right? Your hearing is more sensitive than your eyes,

like, as like a, as a matter of like degree, right? You are going to be just as, if not more able to pick out weird, uncanny nonsense with your ears than you will with your eyes.

And this shit is miles away from even approaching anything that a human being would sound like competent at. This is actually worse

than like Chinese TikTok movie synopsis AI voice. Right, right, right, right, right.
Way worse. And it reminds me of like days where like a game comes out and it's an absolute dumpster fire.

So early cyberpunk, for example, where all you're seeing is clips of bugs and dumb bullshit, right?

But in those instances, like there's a chance that people are getting running into these bugs or just having a normal experience.

Not every cop car is flying through the world and exploding, but the funny moments where people are running into these bugs and crashing, they're clipping and throwing online.

But it's in this instance, everyone is hearing it. Everyone is running into this

person. You cannot puzzle.
It is a universally poor experience. And thus, you have to imagine that, oh, it had to be someone shitty making a decision and pushing it through.

Often one person who potentially is, you know,

again, sitting in the CEO cuck chair. Who knows? You know, but yeah, there's no possible way that you watch this.

And like, if you're seeing these clips and you're like, oh, maybe they're just, they're like grabbing the out of context. Maybe they're cherry picking.
And it's like across the board garbage. Yeah.

Unlistenable trash. Like even it's one of of those things that I always get caught up on when you see somebody do an evil thing or stupid thing.

And like all I can think of is I don't even like interact with it morally of like, ooh, bad person, scold, right? My first thought is always like, what are they fucking stupid? Yeah, like what?

Thought they wouldn't get caught? What was your course of action? That no one would notice? Play it forward.

What was going to happen next?

And the answer to that is, yes, they're fucking stupid. No, they didn't think they were going to get caught.
They didn't think anything was going to happen.

Like, that is actually the answer every time. So,

but beyond that, I am genuinely. This might be naive of me.
This might be optimistic of me, but I am actually of the opinion that the average thinking human being that actually can enjoy anything

on a real level to any degree, and that it goes all the way down to like children, right?

Can understand and internalize

like human like creativity on like a on like a like a larger level as opposed to slop and the the image that I have in my mind right now is this banana fish shit is is dog water it's garbage right the the the guy the robot that reads off and steals reddit posts to put over subway surfers on tick tock sounds terrible right

and so does all the dialogue from multiple resident evil games

but no don't open that door

is so bad in such a human-centric, idiosyncratic, fucking weird way that you didn't go, wow, that's terrible. What the fuck? You also said, why'd they say it like that?

Yes. Why'd they make it like this? And it's got charm to it that the slopped-out shit-ass robot doesn't have because it's not real.
Of course. Like,

the room and I did not

is hilarious because a person

all the time.

An individual made that decision and is, yes, and it's, it's specifically

the product of one person's decision making that you're looking at there. I think that, I think that much is clear.

In this case, too, you're looking at an extra shitty situation because these are three shows that are

made by teams of artists that are now having this bullshit attached to it in other languages.

And it must be as well because it's like, you know, we make our own dubs because it's, again, it's probably way cheaper to just license the raw and do it ourselves than it is to go get the performances and so on that were our

done elsewhere.

But yeah, now you're tainting someone else's work with this shit too.

And I guess the big question is, you know, because again, this is

Prime rolling it out at

three things at once and just fuck it. We don't care.
We're going to move forward no matter how upsetting it is um until people are loud enough is

there

like the trade-off on their side internally is are the people that are excited and investing getting pumped up enough about you saying this quarter we rolled out three new shows and it cost nothing to make because they were entirely ai right and just using that as a bottom line on your quarterly report to get some more investors pumped up and get those get them rock hard porking up we have a we have a different different story that actually relates back to this.

Is that cash gain worth it? Is the trade-off worth it then? It's like selling the product is now secondary to tricking investors. That's it.

Right up until the investors realize they're never going to get returns because you don't sell a product anymore and they all bail on you.

But a number of them, especially the ones that are like riding the cusp, are looking for anything that says the word AI the most times

to be like, the more you say it, the more I throw money at you. So keep saying it.

And you have to wonder, like, yeah, these are the decisions and the moments where they get to just, they get to say, hey, look, we rolled out three shows. It doesn't matter what happened afterwards.

It doesn't matter where that went. It doesn't matter what the quality was.
It's a bullet point we can bring up. So, like, do you have the

EA story on here this week?

No, but I was going to swerve us right over to let it die. Okay, okay.
So I'm going to make a quick point about EA and then swerve back over. So EA,

their buyout from the Saudis got finalized like this morning or yesterday,

who now own 93.5%

of EA.

But part of the reason EA got bought for so much cash is because part of their pitch to the Saudis was our operating costs are going to go down to like zero because AI is going to let us fire everybody.

And that's not going to happen.

30 billion of the 55 billion will just be was debt that we're not gonna have to worry about because look how cheap these games are gonna get to make yeah that's just not going to happen

so EA is on a fucking death clock right now I'm gonna go ahead and say that every according to like all the shit that the the the PIF like everything of from the Saudi investment fund Like of all the shit that is going to be on the chopping block very shortly, video games are going to get it the worst and hardest.

You know what we're looking at? We're looking at Embracer Group again. Of course.
Yes, at a larger scale. Same exact thing.

But imagine this now. Embracer Group.
Well, this is the difference here is that they're looking at the shit they're holding as it's as shit's on fire.

And they're like, well, we're not giving up sports because we bought sports. Yeah, we bought sports.
And we're not giving up wrestling because we bought wrestling. And

here's golf.

And here's a bunch bunch of other shit what the fuck are these video games fuck that shit get that out of here right like that's the afterthought terry bogard just go die like it's over right so that's gonna hit the chopping block first and foremost and hardest um yeah

so from this you know you can you but but always uh as always you just get this the race to the bottom is there's still people that are excited by the word the investors with their they don't know what's going on and if we can keep them tricked long enough um so you got to come out loud and proud and say it with your chest let it die

uh um

the fucking new one it's crazy because i'm like i'm like this it's what an aptly named video game let it die inferno um

has proudly come out to announce that um yeah it's a ton of ai generated content has been used uh in game not just for voices but for music and for graphics background textures illustrations infocast everything, all assets you're looking at are

massively relying on AI-generated content.

That's why this game is coming back to begin with. That's why you're even hearing about it again.

I

was shocked

when I saw...

Yeah, isn't that funny? Isn't that funny?

I was shocked

when I saw that Steam page go up and the sequel to the game who had like 100 indie bands make a song called Let It Die and that was like the whole soundtrack

went and said, you know what? We're going to use it on a couple things, like the art and the music and the voices.

Like all the game. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well,

this is how we ship the game for $18, right?

This is how we do it. It's the most AI game of any note so far.

Everybody, like,

there's a secret second podcast that goes on during the podcast, and that's...

And

that's just for you and me over here.

It's really fun to deal with, let me tell you. That's good stuff.
That's good stuff. Yeah, yeah.
The approaches are getting wildly bold.

I think that,

yeah, you get to look at these stories and go like, you know,

the fact that they're coming out and proudly talking about how few human beings.

I have to tell you, I actually,

no joke, no sarcasm. I actually genuinely appreciate it.
This is exactly how it is supposed to be.

They feel very strongly about the use of AI in their game, and they feel so strongly and proud to say it that they are putting that disclosure on their web page so that I know to ignore that shit forever.

There you go.

Unlike something like Where the Winds Meet, which got away with not putting the generative AI disclosure on its page, despite the fact that every NPC is being run through ChatGPT.

Or Level 5, which is now after

they've put out articles and they're showing out how, you know, with Captain Tsubasa and with Megaton Musashi and a bunch of their games, they're like, we're using it for the concepting phase, and then we are getting the artist to go and draw for real over the generated image.

And again, proudly, proudly being like, this is part of the workflow, this is the process.

And it's like, if you're going to do the thing that most people can accept, you can talk about like something,

well, something mundane and

a a repetitive task that you are automating here right because boy could you people use automation and and for all kinds of purposes and with coding and so on and so forth but the idea that hey you know what's a boring mundane repetitive task being creative it's very hey you know what just really tired of writing new prompts is

a way to have the prompts write the prompts for the prompts themselves i mean

fuck god i wish i saved it i read that post yeah no everyone read that That, that, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay, you're right. That was a real fucking thing.

There's a reason why it keeps coming back up. These prompts are so exhausting.
Can't we just, can't we just have it do it the prompts for us?

Do you just want a button that says make music and then puts your fucking name on it? Yes.

And as I said before, there is a portion of our population that resents the concept of thinking with their own brain.

It is the mental equivalent of somebody who doesn't want to get up off the couch to get themselves a beer.

Um,

I, I've, I, I, it's just someone posting their like shameful secret that they're like, yeah, I've been, I've been addicted to listening to AI-generated juice world

tracks, compilations, and, in,

you know, multi-hour long videos. And it's just like, I, there's,

that's done. You're, it's over.
You're done there. Um, so, so, anyway, uh, so that's, that's, that's happening over on on the

let it die side of things. But

then you have,

I kept checking back in. Every time we talked about marathon and a new statement would come out, they're like, well, what does Anti-Real have to say about this? What does Anti-Real have?

What does Anti-Real have to say today, Wooly? Anti-Real, as of this afternoon,

made a post and said, December 2nd, 2025, the marathon art issue has been been resolved with Bungie and Sony Interactive Entertainment to my satisfaction

that

is a settlement okay that is a that is a settlement now that is a

word

oh that is that there there are load-bearing lawyers on each side of that sentence holding it in place that is the the clearest settlement language we've ever seen that is bag secure

in that that is the requirement from Anti-Real

to get all of the money is to say the problem is solved and then never talk about it again. You sit in a room, you've got your lawyer, and there's one word, and it's Gibbs, right?

And I believe the name of the actual clip from the podcast was Marathon Cut the Check or Die.

I believe that's what I titled the segment. Cut the check or die.

I've been talking to people about this, and it's my opinion.

So you know that they're running closed alpha right now, but they won't allow any footage of it.

And the reason why I suspect they don't allow any footage of it is because anti-real shit is all over that fucking game.

And supposedly, the person who put anti-real shit into that game has been fired.

Is gone. Yep.
And unavailable. And what I believe to be the case, this is a gut feeling.
I don't have any inside information. What I believe to be the case is that it is too entrenched to pull out.

Yes. That it has made up too much of the genesis of the way the game looks to pull out without redoing literally the whole fucking game.
Not worth it. It's everywhere when we look at it.

It's inescapable. you cannot turn the camera in any direction and not see anti-reels work

so

how pat how lucky are they that they only visibly confirmed stole from one person in such an obvious manner as opposed to a plethora

How fucking lucky that there's one person they can sit down and throw a bag of money at? And this was not a

mid-journey ass situation where 100,000 people are like, yo, what the fuck? Why is my mid-journey says it can't pay? It can't lose that lawsuit legally because if they lost, they'd go bankrupt.

Of course. That's part of their legal defense.
Yes. Yes.
We stole so hard that we can't afford it. Of course, right?

Right. So in this instance, they went so hard stealing from one that you can sit one person down and negotiate it.
But if this was many,

which it easily could have been and will be in the future, make no mistake, you don't get to salvage the game anymore. You cut your losses and shut it the fuck down, and there goes the company, right?

Because this is not a Concorde situation. This is Bungie's last legs.
This is

the bungie corn. This is such a good follow-up to our discussion about AI because a lot of AI is just natural plagiarism.

This is an example of good old-fashioned human-centered plagiarism. Human plagiarism.
One person stole another person's work and tried to pass it off as their own. You made this?

I made this. One person stole another one person's work and there is a direct line.
That person who got shafted has a clear exit for restitution. which they have assuredly received.

This reminds me, a couple years ago, before all this AI stuff, I think I forgot who it was, but it was a texture artist or a photographer or something like that. I think they were Italian.
Said, hey,

I was going through my portfolio and discovered that Capcom fucking stole like thousands of my photos to use as textures in games for like decades.

And they posted photos of the shit they had taken for like Resident Evil 4 and like a bunch of stuff. And it was like one to fucking one.

And it was the most obvious fucking shit in the world. And we went, wow, they better pay them to make that go away.
And we never

put up on that.

That story just fucking went away.

Companies, megacorps,

giant studios, et cetera, like, if you're stealing,

you better steal from one person, right? If you can't be stopped, if you can't be convinced not to steal, at least pick one, because then you can work that shit out.

It is, it is, um,

yeah, it is, I think, sheer, like, again, the human plagiarism.

Human plagiarism is better than robot plagiarism. Because they're going to pick one, and then you can pull this afterwards.

You have a way to actually fight back, and there's a person that you can pay. But if you had 100,000 artists all pointing to different walls in Marathon going, that's mine.

Well, then they're going to draw and quarter your company in the courtroom and you're going to just perish.

You can't pay enough people to make it go away.

That is quite the update.

You ever sit around and think about like, oh, man.

We're so preachy and anti-AI on this podcast.

Man, we're going to look really stupid in a couple of years when it just completely takes over everything and puts all creatives out of work, and it's just robots running the future.

Don't you think, oh, how stupid we're going to look if we turn out to be wrong? Oh, we're going to look so dumb. Just embrace it now.
Who cares? What's the difference?

It's coming regardless.

So, hey, Mr. Sweeney,

that's a quote from one kinda in the chat. That's Mr.
Tim Sweeney. Yeah.
Mr. Tim Sweeney went on to the social media and he said, I don't know why the fuck anybody would have to disclose AI at all.

Everything's going to use AI soon. Why would you disclose it? You might as well disclose that they use, I forget what it was, but like a game development engine or whatever.

And I saw that and I was like, wow, that's the exact mentality of somebody who's doing it and not disclosing it right now. That is like

everyone is doing it, says man who is doing it. In the middle of doing it.

And so, hey, guess what? Fortnite. A bunch of posters, sprays.
Found out that just kids fucking slopped up to shit. Of course.

And, you know, this is one of those bits where it's like, originally it was,

well,

I was going to say, I've been waiting pretty much

most of my adult life for the Kill Bill,

The Whole Bloody Affair, which has been confirmed that it's going to be happening. And

apparently, a cut chapter has been

Quentin Tarantino put a cut chapter and did it in Fortnite.

And it's like

monkey's paw, I guess.

Because yeah,

I've been hearing about, I have a poster for the whole bloody affair from Mondo, literally up over there. And

alongs this comes the

Yuki's Revenge, which takes place in Fortnite, where you can go and get

the chapter that was cut from the full story. And it's kind of like,

apparently, someone on the subreddit reviewed it, Sod and said, like, yeah, it's not bad, it's fine. And it's like, okay, I guess so.
But, like, did Palpatine teach us nothing?

Like, did we learn nothing from

the emperor? Everybody still sometimes says guy in your kitchen late at night wearing a mask.

Like, fuck off, Tim.

Yeah.

God, that Epic Store is just such a loser. It's unbelievable.
It's fucking crazy.

Well, just never forget that, like, besides the fact that there was an apple lawsuit there was the big like get the public on my side campaign and all the the images and videos and the whole fight back with us together unlikable horrible fuck no one's ever gonna want to be on your side

uh

anyway so um i saw an excellent uh breakdown of somebody going through the gears of war one credits i think it was and they're like every single person on here that has like a photo next to their name and has like a quote for the development, they're all like thanking their family or like being like, Yay, yay, I love my kids or whatever.

And like Tim's is like, it's better to change the world than be forced to live it like some fucking cringe-ass incel supervillain shit. Sure.

I just,

yeah. Anyway, again, it's the, the,

this all, this always needs to come back to the, the, the, the fact that it's slop and hilarious to report on and look at and laugh at needs to be divorced from the actual opposition and the reasons for it.

But it's it's great that it looks like dog shit when I see Call of Duty Street Fighter VI fucking Ryu's arm is inside of his gun, inside of his chest strap shit. And you're like, what?

Yeah, I don't know, man. What am I looking at? Maybe, maybe I'm old and broken and whatever, but like, I don't even find it funny, and I never did.
Because it's like

program outputs a shitty result is not really all that funny. Actor does a terrible job.
Now, that's funny, because they're embarrassed, and I'm embarrassed for them, and all that.

So, like, you know, like washing machine fails to do a good job on that one sticky dish. Oh,

like, uh,

so that's so, so to go back to good old-fashioned human plagiarism, uh,

you know, yeah, I think, I think, I think we need to keep an eye on this because have you heard of Gold Rush Alliance by any chance? Oh, I thought you were going to talk about Sammy Salazar.

What's Gold Rush Alliance?

Gold Rush Alliance is the hot new game coming out of China. Oh, China.
And if I can get you some footage over this. China will never change.
I mean, like.

If you want to count up how many fucks China gives. It's fucking zero.
You did it.

Here we go.

Here is some footage for you

of

Gold Rush Alliance.

I mean,

I don't even... Did Deadlock even launch fully 1.0? No, it's not out.
It's like a weird beta.

You know,

the classic, like, we talk about how, like,

Apex Legend had to hide its launch because Fortnite would steal everything before it even gets a chance. And here comes Deadlock at home.

As the Intel Deadlock page says, they copied our whole flow one for one. It's crazy how this game is just

not even pretending for a second that it's not just Deadlock.

What's crazy, though, is like, you know what happens a lot of the times when you see these crazy Chinese knockoffs is you get to actually see that the game they're ripping off actually did choose the right art style Oh, because like, because this looks way worse.

Right, right, right. Like, whether it just means, whether it actually stands out or looks like fucking nothing.

And there are times where, you know,

I wonder where I'm like, oh, is this a rip-off because this game is never allowed to come out or it's been, you know, held back for some reason or something?

And it's like, no, I don't think that's necessarily the case here. I don't think it's a matter of like, we're making our own diesel because JoJo will never come to the West.
Like,

just like, I want it. I think they just went, yeah, yo, that's pretty sick.
What a great idea. Let's do it.
What a great way to make some money. Good job, guys.
Let's all make money. Thank you.

I thought you were going to fucking segue into fucking

fucking Sammy Salazar

about human-centered plagiarism. I think that's the name.

That is supposedly the name that Tommy Tallarico is going by to get away from H-Bomberguy.

What the fuck is happening?

So remember, you remember when you remember when H.

Bomberguy put out this fucking expose where he's like, yeah, so it looks like Tommy Tallarico plagiarized literally every single thing he ever did in his entire career and is a complete hack fraud.

And then Tommy Tallarico just fucking evaporated. Oh my god.
Apparently, he's going by a new name to get away from that and put the new name out found out.

Or, or was Tommy Tallarico the fake name to begin with? It might have been. That would, that, what a play.
Yeah. That's a bug.
Yeah, no. That'd be a pretty sick play.
Um,

no. Human-centered plagiarism.
Right, right, right.

Um,

well, okay.

Uh,

all that aside, uh, hey, how about how about some some some better news then? I would, you know what, man, that would be great.

Um, I think that this is the kind of thing that's that's worth celebrating. I think this shit's pretty sick.

Uh, it's not out yet, however, they have announced that the Helldivers 2 PC port has received an optimization that is going to reduce the installation size from 154 gigs to 23.

I actually know what the background to this is. So, the specific

team that's making this possible is Nixies, right?

Very smart at doing PC stuff. Who I've worked with on a bunch of shit because Nixie's was basically the IDOS, not in-house, but

their second-party porting studio. So,

Nixies worked on Hitman Absolution with IO. They worked on

Thief with IDOS. They worked on

whatchamacallit? Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.

Every port for anything that was being handled on all the projects I was working on, Nixies were the magic people that were taking care of it.

So, optimizing your fucking 150-gig game down to 23 is kind of incredible and amazing. And

also,

like, I want to celebrate them, but I also go, what kind of bloated bad decisions

were you making the whole time?

Because every time we point out how Arc system works, makes a fighting game, and it comes in at like fucking 10 or 11 gigs compared to the 80 or 90 that Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter is asking you for.

And you're just like, can you please talk to them? Can you go talk to Arxis about what they're doing?

I have the information for you. Okay.

So the reason why Helldivers is so large. Textures? It's the textures, isn't it? No.
No.

It's really stupid.

They are not super good at hard disk drive read and write and compression. So in order to speed up load times, what they did is they duplicated

like six times across your hard disk. Always, always, always.
It's always some shit like that. It's always some shit like that.
Oh my God. So that it would be, yeah, and it'd be faster.

And who cares about install sizes?

Here's the thing. Here's the thing, Helder.
Oh, my God.

Into a game I delete first off my library. Holy shit.
If I need room, to a game that I will keep installed for funsies. And that's a big deal.

The difference between, yeah, I got to delete this game. It's 123 gigs and I haven't played it in a month.
That's ridiculous.

And, oh, I'd like to play the new Helldivers thing, but I don't want to wait the entire evening for it to download. Or,

yeah, I just keep it on my thing if I want to play it every month.

So, this is Nixies walking in the IT department to look at the computer and seeing the Ethernet cable unplugged and just being like,

Yeah, I'm going to need a couple hours to fix this one.

Just might need the rest of the day, actually. I don't know what's going on back here, you know?

There's another thing. So, you know how Monster Hunter Wilds is like god-awfully optimized and just runs like shit on everyone's computer?

People figured out how to uncompress the files.

And the game runs at an immaculate frame rate and whatever resolution you want. It has something to do with the translation between the files being compressed and uncompressed.
So it should,

air quotes be a technical fix of, hey, how about you fix that portion of your engine so that it works good?

We are in a future where because of hard drives and digital games,

companies and devs

no longer need to worry about cartridge or disc limitations and are not. So they just go nuts.
So they just go nuts. And they're not optimizing in the ways that they should.

And by necessity, we talked about this literally last week. Literally, the story

doing the interview with Tim Kaine, you know, where necessity led to amazingly streamlined games and design and everything. And like here, you're just like, nah, fuck it.

Copy the game eight times then. They'll just download a bigger game.
Too bad.

It's a big

shiny AAA. It's fine.
I want to distribute a full episode of this first-person shooter on the pre-broadband internet to the planet.

This shit needs to work on every computer it is ever downloaded onto.

And it needs to be small so that a 56k modem could reasonably download it.

So John Carmack decided to put his rocket chip hat on or whatever the fuck and drink a Diet Coke and code the most fucking optimized piece of game software that has ever existed. And look at that.

Doom sells a billion shit zillion copies off a demo.

Runs on a fucking

pregnancy test.

Yeah.

Yep.

No, it sucks because there are there is there is a job that is there is a person whose job it is to optimize things. And you can see where they just don't give a fucking do nothing here.

I have to, I have to walk some of that back. I don't think in an optimization discussion, it is particularly helpful for me to just say, Why aren't you as smart as as John Carmack?

Yeah, that's not fair, sure, sure. But, like, you could try a little harder sometimes, maybe.

And if I'm not mistaken, didn't like, I think his brother was like

helped

the Arxis team get Exerred, like, oh, no, looking at

running the way they did. like his brother is the world's most foremost expert on the Unreal Engine.

Yeah, yeah, so they so his brother got Arxis set up for Exerd to look into play run as good as it did and to be as optimized as it was. No, no, they got some kind of brain thing going on.
It's crazy.

It's a whole thing. Okay, so fine.
So not them, right? But nonetheless, can we go, can we go from like 154 to

20 without needing to call in, you know, Nixies to do it? Because Nixies is great. Nixies is great.
But if they just look and they see the same shit. Anyway, whatever.

Listen, listen to me. I am more convinced than ever, than ever, that the Call of Duty team,

a team that has been long renowned for being crazy about optimization on consoles and are technically proficient in a lot of ways, or at least used to be, that the only reason that those guys were putting out fucking versions of their game that were hundreds of fucking gigs that would fill up your entire Xbox hard drive is so that you couldn't download another game.

I am absolutely positive that that is intentional.

I'm going to say that feeling also goes hand in hand with, well, we're Call of Duty. We can do what we want.

Wait, you're going to download. You're going to delete Call of Duty hard drive so you can install what? You know, and the feeling that the game is

this big is like, oh, it's got to be good, right? Oh, boy, look how big this download is. This shit's got to be crazy.

You know, you kind of wonder, like, if you downloaded a Call of Duty game and it like transferred completed and it was like fucking eight gigs,

is there some, you know, somewhere out there, are some people kind of going like, huh,

oh, that can't be good.

It's

to quote the bid, it's like getting the tuna that says dolphin free and going, hmm, but what if it doesn't taste as good? Well, I would try it and be like,

It's the part that I like, the dolphin. Oh, no,

anyway, um, so Metroid Prime Beat for Beyond is coming, and I don't know if you saw any of the reviews. I did, I saw that it would, it's pretty good, but it has some low spots.
Got some low spots.

They talked about like some of the biking stuff

not being as interesting as they hoped. Um, but I saw take a pretty good Metroid.
Sure. Sure.
One thing I saw, I saw that Silux is just,

he's not the villain that he's being built up to be. He's not the

Samus

rival that, you know, Federation Force would have promised.

But regardless, no, there's one thing that I thought was pretty funny

in one of them was just the idea is her hanging out, Samus hanging out with the

soldiers, soldiers, the Federation Force, is actually fine. And their personalities being interacting with her and everything is like totally normal.
They're not annoying or anything.

But the issue is that

she is silent and not just silent in the way that Link is, where you're like, oh, Link is saying things, but we're just not hearing it while we play the game.

It's like, no, she's actually dead pan staring at people who are asking her questions and then

suddenly going, oh, no, totally, sadness you know what my bad i shouldn't have asked you know like like and it gives it gives two examples and describes one soldier who she changes suits and then like walks up to and he goes who are you who are you and points a gun at her and then she kind of steps forward a bit more and he goes oh it's sadness hey how's it going you know and then like relaxes or someone who asks a question directly about the mission like what are we supposed to do here or something and then she just kind of shows a map and then he goes oh yeah of course and then everyone is interacting with someone who is not a silent protagonist but actively refusing to speak.

And apparently it comes across as strange as

this is what I want out of Link. This is what I want out of Doomguy.
This is what I want out of Samus. This is what I want out of Gordon Freeman.

I want characters who interact in a realistic world and bafflingly.

Aggressively silent.

Aggressively. Yeah.
And so like everyone has to have a one-sided conversation that isn't the like, oh, in between pressing prompts here. You didn't hear what I said.
It's just them going,

yeah, yeah. So I guess then

we're going left, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'll just, I'll just, I'll just go.

As they said, she just stands there.

By the way,

somebody reached out and sent me a link to the Resident Evil fandom

where there is information about Jurasec filing a complaint against Capcom in June of 2021. However, following an out-of-court settlement, the case was dismissed on the 7th of of February, 2022.

Ah, so we have the actual settlement date. So, yeah, no, that shit just went away.
How about that?

It just went away.

Okay.

And then beyond that,

why is Half-Life 3 that it has made noise now?

Because the voice actor for

the G-Man

made a tweet like in

January or February that just said like, big things coming. That's it.

That's it.

Big moves. Instagram post.
Staring with your back.

You looking out at the ocean, right? One knee up, Captain Morgan pose. Big moves.
Making big moves. Keep your eyes out.

I think as well, it's because there's leak shit going on on and some mysterious person with

the biggest my uncle works at Valve Energy post ever with someone coming out to say,

I don't work for Valve, but I work at a lab that did tech on Half-Life 3 and they found a breakthrough with fluid physics and such

in Source 2, so they're coming out to show a tech demo for all this stuff. And it's coming December 11th, y'all.
And

the idea, the idea that

Mark Laidlaw, the writer writer of those games, would leave Valve and then many years later be like, fuck it.

So here's what Half-Life 3 was going to be, and just break down the whole fucking plot on Twitter. And that was like two, three years ago.
And for them to announce the third game now,

it would have to come along with the Steambox. Yeah, the GameCube, yes.

And that's somewhat reasonable to to assume, I guess. Making it exclusive to the cube.
Basically, if it was ever going to happen,

it would happen soon. With these products.
Yeah. Yes.
And so if that thing comes out or gets announced or gets the price or gets the date or fucking whatever,

and it doesn't come along with a fucking Half-Life announcement,

then shut up.

It's over.

It's done. What if I just post the big eye emoji a few more times? No.

All right.

Yeah.

Guys, chat, I'm old. You can't expect me to know how many years ago things were.

Wooly, have you been playing a PlayStation 1 game and someone's like, whoa, this shit's so old? And you're like, it's not old. It only came out, oh,

fucking 20 years ago.

Well, again, you know, never forget that 2010 was 10 years ago, but the year 2000 was also 10 years ago.

And the 70s was 30 years ago,

and the 80s was 20 years ago forever. That's right.
Yeah, that's it.

But 2016 was 200 years ago.

Yeah, that's it. You know,

it's, it's, it's weird. It's very strange.

Um,

I don't know if you see any of that Night Rain DLC that they showed off with the Undertaker and the Scholar. Yeah, it looks cool.
Looks cool. Apparently, there's a poison swamp in.

They are aware of the swamp meme, and it's not a rule or a policy to have a swamp in there, but it always just seems to be someone's idea that they come up with.

So it's kind of taking on a life of its own. We don't deliberately put the poison swamps in, but it just kind of happens.
Wasn't there a poison swamp in fucking Armored Core?

I feel like there was because there's a skeletons.

Yeah, there was a swamp. I don't think it was poisoned, but there was a swamp, and there were wheel skeletons staring at an item that you had to pick up.
It was the Moonlight Greatsword. It sure was.

Oh, man.

All right. Let's take some emails.
If you want to send in an email, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com. That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Boy, that Game Awards is coming up, though. There's going to be stuff there, I bet.

Mm-hmm.

I bet there's going to be stuff there. Bet stuff's going on.

I bet it'll be never before-seen stuff.

Dear dad dudes,

Jacob asks, you had some words for Nidhogg 2 the other week, and you got me thinking, what are some franchises that genuinely are misunderstood by their own creators? They made a Nidhogg 2?

Some examples I can think of include George Lucas handling Star Wars, or and you've you, you have said, you have said the answer, Ridley Scott, and the modern-day alien sequels. So, there you go.

That's what I was going to fucking say. So, I'm going to like, you know, shout outs to Ridley.
I mean it when people do this, they answer

the answer,

Ridley Black Goop Scott,

and his Prometheus timeline are the most just you are the you have created the thing and you cannot possibly understand why the thing was so sick and we're so far from that and it's sad

Yep, yep

Ridley Goop Master It's crazy. It's uh Scott

Fucking the fucking Daisuke Ishawatari. Oh

Yeah, I don't want to make a fighting game. I don't make an open world okay, okay, okay, okay, but he figured it out though, but he came back.
He came back, he came back, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's probably the only example I can think of where they're like, this is what I really want to make. And people went, fucking no, and he went, okay, okay, okay, my bad, my bad, my bad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, oh, oh, well, no, hold on. Boruto isn't done by Kishimoto, right? Boruto, someone else took the ring.
No, no, no, no, no, no, Kishimoto's gone. Yeah, he gave over it.

He He gave that up, and someone else started going with the guns and the moon, right? And whatever. Yeah, okay, all right.

Yeah, yeah. I

like a temporary lapse in judgment is one thing where you're like, I want to be known for something else. I want to be Steve Martin on a ukulele and stop talking about my comedy.

Man, that's

Jesus. Yeah, right.
That's a poll for no one. That's for nobody.
You sound like an old man talking about fucking Steve Martin.

But that's because I remember his interviews where he went on multiple shows and people were not allowed to ask him about his comedy career. They were only allowed to ask him about his music.

And you're just like... That's so crazy.
What a fucking dick move, dude. What an insanely dick move.

So Kishimoto came back and took it back. Okay.
Oh, did he? Okay, so then Kishimoto is valid again.

He escaped, but he gets pulled back in by his own gravity.

Incredible. That's good stuff.
That's good stuff. Yeah, it needs to be a creator that is consistently misunderstanding and making the mistake over and over and over again.

That's kind of incredible. Oh, man.

At the end of the day, I think...

Well, you can't say Mighty Number 9 because

he implies that Inafune had

human heart and that he didn't evaporate at the end of that like when he faded in that Kickstarter video that truly was the end

all right let's take another one over here

Jason says hello oh somebody just said it

terradine in chat Neil Breen does not understand his own genius

Like Neil Breen does not understand

why people love him.

Do you see his most recent trailer? His acting is significantly better. Oh, yeah.

And he's, and he, but he did go back to real sets, and he's not doing the green screen stuff anymore.

So, like,

his movies are getting better. Interesting.
Like, actually, better.

I refuse to say David Cage because that implies that there was.

That's not what happened.

The games got away from him. But larger teams

made one individual's like

influence less.

Like it implies that there was a starting premise that we all loved to begin with, which I'm not going to give the Indigo Prophecy demo that benefit because it's part of the same fail game.

If there was a, and Omicron came before that. So there was never a David Cage that delivered, right?

Bro, I just, I got to, I was speaking to, I'm not going to blow up their spot in case they don't do it, but I was speaking to a fellow content creator lately and they asked me, Hey, is Indigo Prophecy funny?

What is this? And I got to just lose my fucking mind.

Oh, if you don't know,

and like, if you don't know, that's the best, man. That's that's as good as it gets.
God damn.

But the, but the further into the future you go, the more you run the risk of like the Detroit trap, where a bunch of people walked out of that going, that was kind of a cool game. I don't know.

It was.

It was. I'm not going to think critically about it, but yeah, you know.

You know what? You know what? The best part of Detroit is now, like today,

the best part of Detroit is getting to hear Neil Newbon's god-awful American accent.

Neil Newbon. Neil Newbon plays Kaminsky, the guy who invented the robots, like the Steve Jobs

type dude. And his American accent is fucking terrible.
It is like walking dead coral.

It is so bad.

See, I always give, so I give Idris a pass because he whispers and he gets away with it by just talking really low.

So the distance between Elba's voice and any American accent is a chasm.

Like, of course, Coach Elba's real voice is ununderstandable.

It's crazy. Someone writing the script, whenever you've got one of these situations, someone writing the script needs to write the word aluminium into it and see what happens.

Just to blow up spots.

In the middle of a thick American accent, you know? Aluminium.

Jason says, hey, earth-rending beast and beast of clairvoyance. Longtime listener, first time questioner.
What is your favorite walk/slash run in games for whatever reason?

My example would be Harry's from Silent Hill for both the sound it makes and the fact that it looks halfway between a run and falling over.

Bonus is if you do it IRL because you thought no one would notice.

Here, I struggled with a good question and fired off this one, I guess. Thank you.

I'm going to give a shout out to Resident Evil 2 remakes, Leon on caution

for bafflingly being the fastest run speed. Leon, having taken a little bit of damage in that game, runs faster than when he's fine, which means every speed run of that game looks like shit.

That's great because they all run up and get bit by a zombie

in caution for the whole game. Hilarious.

To me, number one with a bullet all time,

Alucard.

The walk, the run, the turn.

It's good stuff.

And then just with the shadows, it's perfection. It's perfection.
It's really good.

You want to talk about just feel, you know, just feel of hitting the D-pad and then, like, oh, he slides so smooth. It's amazing.

And then I say. This feels like cheating.
This really feels like cheating, but I'm going to say Faith from Mirror's Edge 1.

Yeah,

it's the whole game. It's the running game.

It is the whole game. It's kind of

shit. I'm going to say,

of course, Samus Speed Booster. You know, it just feels incredibly good, and it's such a hype payoff for you to then be able to blast through everything and then turn that into a shine spark.

It's the sickest shit ever.

And to this day, to this day, I still think about K-Dash doing his blackout, right? When K-Dash goes

and slides. It's the coolest movement of all time.
It's so good. Brackout.

You know what? this is gonna be that this isn't as um

flashy as the other one

uh i think

that

the souls series would not have gotten nearly as popular as it did if the standard walk slash jog of the main character in dark souls one didn't have the absolute picture perfect like i'm wearing armor like weight like ka-chunk ka-chunk on every single the clicking of the clicking of the armor it's one of the things that leads to to so many of the complaints about dark souls 2 that your character just doesn't feel as like tightly integrated interesting world interesting i never would have thought about that but i know what you mean yeah fat rolling and clunking around on the ground and then having a nice whoosh for a for a fast one yeah those all matter yeah that's big that's big um

And, you know, I'm going to say too as well, literally like 10 seconds into Hi-Fi Rush, as soon as I realized that

that's just the it's the whole game

that's the whole but holding forward on that opening tutorial and realizing that chai is running on the beat and i'm like oh my god this is this is the game we've dreamed of bro i i started to do a stream on the anniversary where i went back and i put it onto rhythm master but i started a new game so i had no upgrades And like, this is the hardest version I could do to it.

And I got to like the third level and I'm like, shit, I'm getting abilities. The game's now getting way easier.
and I think

like like there's there's that game is so picture perfect that I I tried to turn up the dial to the maximum I was like it's not enough I'll never get that feeling again like it was when it was new it's almost like between this and Expedition 33 that when parries and rhythm lead to stronger rewards as you get powered up there's nothing that can nerf you

um

uh the roadie run. Here's a four.

Always. Oh, man.
Always.

Oh, you know what?

Mass Effect 1's run.

The sprint and Mass Effect 1. That does nothing.

That's a complete lie.

That's a 100% lie. But the feeling, though.

The feeling of the button. Yep.

Oh!

Ryden.

In Revengeance.

That fucking hold the button down, sprint.

Yeah.

Everything going. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But

yes, but I always think of what was taken from us, which is

an inferior game, but that one clip, that one clip, all right? And as someone who played Guns the Duel,

that clip meant a lot because Ryden's running and then he runs up the wall and dashes along it and jumps off and flips over the car and then gets to the boss.

and you're like god damn it that run looked sick but the rest of the game couldn't figure out how to do anything besides slice watermelons so you know

um

okay

um

let's take one over here

uh

dear castle super dads uh i'm a member of a younger member of the audience uh born 2001

uh loved a lot of stuff you've talked about with games and medias over the years, especially 90s and 2000s.

The PS2 came out. Yep.
That's

the last year I played FF10 and Metal Gear Solid 2. You were like a fetus.
The stuff from the 90s and early 2000s goes completely over my head because I wasn't around back then. 9-11 happened.

Brad, you know about that one.

It's very easy for people in my generation to come to despair for many reasons, recent world news stories, etc.

Things have been very depressing. Gen Z is not doing well when you look at a lot of the statistics.
And even though it can be a real bummer,

it's important when you keep reporting on

how

on the negatives, I guess,

that

in some ways it reminds my generation that has not a lot of nice things to call their owns, that things were better and that things may eventually in the future get better again.

But it's important to remember that they aren't just the way they are for no reason, especially when you've got the May I mega corporation tech oligarchy, et cetera, from time to time.

Oh, yeah. I see what they're saying.
They can go fuck themselves. And I think, and I'm like, okay, the sentiment here, thank you

from Buick.

Yeah, the idea that if you're, you can be born

in a situation where you're looking at shit that sucks, but it's always been that way and you don't know the why and the why gets lost the time.

There's old people like us that get to go, oh, it's because of this that fucking happened. I actually mentioned it.
It was 9-11.

So this so like i think yeah so the thing like like it's a bit all over the place but i get the sentiment of the email here and the thing that like terrified me that i didn't know i realized was a terror inside was the idea of kind of like when we talk about uh microtransactions mini buys we talk about how dlc practices work you know going back the children don't know the

before the mini buy right and like that you know talking the the like before it used to be brood wars and now it's fucking selling you the ending etc etc.

The idea that things go on long enough that you don't even know where and why and how it began or what we're talking about and why and how we got here. Um, the, the, the,

the hose on the monkeys experiment, you know, um, when the, when the monkeys go up to the ladder, uh, where the fruits are up top, everyone gets beat.

So eventually, as soon as anyone approaches the ladder, the monkeys beat up that that person because they don't want to get sprayed with the hose. And then they.

Oh my god, I, my, I, I fucking left and i'm like the i okay

and then we took the ladder away or or rather we stopped spraying the hose and there's there's nothing going on and anyone who approaches the ladder or goes to that area of the room gets attacked and nobody knows why because they swapped in new monkeys for old but it's just been tradition for long enough you know um the i yeah all all yes uh long dumb analogy to just say that it's super fucked up that like when we talk about this shit and also talk about fucking 1998 and all that bullshit, um, that you're like, Yeah, you go on long enough, and eventually, these dumb practices become the norm, and then you don't know how or why we got here.

So, what's there to even complain about? You know, games are meant to make you upset because FOMO is a part of the buying process. Why? It's never been any other way.

That might, that might be the stupidest series of thoughts I've ever had while you're talking in my life

because you were describing that, and

as you said,

the experiment. I'm like, what would they fucking learn putting a bunch of prostitutes in the chimpanzee?

And then you're talking about climbing the ladder. And I'm like, why are they making them are the hoes on the top of the ladder? What the fuck?

And then you

and then you kept talking. I just snapped out of it.
And I'm overwhelmed with how stupid that was.

What the fuck was I thinking? You're scaring the hoes when you spray them with the water. Stop scaring the hoes, man.

Like

the monkey hose. Yes.

Yes. There we go.
Right.

Yeah, I know, it's wild to go, like, how did it get like this?

And then someone like us can point at the guy wearing the hot dog costume who crashed the hot dog car into the fucking wall and go, it was that guy.

That guy fucked it up. So like, hey, do you want to know why video game monetization is so fucked up? It's because of Todd Howard.

Todd Howard fucked up monetization for video games.

Oblivion's fucking $5 horse armor. Horse armor is the beginning of time.
That is the start. Yep.

Horse armor is in fact the beginning of time. You know who else fucked it up? I was kicked it in the fucking Overdrive? I was Kaplan over at Blizzard with the loot boxes.

I was

willing to attribute most of the timeline's woes to Bobby Kodick

as just like an actual Sith Lord running a company in the most obvious way from the jump because it turns out they're all Sith, but like there's a bunch of like dark Jedi in there and just shitty assholes that picked up a lightsaber and thought they could, you know, know what's what.

But like a proper trained fucking Sith Lord from the early days, Bobby Kottick,

was open and out about it and,

you know, swerved a lot of evil our way because he was also leading one of the most successful companies and basically kept that seat for as long as he wanted it.

I still think

that interview where he's like the original game guitar hero

is like one of the funniest fucking things that's ever been said. Like a work of art of like, when you want to talk about like just channeling the voice of Satan, you know, like

Bobby was leagues ahead and like he made something that like shitty evil CEOs nowadays have to like aspire to by like buying out the original company and then pretending that they were the imitators as you

as you run the IP into the ground as fast as possible because you know that people don't care anymore because you've already ruined it.

So you've got to make sure they buy a few more before it tanks the already negative thing that you have started. It's unbelievable.

Ugh. Yeah.

Also Codix set up the system that is

giving us the AI slop Call of Duty in that like, well, Call of Duty has to come out every year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, annualization.

And it's like, well, now that has to come out every year. Let's just cut every corner possible.
Was it you who brought up ball and gun games?

Was it you who said that to me? No, but I know what you're talking about because

that tweet made the rounds. But, like, it's so good.

Niggas, when they have to play a game that doesn't have a ball or a gun. Was that Keith? Was it? Oh, it's Mighty Keith.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's pretty smart sometimes.

But, hey, man, that, like, oh, shit.

It's crazy. So I remember

we talked about sports games and how, like, we got, like, here's a really good example that goes to the point we're making, right?

So, Wooly and I are old enough to remember when sports games were like fucking A plus Primo fucking video games, like some of the peak shit you could play on your console. I used to care.

I used to buy it. I used to buy it.
I used to care. It was awesome, right?

And we got to see them just get insidified into goddamn slop. And I don't mean AI slop, I mean just straight up copy-pasted, unworkable garbage.

And I also got to see it because I was way into first-person shooters for many, many, many years. I saw that happen to shooters and would say, bro, it's happening to shooters.

And now it is here.

Like Call of Duty, fucking Call of Duty is a slapped out rehashed piece of shit.

No one

talks about or gives a fuck about wrestling games anymore because they're dead. They were so good.

They were the peak of the genre, and some of the best video game experiences we've ever had were wrestling games.

And now the annualization and one company bought it all, and we're going to make the same shit over. And gameplay doesn't matter.
It's about selling you the old roster for giant, expensive DLC.

That's all it is.

They're dead. They're just completely dead.
Like

development style that football games primarily invented, right? Which is like roster update.

And it's the worst one.

It makes the most money and makes the worst shit.

I remember like a definitive moment of talking about wrestling games is that you and all the other guys, you all played the N64 wrestling game. No Mercy.
Rocky Engine Man. They're so good.

They're excellent. And I played those too.
I would go to a friend's house and he had an N64, so I'd play that, and it was fucking awesome. But you guys never played the SmackDown games.

You'd play the Attitude,

you know, shit, but you never played the SmackDown games. Not much of them.
Yeah, like a little bit at MicroPlay back in the day, but not much of them.

And so we sat down to play those SmackDown games and came away like, oh, this is there. There was something

going on. They're maybe not as good as the Aki Engine ones, but like these were real video games and they had value.
And you would just miss them because of console stuff. Yep.

competing franchises. Like, if you were not like, I was playing the Madden football games, but quarterback club was a different option that you could have gone for.

That was another pretty fun football game. You know, it wasn't as good in a lot of ways, but they did different shit.

But there were actually like competing franchises that were doing fun things, you know.

And, like, not only do we not have that, but the version that we have is way,

way worse

than either of the SmackDown games and definitely either of the Aki Engine, like WrestleMania or No Mercy.

Crazy.

So I don't know if it's happened yet, and I would have assumed it would already, but whatever is left of like sports games, whatever's left of wrestling games, and, you know, shit that comes out that's like just random slop all the time, you know, whatever, like UFC is like a thing, you know, and whatever.

I feel as if like

if they're not already just

massive ads for sports betting crypto shit, like that's going to just be what they become.

Because it does feel like the roster update thing and like all of that sports betting shit and whatever, like it just goes hand in hand with it.

And it would be very obvious that you're like, the same people that like want to run whatever fantasy games are also likely the ones that care about these roster updates.

And I'm just here to fucking see my Jalen Hurts

have a good season.

And I don't give a fuck about the actual, you know, mechanics that like the C-stick to spin off or to stiff arm to the left or right is now a cooler thing that lets you do running plays better, you know, and shit like that just doesn't matter at fucking all.

We figured it out. We have one system of gameplay.
We're never changing it again.

Update the numbers and the four years they get caught not updating anything and they actually game launches with the wrong fucking year on the title screen.

That NBA year where they literally said, we're just not making it this year.

We're just not doing it. We're going to take the fine from the NBA rather than even put it out because it's so bad.

Yeah, it's sad to live in a world where you won't have known that these genres were ever anything else.

And this is not a case of like, oh man, back in my day, the 70s, the music was so much better. And now it's like, no, no, no, no, because songs are songs.

The music is exactly. It's not just your choice of genre and to your taste or whatever.

Like, you can say the music was better in the 70s, and I can fucking get, I can pull out a fucking Bruno Mars album that probably sounds kind of like something you'd hear in the 70s and go, yeah, it's pretty good.

Yeah, sure. Random Axis Memories sounds pretty classic and it's good as shit.
Yeah, it was great.

No, no, it's not that. It is like it is objectively making it worse, but more profitable.
And this is all you've ever known of the sports thing, you know?

It's like saying, man,

when I was a kid, my dad and I used to go snowmobiling and it was really cool. And the answer isn't, oh, that sounds cool.
It's what's a snowmobile?

Because they don't make them anymore. Like, they don't even exist.

It's like talking to somebody and them asking you what a surfboard is because the surfboard just no longer exists.

Well,

if you can't turn to, you know, the FIFA games to enjoy your soccer fix, you can always turn to the Captain Tsubasa's of the world and get your cool anime game fix there, right?

No bad feelings there. Or Inazuma 11.

Yeah.

If you...

Yeah, actually, you know what? If you're.

Good times. I assume most soccer fans are too drunk to care that those games have AI in them.

They're too busy eating scran.

and getting poisoned.

Just jangle the keys in front of them.

They put their fists down.

Inhaling the red smoke

of the flare

is keeping them just disoriented enough.

Good stuff. Good stuff.

The ultras love them.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

The kids are going to be all right.

Eventually. Not right away.
Yeah. But eventually.
Yeah.

I have to believe that because I'm working on one. Yeah.
So

I have to.

Here's the real worry. You ready for the big one? I'm absolutely convinced that Paige and I are doing a great job.

I love my little guy, and I think he's turning out great, and I'm very proud of him, and I'll always be very proud of him, but like, you know what I mean, right? I'm not worried about his development.

I'm not worried about him growing up into a cool person. I'm worried about the other insane iPad-addicted freak kids that he's going to get

else in the class. Yes.

Because I can keep... screen time limits and watch limits and fucking educate and you read a book you got to go to a class you got to do baby karate whatever the fuck.

And I can manage that and I can make sure, but I can't do that for Jimmy and Timmy shithead iPad freak.

Like I said, the teachers have been talking and they've been letting us know that it's looking dire.

So when I go to that parent-teacher meeting, I'm going to just start strong and be like, listen, I am willing to fight a child.

I'll do it.

Now that that we've set that down as the baseline,

how's class going? Yeah, there you go. Everyone gets one until it's done.