CSB350: Secret Chinese Are Vulnerable to Electric

Yo, yo. Hey, dude.
I feel like this is.

Yeah.

Well, no, after you. You got something for me.
I feel like this is a busy week, so where do you want to start? It is a busy week.

All right, first up, if you don't want to get spoiled on the game awards,

you're going to want to bail now. Oh, okay.

If you don't want to get spoiled on promotional marketing material.

Promotional marketing material. you're going to definitely want to bail right the fuck now.

Okay.

Because we're going to be talking about that shit. You want to talk about the.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, we're going to talk about that stuff. Leaky fits.
Fawcetts.

There's many leaks happening right now. Has Capcom ever, ever, ever, on a single project that people care about not had a major leak?

I'm thinking really hard about it.

I think Capcom is the worst.

Okay.

We have a problem though, admittedly.

So here's the problem. We find out stuff through

talking to people. Sometimes.

So

there's a false impression of knowing things ahead of time that comes from most of the things they put out. Yeah, but

I feel like I

out for Capcom. Like, way out there all the time.

Way out there all the time.

And

boy,

I guess you're not talking about big Resident Evil game spoilers, but you're talking about spoilers for whatever the fuck was coming up on Thursday, you know, promotion-wise. Promotional material.

Oh, Sony, but we'll get to that in a second. Okay.
How's your week been, Wolves? What have you been up to? Nuts.

Lots going on. Had a big week.
Had things.

Turned 40.

That happened.

And

how's your back? Yeah.

Are you tiptoeing around the house?

I mean, the feeling, the feeling is that, like, it should be happening any minute now. Any minute now, you're just going to give up.
You're going to feel that one crack, and that's the one.

That'll be there forever.

Congratulations. Thank you.
That being said,

that's this coming year for me. And I got to say, man,

birthdays seem really quaint. Like, sorry, your own birthday seems really quaint once you start counting someone else's birthday.

Oh, because that is the new timer for how everything in your life is going. So

you just hit the end of my bit.

You literally just got to the conclusion of

skipped right to it, right? Because

basically

what happened was

Punch Mom was really cool and had this very elaborate, you know, sort of setup. And,

you know, over over the years, we've had a, like, yeah, there was a, there's, there, there's been a, a, a war of trying to

give quality gifts and stuff over time. And

I feel a couple times like I've done some pretty, pretty big moves. And I'm like, okay, let me pat myself on the back for how that went.

But she blew me out of the water completely this year with this insane

multi-part journey through each decade of my life with a specific gift from that era associated with it, and a letter as well from this whole thing. And it was like, holy shit, you know?

And yeah, like, I mean, I kind of walked through it on the chill stream yesterday, but, but, in like, there was a, um, I talked about the, when we went to Grenada and went fishing for the presents or whatever, and all that.

Uh, we never got a working Lego boat from that thing because it wasn't really Lego. She got the Lego boat from my childhood.
She tracked that from my teens.

She tracked down a reboot hexadecimal figure.

She got some limited edition

Kanba buttons for the fight stick years and this whole thing.

Made a mixtape for the 30s of the soundtrack of

basically us dating and every place we went and all the things we went did with a little audio cassette. It's so cute.

And then for the 40s, you know, as I've been talking about, okay, time to ride this roller coaster down the hill and off a cliff because that's it. That's all we do from now on.

And life is now a footnote in someone else's much better, more important life. So she got a book that is basically a custom kids book.

Basically, that's like happy birthday, dad, from baby day.

And then the artwork in the book is of us, like in little cartoon format. And it really looks like me and her.
and basically we're just going on adventures, and it sounds

to read to her in the future. And it fucking annihilated me, of course.
That was a critical hit.

Just, you know, my heart in pink mist, if you would.

And

like, that's the kind of moment where you go, yeah, it's not my 40s to my 50s. It's her 0 to 10.
Yeah, absolutely. And that's

that's the camera shifts perspective. You know, thank you, Assassin's Creed.

Like,

I feel like when I think about it and someone's like, oh, how old are you? I'm like, I have a two-year-old.

There you go. There you go.
Just answer that question. Exactly.
Good answer. Good answer.
Yeah. No, so she landed the instant kill.

And that's just a fucking.

It was really sweet because I don't know.

I assume. Because there was a lot of stuff that I didn't see, but we spoke briefly like over a month ago, and she was just running like this massive screening data on like

I need details from all the parts that didn't exist.

Where was this? Who was that? What was this? Yes, I found out as well.

She went and started talking to people and did some digging behind the scenes as well to get some of that accurate information to the point where one of the letters is like, Yeah, using 3D Studio 4 on DOS back in the day as your first 3D software.

And I'm like, Jesus Christ, man, what the fuck? So,

incredible. I'm just absolutely floored by that.
And,

hey, guess what? When my back blows out, you know, of age. When?

When? I know what she didn't say if. Yes.
Of age, not of, you know,

loss and exposure. Because that's the, you can get your back, your back blown out, you know, for just getting exposed.
Good reasons. Good reasons.
But no.

From this point forward, it's like, that's okay. We got the camera over there.
You know, we

the the the we we we switch we do the we do the the the assassin's creed camera shift and whatever happens from me in the background, that's fine from now on. So

slowly turn into dust.

I mean, okay, so like

nowadays, but people think of that, they think of the the Avengers, you know, version. But, like, I think of the saving private Ryan guy getting old.
Oh, yeah,

okay, there's that. There's, yeah, there's saving private Ryan, but then, but I mean, for me, the classic is always Indiana Jones because, like, you get to turn into the skeleton

and then you become dust. Like, it's the full thing.
It's faster. That's real.
Right?

Like, Peter Parker got snapped and was like, I'm young and I'm hot, and now I'm gone.

You know,

but no, you need to go all the way to old age, then become a skeleton, then get dusted, you know.

Anyway, so

that was a whole lot of fun.

And then,

so this weekend was kind of nuts, too, because

essentially, and this is going to segue right into, you know, some video games, but

it was Tokan. The beta was happening and I was like, or alpha.
And I was like, oh, okay, that's cool. Good, good chance chance to check it out now that people are allowed to play.

I'm going to get into Tokan at the end of this. Yep.

I don't like the official PlayStation signup for the beta system thing. It just feels.

I really don't like it. It feels like you did nothing.
It feels like you didn't register at all.

You don't even know whether like makes sure to register and you click on the link and it goes, here's how to register, and there's nothing on the page because you've already registered. Super weird.

But it doesn't tell you that you registered. Yeah.

But being on the page makes it so that you're it's really fucking awful i don't like it did not like that so anyway everyone got in this time and and uh the there you go that's great uh so the plan was like hey let's let me jump on and see what this what's this like over getting to fighting games um shout outs to one kyle baddit games the um the local uh air dashers streamrunner and to

who was like, hey, well, you know, why don't you pop over to my place? And actually, I'm going to have a setup so that people can play locally together.

So we'll have two PS5s and then we'll just go meet up in a random server and then we'll just be able to play the equivalent of a versus offline match, but using the beta, you know?

So that's happened before as well.

And

then

he was like, okay, cool.

That's perfect timing because something I was thinking about during the break when I was off, and I spoke to Reggie and Min about it, was like, I want to do a special get into fighting games type of show.

I have for fun, for glory, for fuck's sake,

for girls. We did, you know, all these different variants.
And so I wanted to have one that was like

for locals, you know? And it was,

yeah, get into locals, not locals X, Y, Z near you,

hot and single, but for your local fighting game event.

And this was a great excuse to try that out because something that's a lot of fun is having the handheld camera out on the the floor talking to people at setups, getting a feel for the area, what's going on, the vibe on the on the floor, you know?

Um,

and what I want, so some people do that sometimes, but it's a little more like, okay, we're just gonna have a handheld camera and talking to the chat that way, but I want to be able to switch back to

dedicated gameplay, you know?

So we kind of had this elaborate setup of like, okay, we have one camera on the floor to go check out and talk to people, and then another to switch back to the stream setup.

And that was all, that worked perfectly. So we did it, you know.
And

at the same time,

I saw, I got an email, and it was like, hey, yo, so the Avatar Legends

beta is alpha is also happening this exact weekend. What a crazy coincidence.
That's nuts. That seems unfortunate timing.
Why would that be the case?

I mean, this was a small canceled game that came back out of nowhere. And then this other game was the massive, huge FGC fucking hit that's about to drop.

So why would you want to compete on the same weekend? That's wild. Anyway, let's grab that.
So I put it on my Steam deck and

went over.

And

this weekend has been

fucking

illuminating in so many ways.

So for one thing, aside from the games, just the reason why why I segue this way, is because as I showed up there, I saw some people from Air Dashers and a couple of people from like the old MTLSF guys.

And then like some friends, some people I recognize are rolling and I'm like, hey, what's up? And then like Min walks in. I was like, hey, man, what are you doing here?

And he's like, oh, yeah, what's up? And I'm like, stuff. I'm like, okay.
You know, talking to Reggie and Jimmy and stuff. And then like all these other dudes I kind of know that are like...

The guys that just played Third Strike and like Alpha 2 that would never be caught dead playing a new fighting game at all walk in.

Like Chairithi's there and, you know, Yunes and some of these people I'm like what the fuck is actually god damn it Reggie did you secretly and he's like ah

so yeah he secretly made it a thing and then it was a it was a little fun thing when they brought up what all these old guys doing here they don't want to play these new fighting games that's crazy you know so yeah secret little Little birthday thing.

So that was nice. I appreciated that.

And

then we got to jump into Tokan.

So before I go into gameplay, what was your lead into that? So I had a very different lead into that.

So I was going through my emails and I was like, I have a weirdly enormous amount of playtests sitting in my email.

Like it just so happened that I have two.

random games. I have somebody reached out to me with a playtest code for the Quantic Dream MOBA.
Oh shit.

And

I got the Tokon beta and they were all like staggered like on top of each other. Okay.
He's like, fuck it. Okay, let's do, let's just roll through all these.

We'll do a big day of streams and we'll just fucking check out all these unreleased video games, right? Wow, wow, okay. Sidebar, the unction is amazing, and I am immediately

immediately grabbing that. That's a great name for an event.
Go on. So I'm like, all right, let's just check them out.
And in order, I played a a game.

These are all not finished, so take it as you will. I played a game called Wanderburg, which was, you might have seen a trailer for it.

It's a little, you play a little castle that rolls around on wheels, and it's fucking vampire survivors. It's slow vampire survivors.
But you are an entire castle. Yeah, it's not.

Okay. It's not.
It doesn't got it. Okay.

It doesn't got it. Okay.
Yeah.

Then I loaded up Vault Breakers, which even after reading through the whole press email, couldn't figure out what it was.

And then I loaded it in. And then what it is,

is, hey, what if you took

the moment-to-moment gameplay of a MOBA

and made it an extraction game

where you're playing a MOBA by yourself? on a Warcraft 3 map, but you have to extract out to keep keep any of your gear.

And I was like, this control's really bad. And then I died and then the game crashed.

Wow. So that's Vault Breakers.
And you don't even get to like shit on 12-year-olds and ruin their night.

Well, it is PVPVE, but it loaded me into an empty game. So I don't know if that was...

Because it was an unpopular playtest or because it was broken, but

okay. Okay.
And then I was like, Vault broken.

I was planning to do like a six, seven-hour stream, and I've blown through half of the games in 40 minutes.

Cool.

Well, at least we can play at least, you know, a half-hour match of Spellcaster Chronicles, which I should mention again is a terrible name.

Terrible name. Spellcaster Chronicles is the MOBA by Quantic Dream.
You don't, I even said it before, and you couldn't remember. That's the Quantic Dream MOBAR.
Okay.

I just said it. Oh, fucking two boys.

Oh, it is a bad name. Oh, your market, your target market testing team failed you guys.

So I'm like, I load it up, and it's got like decent art and some interesting menus. And you know, you're doing that.

And I was a little put off because the characters' names are like Ice Skeleton and Swamp Witch, and like they don't have names. Oh, they're just classes.

And I'm like, this seems really strange for like a hero look. Huh?

So then I'm like, maybe it's like fate.

Sure.

And then I'm like, hey, I'm going to load up and I'm going to hit quick play. And then I quick played into the timer for nine minutes and 55 seconds.

And then the game told me there was a technical error,

which was not true. It was actually the timeout for matchmaking because the game had the playtest had like a worldwide audience of like 500 people.
Oh, the hallmark.

the fucking, the absolute, yeah, the classic

quick play, quick, any minute now. Oh, no.

And I was like, well, I'm going to give up on this. Was there a tutorial that you were able to see no gameplay? No gameplay.
Oh, my God. And so I'm sitting there going, wow.

As far as stream or like video gimmicks have gone, this is definitely one of the most disastrous runs I've ever had.

I'm like

an hour and 20 minutes in, and I have like done shit all and blown through most of what I had planned for the day. Nothing's happening, so I'm like, well, thank God

I saved the best for last. Let's load up that Marvel Tokon beta.
ARC system works.

Save my stream today.

And

this was 15 minutes before I texted you and went wow toquon feels really bad

it feels really

really bad hey we were supposed to go on a journey to get to these conclusions okay

um

even though it feels really bad even though I believe my reply was in all caps boy does it

that is that you have all caps there it is looking right at it oh because I was you you know what I was hoping for? Because when you say shit, like, yo, this game feels like ass.

Someone in the comment, someone in the thread, somebody in the

chat, somebody is always there. Like, nah, man, you just gotta get out of here.

You're missing out on your time. You're missing the sauce.

So I'm like, well, I know Wooly's been playing it for a couple hours by now. I'll text Woolly, and he's going to tell me, nah, man, you actually got to give it a minute.

Oh, there's actually some secret stuff. Oh, there's some cool stuff.
And instead, instead, I got back, yeah.

Okay, so I mean, if we're, if we're starting at the ending, then at the very least,

yeah, I'm just gonna, yeah, normally I wouldn't jump right to the end, except for Tokan,

that was the beginning. As soon as that tutorial started and I started to do jumps and dashes, I was like, Something is wrong here,

something is off.

So, I, you know, we had a,

I've, I've gone over this quite a bit, you know, many times now at this point, just talking to the guys in the room and then again with Reggie yesterday, and just trying to figure out what are we looking at here.

But, um, and it also is this extra weird thing because of the weird fucking way that like I watched, we watched the trailer late and everything. There was this initial, like, yo, Marvel man,

you have something to say about the Marvel game, you know, and I'm like, yeah,

no, it looks beautiful, it looks gorgeous, it looks gorgeous, but what's happening here, right? And like, I really didn't expect that Arxis

trying going to make their own Marvel game, but trying to make it not Marvel versus Capcom, but still their own version of it, that they would hit all of these weird walls because these are things that they themselves have solved in the past, right?

So for starters,

you're kind of playing playing it and the first thing you realize is when you are running at your running speed you are moving at walk speed in street fighter 6 it's very slow right you're seeing captain america sprint moving at the speed that you're just holding forward with like luke or something so that means when you're walking with the characters you're like fucking makoto like it's so you know it's this really, really slow feel that's like, but the game is full of all this shit.

It looks like a hyper game, right? It's a, you know, so everything's flashy, everything's big, everything's slow. So you feel really, really like right away that, that, that's odd.

Um, and then you also are like, you know, uh, touching buttons, getting a little feel for it.

And like, the thing I think that's the coolest about the game, besides the amazing art style, um, and the like, I do appreciate the whole, like, this is an an unapologetically japanese version of these marvel characters you know um

their fucking storm is not as yelling tatsumaki when she does a tornado you know like uh so all that is great and i like that the idea of the game is um

instead of starting with all of your team together and then woodlink down to the last survivor you assemble us avengers assemble what a cool idea for the whole of a cool idea

now what ends up happening when you have four characters is you don't want to intimidate players by having them learn people that are way too different and that feel too different.

So, you kind of end up homogenizing a bit and making it not matter as much when they're on your team.

But to have this whole assembly thing work, you have to have these situations where the way they join your team is by wall breaking, for example, doing certain types of interactions.

And these wall breaks are, you know, like Guilty Gear style, like Strive style. And

I feel like I didn't, like, in Strive, I didn't mind the idea of going, like, okay, let's make a hypothetical different version of the corner in a fighting game where you're going to get pressured, and eventually you're going to lose the exchange, but you're going to give your opponent a big reward as you do this big stage transition, right?

It's a really interesting thing because it's like, okay, maybe being in the corner for a whole match is like a nightmare.

And like, Guilty Gear characters can make, if they were stuck in there forever, the nightmare can be never ending.

So let's make it so if they win too hard, they actually break you out of the corner themselves. And get a big reward for it.

Yeah, I think, and I think it was, like, I much preferred, I thought it looked a lot cooler and flowed better than like the way like Injustice had these insane fucking pig transition factory thing.

It was not, it was wild.

Yeah, they did it in a way a way that I thought was like, you know, okay, interesting. I love how Street Fighter VI came and said, no, fuck that.
Die in the corner.

Die. You will live, breathe, and die in this corner.
2XK all says that.

If you're not getting out of the corner, just die there.

I do respect the response

on behalf of other companies. However, this game...
You can't get out of the corner.

Bitch.

Shouldn't have tried.

But I feel like the problem with Tokan was that you have to do these constantly, and

you need to see six of them per match to get the whole team together so what you end up having is a slow game but then every time you do one of these combos into a transition it breaks the flow up even more

so you're like constantly getting interrupted seeing people knocked out of the corner like five times a match

um

that's a lot it's interesting because one of the maps the ex uh xavier mansion is um they don't have stage transitions on it they make it so that you just splat and then the new person joins.

And it's almost like they're testing to see, oh, do people prefer the version where we don't have a constant break?

Because I think it's a cool comic book cut-in that shows you something that's very Marvel-oriented, but it does get exhausting in the alpha

with how many interruptions are happening in the match, you know?

Luckily,

you know, aside from all that, it's a tag game.

And I was doing a little combo, and I tagged in you know I hit Storm's Assist and I said to myself wow

it's really good that tagging in a new character in this game feels good

okay

so the problem what a what a core concept to nail oh I'm so glad they nailed it the problem with what you said is everything Pat it was a lie it made up a lie actually okay let's take a character I like like Alawi and a character you like like Blitz right?

Sure. And there's a thing you can do where Alaoi can drop the tentacles and make her tentacle super come out, and then they hit you every couple of seconds.

And then after doing that, you can call in Blitz crank to grab you from the air back into the tentacles and extend the combo longer. Right? You're going to deal with it.
It's really cool.

Tokaw, and that means when you pick your character and the assist they do and stuff, like you can, you have a lot of variety because your team is all based on it.

like you know what if like what i do with teemo and blitz is i throw out a i throw out a bunch of mushrooms and i use blitz's uh assist to pull them into the mushrooms to get my badges a lot of interactions in the in the design attempt to simplify the game as much as possible they made it so that you don't pick assists for the character where they are on your slot is what they do so the first person um who's going to be i guess to the left of your portrait well it that gets weird too because the left the the order they're in is like a diamond but when you're on player two side you press the

you you you call the wrong direction button for the person you want to jump at because it's inverted shit gets weird right but the assist facing the opponent is is the forward one and like a like a horizontal strike they come in and do a thing and then the assist that's below you comes in and does an uppercut and the one behind you does like hidden missiles or something tactical here's a grenade right um

so no matter where you place your team that's the thing they're always going to do is those functions.

Horizontal, vertical, and then weird. Yeah.
And if you tag anyone into the bottom slot, they're going to always do their version of a Shoryukin, like an uppercut, whatever. Yeah.

Okay, so let's say you do a combo and then you're like, I want to do a bunch of pressure, hit you with some buttons, and while you're blocking, I'll call in Dr.

Doom and he will do his Hammer of Dawn laser.

And while that laser is like getting cooked, and starting up, I'm going to jump to the other side and do a little teleport and mix you up and do some stuff. You call in Dr.

Doom in the middle of of a combo, and he jumps in and he doesn't do that laser you wanted him to do. He just hits you because the assists change what they do in the middle of a combo.

In the middle of a combo, every assist jumps in and doesn't do their move, they just does a generic hit because they want the assist to not matter.

And so every combo is going to look the same no matter who's there

at any point.

Do you want to hear something really fun and stupid?

I thought you were going going to make a completely different complaint about the assists what was that

so i'm like i re so the the assists the characters are on a diamond right and the the character on point is always the top of the diamond right and what assists they do is dependent on where they are on the diamond so what i discovered is that if i'm captain america at the top and i tag to Kamala at the bottom and then I tag to Star Lord on the left and then I tag back to Captain America at the top.

I will have actually rotated the fucking characters off their original pieces, which means they won't do the assists that I want them to do. And I was like, wow, that's fucking terrible.

But worse than that, and I mean way worse than that, is when I discovered, oh, it's actually fine because all of their assists are the same. They're the same.

Everyone's vertical assist is a Captain Commando

projectile or a Joryu, but they all function identically. If you want, like the back assist is going to be like the laser or the grenade or the tactical one.

But regardless, where you put them into the slot ends up. So the goal was to simplify this process to make it so that they don't matter.

But you've actually made it more complex because now they're going into these different positions. And you're like, oh, are they different? And the trick is no, they're not different.

It's actually really weird and complicated.

So if I press light medium heavy assist doesn't matter which assist doesn't matter what's going on someone somewhere will jump in punch you and jump out and like you stupid pussy why would you ever hit light medium heavy

just mash out lights or mediums bitch and now we get to the a big weird thing here which is the auto combo problem that is everything this game seems to be encouraging is to just rely on the auto-combo system.

And a lot of games will be like, hey, that's a part of it. It's an option, but you don't have to do them.
You can do other stuff, right?

And in fact, I'll say, like, you, you know, to get into XKO, you use pulse combos, you see what they do. You can turn them.
You can get some basic BNDs. Turn them on or off, whatever the case is.

But the moment you start doing stuff on your own, you'll have like a moment of being like, oh, I can go from here to here to here to here. And I'm like, ooh, you get some ideas.

Basic bread bread and butter in

2xKO with like a single extra piece of kit on it is like a hundred times more effective than the pulse combo.

And so I go pick anyone on the roster and you go light, medium, heavy, and then let's say down heavy to just launch them up. And for half or more of the cast, it just whiffs completely, right? Yeah.

So you're like, oh, they don't want you to be able to do that much. Okay.
So then you go, let's shorten that to just like, let's say light, medium, then crouching heavy. Cool.

And then everyone can jump and like you get a little hop and you can do a little bit of a air one, two, air one, two. And it's like, it's very much like

it's not giving you a big reward for doing manual combos. It's giving you a very stilted feeling, small range of options.

And what sucks here is this is a great thing where I'd be like, well, let me go to the training mode and actually experiment with the system and see what's possible.

But the game's like, go fuck yourself, right? It's a completely separate issue here.

This is where like a network programmer is basically like we want as much network data as possible and every time people play an offline match that denies me my data.

So absolutely force people to play online and that way we'll have all the info we need to for working.

And it's like, okay, I get that reasoning, but what happens is, is you create a really bad first impression for people who don't get a chance to figure out what the fuck is happening and what they

and so what they end up doing is they either go to the training mode, not training mode, they go to the tutorial and have to to skip forward to that one part where you can use Cap, Storm, Kamala, and that's what I did.

And Star Lord, and then you can now beat up on the Tony for a minute, but not what he's blocking, only in the part of the thing where you can do whatever you want.

And you make your own weird training mode, or you go fight the CPU, but then that's annoying because you can't really still test your shit out anyway.

You know?

Before we get too far away from it, so I also tried to be like, well, what about light, medium, heavy, or heavy, heavy, hop or whatever?

This is the only game, this is the only fighting game I can think of that I can say this other than like Mortal Kombat.

It feels like the gravity and the movement speed of the characters is actively fighting me to do anything other than the auto combos. It's crazy.

Like, it, it, like, the auto combo, like, mashing square would get me like what looked like a normal combo and is also the only way to do like the assist, like, team-up moves at all.

There's no manual function to it at all but on top of that when i tried to break out of it with like a launcher at any given time and do like a like a non-slam down air combo it would just it would just stop it would actually just break like i remember like cap's medium kick doesn't even correctly hit air opponents unless he's right next to them from the launcher so you're getting the both the worst of both worlds because One, when you start doing the auto combo, I feel like what happens is, and I need to confirm this, but it just, it felt like what happens is you get locked, the characters get locked into

the combo in a way where,

like, if you try to do it.

Yeah, if you try to do it manually, they'll drop out sometimes, but they get locked, they get magnetized in exactly to position. So you're encouraged to just use that system.

And if you want to then break, again, like you said, break out of the auto combo and do something manual towards the end of it, you can't.

You can only switch from auto combo light to auto combo medium or auto combo heavy.

Whereas like, again, a more freeing system like the pulse one would let you just be like and now do now do what you want you can start the first couple hits manually and then do what you want but here they really lock you in it feel it sucks because everybody else that can't use training mode is just relying on this system the system itself is encouraging you to just use them to do these wall breaks to get the team fast faster so now all these matches end up feeling slow the same everyone's doing the same basic setups here and it's discouraging you from do using the system to truly do manual things and explore it and so on.

And it just kind of ends up being like, God damn it, man. Like, this is so weird because.

Even towards the end, I saw like last day, some people put out some footage of like, here's a cool Dr.

Doom combo where he's like juggling you between his shield or like Spider-Man tech where he's doing some fast stuff that looks different from some of the other of the cast members, you know?

But like none of those options are going to change sort of these weird fundamental changes, these fundamental like tag assist problems you have.

And this is the version of the game that like when they first brought it to Evo and everyone was playing it, people were like, I don't really get what's going on here.

And then the devs came into Max's stream and ran some sets. And they're like, oh, that's how you make it look a little better.
Okay.

But they still came back and changed it to add more freedom to tagging, but it was not enough. So the characters jump in now.

And before you had to wait for them to do their thing, and then there's that little timer when you can switch to them.

And now it's like, no, you can do it beforehand, but you still want to be able to do it sometimes in the middle. You want to be able to do it anytime.

The first thing is that the game is like, you know, how you should tag? You should tag by holding the button down in the middle of your combo.

Yeah, like you have there's a fast tag button on L2, right? And, but, like, for the most part, you have this thing of like, choose when you want to hold it to take over.

And sometimes, if you want to take over, again, in the middle of the move, that it's like, nope, you're not allowed there.

And then, when you do decide to take over, which admittedly, when there's eight people on screen, I can understand the cluttering to make it clearer to view.

But you have this whole like, follow the ghost. Where is it going to go? Is it left or right? It's on your left.
Okay.

And in the meantime, what have you been getting used to? I've been getting used to like instantaneous handshake tags.

There's a fun moment that happens in handshake tag, which is, this is also, it happened in other, so it's a moment that happens. Street Fighter V had it every time you activated V-Trigger.

The game pauses.

I get like 10 milliseconds to be like, what's going on?

Should I jump? There's a moment in fighting games where we both players, the game will pause for a second and both both players go, what's going on?

And it's really fun to like have that little like, oh shit, adapt moment, right? Shit, block left, something else. And it's, it's a, it's a, yeah, just a little, a little pause.

And 2xKO adds the little handshake clap noise and the green flash to actually like Pavlovian response trigger. Like they want you to hear clap and go, oh fuck.

And everyone, all four people on a station will be like, where's he going? Okay, there he is, right? And in this case, it's like tag and ghost trick. Oh,

Iron Man.

You're like, guys.

It feels really bad.

It feels like Kusoga.

Like licensed Kusoga. It feels really bad.

So the strange thing, again, Arxis has solved this problem themselves already twice.

Persona for Arena and Ultimax and Dragon Ball Fighters both do something fantastic with the auto combo, which is they let you do full,

you know, manual everything, have fun, enjoy your characters, explore. But there's an auto combo that each character has that's unique and useful.
It has some weird property to it.

It has special moves that only are a part of the auto combo that you can't do otherwise. So even at the highest levels of play, you always want it.
There's never anybody going, nah, fuck that.

I don't want that auto combo. It's like, no, no, no, there's a part of this move that's useful for everyone.

So make it that, that it's actually just adding to all the moves the character can do, and it's a benefit for everybody instead of this weird version you have here. It's a step backwards, you know?

Such a strange thing because you will see people regularly using their auto combos in Dragon Ball as a part of their longer sequence to do stuff. Like with Android 16, I want a side switch.

Bam, I get the third hit. slam you behind me, you know, or

I get like

a Vegeta, like he, he adds height to his like uppercut, you know, and he gets closer to you. So I don't know why they approached it in this way.

And I feel like a big part of it was we want to be different from Marvel versus Capcom. But in the race to do that, you just made it not fun.
And like people have been saying sauceless.

People have been using the word sauce a whole lot this weekend, you know, and I mean, it's people have different feelings on what is and is not sauce, but what I can say is I can tell you what sauce is.

What sauce

sauce is good, sauce is good.

What I can say is the mission to homogenize the cast was successful,

mission accomplished. You made things feel the same, so hey, and here we are as much

as much as I've been dogging on to XKO for its roster, and I will continue to do so until everyone I want is in that game.

If the raw, like, okay, when Dragon Ball Z Fighters came, or sorry, Dragon Ball Fighter Z, fuck, I hate that game's title, came out, and like, everybody was like, like, a lot of characters were a variation of Goku because that's how fucking Dragon Ball works.

You're like, well, it should have a big roster. And it did have a big roster.
And then it had a really big DLC roster, right? That game's roster is enormous.

And like, people are like homogenized to a degree because it's energy blasts and kung fu things. But everybody's got their gimmick and everybody's unique.
Right. Dude,

I feel like

I don't care what special button you put on fucking this. This shit better have a roster of like a hundred fucking fighters if it's going to feel like this.

Pick your dankest Marvel character that you want to see showing up here. And I'm telling you, they're going to have Squirrel Girl Uppercut is going to be her little squirrel twirl.

And then her back special is going to be tossing a nut with an arc that bounces according to the strength.

There is like an order of magnitude, more mechanical complexity between Marvel characters in rivals, a game that has like four buttons, than this tag fighter.

So this is where the part two of this conversation goes, and I find it insane.

But we were talking about 2XKO's roster being too small and how that needs to get buffed up because it's too small. Very fun game, but you're fighting the same characters a lot.

We want to feel more variety to it.

Holy shit, does it feel ever so minuscule here? Because something Dragon Ball did was they made each of their characters have less moves so that they would feel part of a team.

And here you're feeling that excessively so while being homogenized, right? I'm playing as the Avengers. Who's in it? I don't care.

So then I pop in Avatar Legends: the fighting game.

A game that I remember it getting canceled. It got canceled, and then it got resurrected, and here it is.
That's wild. That's crazy.
Things shouldn't exist.

So, you know, seems to be pretty small budget, seems to be pretty tiny.

Seems like it was made fairly quickly in a very short time. Kind of looks like a Flash game.

But the Sprites look like the show. And when they win and they get close-ups on them, they look even more more like the show.
And you know what?

That's pretty sick because, like, if the game was a really high-budget Arxis, 60 frames per second, amazing Aang doing all his shit like thing, it would look really cool, but it wouldn't look like the source material necessarily, you know.

But this is like you're nailing it, right?

You go look at the move list on it before you even see it in motion,

and every one of those characters, there's four characters in that demo:

Cora Ang,

Zuko, and Katara.

Their individual move lists have more going on than the entire cast of Tokan, each character individually. Hey, look at that.
I'm watching footage right now. Do you know what I see?

I see a blue demon sword bar under Zuko, and I see Korra with all four elements underneath her health bar. I see meters.

Okay, so one, you start playing this game and it's super fast and it's just like go, go nuts, have fun, press buttons.

Something you know about me and is I love me some movement. I love me some defensive options.
I'm kind of obsessed.

And the reason why I like a character like Steve Fox is because two of his buttons are dedicated to movement instead of attacking, right?

This game adds a flow button that makes everyone able to move and like quickly get around the screen. And when you hold it in neutral, you get these dodges that are very dynamic.

And then you can cancel out of those into flips and all these really cool

moments of I'm punching you, you're dodging it, you're punching me, I'm dodging it. We're both flipping backwards, re-engaging.
It feels like fucking awesome high-speed anime Sakuga, right?

When you're playing it.

There is

stuff going on where everyone has like, if you have have Zuko, he's got like, he doesn't just have like a fireball and then an uppercut or whatever.

He has like six different types of fireballs that all do different things. He's got a ridiculous amount of, he's got like six different dive kicks, whatever, etc.

And they, and they're just like, what do you want to do with it? You want to go nuts? Okay. You can pick a buddy.

You don't have assists in the game, but it plays like a 1v1 hyper Marvel game, the speed it moves at. It's the fastest game I've ever played.
It's the fastest fighting game I've ever played.

It's, um, they have things where you pick a

one friend who stands in the background and they act as a variation or like a groove for your character.

So Zuko, for example, can pick, I forgot her name, but

June,

who's in the back

on her big

mole.

And it means that he can make his dive kicks that are usually pretty decent even better by doing them as low to the ground as possible.

And on hit or on whiff, he can cancel out of it into an air dash in any direction.

Girlfriend gives me the confidence to do lower to the ground dive kicks.

So

you get these options where you read that in the description and they go, oh my God, they want you unchained. Do anything you want, right? But then, like, in terms of character design, so Zuko.

has uh um again you said you have that sword meter right and then the other things you have are your chi and and your chakra. So Chi

is your

basically your call it your

drive meter. It's your flow.

Every time you move and do flow things or parry flow things, it's going to cost this movement meter. And then you have super meter that you build up.

And when you drain that movement meter, your flow goes to zero. Your Chi goes to zero.
You become unbalanced. And you're in burnout.
So now you can't do all those fancy movements.

You're gray and you're waiting for it to come back, just like Burnout and Street Fighter VI. Hey, what's these fucking seven dragon balls underneath the live bar filling up?

Yeah, so that's your super meter. Okay.
Every time you land a special move, you fill up, you get one pip of Chi that does a super.

So a level one super is going to cost four circles, or like a level three will cost all seven. But you can only do it on the second ball.

I'm looking at footage and like Korra only has five, but like Zuko has seven

balls. Because on round, and if you lose a round, you get up to seven.

Oh, wow. Everyone's super.
Okay. So everyone, you only get access to your ultimate final technique on your second round, you know?

But here's the deal. Zuko exhausts himself.
And when he does, one pip of that sword meter next to him goes up because that is his redemption meter.

Of course. He gains one level of redemption by burning himself out too hot, too fast, and exhausting himself by being too aggressive.

Then you calm down and one of your moves in your kit gets a little bit better. Right? He gets a launcher off of an air fireball that gets better and you can do more shit with it.

You exhaust yourself again. You get to redemption level two.

Then his breakdancing flame kicks get better, right?

And then at level three, you get a parry that gets gets way better and you get a full like reward of Chi. You become balanced.
Zuko's system encourages you to burn hot and fast and then calm down

and redeem yourself. That's his redemption system,

right? That's his character.

Winquo's, WinQuote at the end of the round, I've changed, or, oof, that was rough.

I'm watching some of the, one of the other things that really stands out is that like I'm seeing like people getting like counter hits from projectiles in the air.

Like Cora will like tag you with like a water fireball like as you're jumping in and she'll just throw out five more and combo you all the way to the other end of the fucking screen. Okay, right.

So what you're seeing because again, what I just described is Zuko's specific honor system. And

what they will have on the move list at the end of the move list, they have like all your different options is essentially your character's plot arc

stuff, where if you do this in the match, this matches what their plot arc is in the story, and this rewards you. So, Korra, for example, hers are, her main system is do the different

elemental moves in the right order, right? Do them in the right.

Do them in the correct order, and you then your next avatar state move, like you, you, you improve the strength of it, whatever, right so that's her main thing going on and then when her life gets low or when you do her super she pops off and becomes the avatar state um there's stuff where they're like okay

uh korra if you do her flow forward where she dashes at you and go right into an uppercut balls out you get a reward because she's brash impulsive and doesn't give a fuck right

so you need to rush in and do an insane thing and the game's like good You're playing as Korra, right?

Oh, that's so that's so cool She gets rewarded for landing the first hit of the match, but only if you never block

What

you have to land the first hit without blocking because real first hit you have to go in yes If Korra blocks, that's not her. You're playing Korra.
She's dumb, impulsive, and brash and going in.

Get the first hit without trying to defend yourself, right?

There's the plot side of things going down on the, on, on, on each character. It's fucking incredible, right? It's really cool.

Wow. And then it's...
It's really cool how you're telling me about

the avatar fighting game.

And instead of telling me what's not in the game, you're telling me what is in the game. That's crazy.
What a crazy concept.

I mean, so I just went to Katara and I was like, let's see what's going on with her. I think she's cool.

And right away I saw she can do her water whips and then she can go into like Rekas, you know, like high, low, medium. Or she can go backwards into, you know, Johnny

basically doing his slashes, you know, mist finder stuff. Exactly.

So she can do that with her water whips, right? So I'm like, oh, that's cool.

But when you're in her water whip stance holding the water, you can then slide on the ground forward, backwards, up, down, doing flips while holding it to then whip in the air, straight down, across and it gives you buffed versions because you're you're combining movement with your stance holding you know and so she asks you to like press extra buttons do a little bit more right and i had an idea just i was just like can i try something here what happens if i do like a light medium heavy knockdown and then because i canceled into her water whip stance i recover faster can i then dash forward and jump over and whip them on the ground oh my god i absolutely can and it rewarded me for doing that and says continue your combo now.

So you can go like one, two, three, whip, cancel, dash, pick them up, keep it going. And I was like, oh my God, that's a really technical thing that they, I, I just had the thought, can I?

And it said, yes, right. And then up till yesterday, I'm like, can I?

Like, I was doing a thing. I was like, there's a moment where you can do a big whip that knocks them really far away.
And I'm like, you can't follow up with anything there. She's, they're too far.

But the one thing that I can do is dash out of it. And it's like, can I dash forward and then cancel that into a thing? And no, you're not close enough.
They're too far away.

And then I basically realized at some point, labbing, long story short, is if you press the movement buttons while you're doing other stuff, it'll buffer in to come at the end of the last thing you do.

It's like specifics aside, listening to you describe playing Avatar and going through that fun little process of, can I do this? Yes. Can I do this? Maybe? Yes.

And is so wild in comparison to my experience playing Tokan, which was, can I do a air combo?

No.

It's so nuts. Maybe if I watch a video, I can do an air combo? And it just, it really feels like they, it's the exact opposite where they're like, look, we have, we don't have a lot of money.

We've got what we've got. This game, again, it was like, this was fucking already canceled, and we're pulling it back out of the dirt.
What can we do with what's here?

And it's like, you can make it feel good and make it so that

and just go and let people do what they want, just let people do what they want, let them have fun with the characters, and go in.

And all, yeah, just four characters that feel like they have way more going on individually than anyone else on that entire roster. I would like to have you hold that thought.

We just got a great question in the live audience that works really well for you to answer. Isn't Tokan in beta right now? Why so harsh?

And then I'm adding my own emphasis to a game that's not finished yet.

Well,

it can change and they can take feedback, and boy, should they after this weekend. The beta for feedback.
You know, they literally ask us for the feedback.

However,

I'm going to say that, like, it, if ultimately,

if what you're looking for is

if what you're looking for is pretty much just like, you know, the character's doing the cool stuff and

everything's like, if you didn't necessarily feel any of the limitations I'm describing, that's okay. Like, I'm not, that's valid and you can still enjoy yourself with it.

I'm just saying that like when you make a game that is in the Marvel style, that's coming into this space where people are used to having freedom, movement, you want to touch buttons, express yourself, go nuts, and have fun.

And instead, you get something where they're specifically looking to hold you back.

I'd say now's the time where they need to be put on blast to hear about what they need to change. The time to complain is now before the

deal is finished.

Because if they hear that, they can go back to the drawing board and readdress a bunch of this shit, right? They changed it between Evo and now to add more options to tag to your characters.

They need to take it back and change it even further.

This is exactly it, you know?

And

I hope that, like, it doesn't need to just, like, readdress the way, like, all that tagging stuff works and everything. It needs to, like, go straight to Super Turbo.

You know what I mean? Like, they need to find a way to skip World Warrior. and get right to the final version of that game.

Because it just, like, everyone is happy to see a new cool fighting game, but like the herd gets thinned out real quick when this throne of Marvel that's vacant,

when the challengers are like, nen impact, invincible versus Tokan, and you're like, whoa, what happened? There were so many games a minute ago, and now it's like, yo, we got 2x KO here.

That's really fun. And this Avatar game out of left field, just like, ah! And the fighter's over there.

yeah doing its thing ang is over here doing fucking water wind tricks and the foam guy is coming out going

which is a wind pose by the way he actually falls over in a wind pose that really stood out to me about like um

tokon was starting it up and they have the button to do super to do special moves and uh but they also have motions

And I'm like, the motion,

like, it's totally fastigil. There's no fucking reason to fucking do the motions at all.

I don't understand why they're even there, other than to, like, acquiesce to people going, I don't want it to be a one-button special farmer, but the whole game is built to be a one-button.

It is.

In fact, the fact that they let you do, like, if you want to do the heavy version of a quick input button, you press the heavy button at the same time as the quick input one.

And I'm like, oh, God, that's just a super fucking awful to X KO. It doesn't feel good.
It doesn't feel good to do that, you know?

Yeah.

So, and here's the thing. A lot of what I was describing that's really fun and felt good in Avatar Legends, the fighting game,

was stuff that I got because I went to the training mode they gave you.

And then when I was there at the local meetup, we went to the local versus mode that it gave you. And we played against each other and we got to feel what the game was like.

And then we're like excited for it.

It's such a backfiring, stupid way of looking at things to just go like, no, the network test information is the most important thing. Want more data?

And instead, you lose sight of the fact that first impressions are lasting impressions, man. You know?

So the weirdness of this weekend was just the complete left field upset that is this little flash game looking thing that plays like fucking crack, you know?

And yeah, I mean, going and watching the way people were starting to figure out how Korra works or how to use Aang, like,

Reggie touched Aang for like a second, and like, you jump with him, he does the air, like, glider, and then you cancel that into air glider again, and like you can fully control how you're approaching, and then you can now blow wind so that you can get there faster or slow yourself down, and you can see all this insane variation in how you move and approach your opponent in this game that's not like anything else out there.

And it's just like, this is, was this put out to steal Tokan's lunch? Like, was this a tactical alpha? You know? Because usually you run away from the big guy making the thing, right?

Like, oh, you know, we're announcing fucking Zelda when. We're announcing Call of Duty when.

GTA when? Everyone run away. And here, the small game was like, no, I'm running into the storm, actually.

It's so crazy for just a random coincidence. And also, they basically did a thing where, like, at the last second, they're like, oh, some Earthbender's gotten to the servers.

We're going to keep them up for another nine hours. Ah, all right.
Yeah. Go have fun.

Yeah, just, I mean, what I will say is, even casually, like,

just go watch some footage of it and just see how like wild and fast and fun it looks. Oh, it's nine days.
It's night and day.

And like, it does have, and here's what there is an auto combo, like, a system on the light button where it'll do light, medium, heavy, and then you get to pick the ender.

Oh, that's crazy that you want to do

after that, you know? Can you believe that?

Yeah, three stages, you know, lots different, and like they give you all these colors right off the bat where

everyone is in a different, like you can put anyone in a different tribe's color right off the right away, you know?

There's moves where Cora jumps off the ground that, like, earth bends up to her feet, and

uh,

it the earth that pops up is depending on the stage. It's, you know, in the ice area, it's ice that sticks up.
In the earth area, it's normal ground.

It's just little details where like, yeah, I'm glad you put that in there. That's cool, you know.
Um,

and then, like, of course, from that, you get your ability to do her crack shoot or hold the button and turn it into like a bandit revolver or press the dash button and she flame dashes up to you.

And you just, it's so insane how fast and free-flowing, you know, the game is. And the fact that you're looking at the descriptions and it's like, hey, Aang is about being passive, actually.

So he rewards you for dodging

with your flow state before you attack anybody, you know?

And yeah, just

whatever.

It was great. It was super cool.
And I watched as like the neurons were firing as everyone that touched it got to be like, oh, oh, oh, shit. Okay, hold on a minute.
there's some stuff here um

i i don't think tokon

it's like it's not a wrap because they've shown their willingness to go back and change things after you know people got their hands on it and feedback came through but they have to drastically change what they're doing um

i feel like the weird i in uh was it invincible versus was like this kind of weird thing that like flying bricks and you know ki team i like what they do but but it didn't look that appealing to me at all, or so.

But I'm looking at that, like, I think that looks more fun than Tokan felt,

you know,

anyway, and everything fucking looks more fun the way Tokan felt. It's crazy.
I can't, I can't get over it. Anyway,

I'm just sitting here just going like

it's fucking

like give me evil zone for fuck's sake it's not often you have a weak

honest

like it's not often you have a beta come out that's like anti-marketing you know like

it it your eyeballs were way more interested in in what was happening than your actual fingers were you know yeah 100

anyway um okay so that aside

A couple other things. It makes me sad.

There's a genre of game that's popping up a little bit in indies that are essentially like ballatro-likes that are doing ballatro-like things, but with different genres. I talked about that.

Yeah, like slots and daggers and

the buckshot rules. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I mean way, way more directly. I mean like

there was a Mahjong game called Aotenjo, which was like a Mahjong but Balatro version where you get all kinds of.

Somebody mentioned one. Stackflow is the one that somebody mentioned to me.

Ballatro but Tetris. And I played it.
That's why I bring it up to say I played the Balatro but Tetris game.

I like the idea. It's way too early.
It's way too rough. It seems like the whole point of it is you're playing Tetris, but you have a limited number of drops to clear the stage.

And the blocks you get can have different textures to them that cause effects like explosions or goop or filling up lines, et cetera, to do like wacky Tetris things.

And your point score can requirements get higher and higher as you have to clear the bosses.

It's just not there yet.

The idea of a Tetris-style version of this, like, also there's not enough, like, I guess, juice.

So the Ballatro thing of getting your multipliers stacking and things exploding and all that, when that starts happening here, it just, it just doesn't feel like it really pays off that much yet.

But I tried it. It also doesn't explain itself to you.
You have to spend a little bit of time understanding what stack points are and what flow points are.

I was hoping for good things because I'm a fan of fucking Tetris and and I love Ballatro, but this does not feel like the fusion of those ideas executed to the full strength of what the promise is.

But I go, yeah, someone recommended it to me, and exactly, I checked it out and I was like, yeah,

you know, I'm not going to stream it.

I think that's kind of your deciding factor in a lot of this stuff. Is like, is it worth popping on for a stream? And I'm like, ah, it's

not there yet. So maybe this is maybe this is a really petty first impression, but the thing that really stood out to me is that when I looked at the Steam page,

the blue and red they use for

their points on the left side of the screen is the exact

same shade of blue and red that Balatro uses.

Like, it's not blue and red also.

It's like literally like the hex code exact same color. And I was like,

you know what you're doing. Yep.

I mean, I'll tell you one thing. I went back to ball pit and just unlocked some more shit.

Yeah, I also did. I got it on the Switch too, and I was like, yeah, ball pit.
Oh, yeah, okay.

They released it to both. Nice.
Yeah, and it's got cross-play. Oh, keep your save.
Nice. Perfect.

Okay, this week I have started and played up to episode three of Dispatch.

That is weird because those episodes are like 55 minutes long.

They're like really fucking short. I'm kind of shocked you didn't get to episode four.
four. Well, because we had to start late because baby stuff, and then we had to

end because baby stuff, so I couldn't take it to four. We got three in before the day was done.
Do we are we talking about dispatch in specific terms or broad terms?

For the first three episodes.

I mean, I don't know. So, I probably have one question about

the first three episodes. I don't have to go too into detail, but I will say that

I guess I'm okay to talk about things broadly

okay you know what I have a question for you

that I would like to

listen to okay yeah okay so my journey was pretty fun because

I mean for one thing right the what people can see is right off the bat I'm looking at

I'm looking at

this is gonna oh oh I'm gonna ruffle some feathers say your words man. Say your words.
Speak your truth. Yukari walks up and goes, hey there, new MC.

You're cute.

And I'm like, get away from me. I don't trust you.
This is suspicious. Nah.
Really? I was immediately like, that's crazy. You're coming in.
Yeah, nah, nah, nah.

Little, little, little Miss Blazer came in a little too, little too hot, you know, right off the bat. So

I lean back to observe the situation, and I believe I was correct to do so, much to Reggie's chagrin.

But it is funny to see the different,

our eyeballs are splitting in opposite directions,

because, hey, look, it's fucking Invisibitch,

self-proclaimed, and

okay, you are aesthetically

what I'm looking for, but what's coming out of your mouth? Oh my god. Oh Jesus.

This might as well be it might as well be like

just a mashup of the CSB taste chart.

I now here's the thing is, I absolutely enjoy

a filthy mess that can, you know, crack wise and keep up and all of that.

I like some spunk, but the level of absolutely absolutely toxic, self-destructive, nightmarish, oh my God, coming out of here, I'm like,

well, I guess we're going mountain climbing then, because

at the top of this mountain, there's a flag to plant, and the opposite here is a fucking parking lot

that may have some twists and turns to it, as it may appear. But I guess we're going mountain climbing.
Holy shit, at that, right off the bat.

And this is, of course, already establishing the true answer. Carlak is no longer

an answer.

What if Carlak was Daisy Dukes and had an accent? That's not fair. That's not fair.
That's not fair.

And specifically, Reggie was like, eh, okay, whatever. And then she walks into the scene and you see the V

and you're like, oh my God. Okay, I'm in.

Then there was a moment of, yes, which way are you going to

lighten the load on the team?

Make your staffing decisions, exactly. And I had a simple thought.

I'm look, the whole time I'm playing, I'm like, I'm not a fan of fucking greasy Razor Ramon, and

that dude can eat shit.

And unfortunately, I was not provided the option. No, no, you were not.
You were provided a very different set of options to let Razor Ramon hit the bricks.

So what I did was I said, I just taught my man bat how to fly and invested in him. Your choice was set up.
Your choice was done for that.

I am not going to lose the unit that I just invested points in. How dare you?

So

off she went.

Off she went. So

you can totally, if you're just like wildly unlucky, you can teach both. Like there's two slots during that mission.
So you can actually upgrade one and then the other and be like, well, fuck.

Ah, interesting. Because she's pretty useful too, you know? Absolutely.
And I also noticed as well that there was a little thing happening with the little Irishman, the little, little fucking you

that's like,

Jacksepticeye. Exactly.
And he's there.

Like, he's like, oh, can you send her out to watch my tournament? And I'm like, nah, do it alone. And he, you know, but it was for the best.

So yeah, that's that's how I decided to play it, you know. No coopy sandwiches on my team.

And You say that, but like one of those people is like way into crypto, actually.

Like way

into it. However, when it comes to

when it comes to who I'd rather fight if they had to come back at me mad, yeah, I'd rather fight fucking

Moist Critical. Yeah.

You know?

But unfortunately, I spent my stats. Yeah, you could take Charlie.
He's like my height. He's really short.

Dude,

we all watched as our materia disappeared into that fucking water.

And we all know the pain of like, how dare you, how dare you rob me of my resources? I'm never again.

That feeling of never again. So

I want my flying Batman, and he's going to pick up my members and do that. Also, I mean, he's besties with Malevola, and she's she's the best person on the whole fucking cast.
So

there's that. That's an easy decision.
I appreciated

the little hacking mini-game makes me miss Nier.

You know? Oh, weird.

That is such a... I would never have connected those two dots.
Yeah, there's just something about it that made me feel a little bit like, oh, yeah, moving on the little grid, you know?

But

yeah, that was a fun little mini-game. I enjoy that, like, that aspect of it.

It's definitely kind of weird that like, okay, so you have the QTE on or off was like one of the things.

That's pointless. That shit is actually pointless.
I saw people saying, just turn it off. Just keep it cinematic.
It doesn't. One page point.
It doesn't do anything.

I'm not going to tell her to turn it off because it literally does nothing. Yeah, but what it does is keep these weird slowdowns in when you're watching it play out, you know? Sure, but still.
Yeah.

There is a feeling I have where I'm just kind of like,

I really like when things are in-game. I really like pre-rendered does feel oh, yeah.
So, to people who don't know, Dispatch is a fucking FMV game. Like, that game has like

no gameplay or polygons at all outside of the dispatch gameplay and the hacking minigame.

Which means you don't have funny, weird bugs of people falling out of world if you're just playing a fucking video. Bigsby doing his stripper dance by accident

in the background. It also means you can't rip models

and upload them you know uh but i but no it is it is it is great so far in just those three um

and you can tell too that it's like oh critical role is behind this oh well here's eight billion subtitle options here is a ton of attention to like how the voice action voice acting is performed and it's it's a you know an absolute star player there is like um the line delivery is is coming through i feel like they're trying to hit a medium ground where they're not completely without quips,

but they're not MCU quippy. No, no.
Like basically it's it's snappy, witty dialogue, but

when they're having like a serious moment, they allow it to just have a serious moment. Yeah, you know,

they're not insecure in their own writing and go, oh, Iron Man's going to have to make a joke about his butthole here to cut the drama.

You're not going to necessarily get, he's right behind me, is he, isn't he? But you might get a Kung Fu Panda eyebrow raise. You know,

you might get a...

So,

yeah, that was... Let me ask you.
For the dispatch gameplay, like the actual core gameplay of the game, how do you like it?

I think I got the hang of it. It took a second to like realize

what it needed me to do and stuff. And, you know, people were screaming, like, clear the messages.
And I was like, yeah, I'm like, you know, but I think I got the hang of it.

And I'm like, yeah, it's basic management stuff.

It's, it's, I don't play a lot of those games, but it's a, it's funner than championship manager, you know, I'll give you that. Absolutely.

It's a little weird when there's moments where they're like, no, I'm not doing it because plot reasons, you know, or that there's that one bad shift, which is just crazy.

I was so stressed out, and that's the intention.

But what I will, but I'll say that, like, the desire to like get better at managing the calls and smooth it all over and get in there and use things efficiently is like, I'm thinking about it.

I'm like, yeah, I want to do a better run. I want to, you know, not have to use that pick-me-up power to save one of my team members.
And, and, and then the other thing to, okay,

I know this is something where like

this, your mileage may vary depending on who you are, but decipher, but keywords, sometimes the logic of what the word is trying to get at is a little nebulous. And I think that's the game.

I think they're purposely.

Yeah. So, you know, when it was like, if it says, like, defend against, you know, people that might be fighting you and you're like, you're going to have to chase and fight them.

Okay, well, I think I figured it out.

Yes, yes, you know, but that means it's not the fight stat, right? Even though the activity is a fight, it's not the context that of the whole sentence that matters. It's the main word, you know?

No main words.

Plural, yes, yes. Yeah.
But there were one or two where I thought it was defending and it actually was fighting.

You know, there were one or two where I thought it was charisma, but it was actually brains, you know. Yeah, learning that is the game.
Right. Like

investigate is like, you need your brains to investigate, but sometimes it's like.

you're investigating by talking to people, you know, like there was another word for like determine, you know, or something like that.

I forgot what exactly it was, but there's a thing that was like, oh, is that charisma? Or and it just was a little bit in between. So, yeah, that ultimately is the game.
The wording gets a little

vague at times.

And yeah, and then in terms of how to build out your characters and stuff, I'm like, I don't know. I'm just covering your bases, I think, feels feels pretty smart.

You know, I imagine the requirements are going to get higher and higher as you kind of go, do I need to spend all four team members on one mission over here? I don't think so. Maybe not.

You know?

I think that gameplay actually is like. So they traded out walking around and talking to people.
Yeah.

For

the dispatch gameplay. Yeah.

And after having beaten the game, I think that was a really smart decision. Way better.

I really like the dispatch gameplay. And it has a bunch of little

twists they can throw at you. Like, they'll bring up a new concept, which will massively fuck up the strategy that you have been using to succeed.
Yeah. Okay.

And then they'll introduce a new thing that you can use to succeed instead. Because

walking around that office and like finding little toys for your dog to then

that would have just slowed shit down. Yeah, it would have been nothing.

As such, it's super, super brisk. And the other thing is that I was actually quite bad at the dispatch mini-game.
I was like pretty bad. Yeah.

Like, I get to the end of the first two or three episodes. I was like, you did better than 15% of people.
Okay. And it's like, oh, okay.
Oh. I did better than 90%.
I, I, I had, you know. Good job.

Um, and then when I got to uh, the final dispatch encounter, which is the game's, you know, final boss, essentially, um, I broke it again. Uh,

I, I, I, I, I broke the final encounter and FaZe skipped a bunch of it

and missed out

on like dialogue and scenes and stuff

a bunch. I missed out on on a bunch.
Oh, man.

That's a fucking bummer. Okay.

I don't know what video games want from me anymore.

I thought what they would do is if you do really good, you just hit the next phase and the next phase starts.

But there's so little for you to do here.

It's just a spreadsheet. Like, click a map.
No, I missed out on a phase of my spreadsheet. Oh, man.

You know, that game's great. Performances are super excellent.

Very excited to talk to you kind of

when you're done. Really? Yeah, yeah.

There's not a whole lot of meat on the interim. And it won't take long, you know.

I appreciate the like. Although I did kind of start.
I'm banging out in one. Though the last episode is longer.

Well, I started episode three thinking it would be an hour and it was an hour and a half, you know, so I was like, ah, fuck, okay. Like that one trailed a bit.

But in general, yeah, it is good for stream formatting when it comes to the length of things.

We will encounter what else has to happen.

I'm glad I actually stopped at three because now I can fully prepare.

You can do like four, five, six, and then seven, eight, probably. There's also something to like when you put censorship on where it's like, okay, we're doing this comedic black bar style.

And it's not fast enough. It can't follow Toxic's dick fast enough.

Like, it's just, you know, like, there's ways to go about it. Like, blur if you need to blur or cyberpunk, it's just gone entirely, etc.

But nah, we're going to put a goofy fucking giant black bar that chases you around. And here's this old man ass.

I think the funniest thing is that, like, there's two sections of the game where if you have a black, if you have the, the censored thing is, it just makes the entire screen black.

Like, it just blacks out the whole screen. And it's like, well, that doesn't.

You're not, not you're not covering it up you're just okay whatever yeah

anyway so um yeah that was dispatch um

gonna gonna take a look at more of that uh as soon as i get the chance uh but it won't be this week because this week is pretty busy so uh

there's stuff going on this week stuff going on so yeah tune in tomorrow we're gonna be playing some more um expedition 33

and we're fucking booking it man we're making moves getting ready for the sweep one axon down. And the sweep is...
Yeah, the sweep, exactly. The swithreep

this Thursday.

So Expedition 33 tomorrow. And then on Thursday night, the TGAs, the TTGAs,

whatever that desert Satan is.

I have some news about that. Ah, okay.

And

I'm going to have to go make some predictions, even though I did did not play all the things that might be contenders this year.

But whatever.

I played

most of what is on the list this year.

Did you play Expedition 33? I sure did.

You're probably good. Okay.
Well, you know. I'm just thinking

Page did our list. I'm probably going to go back before and like

change it a little bit to add more Expedition 33 onto my guesses. Well, I just would also imagine that at some point

a Toby Fox or a Kojima might also get some flowers at a Jeff Keely show. I think Jeff Keely will give the flowers to Kojima that are at the back of his mouth behind his molars.

There's flowers back there. There's flowers back there.
Yeah.

So

I'm assuming that, you

whatever is going to come of that is going to be like, hey, I didn't get around to Death Striding 2 yet. So we'll see.

Beyond that, though, just to, I guess, so, yeah, that'll be Thursday. And then on Saturday, we're slop streaming.

So

no fighting games this week. We're just going to slop it up.
The return of the list. So tune in.
It'll be a good time.

And then,

yeah, the dispatch will come through perhaps the week after that when we get back to it.

If you want to to submit stuff, by the way, you still can,

you know,

whether through socials or the Reddit group, we've got the two sides there. So

send it all, send it all over,

and yeah, and tune in. That's it.

Woolly versus on Twitch and on YouTube. Oh, yeah.
Look, I mean, we've been playing

our dulls, our wordles, and our rule30 Fordles and all that stuff. That's over on the chill stream.
You can check out that. We'll be putting some clips up.
It's good stuff.

There's some clips. Yeah.

Have a good time.

I had a great time watching some of that content. What did you see?

Woolly, you know more people in your personal life that want to fuck Fallout characters than you do, Dick.

So I could.

Did you think my wife was just a one in a million Freakazoid?

I was not thinking about the show.

I completely forgot about the show. I was just thinking of.
Oh, my God, that's an even crazier it's I completely forgot about the show.

I was just thinking of the games on that when that box art popped up. It completely fucking.

I'm thinking of the,

yeah,

when it puts it all together. Yeah, fair enough.

Oh, man.

Oh, you're a crazy guy. You're a crazy guy.
You got to update your geographic goon map.

I've seen a couple of things over the years, but I guess it just stuff from Fallout.

Either I didn't register what the monster was, or perhaps it just hasn't broke the level of containment that some of the other horny stuff is. Because

Elizabeth broke horny containment. Mercy broke horny containment.

And I don't think I've encountered stuff from Fallout that broke horny containment. Snap.
So

it broke horny containment. Here's the thing: things don't have to break containment, they just have to live in their own fairly, extremely large bubbles.

I hesitate to use the word bubble here because Fallout is like broadly popular, right?

This actually is just feeding into

the same discussion of I couldn't figure out how to explain Skyrim to you.

Like, like that, this discussion actually lives in that box. I guess.
Because there's this like huge

swath that you just dodged. Yeah, I, I, you know, I, I guess you can continue, people can continue to underestimate or overestimate how little I know about Fallout.
Like, I really

couldn't tell you much, you know?

I know, like, so, like,

living in my house right now, I know so so much about the second season of Fallout.

Like,

I had a moment where it's like, I hate it. I hate it when you get frustrated about something and then the person you're talking to just proves you super, super wrong.

And then you feel like, really dumb for getting frustrated. Because Paige is watching every interview that she can get a hold of about the second season of Fallout, right?

And I'm like, man, I fucking hate interviews. Every interview before a fucking TV show is totally pointless because all they do is lie.

And then every single day she comes up to me with like a fucking list of like, this is going to happen and this is going to happen and this is going to happen.

This is how this character's arc is going to go and this is how this character's arc is going to go.

And this person can't be trusted with spoilers and this person can't be trusted with spoilers and this actor flaps and this actor shits.

Oh, and promotional material. Okay.
Yeah. Damn, that's crazy.
So she's like, like, good example.

You can't listen to Ella Purnell because Ella Purnell is like a Tom Hollands type in which they don't tell her what's going to happen and she only reads her lines

because she can't be trusted to do an interview.

Okay.

I have stupid questions.

I have stupider answers. Okay.

So.

You know me. You know I have a stupid answer ready.
Yeah, I mean, that's what this whole show is about. So

who is the most popular named character from Fallout?

The most popular named character from Pit Boy ever.

Well, Pit Boy is actually Walton Goggins now. Okay.
So aside from, I guess,

the logo character,

the mascot. Are we talking about

named character as in like Robert House?

Or are we...

We're talking like a human being character? Are we talking about like an icon? So

whatchamacallit? Or pornography. Are we talking about pornography? I guess I'm just talking about General Zeitgeist, because if I say Overwatch and I go, oh, Mercy, right?

Or if I go Bioshock and go, oh, yeah, Elizabeth was someone there, right?

And then even if I go to like Skyrim or stuff and you've got your fucking

whatever, the Fusaroda,

your main dudes,

whatever. Anyway, Geralt for the Witcher.
There's usually a name. There's things.

So in Fallout, the whole franchise, is there, like, what's the most known named character, in your opinion? Nobody. It's a setting-based narrative.
Okay. Okay.

Individual characters are not actually important.

Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So that's that feeling that I kind of because I the fact this this question is coming from the fact that like I have to go I can't think of any

you can't so like the dog meets a game a character in a lot of games the the the playable character from from New Vegas is named the courier right etc and that reason is enough for me to go

and here's the thing

here's the thing Reggie sitting next to you was dead on the money. The reason why Fallout has a presence on the pornography world is because Fallout has

named monsters that people want to fuck on. So the Death Clause was a joke from last week because we did Power Scale and Death Clause popped up and neither of us knew what that was.

And it was on the power scaling versus thing. And we're like, oh, it's a fallout monster.
And they're like, yeah, it's a, you know, it's a popular fallout monster. I was like, oh, shit, okay.

So we, so that came back because we just learned that a couple days prior, right? You got, you got your ghouls, you got your super mutants, you got your death claws,

um,

uh, you got your, your, uh,

Robotrons, your assault trons, and Fisto, the robot.

Okay.

Um,

because,

like,

for example, like, you know, when, if I'm going to, again, use another franchise and talk about, like, pop character popularity and stuff, it's like

this is a case where Liara is a known popular, you know,

character, and a lot of people want to fuck some blue ass. They're all about it.

But.

For when your mild curry is too spicy.

However, right?

For when that Jamaican patty is just too hot for you.

Just can't deal with this.

But like, in that case,

even before

knowing and stuff, there's things where you're like, okay,

it'll be about Liara. Whereas here, it's like not that.
It's Asari as a broad class

is what people would be into. I'm going to tell you this.

The vault suit carries a lot.

Like, you watched the first season of the fall. Ella Purnell looks really hot in that suit.

Period. That's it.
Okay.

That's like a huge proportion of it. Okay.
And

I think that the question as to like, it's not about the characters, it's about the setting is why when I think of like people getting horny for Fallout, no one comes to mind.

Thus I go, I have no fucking idea. So like a real but I see Zangiefendo's muscles though.
So for a really good example is Skyrim

actually has a weirdly enormous amount of pornography made from it, despite the the fact that I could not tell you a single character's name in Skyrim after beating that game twice.

And that's because people used the mod engine to just create sex houses.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. 3D environment, go nuts, do your thing.
And like, again, Dovakin is a thing that is out there, at least in named form. Like, you got that.

But a lot of the

other franchises and stuff that I've, that definitely people are horny for, they'll say, like, you know, Yennefer, or

there'll be examples of like this tag.

So, Witcher is a character-centric franchise, and the reason it's a character-centric franchise is because it's based off a famous book series.

Yeah, also, there's fucking literally booty cards in the first game, and they're like, they're all about to have a chance to play it.

And also, the Witcher series can have literally any fantasy creature you've ever heard of in it at all.

Like,

it runs the entire fucking game.

Okay, that explains it.

How could you forget about DaGhoul?

I mean,

I'll tell you, two-year-old will go, mommy loves Daghoul

sometimes.

I will also say that the power emitted by one person in one location on the other side of Canada

is, there is enough aura coming from just that one to combat the numbers that other tags might put up.

Well, the other thing you have to remember, and this is really important, this is a really important detail, much like there is the Black Otaku Council, right, and the FGC Illuminati, and every, every, every, it's special interest groups, like, secret cabal,

if you know one person who is like waving the big ass fucking ghoul flag, there are many,

many others hiding deep, deep underground, hatching their schemes. But sometimes, sometimes, yes, but other times, I think it's just a power number, right?

So, for example, let's say the question was Vaporeon versus Reshiram. The correct

want to have this conversation anymore. The number is going to be higher on Vaporeon,

but the Reshiram number, you know, the power within that one.

The power of that one trumps

all 15,000 of those casual Vaporeon dippers.

I think he's right.

Power.

Okay, well, congrats. I want to leave this conversation fast now.

I played a couple other things this week of note.

Three of note. I played Metroid Prime 4.
I did not get that far. I played it for one session.
I'll go back to it at some point.

Little bit. Pros.
What's that? You touched it just a little bit.

I play it for about four and a half hours. Here's a weird question for a Nintendo game.
How did it run?

Great. Incredible.

Switch to

no issues. Everything.

Okay. Were you playing

on screen or

held? Oh, I streamed it. So I was playing on the on dock mode.
Great. Okay.

I picked the 4K one because the chat can't see 120 FPS. I can't see that shit.
Right.

Ran Immaculately.

And

a couple things that are really funny.

Samus is in a new location, so Samus needs to get new stuff. And every single fucking upgrade she gets is psychic thing.
Yeah, purple thing.

But no, like, they're literally called psychic boot, psychic ball, psychic ball. Like, every single thing is a psychic.
It's really funny.

On top of that, I ran into your friend and mine, Miles McKenzie, the Federation officer who chit-chats to Samus over the radio.

And I got everything that I wanted out of him because

every single time he talks to Samus,

she completely refuses to speak to him in any way. In almost every cutscene that they are in, she

doesn't even look at him. She refuses to pull the visor down.

It's like he's a non-human.

Like he's like a goddamn sign. Like, doesn't give a shit, even a little.

Like I said last week, you can imply dialogue without showing it, and then you can just have, actually, I'm staring at you awkwardly

as you have a one-sided conversation.

I don't want to talk to you at all, Miles McKenzie.

I did the first tutorial area and I got through the first run of first opener area

called the Volt Forge.

Raced by alien birds, by the way. Yeah.

And

it's a fine game and it's visually very pretty and I'm enjoying Metroiding through the area.

I'm not really getting what I want out of the Metroid game.

And I talked kind of at length about the, I have really weird opinions on Metroid. Like the, I'm standing up in Congress, Norman Rockwell, like hot take, man, is that

I think old man, like,

like, I don't like all of the really beloved Metroids. Like, I don't care about Super Metroid at all.

Right. And that is the hottest take.
That is

the hottest take. I mean, I don't care about it as more acceptable than, like, I hate it.

I don't like to play it. I think it's really cool and I think it's wildly important, but I actually don't like playing Super Metroid.
And the reason for that is you. Wait, hold on, hold on, Wooly.

I'm not going to get a fucking... That's fine.
No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not an eye roll.
It's damage. It's just damage.
That's fair.

So, no, the reason why I think that is because I came to the Metroidvania

genre backwards.

So most people got to Metroidvania by playing Metroid games. And hey, look, Castlevania is like Metroid now.
Right. I

love Castlevania. And then Castlevania got weird and really awesome.
And I went, why is Castlevania's Symphony of the Night so weird and different now?

And I was then told, oh, because they made it like Metroid.

So, oh, I should play Metroid because that's what these are like. And my first thing is, why doesn't it control as good as Symphony of the Night? Well, it's because it's a game that's like,

but like, I want it, I like, I like the controls of Castlevania better than I like the controls of Metroid, right?

This is just brutal. This is a brutal timeline for you, man.
I'm well aware because

you are the person who is at the full opposite end of that fucking diagram because Castlevania starts a Symphony of the Night. Sure does.

Right? So, like, we are the polar opposites on this fucking diagram, right?

And then I play Metroid Prime 1 and 2, and I fucking love Metroid Prime 1 and 2. I think they're great.
I think Dread is amazing.

And

I play this, and I'm like,

it's not harming me the way Metroid 3 did, Metroid Prime 3 did. Metroid Prime 3 harmed me.
It hurt my wrists.

And I did not care for the waggle or the aiming. So the only thing that I got out of that control scheme for Metroid Prime 3 was that it

harmed me. So, this game does not harm me because I can play it with this nice Switch controller that plays like a regular controller, right?

It is a lot more like Metroid Prime 3 than it is like Metroid Prime 1 and 2.

I played it for about five hours and I never got lost. Okay.

And

it very much feels like the areas are built like Zelda dungeons.

Like you're going through what is essentially mostly a linear path and solving puzzles and fighting enemies, and you'll use your new upgrade to

traverse it and solve puzzles. And everywhere you look, there's things you can't do yet because

you know you can upgrade to course, of course. But you can see that they lead to missile upgrades.
You can see that they lead to energy tanks.

And it's it's like, this is all come back here to get more stuff and not come back here because you're absolutely fucking completely lost and you don't know where to fucking go to get your next upgrade.

Like in Metroid Prime 1 and 2, I was fucking lost, man.

I was just scraping up and fucking down until the system took pity and was like, maybe you should fucking go look in this zone.

Okay. Right.

It's a fine game. It plays well.
It sounds great.

The combat's fun. I'm not getting what I want out of it.
So I want a lost wandering area. So what it is here is it's a dungeon connected to the desert.

And the desert is a gigantic, empty fucking pile of shit with nothing in it other than green crystals you can get for completion and like one objective. And it and the desert sucks.

And having to buy a $30 Silas Amiibo to turn music on in the desert

really, really fucking soured me on it. Come on.
Really?

Yes.

And people are going to say, well, if you get 100% scan, you can. No, that's not true.
That's not true. The only way you're turning real music on in that desert is to buy the Silas Ami, Silix Amiibo.

Jesus fucking Christ. That's gross.
That sucks.

I was going to ask, like, did you fight a boss that was using the psychic abilities to do some cool shit as you're wont to do in a Nintendo game like this?

I fought my run against Silix, right? My Virgil won against Silix.

And I had to use a huge amount of my kit that I had up until that point to beat him.

And that was really cool.

But

it's just really linear.

It's just really, really linear. I have a photo

that I can send to you.

God, just as you're saying that, yeah, like one of the most defining important aspects of Metroid Prime is the music. So any fuckery involving taking it away from you is criminal.

So I have sent you a photo of the first area in Metroid Prime versus like the

area

in four, and it's like they look like straight lines with little branches off them. Chozo runes versus they don't loop back on themselves.

The backtracking is for

items. That's a complete map.
Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

I do have to say, too, as we're like talking about like Metroid Prime 3, when I think back on it,

a big part of my bummer besides shitty wrist stuff was

I find

like Dark Samus to be a really lame rival. And so the buildup around her was all just uninteresting to me, and thus I'm bummed out when I think about that chapter of things.

So, you know what's funny? That is one of my big complaints here. Okay, Silex?

No, my complaint is

I'm playing the game for multiple hours. I'm like, oh, can't wait for them to introduce Phase On.

To which chat says they've they've done multiple interviews to saying that Dark Samus and the Phase On thing is completely over.

I'm like, then they shouldn't call this fucking game Metroid Prime Prime because that is the final boss of all three games and the reason it's called that. Or the essence of Metroid Prime, you know?

Yeah,

I'm just thinking of the, you know, not only was that like one of those lame dark shadow characters that is like, I remember there was an excitement back in the day with like, oh shit, you know, Mirror link and stuff and you know but then like there's there's times where it just gets played out and it becomes a trope that's just not done in an interesting way and the thing with Samus in particular with Dark Samus is like you did an infinitely cooler version of this called the SA-X right like the SAX in Metroid Fusion was

your old suit getting possessed by a virus and it was way more interesting as a rival character because it was a haunting thing that was chasing you throughout the game you know like the emmys were it wasn't just this other nebulous force to have a showdown with it was well the other thing you know has it's a problem is like i love that samus doesn't talk i think that's like a great defining feature but the problem is is that dark samus

also doesn't fucking talk because they're like a metroid so like you have the antagonist and the hero square off and fucking say nothing to each other yeah i that's that's it like you know the idea of again as someone who loves the rivals and stuff, it's got to be compelling.

And in this case, you know, Fusion did a rival that felt like fucking Mr. X coming after you.
You know what I mean? Like, that's a way, way better way to do it.

And then you're coming in with your own weak version of it in the third game. It was just like, meh.

But anyway, that being said, it's been a really long time since a Prime game. So there's a level of like,

I'm giving a lot of like benefit and leeway to just be like, okay, can you scratch some of this itch though?

I feel like the game's extraordinary development time has really harmed my perception of it because a lot of games have come out since Metroid Prime 3 and now

that gave me what I wanted out of Metroid Prime in general. Like...

Bro, Hollow Knight came out after fucking Metroid Prime 3, dude.

The whole whole fucking Hollow Knight Silk Song fucking thing

is in between the release of 3 and 4.

And also, I'd say, just in terms of

big Nintendo releases, a minute ago, Donkey Kong came out and you were just kind of like, yo, this is great. Donkey Kong's fucking crux.
And that's it. No strings attached.

No strings attached, no notes. Donkey Kong fucking rules.

Yeah, I really liked Dread.

I really enjoyed that.

I was hoping for something as good as Dread, and

go play Dread again. It's good.

Well,

2D Metroid, you know, still

holds the crown over fucking Prime. I think Metroid Prime 1 is probably the best game that studio ever made, and that's fucking weird because it was the first one.

Like, Metroid Prime Remastered

on the Switch is probably a straight-up better game than Metroid Prime 4.

I'll go side.

I'll go side.

Can you memory check me?

In Metroid Prime,

when you were doing a platforming and you were jumping from one thing to the next, did Samus tilt her head down to look at the platform

so that she'd land on it more easily?

No.

I don't recall that. Because I remember that.
Did she?

I don't remember.

And

she did? Yes, she did. Okay, a lot of people saying, yeah, I don't remember that.
Okay.

That was a really cool detail

because it was like a way to

make sure that you could always platform correctly. Okay.

And that was also because of the way the GameCube controller worked and it sucked for dual analog. And I'm playing Metroid Prime 4 and

I'm like I have regular dual analog controls I'm like I kind of miss that because I thought it was a really cool little the little look down yeah

I did play two other games that I don't have any qualms about recommending at all that because they're fucking incredible

I got sent a code for Skate Story oh have you seen skateboarding yeah absolutely so full version is finally out right yep you played skate story I played the full demo um back in half how long is that demo so the demo is a long demo it's like the first half hour of the game or so um okay uh i played the first two full levels like i got two moons

poetic writing trippy

phenomenal

unbelievable visuals yeah

tight controls

um

It just, it's a... Incredible.
Yeah, this is a, it is a work of art. You feel the autorship.
David Ng, I think was his name, the creator. Like his name is on it.
Something Eng. Something Eng.
Yeah.

A skate story just in one fell swoop playing that. I walked by Sam Eng.
Sam Eng. Sam Eng, yeah.
I've walked by that

on the show floor and was like, what the fuck am I looking at? And then you go and just touch it and you're like, okay, someone decided to do their own kind of skate thing.

It's not just Tony Hawking or whatever, but it's like, yeah, trippy, drug, you know, fucking visuals. You are a demon, you're made of glass.

And every time you wipe out, you shatter into a million pieces.

And the camera follows the skateboard into the distance, you know.

Yeah, it's visually incredible. It's narratively interesting.
It's incredibly well written. It has a killer soundtrack.
It controls excellently. It is a totally unique idea.
Like,

it just hits on every level. And it's fucking awesome.
And it's got that

weirdo, pseudo, sweary,

annapurna like artsy game confusion abstract nonsense thing going for it, which is like it's just beautiful here. You know, the soundtrack I remember was also fucking sick.

Yeah,

Skate Story, I was immediately captivated by that, but I just didn't know when the full game was dropping, so it seems like it just came out. Big recommend on that.

The only thing I would say is when you're playing it, is that I had Tony Hawkbrain when I was playing it.

So you'll fight like a boss, and it'll be like, do a bunch of tricks, and then do an ender to hurt the boss.

And I was like, I was trying to do like manual, kickflip, manual, shove it, manual, grind, manual,

whatever. And

then I would do one bar of damage to the boss.

And then the next time I'd do

kick flip, pop, shove it, and do one bar of damage to the boss.

Like,

it wants you to navigate and do a couple cool tricks. It doesn't want you to full speed combo around the fucking world.

It plays a little bit like skate in that way, too, more so. And it wants you to grind and do more tricky grinds and jumps than it wants you to, yes, go in one spot and just go,

you know. But it is incredible.
It's absolutely fucking phenomenal.

Yeah, and I mean, you know, there's a couple other, like, because like Skateburb is another one, or Bird, rather,

is one of those games that, I don't know if it came out yet, I don't think so, but it's a Tony Hawk with a bird. It's cute, it's fun,

but you don't, you don't have to, like, reroute too much of, like, what you already know how to do, you know, playing that.

And there was another one that I played on Steam the other day that was a skating adventure game that crashed and was just not ready.

I forget what the fuck it was called, but

it was, it seemed like it was gonna be like a skating adventure game, but whatever it was, this, this thing is fucking super worth it. This looks great.
Uh, it's it's fucking stellar.

It's fucking super cool. Now, granted, I did get the game for free, uh, but uh,

it's just fucking, it doesn't matter. That game is fucking awesome.
Um,

so this is the total opposite. I did a stream of this and routine,

which is the total opposite of my playtest stream because both of these games are fucking incredible. So, routine has been in development for 13 years.

I believe it is the game that Alien Isolation is based off of,

which is a crazy thing to say.

This game that was in development before.

Yeah.

Okay.

Routine takes place in space on Damoon

on a lunar on a lunar

colony,

um,

and it is

it is the furthest expression of cassette futurism I have ever seen. If you're familiar with that aesthetic, it's cassette futurism is easiest explained to people who don't know.

It is explained by uh what the people in the 80s who were doing the sets for Alien thought the future were going to look like.

So, floppy discs, VHS tapes, CRT, bulky plastic padding, etc. What came after Jetson's futurism, basically? Yeah.

I would say this is the furthest into cassette futurism I've ever seen. I would go so far as to almost call it CRT punk.

It is like obsessed. Like there's so many VHS tapes everywhere.

It is a spooky horror game on the moon.

in which you wake up and, you know, you're alone in an empty space station or moon moon base

and you quickly discover that the robots that run the station are attempting to separate your head from your shoulders and This is the type of game where it's not about concept, it's about execution it all the little pieces fit together to make something larger than the greater whole so

The first thing that you get is your gun, but it's not a gun It's a maintenance tool and so when I say that people's brains go to dead space and they think of Isaac Clark's fucking plasma cutter as a you know engineering tool to cut things apart.

No, this is actually a maintenance tool. The only thing this can do is zap a little bit of electricity to like trip a fuse box.
Like, that's it.

Like, that's it, you know, it shoots a little zap and it'll open a door maybe if you hit the fuse box. Uh, it has a CRT monitor on the back of the gun that has a refresh rate of half a frame a second.

So, as you aim it and move it around, it struggles to keep up with what you're pointing at and will like have vertical

vertical sync issues and it's a it's a piece of shit CRT monitor on the back of this thing.

But also it works as your Wi-Fi terminal.

So you can aim this and shoot it to do your little zap or you can hit a triangle or Y or whatever it is on the keyboard to pull open the side of your device and switch it to Wi-Fi pairing mode. Okay.

which will link up to like local projectors and give you a computer screen on the projector, not on your device, on the projector, which you use a mouse and keyboard to interact with.

Or you can flip out a piece and put in like a

viewfinder in it to read things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to read. But when you do that, it turns off the sparkshot ability.

So if you want to turn it back on, you have to open it up, move the mouse, flip up the module, and then lock it back into electricity mode.

And you're doing all of this in a spooky environment with no time, no pause, no. Yes, yes.
So it's and on top of that, if you get too close to certain types of machinery, your

CRT monitor on the back of your gun will start to freak out, and you have to degauss it.

You have to move your mouse to a button and hit the degauss button and hear that friendly old dung as it degausses.

I'm watching the trailer, and when I see you saying what alien isolation is based on, I fucking feel it.

Because obviously, the level, because like

Alien World Tech is doing the same thing with a lot of this type of

CRT screens and

horrible frame rate and old ancient

technology. But also, this is like 99% vibes.

You don't have an inventory. Yeah, gameplay is really just first person walking around in a really, really well-designed environment and setting, and it's delivering that.
That's cool.

Okay, interesting. So, your little zapper has three shots before needing a new battery.
You can't keep extra batteries on you, and there are batteries everywhere.

So, they really don't want you to be stressing about inventory. They don't want you to be stressing about these things.
It's literally just exist, and when you need it, pick it up, deal with it.

The enemies are the other part of like dealing with

the total completeness of it in that the enemies are eight foot tall humanoid robots that make an extraordinarily loud stomping noise as they walk around so everywhere in your vicinity you will hear stomp stomp stomp stomp and the audio has excellent positional tracking like you can tell like pretty much exactly where they are

They have a little battery on their chests that if you shoot and zap, they will turn off. You cannot harm them.
You can only turn them off for 15 to 20 seconds.

The other thing is that you have no way to physically defend yourself if they catch you.

And they will run their routes and they will examine things that make a noise. But they are also, and this is really important, dumb as shit.

If you hide under a table and it didn't see you go under the table, you're fucking safe.

Go around a corner and it didn't see you go around the corner and it's outside of its path, you're fucking safe.

If you block the view, well, you know, sometimes when they're looking for you, they'll do that like red line like cone thing.

If you're not in it, you're safe, it's not a problem. Um, they're not xenomorphs, no, but what they are is ever-present.
You can't kill them,

you hear them constantly, they're they're usually in your way, um, and it makes this really, really excellent thing where you'll see one, you'll duck around a corner and you'll, you know, hit the button to lean and peek out

and wait for them to turn off. The other thing that really, really

makes it work is that they don't even have a vision cone. They have a vision line.

Like, they have a direct line.

There's no cone. It's crazy how blind they are.

So you feel like you can get around them other than the fact that they're everywhere and they're a problem. You can't hurt them.
They also will finish their patrols and turn off.

So,

they will do their route and then find a spot in like a hallway and then just depower and go rigid. And I have no idea what causes them to stay like that for how long.
Yeah.

So, you end up having to like crawl through doorways around them. And I have no idea what turns them on or not.
I think it's time.

I think they're turned off for like a certain amount of time. But unless you saw them turn off, you have no idea how long they've been doing that for.
Right, right, right. Yeah.

And it just makes this really, really, really excellent mix between what I would call panic horror, which is amnesia where you can't defend yourself at all, and survival horror in which you can eliminate enemies.

Right? You can defend yourself, but you also can't actually harm enemies.

It's so interesting how this is all just, again, it's not concept, it's just execution, as you said. Like, it's just really

well

done, scary.

They move at the right speed. You can outrun them, but your movement speed when you're not sprinting is really slow.
It's all these little details.

One of the first things that really stands out is that the game's first tutorial puzzle is teaching you that not only can you lean, not only can you crouch, you can crouch and then stick your head like on the floor to look under like deep furniture.

Wow. And you can stand up on your tiptoes.
Nice. Okay.
Wow. Like they like being able to see something while they can't see you is like a huge part of the gameplay.
It's excellent. Also, it is great.

This feels like this environment feels like you're running around in a stromo.

Absolutely. 100%.

That is very

good game. Super cool.
And that's what I did this week.

Oh, of note:

this is Caboose the Dogs gotcha week. This is one year of Caboose this week.

Oh, okay.

We have had Caboose for one year.

Exactly. I was like, is he SSR?

He is.

Yeah. Did you pull?

Damn. Okay.
Yeah.

Gotcha.

I've never heard that term before. It feels like I've had this dog forever, but nope, just one year.

Just one year.

Congrats. Happy gotcha.
All right. Well,

how about Caboose

gotcha? Caboose has got to go pee

pee out of his bladder. Yeah.
Yeah. Who's your little baby?

Go do that. All right, beer pop.

Hello. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors.
Dude, I love sponsor.

I feel like that statement is losing words over time.

I feel like sponsor love.

Eventually, I'll just say sponsor in in an agreeable tone

hmm

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All right.

This week, the podcast is sponsored by HelloFresh.

And I'll tell you one thing.

It is

very much

a really, really, really nice thing to be very busy these holidays, be running around and doing everything we're doing, and not worry about the grocery cooking

mess about the Santa's got enough to worry about man it is not my high my list of priorities um eating well is something that should always be up there it's way down there right this season but it's extraordinarily low as as as yes we enter December just give just give me a half stick of butter and that'll do me for the next couple of days no don't do that you can eat so much better and why not trust people that are, you know, literally their whole job is to make food that tastes good and is healthy for you and that you can get fresh straight to your door.

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And last but certainly not least, this week, the sponsor

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And I am very much enjoying the convenience with which I can get my daily greens and vegetables and nutrition

because I, when left to my own devices, make poor choices regularly. And a lot of those poor choices involve, you know, eating things I want to eat, like meat tastes pretty good.

Just give me a stick of butter. I can live on that for a couple of days.
No, don't do it.

You will die.

I won't die.

I will get sick, though. You will not live.

Which is, that's another thing entirely. But

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Alrighty, I could really go for a stick of butter right now. I'm just saying.

Yeah. How about people say,

do you ever see people like fucking like trying to recreate an olive garden recipe or some restaurant's recipe in their own? I can't get it to taste the same.

And she just come in and be like, that's because you care about being alive. Throw an entire fucking stick of butter into the pan.
I don't give a shit if you live or die.

I'm just cooking it to hit a certain taste. Yep.

Someone we knew worked as a sous chef that was basically just like, the way that steaks taste at restaurants is better because they take the whole steak and dip it in butter, and then they don't care about you being alive, and then they grill it.

Just take the meat and dip it in the butter. That's all they do.
That's why it tastes so much better. It's not a mystery.

Nevertheless,

I don't recommend a stick of butter, but could I perhaps offer you a stick of ram?

No, I can't afford it.

Well, are you sure? I can't afford that shit. Well, what about now?

No, I. Oh, I can afford it even less? Well, now?

So

we are in a section we call AI's ruining fucking everything again.

Enjoy this

current moment. Chip flation

has been upon us, and it's always been pretty rough. I mean, ever since we've been talking about the fucking Nvidia, you know, debacles and shit for a couple of years now.
But it's gotten so stupid as

AI is affecting the industry and making it impossible to buy things. And the prices are

in the process of getting bat shit crazy. So a couple seconds ago, people were looking at like 400 bucks for 32 gigs of DDR5.

64 gigs going for over 900 in some instances and

getting worse on Black Friday.

Way worse. Way worse.

Times where you're like, just wait for Black Friday. No, idiot.
It's going to explode five times more.

So

the whole market's fucked. And

yeah, so what's happening is that RAM manufacturers are just deciding to sell directly to AI data centers and OpenAI and whatnot. Yep.
Instead of the consumer. So there's less left over for you.
And

this is

two things to this week in particular. One, Samsung

is

so desperate, and the market is so fucked that Samsung will not sell to samsung

um

there is

definitely definitely sustainable

let's let's sell all of our stuff to companies that don't make money and make sure that our own sister companies can't make their own products samsung electronics tried to get

their ram from samsung semiconductors and Samsung Semiconductors refused the order for the new Galaxy phones that they were producing because go fuck yourself.

We cannot, and we will not sell it to even you. You can't get a computer, so you can't use AI.
You can't, you gotta get a new phone. So, let me get this straight.

Gen Alpha and Gen Z are killing the iPhone market by holding on to their phones for longer, but also you can't even buy a new phone because they can't get the RAM to even manufacture them.

Well, yeah, I mean, mean, this is somehow the consumer's fault. Oh, well, you know, don't forget that millennials killed the family-style restaurant.
Yeah, I remember.

Eastside Mario's is dead because of us.

I'd like to

swoop in on this.

In addition

to this being the biggest bubble that's ever been,

there is some evidence

to

support the claim that NVIDIA is selling

its own GPUs to some of these AI companies ahead of need or demand, and they're literally just sitting in the millions in warehouses

because the data centers that would use them don't exist and can't exist because the power draw would crash the grid

just

okay. So let me let me let me let me give you a really rough version of this.
Okay, let me give you a really, really, really, really, really, really rough version of this.

The demand is for an impossible output. Okay, so

AI company

that

NVIDIA

has stock in

orders in orders cards from NVIDIA.

NVIDIA then sells the cards to AI company who puts puts them in a warehouse. The money goes to NVIDIA,

which increases NVIDIA's stock because they're making lots of revenue, which they then use

to

invest in the AI company that bought the cards from themselves. Oh,

yeah,

this is going to work out fucking great. So

everyone deserves everything that's coming to them.

If you are a Seinfeld fan, this is literally the racket that George Costan. Vandalay?

No, no. To buy a bunch of computers from his dad's company so that he gets the promotion over the other guy.
And then he's about to return the computers afterwards.

And then Kramer destroys all of them. So let's ignore the part where Kramer destroys all of them.

If George did try and return all the computers he bought with his fake company to his dad, his dad's company would go under.

It would go bankrupt.

I'm like,

I can't believe we're in a state where

things were better when the scalping bots and assholes were the worst you had to worry about because they were trying to grab as much as they could off video cards for crypto.

And now you're just in a whole other realm of, no, straight to the manufacturer, actually. And this is.

We are just in the issue right now of a bunch of rich people have made a fake product and are selling

pieces of that fake product to each other in a big circle to commit check fraud. Like, do you remember the free money glitch thing?

Yes, where a bunch of poor people discovered check fraud at the ATL fucked over.

There is no difference between that check fraud and what NVIDIA and OpenAI are doing with their money now, other than the fact that they have more lawyers and accountants Guys also screwing up everything.

I discovered the craziest trick. It's nuts.
Just a TikTok CEO.

Just being like, so you go and then

you make the cards, right? And then you don't actually ship them anywhere. And then you take the money for the order and then you put it back in the same place that bought it from you.

If you can find a Nintendo Switch or a PlayStation and you were thinking about getting one, get one as fast as you can. So

the computer that's to my right,

it is top of the line as of two years ago. And this thing is, I thank fucking God, I bought it then

before all this shit went nuts. The prices of every electronic that you could possibly think of is going to just go up, up, up, up, up.

And simultaneously, I see a fucking economist article going, so what's up with Gen Z and old technology like the PSP? They can buy it.

Well,

they can buy it. Hey, hey, hey, look,

all you really need to do

as this bullshit's happening, you just need to find a company that you can trust to provide your RAM needs. So fortunately, if you need some RAM, I think you should turn to Micron and get yourself...

Get yourself in and buy from them because that'll be the right the that'll be Are they stopping sales to consumers entirely?

Uh, yeah, actually so you talked about Nvidia and that wasn't even where I was going. I was talking about Samsung not selling to Samsung as a on a on a journey to the story that is

Micron has exited the consumer business entirely. They just said fuck customers and 100%.

And in their announcement

about this, why is because they're basically going to be spending 100% of their time and resources just direct providing chips to AI companies. And

that's going to take all of their time, all their resources. They have no more need to turn to consumers.

They're going to get all their money from AI companies from now on, forever, and everything will be great and nothing will ever go wrong.

I would like anyone that ever even thinks the phrase the market will provide or the free market, yada, yada, needs to remember that we are in the process of, I would say, enduring

the largest squander of technical resources that has ever existed in human history.

Well, like in terms of

technology use straight into the dumpster,

there will probably never be anything like this again. Yeah,

and they're also,

like, in particular, like, while you're watching

this era of what's happening and the speculative aspect of it is completely divorced from the other half of this, which is

apparently they're also through subsidies

and tax breaks already

making record profits compared to what they used to. And all of that is basically being passed on to their AI customers.
So there's mega corporation AI customers that are reaping the benefits of that.

The fact that the money that they're getting from that makes it worth it for them to exit the market entirely 100%

is fucking nuts. Um

and I guess

I don't know what the

I don't know what like

when you have a situation like this where it's it's not even

Like you said, it's like the the product itself doesn't even matter in the equation.

Like it's one thing to just be like, no, we want to get this uh um we want to cut out the dealing with the customer entirely and just work straight with

the AI companies or whatever.

The part where you're describing that like literally there is a just a fraud loop happening indefinitely here, it feels like that is

like if there's a natural bubble popping point that we're looking at, does that this not just hyper accelerate it into like yes, it makes the bubble much, much larger.

the like see the reason why people keep investing is because the the the the stock valuation goes up so all there needs to be is one singular crisis of faith because the stock market is entirely based off of vibes

so one very large investor has to go you know what i'm going to get out while the going is good and pull it and then other people will pull it and then the stock will crash which will cause everyone to pull it and then open ai will go from infinite capital through stock to nothing and just go right under.

Just go right under. And I don't think there's enough money in the world to actually bail them out because of the way they've been running things.

Yeah, no, the phase where you're producing things and they're pretty much going straight into a landfill is, if that's not your edge of the cliff, I don't know what is.

I saw people comparing Micron, you know, pulling out in this way, similar to like what Colt did in the 90s, where like they just went 100% with military contracts and then basically went bankrupt immediately afterwards.

Think about Konami.

Right.

Yeah. Like, let's use an example that we're actually much more familiar with.
Didn't die. Konami almost went under because they were like pachinko all the way.
Fuck it. Oh, shit.
Pandemic.

Video games

after they fired all their fucking talent.

I'll tell you one thing

is

rest in peace then to

the other thing is the Micron pens that they used to make were really good for art.

Known for chips, and I guess for really nice fine-liner pens.

I wonder if that part of their business is also going away forever. I would imagine so.

Is it the same Micron?

Are Microns?

Is it one of those things where

hold on a minute?

Because Micron pens,

whenever you're doing line art, are they the same company?

They are not the same company. Okay, well,

there's also a very minor addition

to the AI Sucks news this week that has nothing to do with Ram.

Did you see McDonald's

AI commercial for the holidays?

Not yet, no. Well, you can't now because they pulled it down.
Oh, yeah, did they?

So here's what happened: they put out an AI slop ad that looked like shit for Christmas, and everyone was like, yo, this sucks. This sucks shit and is god-awful.

To which part McDonald's came out and said, hey, the technology isn't magic. Our team had to spend seven sleepless weeks working on this AI 30-second ad

because we had to do, and they listed off like a hundred different technical things they had to do to make it work. And it's like, okay, wait a second.

The AI robot that's going to make everything trivially easy for everyone to do it forever actually took a team almost two months to slop together instead of just shooting a regular fucking commercial.

McDonald's would definitely not have taken almost two months to shoot a regular fucking commercial. They would have banged that shit out in a week.

And now

that didn't endear them to people because it's such obvious horseshit, and now they've taken it down. But can you imagine seven weeks of sleepless nights of prompting?

I can, and it sounds miserable.

Dude, it actually sounds absolutely miserable because it's trying to get a toddler to put the cap back on their fucking cup. It's like, okay, no, put it on.
Now turn it. No,

no, grip it with your fingers and push it and turn it. Like it's like every single fucking thing comes out like shit.

And all the clips are like one second long because they can't maintain any continuity. No, what if you add comma hallmark commercial to it? Crazy.
Yeah. Crazy.

Well,

hey,

Silver. The thing that sucks and isn't worth it, hey, it's also absorbing all the the world's technology.

Like, it's literally eating it. Well, silver lining, the pens are going to be fine.

I fucking thought. Yeah.

You know, you know when like companies do like one crazy thing and then they're known for doing like one thing, but they just just one other thing they keep doing? You know, like

Yamaha. They make motorcycles, but they're also like, and we make music shit.
And you're like,

you do a good job with it, but like, why are you also the motorcycle company? What's going on? Anyway, it's weird. Um, or Samsung guns.

That's a thing. What Samsung made guns.
Oh, they do? Yeah.

Samsung's like, yeah, no, we also do that. Exactly.
It's like, what?

Anyway, whatever.

So,

in terms of video games,

in the meantime,

Checkered Inc. is an Indie Dev that has recently

put out a giant 10,000 game asset pack so that developers don't feel the need to turn to AI. It's 10 bucks.

You can get it off of their itch.io page. And it's like,

yeah.

If you need assets and you're desperate for them and you're going to go hit a prompt, just don't hit the prompt. Here you go.
Here you can do this, right?

Asset flipping is now like the more noble pathway.

Asset flipping always was always

like defined as buying the shittiest assets you can get and then doing nothing to them without any hope of cohesion.

But now the assets you are buying are made by human beings, thus it is de facto a better practice than

what they're fighting against here.

Person who hears this and knows anyone in game development. So that's checkered ink, you said?

Yes. Okay, to let people know that, because by the time you hear this, some shithead has bought that shit and jammed it into the plagiarism machine and will try and pass it off as their own bullshit.

Of course. So please, by all means, go down to the actual fucking source for its actual real purpose.

But yeah, these types of gestures are pretty sick, And hopefully, you know, more of this can be made available because

you get the feeling that there's a lot of people they're talking to here that are like,

if you have to decide between

using one, generating without a prompt, and not, then you're probably not going to be the type of person who's

in the target of this anyway. It's like this.
Yeah, but because you don't have any integrity at all.

It's already in that situation, right? Yeah, you're already like a stupid, bad person, but

if you, but if you uh have

this type of thing at the very least available by like you know, different developers and stuff, or different groups of people putting out these types of packs where it's like if you just want to get your game prototyped, if you just want to work on something and you just need assets and you need them quick, and you're not even thinking about final, you just want to show off something or whatever the case is here, right?

The you

there's no excuse, you can just get it very easily, readily available. So, that's a cool move.
I appreciate that.

Anyways, we're going to have to stop talking about this on the podcast because eventually I'm going to let my real opinions come out and I'm going to get in trouble

about what I think should be done with the people running these companies. Ah,

yeah.

Well,

okay.

TOS is a funny thing. Yeah, it's fun.
Yeah. It's a funny thing, you know.

Anyway.

How about that Netflix $82 billion deal to acquire Warner Brothers?

This is the worst thing that has ever happened to the film industry in the United States, literally ever.

This, if it goes through, is literally the end of going to the movie theater.

So the kill shot.

The headline they announced was

announced $82 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. and commits to continued theatrical releases for studio films.

Oh, Paramount fought over it. Oh, good.

That's the second worst thing that could happen to film ever is for every movie company to form into an amorphous blob that just all they know how to do is cut costs and not put out movies.

Yeah, it's happening, and shit gets shelved, and shit gets put up, divided

by the streamers anyway.

I don't see at this point, especially how things have been going. I don't see any way around it, but

this means, of course, every Warner Brother property and people are talking about how, like, you know, okay, so everything from fucking NRS, all the recent DC universe, everything,

all of it, all of it, all of it is under

that arena. The question is: like, does Netflix then choose to

like

what incentive do they have to put out movies in theaters? To just, that's what I'm saying. Like,

the legacy part of whatever things were was here is directly competing with your own business, but you're allowed, they've allowed custom deals for people to be like, okay, you get a couple of weeks in the theaters before it goes straight to it or so.

I don't know. I don't know.
Obviously, the play is to make sure that it gets to Netflix first and faster.

In some cases, I imagine you're buying out merely to avoid your rival streamers getting these properties, you know, to make sure it doesn't end up on their platform eventually after the initial run.

I could see that being a major incentive as to why this type of shit's going through.

This story is so inherently economic political that I don't even know how to approach it.

Like the Western United States movie industry cannibalizing itself is like a empire destroying loss of soft power over the world.

Like the amount of influence that the U.S. has had globally through Hollywood and the exportation of American ideology is

unbelievable. It's a civilization culture victory.

I would argue that that was already lost when the mouse went the way it did.

I would say that what you're describing began with Disney and was already on the way.

Meanwhile, I got a code in my email for a fucking C-drama game on scene called fucking,

God, what's it called?

revenge on gold diggers.

That looks fucking awesome as shit.

Um,

yeah, I mean,

it's anyway, the catamari continues to roll, and um, whether it rolls uh

internally in in America or whether it's rolling over, you know, from China or whoever's pushing it.

Everything.

You've got to get on these sea dramas to get in on the fucking fucking Chinese century early, man.

Look, the mouse will break your knees to make Winnie the Pooh happy, and it's just the way it is. All right.
South Park can suck my ass. South Park addressed it.

They hit it.

They did their job.

I feel like

we're racing to the Omni Omni Corp, and we already were looking at that because I want to say that

we were looking at the five major companies that were

in our in the 90s, like we were, everyone was like, oh, there's GE, there's fucking,

you know, the ones that only RoboCop is so good.

RoboCop gets better every year, man.

And, and, and

idiocracy gets worse. Yeah, idiocracy gets way worse.
Because it's turned, right? There was a moment where the like, oh my God, we're living in idiocracy. We're living in idiocracy.
It's hap.

And it's like, no,

because the turn is that in idiocracy, they were just dumb, but they actually were not evil. They were just stupid.
They were not malicious. They were not actively trying to kill you.

They were just unable. Idiocy is like kind of eugenics-y, which is kind of terrifying in its own right.
Sure. Don't like it.
Sure. But

just, you know, whenever that point comes up, it's like, yeah, they were dumb, but like here you have dumb and evil, which is a completely different mix. I have a question.

Say your young daughter is a little older, and she's running through the house with a little, you know, pizza.

And she drops that pizza on the ground and it makes a splat noise and she starts laughing hysterically.

Is your thought A

I'm a human being and the pizza fell down and made a funny noise? That's really funny. Or is it B, I don't understand human emotions at their most basic and can't understand the joy of a child.

I better look up ChatGPT to find out why my child laughs at dropping their pizza on the floor.

Can you live in a world in which you don't use ChatGPT to raise your child? Please tell me this is a hypothetical example. Oh, buddy.

Well.

Uh, fuck. No, it's not.
It's not a hypothetical example.

One of them AI bros, I think it's Altman. Oh, Sam.

Yeah, okay, right, right. Going, oh, I can't for how could anyone raise their child without a chat? Hey, do you know what's the most human experience that's ever existed in the history of the world?

Is raising your children?

It's literally the single least technological thing you could ever do. Maybe if you had family that still spoke to you, Sam,

that they'd be able to help you with your kids. What's more terrifying, that sort of situation or the one where Zuck is like, I don't let my fucking kids use Facebook? What are you out of your mind?

I think that's like that's way like

just what are you crazy? The thing I sell? I would never unleash that on the people I love.

I think my favorite is like the response to that was a very old tweet, which was CEO of Oreos says Oreos are just as important as oxygen.

Right?

And like, my response, I didn't see the Oreo one because that's way funnier than what I said, but it was like, children need one gallon of snake oil a day to survive.

I don't know how kids live without without snake oil in their bellies.

How they even make it to adulthood. It's impossible.

Yeah, I

like the person who's like, no, we all, we need to swerve this into the ship into the rocks. And I'm a true believer in this bullshit.
Or the one who's like.

Are you out of your fucking mind? There's no way I'm giving

my kids that poison.

That being said, I got to tell you, like, bluntly, maybe I'm not a lawyer, so I'm sure a lawyer can come out and tell me that I'm an idiot and I don't know how the world works.

But I'm of the opinion that everyone who built that plagiarism robot that told those teenagers to kill themselves should be up on charges for criminally negligent homicide.

And I think that any parent that gives their kid some mixture of whatever after ChatGP told them to and it harms them, that they should also be pulled up on charges for making the robot that tells people that.

If your doctor, if Willie, if you went and spoke to your pediatrician and they said, Yeah, just give your uh give your two-month-old a big bottle of water every single day

and your kid got sick, they'd be responsible.

Yeah, um,

I was reading about just

anyway,

the whole that kid with the Daenerys fucking killing himself thing and how

a bunch of anyway, it's just

there's extraordinarily like predator-driven

AI companies that are specifically looking to find people like that and capitalize on them as much as possible.

I imagine, like,

uh,

like, I don't know if you've seen uh in New York, there was like these, these billboards that were like friend.com or some shit like that, or some like there was a weird thing that, like, it was a massive marketing campaign for like this, like, come AI slop shit.

Yeah, and it was like, but it was talk to your friend over here, talk to this app, you know, um, yeah, report all your, all your taxes and all your crimes to it.

Like, they were consistently violently vandalized, uh, yes, aggressively so, mostly by people just writing the word feds

all over it. So, what else, Willie? Yeah.

Did you notice that those ads had about 30%

of space blank on the right side of the ad? Ah, did they? Why is that?

That's because they were designed to be defaced so that people would vandalize them and take photos of them and put them on social media. And that's the only reason you and I have ever heard of it.

Can we go back to the days when expensive microtransactions were like the biggest reason to yell? Yeah, absolutely. I'd go back to that.

Can we start complaining about horse armor and space two's bad multiplayer?

Can you believe that Battlefield put the price so high on the on the on the season pass that they when they will surely get the Karkin they reduced they reduced the price when people got mad, but it was still higher than it was supposed to be because they factored in your outrage.

Can you believe it? Yeah, it's crazy.

Online passes.

All right. Well,

hey, what else is going on?

A lot, actually. There's quite a few things.
Big,

huge one, left field. So Harada is leaving Bamco.

Crazy. After 31 years.

My thoughts are that, like, even though Tekken is in a state where a lot of the players are not happy with Tekken 8 right now, and even though there's been those goofy moments of him being like, let's focus on, you know, like fighting the CPU and making that a more human experience versus working on rollback and all these things over the years.

All that aside, Harada has been an instrumental figure in fighting games and has done a massive job turning that franchise into something you care about. Because

he is a cool guy. He is a good guy from all accounts that I've ever heard.
I've never heard even a single negative thing ever said about Harada. He's done some great work with his team over the years.

Starting with directing Tekken 3.

So guess what? Oh, man, that's such a good fucking start. Guess you didn't know he was there at 3.
Oh, that's great. Guess what? The only reason any of you care is because of what he did.

And from that, there's another level of this too, where

we definitely talk to people and hear things, and people are possible.

People are very, very transparent whenever working with someone is a nightmare. And oh, no!

This is not one of those people.

This is somebody. Oh, yes.

It's true. Let's try that again.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Oh, yes. Indeed.

In a fune

way,

it's kind of like

it's kind of like.

Oh man.

That's good.

Oh, that's a good one. Oh, that's so good.

Oh

man, you tried so hard.

It's kind of like word gets around.

The way you treat people.

The way you treat people

tends to make it out. You know what's actually really funny? When word gets, if word gets to me or you that someone sucks shit, it had to travel a while sometimes.

And the fact that it like got like three jumps away, ooh, they must be really bad to work with. That's it.

So all this to say is that Harada wasn't one of those people. He's been been a real one.
And

it is, it is kind of crazy too, but like the way he's been talking about stuff on Twitter and, you know, again, the whole don't ask me for shit stuff, all of that.

He's been very transparent about all these development stories and interactions and things he's had over the years.

And something he's been sharing online recently, and it sounds like a big part of what affected him here was Itagaki's passing.

It sounded like, you know, between that and a lot of other people he knew in the industry that he started with at the time, because him and Idagaki went to the same college, you know, like

and a lot of people that like either

just got out of the industry or so or were his age or older that are going different ways with their careers. He kind of started thinking about like

what to do with his tide left and what that he wants to do creatively with video games. And so he's like, yeah, I guess after 30 years, you know, now's a decent time.

There's like a real like

like poetic like sweetness to like,

my hater is gone. I don't know if I can keep making it without that hate.
Like, I don't, like, the spark, that magic. But the flashback story is the two of them literally went to college.

They were in the same fucking, you know, shit

before that even. Right? So, like, there's, there's always, there's always that chapter before and then the chapter chapter after.
It's like

grandpa in fucking Freeman and

then the boondocks

where he's like, come to my funeral. Come on.
I know you hated me for my entire life and we were bitter rivals, but just I need you at my funeral and I got something to give you.

And at the end, what do you have to give me? These nuts, nigga!

Ah!

From beyond the grave, I owned your ass. And you can't do nothing about it because I'm dead.

Yeah, so, you know,

it is a little something like that.

It's a good reason, I get it. And,

you know,

I just wish that last Tekken 8 patch had gone better because it has empowered the shittiest guy you know to be like, well, of course he's leaving now. He's he's

done all his good. He doesn't know what he's doing.
And it's like, shut up. I mean, look, he, again, like, he still brought like

good

net play to and finally it took a while for it to happen but that's a thing um one of the best replay systems all these features all this cool shit did eventually get there and it is kind of cool too that he's on it going out on a note where he's like the last thing i want to do is mix a dj set you know and here's my playlist of tech end music and it's like what you you're a music dude Oh fuck, that explains why Tekken music has been so sick for so long now.

I think putting a SoundCloud in that in his resignation is like fucking cool as shit.

It's like a real-life version of that Mega 64 skit with Segoguchi. It's like, finally, now I can quit making these dumb video games and start making tunes for the club.

I,

yeah, it's, it's just, that's a, that's a powerhouse name for these games. And again, from Tech N3 upwards, you know,

beast of a career. And you finally now cannot ask him for shit.

So, go check out the final mix, and there he goes.

I can completely understand after putting in this level of time-you know, a chunk of your life on this planet, and then you see someone you know pass, and you kind of go, huh, where am I at?

I think I need a change, I think I want to try more things, I think I want to do something. And he's out at the end of this month, so it's like immediately, you know, going into 2026,

they'll be without him. So let's see what happens.

Can I speaking tangentially of haters? I would like to give a little golf clap

for somebody who's shown. I knew they were a hater before.

I knew they were a hater before because of what they did to Jaw Rule.

But I want to give a special shout out

to 50 Cent having the biggest, cleanest, most toothful hater smile I have ever seen in my life. Oh, that man looks like he is on top of the heavens, smiling down with the mandate.
He is so happy.

Yeah, now Fiddy had an opportunity to clown this whole thing

into

meme territory, right? And I mean, and to be fair, a name like Diddy Do It is kind of incredible. It's pretty.
And is reason... did he do it is reason enough to execute on the project to begin with.

But what I've, I haven't seen it, but what I've heard is everyone's like, actually, this is a really serious

expose.

It is a stunningly comprehensive documentary. Exactly.
And it, and all the footage was there, and it's all shit that, like, he was filming around him doing all that, all the crimes at the time.

And, like, Finny took the opportunity and, like, could have made it, I could have shoved himself in there and made it as dunk as hard, uh, as hard of a dunk as possible, but actually stayed back and let it speak for itself.

Yeah, just run a bunch of footage of Combs just going, yeah, I killed him.

I killed them all. And it was me.

You know, and it's just like, like, your hatred is your hate is being delivered in a boardroom with a suit signing papers. Like, it is, it is,

it's next level. You know, talking about buying out the front row of Jaws concert is ain't shit compared to this.

He was being interviewed on, I think it was ABC, and he was sitting there with his hands clasped in a nice suit, just big smile.

And the lady interviewing him asked, What do you think Sean Combs would say about this documentary?

It really seems like you hate him, to which he responded with, I think he'd think it's a really well-put-together documentary.

I think he would think it was really well made.

Yeah. Just the biggest fucking smile.
Oh, man.

It's kind of incredible. But it's also, you know, you can also thank the hubris of people like that for

filming their crimes and being totally

thinking and having their ego basically blind them to the idea that there'd be any ramifications for any of it, right?

Kind of incredible.

That's

a hateration fucking

milestone. One of the best to ever do it.

Okay, and then, you know. We're talking about the leaks now.
There's a couple leaks. There's a couple leaks.
Yes, we talk about the leaks. We don't want some game awards leaks.

And we actually mean game awards leaks, not video game leaks. Leaks for the game awards.
You best dip now. Well, there are video game leaks too, and they're not even.

Yeah, but the big ones are actually the game awards. Yeah, sure, because it's like, okay, hey, guess what? The Peggy fucking ratings revealed that Assassin's Creed Black Flag resynced is a thing.

Cool, man.

That's way too late. Yeah.

That's way, way

too late.

It's one of those things where I look at it and I go like, that's right on time for if I was like, hey, yo, Reggie, you ever play Black Flag? It's pretty cool. You should check it out.

Like, I got to tell you, I fucking hate Assassin's Creed 4. I fucking hate it.
I love that game. I love that game to death.
I always want to to call it Assassin's Creed 4.

I am afraid to speak that name out into the ether. It's worrying to me.

It's awkward.

Assassin's Creed 4, BF. Yeah.

Yeah.

Don't stutter.

I'm afraid.

Street Fighter, Alpha Generations. You say the whole name.

Every time.

Every time.

So, so, yeah, they basically confirmed

they're remaking the good one.

Hopefully. The last one that was like, yeah, this one's great.
That was the last one. All you really need to do is announce you're adding more shanties.
And

that's your remake right there, really.

I'm not selling them for like $10 a piece.

But we'll see what happened. We'll see.

Hey, so I guess we talked about we hinted at it a little bit earlier, but

the cover for Resident Evil Requiem has leaked. And don't listen to this if you don't want to be spoiled on promotional material that will likely be popping up at the game awards.

But Leon's on that cover. There he is.

Shocker. So here's the fun thing.
This already leaked out earlier this year, but it leaked out in that way of like it's a 4chan post, so who the fuck knows?

Right?

Kind of like how Tokod leaked out on a 4chan post. Yeah.

When Requiem got shown, and it was shown that you're going back to Raccoon City, I'm like,

literally during the reveal trailer, I said, oh, Leon's going to be the other character. Because if you go back to Raccoon City, you're going to bring a Raccoon City character back.

That's what you got to do. And Leon's the more popular one of Jill and Claire.
So, yeah. So, like, this is the most least shocking shit that's ever fucking been.

Um, so when's the last time he was seen? RE4 Remake? Two years ago? Three years ago? Oh, sorry, canonically,

Resident Evil 6 when he fought that T-Rex. Okay, so seven, eight, nine, nothing.
No, it was all just Chris and

new characters. Yeah, it was Chris and

well, this is nine, right? So seven and eight, it was the Chris and Ethan show. Okay, so the whole like older, new Chris bit, like, nobody knew what was going on with the others yet.
Yeah.

Okay, where Chris had the weird head. Okay.

Yeah.

There's like a big time jump

into this timeline now, right? Like, oh, there's a massive, and I mean massive time jump at the end of RE8 that goes like 30 years into the future.

You do the DLC, and then we're just going to never go back to that character ever again. Oh.

Yeah, never. Maybe in 30 years we'll have a character with a game with that character.
Okay. So this is like the second of the like returning characters in the double time jump.

Yes. Okay.

Damn, we're in fucking Boroto town. We're double shaputing.
Bro, bro.

Like, me and Susie could start it out for you. And people are like, what about the Netflix? Shut up.
Shut up, all of you.

No, I'm talking about the Netflix stuff because what we are going to talk about is the CG shit, which sucks.

But there's cool stuff in there. Like, maybe 1% of that OCG movie is like gunfighting on the ground, rolling around.
Oh, no, not that. Equilibrium.

This is one where, like, Leon takes like a full-on Superman punch from a 25-foot

saw tyrant and bounces off like a building and then just gets up like he's completely fine. Like, these people are not human beings anymore, man.
Sick. Fuck yeah.

That rules.

It does, bro. It fucking rules.

Okay.

so so uh has any of the material like indicated like anything about like the hows or the whys or i guess we'll just no so i'm gonna tell you what it is uh and this is based off of my own gut and the fact that i am i'm an obsessive freak about resident evil so one of the original ideas for uh resident evil uh two was that you'd eventually go back to the ruined estate of the mansion lab and go around in the dirt and the rubble uh and that never paid off uh and instead, when you got to RE0, what they did is they would send you to parts of RE2 and various little locations, but it was pre-collapse, but it was just a little cute little thing.

Like, hey, look, you get over here.

And when we got to Resident Evil 8 Village, which was suspiciously like Resident Evil 4, because I have a suspicion that, based off the doll gameplay from the Hookman demo, that Resident Evil 8 is actually a redo of the

pre-Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 4 that was the Hookman version. That's all the hallucination and the Hookman stuff and all that shit.
And there's also some

spinning giant fan stuff in the mechanist area.

So, based off all of that, it feels like they're going back and reusing old ideas they never.

I was about to say, is there anything on the cutting room floor that we haven't seen yet at this point? Yeah, we never returned to the ruins of RE1 or RE2.

Right? So now we have a thing where

if you go deep into the cannon because you're a psycho, you find out that even after they nuked Raccoon City, they still had to put up a military blockade that's like a full circle around the fucking thing because shit still wanders out because anything that wasn't totally vaporized could still leave.

Right like a dog or a zombie so the military is just on hand to shoot anything that walks out of raccoon city which means Raccoon City is still actively dangerous, which would make a good excuse for you to go there.

Now, despite the fact that in the ending to RE3, you see the police station absolutely vaporize into dust,

it still has a standing structure that you can explore in the RE9 trailer, so don't worry about that. I just realized that the Hookman demo

is your own personal Metroid Dread. That thing that never came out, that just was obsessed with it until finally finally it did come out and it did come out.

We got Metroid Dread eventually, but until we do, I'm fucking obsessed.

And I'm of the opinion that that gigantic lady monster that is running around is probably Lisa Trevor, who is still alive.

Okay.

Because Lisa Trevor never dies, she just jumps down a pit into the depths of the Arclay Mountains.

And what

was the virus that

she was infected with?

Bro, you just. Okay.
Yeah.

Okay.

So

Lisa Trevor was a test subject for the original T-virus, which had an unexplained, uncommon effect, especially after they put in the nemesis parasite, which then created a variation that was then synthesized from her body, which was the basis for the G-virus, which then William worked on.

There you go. Okay.
But the G-virus is actually a modified version of the progenitor virus with with the mold from RE-8,

which is actually a superhuman serum coming off of a single plant deep into the Mayan jungle of Africa. Susie, please, Susie, help.

No,

she'd just be saying the same shit here. Yeah, well, both sides.
This shit's so stupid. It's so stupid, Woolly.
It's so stupid. I just want to know why Wesker was in a volcano.

I just, that's all I want to know.

Because you shot down his plan. his plane.
And then he was like, I'm on a volcano.

But like, why does, why do things evolve according to like

the mutation can be lame or cool according to like what the plot thinks you are? Oh, so no,

there is like a real reason for that. There's two things that happen.
Either the effect that they get is not the effect

they think was going to happen, right? Like they juice themselves up and they're like, okay, well, this is not, oh shit, ah, I'm a monster. Okay.
And then the other one,

specifically Irving in RE5, who turns into a giant fucking shit. That's who I was thinking of.
Exactly.

He literally has a line of dialogue that most people miss where they're like, I guess I wasn't worth the good stuff. So he thought he was going to get superhuman Wesker Superman shit.
Yeah.

But instead, they gave him the vial that

turns you into a big, ugly flesh beast. Okay, because I was always like,

how come fucking whatever

Tarantino RE5 dude just became a goop instead of becoming a cool teleporter? They tricked him. They gave him the bad goo.
Okay.

And Wesker did give himself the good goo, but it required constant maintenance, which is why when he got hit with Ouroboros and then had too much of his synthesizers, it had a weird effect, which he maintained some of it, but then he had the Ouroboros goo.

But it's lucky that he was fought in a volcano because Ouroboros has a canonical weakness to fire.

It's a really bad fucking weakness.

You know, we were just talking about the Prometheus goo

and

here. Well, that's different.
Resident Evil is like nothing but goo ruined your day.

It's all the

dayhazard. Biohazard.
It's right there.

Way better name than Resident Evil. Way better name.

So, so, so, what are you thinking here? You're thinking we're going to get

you're thinking, okay, so in terms of

fucking game awards, back to the broader.

Oh, well, the way it's going to work is that you're going to play as Grace Ashford for about 40% of the game, and then you're going to switch to Leon, and Leon is going to be Leon.

So, you're going to go from the classic Resident Evil style character to

the man,

and then you'll switch back to Grace at the 65% mark, and then you'll switch back to Leon

for 80 to 95% and during the finale you'll be switching back and forth, back and forth, back and forth while Leon fights the boss and Grace goes around to do puzzle solutions like the Ada and Leon boss fight in Resident Evil.

That is an incredibly specific prediction. Yeah.
You've played these games for a long time.

Willie, I don't know if you remember, but at some time I was like, you know, every single Resident Evil game has like an incredibly strict formula, and the formula is mansion guardhouse mansion sewer lab

and like once somebody says that out loud to you you actually realize oh wow they actually are like wildly specific on that progression of locations

um that shit in the desert what are you thinking i elder scroll six

So we went through a whole round, right? Everybody's going, what the fuck could it be? People asked Corey

Barlog over at God of War because there's a gator on it. And so thinking, maybe it's in the desert, maybe a gator, maybe it's Egypt.

No. He says, no.
People bothered Todd Howard. He's like, nah, it's not.
That's not us. Half-Life 3.
And maybe that's a ridiculous one. People thought Doom.
Doom also said, no, that's not us.

And so

today,

there was a trademark filed by Larian's company that included a new logo. And the new logo 100% overlaps the symbol on that fucking statue in the desert.
And that happens to be the new symbol for the

long-standing villain of divinity original sin, the God King.

Okay, okay.

So, then, is there anything left to reveal?

Yes.

A new Bloodborne Remaster.

Come on.

A new OD trailer, probably,

you know.

So here's the thing. The Resident Evil 9 Leon reveal and the Divinity reveal are absolutely the showstoppers for the game awards.

And if I was Mr. Keely, I would be losing my mind fucking pissed because people pay a lot of money to get those good trailer spots like millions of fucking dollars.

If I was Capcom, I would be asking for my fucking money back because Sony

leaked the title, sorry, the box art for Capcom. Capcom didn't leak it.
It came from them. It went up on the PlayStation store as for pre-order too early.
Classic. Okay, okay.
So Sony definitely

was Capcom. Big, big man for sure.
Okay.

Nothing about what was the other one called? Pragmata?

I was wondering. Did that come out?

I don't know.

I don't even know. Wait, no, no, that was the Is the Little Girl Mega Man game.
Oh.

I think. Yes.
I don't know.

All right. Well,

in any case,

I'll tell you what. There's that

when Divinity 3 comes out. By the way, I have a follow-up.
Somebody asked Very AFK this afternoon, hey, Very AFK, have you seen this shit about the thing in the desert?

Are you guys going to reveal Divinity Original Sin 3?

To which he said, we are not working on Divinity Original Sin 3, but we will be happy to show you the thing we are working on next.

There are like 20 Divinity games, and they all have different designations. Okay.

Okay.

It could literally be called Divinity 4. It could be called

Beyond Divinity 2.

There's a game called Divinity Dragon Commander, for fuck's sake.

Apparently this week there was a trademark filed for Control Resident.

Cool.

So

Remedies corner of the show might be that. That makes sense because Control 2 is like...

I mean, it should be unveiled pretty soon.

Yeah, whatever. I guess we'll see.

then I think they confirmed the 2x KO next champ as well.

You know what I'm not going to do with Larian's game this time? I'm not going to wait until it's completely fucking done before playing it in early access because that is a multi-year nightmare.

I'm just going to fuck when they put that shit out on early access, which could be as soon as fucking Friday.

I'm just going to fucking dive in on that shit and fucking play it when it updates. Because

fuck this wait 35 35 fucking years for it to be done shit i'll just play it when it starts on every update and then when it's fucking done i'll play it again like whatever or if you lose everything then close your heart to it and and and that'll be that'll be that okay

um

yeah they they announced there's gonna be a new they're gonna reveal the next 2x ko character we'll so we'll see whatever that is

i i i'm gonna put my fucking guess down you want to put your guest down on this riven sword broken sword girl okay I'm I have two guesses here. One is a prayer.
I will pray. I will pray to God.

Anyone but Caitlin. Anyone but Caitlin.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally, just literally anyone.
If you see a top hat, shut it down, go home. Like, the 2xKO subreddit is like fucking drowning.
Yeah. Oh, my God.
Please, anyone but Caitlyn.

And it's so frustrating because when I was doing the slam and talking to Sajam, he's like, yeah, but Caitlin's fire, though.

No, she fucked, Sajam.

Yeah,

I think you're not going to get Thresh for a minute. I think they're going to.
Oh, I think it'll be Riven. Yeah, I think so.
The girl with the sword. The

broken sword girl. Yeah, I think that makes the most sense, especially given leaks and whatnot.

Can you do me a favor? Me and Paige talked about this. None of my prayers ever came true, but the Angryo, the Kaufo Angryo Wishing Well,

every wish I ever made at that wishing well

ever came true. So, can you go down there and throw a quarter into that wishing well and just

broad anybody but Caitlin? Literally, just go down to that wishing well.

Anybody but Caitlin. I can just, I can two days.
You have two days to do it. I can burn a top hat as an effigy, you know.
No, that will summon her. Oh.

God damn it.

And then it's like, not only that, but then you have to deal with like a sniper gameplay system that's just

like you want to put three

gun zoners in your 12-person roster. But now that Arxis has introduced it to the world with Happy Chaos and fucking Elfelt, you can get your gun zoner with the cursor on your character type.

I would hate it

so much. But you.

I would hate it so much.

It's like the character and the gameplay, you know? And her outfit, really.

I hate her outfit.

Her league outfit is terrible. It's so bad.

Like, it wasn't doing. The character in general ain't doing much, but like seeing what she used to be and just being like, oh,

swapping the top hat for like a beret and a military unit was like... a million times better.

It's really, it's really interesting when you see a character being adapted and the only way to make them work is to completely change their whole design. Yeah.

But at the same time, I'm looking, and I'm like, they should have went more wolf on Warwick. Like, knowing what that was, I didn't know that was a character at all.

I thought that wasn't a fucking plot monster.

Invent a character. Invent a character right now in your brain.
Just say, say a concept.

Fucking

priestess

that was sacrificed and and is now resurrected and necromancer. Oh, which one's that? That's the fucking green one with the necromancer priestess.

What's her name? She's the Sunken Isles.

No, that's not Karma. That's the other one.
Not Soraka. Is that Soraka?

No, no. Callista.
Yeah, Calista. Oh, yeah.

Jesus Christ. Fuck.
Okay.

Here, I'll get you a fucking photo. Wow.

Like, this is what happens. This is what happens when you have, like, the largest, like, when you have a roster of hundreds, right? Is you just, you just get it.
Like, you just, here you go.

This fucking.

Horseback Mongolian archer style Falconer type. Uh, heckar him.

Ironically enough, also a zombie. Really?

Yeah. Damn.
Well, he's more of a centaur, but still. Okay.

If you want to go more alive, you could go for Quinn.

But she's a Falconer.

She's not a Mongolian.

You can do this all day.

I can change one advocate

and nail it.

So when your choices are literally anything you could think of, and that bitch has a gun in a game that that bitch also has a gun.

Like, Kate is like uniquely awful. And you're also, you're becoming one of 10, you know?

Okay, beyond that,

the console release happening in January as well. Sure.
Yay.

What

we also found out. So fucking Romeo is a dead man.

Launch. Suda coming out to be like, no AI.
Yay. Thomas.

I mean, because things that are directed in that style with lots of clips of different clashing art styles and things like that are like prime bait for it, you know, because you can just quickly, low effort, churn slop out and put it in quick filters.

But so he says, and so there you go. Meanwhile, let it die on the other side of the grasshopper field.

It's kind of interesting how it's the complete opposite fucking effect. Romeo must die.

I have another quote from Larian, by the way.

So Very AFK said that earlier, and their publishing boss, Michael Dow, says,

There aren't currently any plans for a new Divinity Original Sin 3 game.

But once we are ready to show what we've been working on, we will. I can confirm we aren't working on a toilet simulator at this moment.

So both of the quotes are: We are not working on Divinity Original Sin 3. There is nothing guiltier than saying the full title of the thing.
Yeah.

In that context, everybody else said, Nah, that ain't us.

So Romeo is a dead man. I keep saying Romeo must die.

And I really

wish that was correct, but unfortunately. That movie's all right.

It is not all right. It was all dumb.
I like when he does.

I liked when he does the

fucking hammer, the meteor hammer scene with the fucking fire hose.

I like when the cops are running in at the end, and then they look at the dude who was in the crime and go, you're the protagonist, you're okay.

And they run past him to go in as he and Aaliyah are hugging. And why?

Why was Anthony Anderson in every single one of those movies? Because Anthony Anderson was fucking...

He was one of the it black people at the time that got the job everywhere. It's what it was.
When I think of Steven Seagal, I actually think of Anthony Anderson.

It's like, you know. You also think of Steven Sagal in prison with a do-rag on.
What movie was that? You're thinking of him in Russia.

No, am I thinking of Cradle to the Grave?

You might be thinking of Cradle to the Grave, but I want to say you're thinking of him in Russia being fat.

No, I'm not. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Okay.

Definitely. Because I want to say that Anthony Anderson, it's kind of like how Craig Robinson took this.
Craig Robinson came and took all of Patrice's

potential roles. Like, it's one of those things, you know? Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Half Past Dead.
Half Past Dead. Okay.
Half-Past Dead.

There's Steven Seagal with a do-rag on in prison. Fuck yeah, this shit sucks.

Oh, God. We got to do the action movie, but this time, let's get the rapper or the black guy to co-side and update the fucking.

All right, anyways.

DMX. God bless.

I.

What am I fucking...

Not in jail.

Not in jail.

I promise.

Why am I thinking of Romeo Must Die? Fuck off.

I don't know how we got. Oh, Romeo Must Die.
Romeo is

now you can't even say the real name anymore.

Romeo's a dead man.

It's episodic, apparently.

This game should just be a cross between Romeo Must Die and the one. I mean, it would be pretty sick.
That would be pretty sick.

I am Una. I'm nobody's bitch.
Oh, man.

The enemy of that movie is so stupid. He is fighting off.
He fights forever. He has to fight forever.

And then it zooms out, and you see all these CG people climbing the pillar, and he's beating them all over.

That totally stole that shit

at Armageddon, didn't they? Fucking Jet Lee doing the Bachiqua.

The one.

Oh,

that was so much better than Romeo Must Die. This is what Netflix wants to take away from us.

I think Jetly in the one is the most powerful Jetly.

Second to

Jet Lee and Shenay.

In chained or... Fuck you.

No, in chain.

In In chained.

Unchained.

These are two weak sauce jet leases. The strongest jetly is

the jetly who, God, he was in a movie with Jackie Chan, and it was a fucking Journey to the West rendition, and so he played Wukong. Oh.
He played the Monkey King.

And like,

Wukong. Come on.

Come on.

Okay.

Fine.

oh have you seen that power scaling website uh power power scandal we did it we did it yeah you did that one um but that's tough that's a tough one sometimes there's some bullshit on that um okay wukong

um

uh

the one

yeah and then right under that i'm gonna say wang fei hung

oh and the old one once upon a time in china yeah unstoppable yeah unstoppable he keep he beat bison man i mean

I prefer Jackie Chan's Wang Feng Hung personally, but that's because I just think Legend of Drunken Master is a better movie. Hmm.

Either way, that's top three. Yeah.
And then you can get your Romeo Mustafa. Oh, people are saying Hero.
Oh,

he's exhausted in Hero. No, he gets fucked up in Hero, though.
No, he lets himself get fucked up in Hero. That's the difference.

He could have parried that shit.

How many steps to the Emperor to take a drink?

Okay, but then that giant brushstroke shit was fucking sick, though.

It was so lame, but it was cool.

Hero is definitely a movie that I saw at the wrong time in my life.

Like, I saw what Hero came out when I was like 20-something, and I remember watching it, and I walked out of the theater going, what the fuck? That movie sucked. He could have kicked all their asses.

I don't get it. Oh,

yeah, I'm still there. I don't, I, I've never updated my views.

I did not watch it again. I have no idea.

No, the whole point is that there's no need to prolong senseless conflict in the unification of China, which is something you see in a lot of movies in Japan where it's like there's no point in continuing to fight Nobunaga because of the inherent long-term effects of the unification of Japan, which is a point of view that you can only have like a thousand years later.

But it's just because his ambition is so great and it can't be stopped. Yeah, whatever.
Look at the pretty colors in the meantime.

Like, it's really easy to fucking 2015 China to go, well, it was always going to be unified. There's nothing Jet Li's character could do when he's like the year 600.
Like, shut the fuck up.

Fighting against the weight of history. Yes.
You don't know that the Han dynasty is going to fucking last for eons. All you know is this guy's an asshole.
Have you seen this wall, though?

It'll keep him out. You can see it from space.

And then,

anyway. Should I re-watch Hero?

No, you're good.

I just solved it for you. I solved it for you.
Okay. All right.

You know what AI is stealing from us? AI is stealing your friend telling you what a movie was about badly and wrongly. But at least you got to talk to a person.

That's pretty criminal. I don't like that.

Yeah, like,

didn't we describe Where's My Elephant to you

as Where's My Elephant? Yeah, I did.

That was weird because I hadn't, I had never seen Tony Jaw ever.

And so, you guys were just telling me about this movie where this guy was just fighting people and screaming at the top of his lungs, Where's My Elephant? That's it!

And like, you were both so you and Matt were so excited, you really weren't making any sense at all.

And then I watched the movie, and I'm like, oh, I understand why they didn't make any sense at all because the movie doesn't make any fucking sense. They took Snappy.
They took Snappy away.

Fuck, fuck you.

And then at the end of the movie, he fights that one gigantic white man that every fucking movie out of Thailand and China hires.

I don't know his name, but like he's this seven and a half foot tall, giant muscled white dude that's in everything. The final white, yes.

The,

The fucking the emblem of the Caucasus.

You are defeating them all when you defeat this one.

You know what's an underrated, overrated, underrated movie?

Mm-hmm. Chocolate.

Oh,

chocolate was good.

But think about it. Remember a shot? Chocolate.
The little girl with autism bites

the breakdancing guy with Tourette's

uses his Tourette's to fake her out. Oh, no, I don't.
You don't remember that?

Because he does some

break dancing style, like kind of capital, and he starts twitching because of his Tourette's, so she can't predict his moves.

I just remember that was the movie that cemented the rule that the high never climb. Never climb when you're a bad guy in an action movie.
The higher you climb, the worse the wipeout.

There was a year or two where we watched Tom Young-gung and then we watched Chocolate, and that's when you came up with don't get up on anything. Never climb, right?

And then right after that, you got the proof of your thesis statement because we watched The Raid, The Raid, The Raid, yeah, yeah.

Everyone who gets even one step above the protagonist gets murdered way more violently than everybody else.

Um, and also uh, Shapo Lung, where Donnie Yen does air combos in real life to people, so he elevates them first and then takes them out.

Yeah. Never climb.

Sha Polang has the strangest

B plot of any of these Kung Fu movies ever.

It's Donny Yang

beat up a guy after he was arrested. And he knocked him out so hard he became permanently mentally disabled.
And all he wants to do is play King of Fighters all day.

So he goes and visits the guy he punched into having brain damage, and they play King of Fighters on the clog stage.

And it's so

fucking weird. It's so fucking weird.
This is supposed to be

Donnie Yen's character feeling remorse for his violence as a police officer. And he's literally just banging out like matches of KOF, I think, 2000 with a guy with a mental disability.

It's fucking weird.

I just remember Evil Samo Hung, you know?

But fuck. KOF clog stage specific.
You remember that shit? Oh my god, that's unlocking. Yeah, okay.
All right.

That whole strip of 80

81 or whatever to fucking 2015 of like Hong Kong cinema is like the

actual

real shit kung fu flicks. I can't, I have not thought of chocolate since I've seen it.
That's crazy. That movie's nuts, man.

Fuck. Yeah.
I remember they were building her up because she was Tony Ja's

student, and they were building her up as the lady Tony Jaw, and then that just never happened. It never happened.
It was her first acting role. She played a very disabled girl.

And then, and then, like, Wu Jing was another dude who was getting set up to be like the Donnie Yen replacement, but then it never happened.

And then Donnie Yen kept, and he just kept doing more It-Men movies. Yeah, Donnie Yen just was like, No, it's me.
It's the me showing. Shut the fuck up.
I'm going to be in Star Wars.

I'm never going away. You fuckers in Star Wars.
You know why? Because you don't speak English. Pass the mantle, Donnie.
Pass the mantle on. Go fuck yourself.

Man, to the combo to the ground. Yeah.
Never. He refused to let it go.

Oh, man. Yeah.
All right. There you go.
You know what? Conversations that you can't get from Chat GPT.

How about that? Would you like that to be more professional? No, I want you to tell me what the actor's name that got disabled and was playing King of Fighters and Chappelle Lang was.

So that when I watch Monster Hunter, I can be like, oh, fuck.

That's what Tony Jaw is up to? Damn. God, that's such a...

Yeah.

Tony Jaw going from like the coolest guy in the world to being a monk.

In a cave. Went in a cave.
Straight up. Just like went up to train under a fucking waterfall like Ryu.
I'm out.

To come back and do gut dog shit like Monster Hunter and be the fucking, be the fucking like ethnic kung fu hire for fucking Paul Anderson's fucking wife.

You had the best ending and then you interrupted it because time had to keep moving forward. Didn't he walk off the set

of three? Of which one was it? I think it was three.

The three of Ongbak, Ongbak three. I think he walked off the set of Ongbak three and said, fuck this, I'm out forever.
He's become a fucking hermit. Yep.
Yep. You know, he almost Alan Moored it.

Alright. Let's take some letters.

Raid 2 was not nearly as good as Raid 1. But it had some good wipeouts.
Yeah, it did. But, like, God, there was so much fucking fluff bullshit in that.
Because Raid 1 was a video game.

And Raid 2 was not.

Raid 1 had nothing going on other than the best action you've ever seen.

You want to play a game where you start at the bottom of the complex and have to work your way up, but then halfway through, you find out about the machete gang that's killing everybody behind you, so you have to move through the levels faster.

You know, and at the top is the shortest man who's so dangerous. He's so tiny and so insanely dangerous.

Fuck, what a good movie. God damn it, the raid ruled.
Oh, Raid's so good, man.

The door frame.

Yeah. The fucking door frame, bro.

I curl up my hands. He's like, ooh, I don't like it.
Oh,

I got, I was lightheaded walking out of there, man.

Jesus. Mad dog.
And then they bring him back to be a different person because he's just that fucking shit. I just want you into the movie to have a completely unrelated fight scene.
That ruled. Okay.

You know, a movie's fucking A-plus amazing when Hollywood can just rip it right the fuck off and make a completely different movie. And that movie is also great.

We saw it with Infernal Affairs and The Depotted. Depotted.
And then you saw it with The Raid and with fucking

Judge Dredd. Yep.
Yep. Yep.

I don't even...

I'm afraid to ask what exists that's in the category we were just covering anymore, but it feels like the last action anything anyone's talked about has been the John Wick movies.

Like, I feel like there's just nothing else being discussed at all. Yeah.

Anyway.

I've only watched like two of them.

I heard three is incredible, but

I don't know. I've only seen one and two.
I feel like they all, like, all of them would struggle to hit the peak that is, they killed my dog, I'm going to get him.

Like, in the second one, it's like, he fucked me over. I'm like, that's not hitting me the same as they beat up my dog.
But it's not just that, it's also how he deals with it at the end, too.

It's the, it's the, you, you get nothing special. That, that's, that's crucial.
It's so petty, and you go out like nothing. You get nothing special.

It's a bookend to the beginning. It's also Furiosa.
Oh, I gotta watch the movie. Furiosa has good stuff.

Furiosa is interesting and has some cool stuff in it.

It's not. Hemsworth does like a really good job acting for once.
It is not.

He plays a character. It's not at all

like as good as Fury Road, and it's not going to approach that. But it's got some stuff that's thematically interesting about the world, and it's a fun movie.
I do like it.

But it doesn't hold a candle to Fury Road, which is literally one of the greatest films of all time. Yeah.

But I...

I think

for what it could have been and the whole like Anna Taylor Joy playing her and stuff like that, I was really worried. And what that's why I didn't see it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I really don't like Anna Taylor Joy, but but what they did was a lot better than I was worried it was going to be, you know. Um,

yeah, it's fine, and it doesn't shit on Fury Road either in any ways that make it worse,

you know.

Uh, all right, let's take some letters.

If you want to send in an email, that's castle superbeastmail at gmail.com. That's castle superbeastmail at gmail.com.

All right, let's see here. We got one coming in from

Carol. Whoa, hold on.
Everyone mad at me because I don't like Anna Taylor Joy. I'm sorry.
This is exactly the same as when I'm like, I don't like Emma Stone. Just don't like.
No.

No. No, thank you.

Same exact thing as John Lenguizamo. It's look, I wouldn't, it's not.

Same exact thing.

It's not the casting I would have gotten with for Furiosa being younger, but again, what I got out of it was fine.

And also, I didn't see Queen's Gambit, so I had no opinion going in beyond just the face.

Anyway, they should have gotten Charlie's there and I'm like, I don't know, it's a fucking...

They're going to cast a character, and they're going to have the same character, they're just going to have the same actor. And then just

run the fucking CG on the face or the...

No.

I don't care.

She's fucking 12 years old.

Standing there being like Charlie's Theron. That's exactly what I want.
All right, Jotorowit.

We used to have 35-year-old guys play high schoolers in high school movies and babysitters club or whatever the fuck. Yeah, fuck it.
Charlie's Theron plays a 13-year-old.

Just have her crouch and put a cloak on her.

Or

you

advance the story so that you can still use her and that it would work.

Have you ever seen the flashbacks that take place in the Dexter series? Oh, fuck. No, no.

Oh, I forget the name. I forget the name.
Michael C. Hall.

In his flashbacks, when he's supposed to be 14, they literally just put a wig on him. That's it.

Absolutely no change change at all. It's the funniest thing ever.
Oh fuck. That's great.

It's Dexter and he's exactly the same. He just has a wig and everyone's treating him like he's 15.
It's so fucking funny.

We should do that a lot. We should do that a lot with movies.
That's what I think.

Like, all I know about Dexter is that like everyone was addicted and then it sucked and then everyone hated it and then there's weird incest and everyone double hates it for coming back.

Yeah, no, basically throw Dexter on the same pile of like Battlescar Galactica and

Lost and Game of Thrones where decisions were made during the finale that just like torpedoed it at the finish line.

But now it lives on as a meme with the dude, with the black cop that's holding his steering wheel. Dokes? Dokes is fucking awesome.
He's staring. Just can't prove it.
But you're up to some bullshit.

That's about all I got. Yeah, so Dokes is hilarious in that show, but he's extra hilarious if you know anything about the books that Dexter's based off of.
Because

the reason why Dokes is chasing after Dexter in the show is never explained because it's supposed to be he's just suspicious of Dexter being a weirdo.

But the real reason is that he's fucking psychic and he's catching Dexter's murder vibes. Oh my god, he's shining.

Yes.

He's fucking shining. Absolutely.

Dokes is standing in the middle of the PD going, the stand user could be anywhere.

That makes that meme so much lamer.

I thought he was just like, I know you're up to some shit because I'm being a detective. They fuck it up.

In one of the early seasons, Dexter thinks a murder thought out loud and Dokes turns to him and goes, What did you say?

And Dexter's like, What did he just literally? He literally hears his thoughts once, and then they back off from that because it's insane. That's so much lamer.
I hate that.

So, the dark passenger that is referenced in Dexter is supposed, in the show, is metaphorical and supposed to be like a name for the devil inside, but in the books, is literally the devil.

Okay, there's supernatural, like, actual powers and shit going on. Oh, my God.

Well, okay, to be fair, I mean, whatever.

I'm not invested in any way, shape, or form

in Dexter.

Dude, I got to tell you, I love not watching shows and then they end. And people go, oh, my God, this is a

fucking waste of time.

Yeah.

Guess you're dumb. Sorry.
Dodge, the clean dodge. People just get real mad.
Yeah.

I think some of the angriest messages I've ever received in my life was when we were doing the Game of Thrones spoiler cast and

I was like, guess I was right to never watch it. And that just made some people just go crazy.

I mean, again, like, I've hit it with lost before. And every time I say heroes, you know, as that was taking over, and I was just like, yep, what happened there? Where did that go?

Was that worth anyone's time in the end?

Or was it just a fucking West World ass situation? so there there was like a criteria for me on this because this didn't start right this was

I saw the way I saw everyone going nuts about heroes then I saw everyone hate heroes then I saw everyone go nuts about lost and then I saw everyone get go nuts about lost then I watched battlestar galactica and then I watched Westworld yep and that

sequence of four events was enough for me to go oh fuck this I waited till breaking bad was on its final episode because of that sequence of events.

Like, Westworld is going to be.

That one's forever because it's like you're getting some of the best Anthony Hopkins you're ever going to get on top of everything.

Anyway, um.

So when the people who helped work on Westworld are writing the Fallout TV show, it feels really good for them to go up into an interview and go, oh, yeah, we totally know what the ending to season five is right now.

Okay, okay. Thank you.
All right, okay, good, good, excellent. But, but, but time and money and, you know, Disney offering you your own trilogy of Star Wars movies that they didn't get.

You know, things change. Never forget, never forget.

They took it away. They rightfully took it away.
They saw the coffee cup and they went, fuck this. And they ripped up those contracts.

Anyways, all right.

All right, good, good, good rando movie bit.

We got one coming in over here

from Carol. Dear Papa Pat and Mama Woolley.

Is this Carol from the UK?

Carol.

Okay, before you get into this, I just have one last sideoid. Okay.
Did you know that new refrigerators that have screens on them show you ads? Yes, I heard about this in Internet of Shit. Mm-hmm.

Okay. Well, a lady in the UK who is diagnosed with schizophrenia and who takes her meds and is otherwise doing fine saw an ad for Pluribus, the new Vince Gilligan show.
Yeah.

That said, in all caps, we're sorry for upsetting you, Carol, on her TV. Sorry, on her fridge.
Oh.

She thought she was having a psychotic breakdown. Oh!

And committed herself to the hospital. Oh,

fuck.

Oh, that's the worst. Oh, everything is terrible.
Wooly, if you walked into your

God.

And looked at your fridge and it said, I'm very sorry, Wooly, you would have a fucking moment, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you have a fucking like, oh, shit.

That's fucking... Wow, that should be illegal.

You have these things where you buy objects like that fridge and sign a waiver or sign a thing that's like, I agree to the terms or whatever the fuck, you know? There's always.

You gotta get a new fridge in the near future. And guess what? It's gonna be a dumb fridge.

You know what it's gonna do? Open the doors and cool things.

Agreeing to a EULA so you can sleep on your fucking bed. That's gonna not work and get stuck in a position and overheat and fucking cook you because the servers are down at Amazon.

That's insane. That's fucking crazy.
All right, Carol got to say, Dear Papa Pat and Mama Woolly, just re-watched the movie Easy A with My Siblings.

Good teen movie, but what struck me most were how cool and supportive the parents were, played by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson. It got me thinking: who are the best parents in fiction?

Conversely, who are the best parents in video games?

Can't be a parent that kills a bunch of people to avenge their dead kid unless shown ample screen time of the parent actually caring for said child.

That's a pretty number one with a bullet is the cant in the the new Superman movie, the Kent, that is literally my answer. Number one with a bullet.

The new Kents in New Superman are the best parents I've seen in fiction. That's it.
We're done.

They're great.

They're parenting.

I love the Kents in the new Superman.

Phenomenal. Phenomenal.

And I appreciate the caveat that is like, you can't cut to your dad being a badass, yeah, doing his own adventure. It's like, no, no, no, being actual parents, doing the job.

Yep, that's the correct answer.

I'm being like overpowered. Because like

comics, film, and video games, like the parenting is bad. It's bad all the way around.
It's not good.

I would say like remarkably poor parenting is the standard.

Yeah, because again, the better you are as a protagonist, adventurer, hero, the worse you are at settling down and fucking chilling out. This is interesting.

People are saying Barrett Wallace is a good parent. Barret is a terrible father.

He spends most of his time away committing terrorist acts instead of staying at home and taking care of his kid.

And

you're like, well, that's for the good of the planet. For the good of the planet.
No, that is his own personal revenge.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's danger happening there that doesn't need to be present in her life.

Admittedly, if he didn't do those things, she would have gotten killed anyway.

She would have been collateral

in Sector 7, but

sure.

We can take that.

Great host. No.

No.

How about

Minato and Kushina? You know?

I don't know.

Who the fuck? The fourth Hokage and Uzubaki.

And Uzubaki mom.

Put the demon in the baby.

Everyone in that fucking village is a terrible person. Put the demon in the baby and then make sure that everyone treats him as a hero.

Every single parent in Konoha is a fucking piece of shit.

I swear to God, even if you don't see them being a piece of shit, the way they don't admonish their children for treating Naruto like shit makes them assholes.

The only way Naruto gets to be bullied for his whole life, despite being, one, a God-king demon freak, and two the son of the two heroes that saved the city is because all the adults around him are pieces of garbage the third was given the specific proclamation to make sure he's treated as a hero

and it's like nah you live on your own go fucking sleep over there kid you know what people are pointing it out to me and i should have known this ricky from Xenoblade is a great dad.

Ricky is a,

what's it called? He's the hero pawn, but he's a fucking, you're pawn. They're these, the cute little fucking mascot characters of Xenoblade.
Okay.

Ricky joins your party because he's broke and he's got like 10 kids.

And that's it.

He has no higher goals at all. Okay, just gotta mouse the feed.
End of story. And like you're getting ready to leave and his like gaggle of kids run over and they're like, need money, dad.

and he's like

i'm going with the guys

and when i leave the chief will pay for your food and they're like yeah

and then his kids become party members in the dlc and you know what they're all right

um

uh what the fuck were the um the couple in full metal again big guy and and tough girl

What am I forget? Farmmaster? Yeah, and her husband. Well, they're not parents.

They're definitively not parents.

Okay,

I'm misremembering something.

Siginazumi? Yeah, okay, no, never mind.

What you're thinking of is the Hughes family.

The Hughes family are excellent parents.

It's been a minute.

Anyway, anyway.

The Kents. Correct answer.
Yeah, no, the Kents are the best.

And it's not so much in what we see, but it's their effect.

Right? The Kents raised just a good old boy from Kansas who wants to do the right thing.

And they clearly nailed it. Because if they didn't, it'd be a problem.

Kevin Cosner's papa Kent is like the word. I can't.
We're so far out. And I'm just still like, just in awe at how terrible a depiction of any character that's been.

It's like the inverse of his character.

It's the worst.

All right. It's the worst.
Oh, my God.

Debbie from Invincible. I don't know who that is.
I am assuming that's that's

oh, Invincible Mom. Invincible Mom is pretty good.

Invincible's mom is pretty good. That's a good parrot.
Sandra O. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.

All right.

Let's see here.

You know who else is a terrible, terrible parent? Almost the entire cast of Next Generation in their own episodes. Oh, no.

Especially Picard.

Picard is a god-awful parent.

Also,

this is not a fictional character, but

I want to throw Rick Morianis, Rick Moranis, on the fucking list. Oh, yeah, he's good.
He's good. Because he's like, yeah, I'm out, actually.

I did my movies, now I have money, and I'm going to hang out with my kids all day. I have a family to take care of.
Bye. That's it.

So,

anyway. Worf is such a bad parent, his child resorts to time travel

to get his approval.

Willie, one day, one day,

I'm going to, you're going to watch these Star Trek episodes. At some point, actually, you're coming up on a good starting point in about five years.

And I will finally get to play the game game where I tell you what happened in a Star Trek episode, and you say, Fuck you, there's no way. And I go, Yes, there is.

Yes, there is.

Oh, my God. Everything I will ever tell you about Star Trek totally happened.

And you're going to say, There's no way the phrase roaming rape gangs was uttered in a Star Trek episode. And I'll say to you, not just once either, like ten times in that episode.
God damn it.

Was it said by Whoopi Goldberg? It was not. It was said by Jonathan Frakes.
Oh.

We made it up. And

Brent Spiner.

A complete fabrication.

Okay, let's take one over here.

Name not given. Hey, WooWoo and Papa.

Longtime listener, first time emailer.

Over the last week, there was a rumor that Honkai Star Rails' upcoming 4.0 patch was going to be delayed because there's a whole geopolitical mess right now going on with China and Japan that takes too long to get into.

Anyway, it was just confirmed that it's getting delayed by two weeks, and they're essentially going to have to redo an entire year's worth of content around a month before the content was supposed to drop because the story was meant to take place in an area based off of Japan, and there's a big moratorium on Japanese representation in Chinese media at the moment because of said tension.

Ever heard of any other game that had such a massive change of content so close to launch and where they had to redo amounts of the game story, voice acting, etc.

Thanks for all the years. There is a definitive answer, and I know you're reading my mind on it.
So, once again,

oh, I don't know. I actually am not.
I'm not reading your mind. Metal Gear fucking solid 2.

Oh, that is the killer, isn't it? I was thinking of the opposite of this example. But yeah, MGS2 has footage.
So it went gold gold on what? 910.

Went gold on

99. Like

it's just.

So if you ever wondered why when you're fighting on top of Arsenal gear, there's like a weird cutscene that's only like two seconds long of Arsenal gear moving towards the city and then it just smash cuts to you way deep in the city, like way deep.

On fire and everything's burning.

It's because originally there was a CG cutscene there of Arsenal gear plowing into the Twin Towers New York, Manhattan

coast. And it literally just plows right through the Twin Towers and blows right through them all the way to the center of fucking Manhattan.

And they had to cut that shit. And they had to cut that shit at like the last second.
Like they had to, they had to like... There's a reason that they just cut it.

Like they actually took the cutscene and just cut it. It's the weirdest moment of all the weird shit happening in MGS2 that confuses you.

There is a just, we're cutting away from this big crash moment where you just don't understand what the fuck is happening. And years later, we find out it's because that was going to show that.

I don't think we learned about that cut or edit or so until he told me. It was many years later.
Many years later.

So I have the opposite.

So this is Japan and Korea.

Which, if you're not up to date on your last 70 years of geopolitics, and in some cases, last thousand years of geopolitics, Japan and China and Korea sometimes don't get along.

It's like a whole thing. A little tense.
It's a little tense. A little tense.
So

the Japanese gaming company, Sega, has released a number of games in the Ryuga Gotoku series or Like a Dragon series, in which it frames Koreans, maybe

not in the best light as implying that they're sleeper agents hiding among us, ready to pop up as a secret Korean, ready to kill you and your family at any given time. So it hasn't had the best.
Also,

the Yakuza Like a Dragon series is fairly conservative in its politics and

iffy on a lot of stuff. But they wanted to open the games up into the Korean market.
So they made a huge push. They said Yakuza 6, the Song of Life, is going to be

the first really big release of the Like a Dragon series in Korea. And what we're going to do is we are going to have the Chinese be the villains this time.
So we can all gather around and enjoy that.

Korea shouldn't have a problem with that. And then what we're going to do is we're going to have have a minor antagonist played by a very famous Korean pop star who looks like Virgil the Dragon.

And it's going to be really, really, really popular. And we're going to nail it.
And then we're going to get it approved for Korea. We're going to get it translated into Korean.

We're going to have it dubbed. Everything's going to be good to go.
And then, hey, guess what? The Korean government banned it the day before release to fuck Sega over on purpose.

Wow.

So basically. He literally watched them do all that shit and proved it.
And then the day before Yakuza 6th Song of Life went on sale in Korea, they went, fuck you, banned.

Which sounds very similar to what was happening in Yakuza Zero with the Chinese zombie man. Yeah, that shit's crazy.
And then the replacement actor.

Also,

the name for, that's really fucking vindictive and targeted. That's wild.

The name for the type of sleeper agent that you're describing is popularly known as a Manchurian candidate. Yeah.

FYI.

Yeah.

So is Manchurian candidate supposed to be like a mental control sleeper agent or just sleeper agent in general? It's a mental control agent. It's somebody who's been programmed.

And the secret Korean is very different because they just hate the Japanese hard enough that they'll pretend for 70 years and then go terrorist at a moment's notice.

Okay, right, right. Okay, so at the moment, the moment that the revolution starts, the uprising begins, you just know that it's time.

It's among us. Yeah, okay, okay.
I see.

The person running your local host club could be Korean. The guy at the back alley doctors,

he could be Korean.

Those guys playing Mahjong

under the tower, they could all be Korean.

This Japanese guy, who's also a gangster,

he could be Korean.

That other gangster who hates the Koreans,

guess what?

He's Korean. He's the most Korean one of all.
You guessed it. Frank Stallone.
Yes.

The only context I have is in fucking eight when they mention them and then we see arrowmen lean out of the bushes and like shoot secret arrows, mind you. Do you mean seven? Seven, sorry.
Yeah, seven.

For like two seconds.

I want you to know that so the mafia that you run into in seven is the same one that Kiryu fought in two and six. They're called Jingwan.

And the idea that you get to talk to them

is so

crazy.

It's so nuts.

They're just meant to be an invisible force?

They're they're

they're played like the Nazghoul in Lord of the Ring okay

Spectre D

just show up I have the context of zero so I do remember when it was like Chinese man

Go fight him, you know before you uh uh uh he gets a name and you know hey, do you know you know what they you know how they get around it?

You know how they they get around it for seven how they're like okay, so these guys were like the secret under evil hiding in our society. They get around it two ways.
One,

they bring a character, that pop star, bring him back to life. And when you're like, aren't you dead? He goes, yeah.

And you're like, this is really straining credibility because I saw your brains fly out the back of your head. Like, no joke.

Did that happen? He's like, yeah, totally. I got better though.
And you're like, okay, sure.

And the leader of the Gomichul or the Gomichul, my pronunciation is that bad, is a really hot lady.

Okay.

And

that's it.

Damn.

Yakuza 7 also

creates maybe some of the funniest

accidental racisms ever. Like Chinese people are weak to electricity

and use ICE attacks against Koreans.

Because you have a dragon, dragon quest, you have a dragon quest format yeah

oh shit yeah okay all right yeah and what this means

is that iryujin the k-pop star who kiryu helps out through multiple games who you meet in seven

despite being korean and having an ice weakness

also uses ice attack so he's like one of those weird Pokemon that has its own type being a weakness. Oh,

so can you try out an element on somebody that you don't know what they are? And guess. Oh!

He got electrocuted. He must be Chinese.

Bully, one of the funniest jokes in the whole series is the very first fight in Hawaii, a guy pulls out a gun.

Like, you go to America. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They just start pulling out pistols. That's correct.
That is, that is correct. It's so fucking funny.
That is very fair. Yeah.

You also get to find out that like certain ethnic types are like weak to gun in the infinite blood system.

I mean,

like,

When you think about it, some people are going to see a gun come out and will not be as phased as others would by the mere presence of it in the situation.

This is true. This is kind of true.

Depending on where you come from,

you might see a bunch of different reactions to that, some of which are super effective.

Damn.

That's great. That's phenomenal.

You're okay. Yeah, I remember watching Yakuza VI get canceled in Korea, and it was like the day before game pan.
I was just like,

mouth open, just like, oh my god, they got like, can you imagine how that must have felt for that guy, that K-pop star that God fucking tagged in? He's like, oh man, they really hate you guys.

That was crazy.

Thanks for the money. Thanks for the paycheck.
Thanks for the fucking. Yeah.

Bro, what if your own parents are secretly Korean?

Now what?

I'm trying to think. No, that happens.
No, it doesn't. Shut up.

No,

no, it doesn't. Shut yourself.
Shut the fuck up. Hold on, hold on.
There's a character in Yaguza whose parent is secretly Chinese.

And a huge part of the plot revolves around the fact that that makes them Chinese. Oh, my god

like how is this

how is this franchise still going this is okay i i so i have played all of these almost almost to complete i think lost judgment 2 is the only one i haven't beaten right um

They're so racist. Like,

like, to like a lot of people in the West and Europe, it flies over their head because it's like Korean Thai. Yeah, yeah, no, you know, like, yeah, like, like, it's like Balkans racism.

Like, you can't possibly keep up with what's going on. Like, it's

oh, man, so racist. It's unbelievable.
And so, whenever somebody's like, I can't believe they hired like a sex abuser to play an actor in Kawami 3, I'm like, you guys aren't paying attention.

These games are crazy sexist and crazy misogynist and crazy racist. God damn it, man.

I was just getting warmed up going, Kuzey.

Yeah, we're having fun.

What the fuck is happening?

It's oh, it's so like he says, as he secretly, with glee and delight, wants to know more.

Oh, man. It's, oh.

Oh, no. This is horrible.
What? In my yakuza? God forbid.

All right. That'll take it.

There is a quest in Yakuza 6 in which the ending statement, like Kiryu's voice is like the voice of the developers a lot of times on these like moral quandary quests, where you are dealing with a Chinese man who's blowing up buildings for fun.

And Kiryu's end of quest like takeaway is,

quote, I guess not all Chinese people are terrorists. Oh my God.

And I did that quest on stream. People in this channel remember that happening.
It was crazy. Guitar strum.

Yes. Yes, exactly.

All right.

All right.

That'll do. That'll do.
So to answer your question, not the Like a Dragon series. They won't change nothing for nobody.

See you next week.