transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:36] Yo.

Speaker 2:
[00:37] Hey, good afternoon, Woolie. How you doing?

Speaker 1:
[00:39] Not too bad, how is you?

Speaker 2:
[00:41] I'm okay.

Speaker 1:
[00:44] What is going on?

Speaker 2:
[00:47] Ah, I'm, we're in a, we're in a no-da-da mode right now. No-da-da, mommy can do it. No-da-da, I need mommy.

Speaker 1:
[00:59] Oh, I wasn't, so I wasn't sure if you-

Speaker 2:
[01:00] Why am I even fucking here?

Speaker 1:
[01:02] I wasn't sure if you're communicating the ideas from him or if you're saying like, I am in no- No, these are quotes. I am in no-da-da mode. Like-

Speaker 2:
[01:11] No, no, no, no, no. No, he is in no-da-da mode. Da-da ain't shit this week.

Speaker 1:
[01:17] I see. Well, this week, I mean, as like literally as of today, sounds have formed that are neutral sounds, not quite-

Speaker 2:
[01:31] Neutral, huh?

Speaker 1:
[01:32] So this morning, we got ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.

Speaker 2:
[01:39] Oh, you're in the goo-goo-ga-ga things. We got ba-ba.

Speaker 1:
[01:42] And it's like, that's almost a thing. And to which Punch-Mom pointed out that if we spoke Arabic or Turkish or so, then that would be dad first, right?

Speaker 2:
[01:57] Just say that you do.

Speaker 1:
[01:58] Yeah, I would have won if we spoke any of those languages, perhaps even what, Mandarin and a bunch of others as well. But we don't. Therefore, technically, ba-ba is gibberish to us. But depending on where you are, you can count that. And I would take that as a free win, right? You're either getting ma-ba or ba, right? Like it's one of the plosives or a meh coming out first.

Speaker 2:
[02:28] Meh is usually easier to say than a plosive.

Speaker 1:
[02:31] It's literally just like your mouth opening while sounds are coming out. But yeah, no, I'll take, we will take those. We take those. We got a ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.

Speaker 2:
[02:44] Don't you worry, bud. In just a few short years, you're going to be hearing like, no, daddy, you stink. And you're going to come onto the podcast and cry. Like I'm trying not to cry right now.

Speaker 1:
[02:58] I mean, I'm already, I'm preloading up some, I got my mockery names preloaded up. I'm going to type one.

Speaker 2:
[03:08] Oh, do you?

Speaker 1:
[03:08] Yeah. I'm going to tell you one that we use on a regular basis for certain situations. We call, we call her.

Speaker 2:
[03:19] Oh, oh, oh, oh, right, right, right.

Speaker 1:
[03:20] We call her.

Speaker 2:
[03:22] Oh, you can't do that.

Speaker 1:
[03:23] We call her that.

Speaker 2:
[03:24] No, you can't do that.

Speaker 1:
[03:25] We call her that.

Speaker 2:
[03:27] No.

Speaker 1:
[03:28] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[03:29] She's going to, you're going to teach that kid to roast your shit.

Speaker 1:
[03:33] Oh, it's happening. Yeah. No, big, big preemptive mockeries are occurring. This will be a house of roasts. It's early ammunition, you know. You got to, you got to.

Speaker 2:
[03:47] It's kind of awesome though, when they just get your ass. Yeah. Like they get you and you're like, oh fuck.

Speaker 1:
[03:55] But that also means that they will be able to go out into the world and get the asses of anyone else around them.

Speaker 2:
[04:01] Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1:
[04:02] Including teachers and friends and. Yeah, that's right. You know, foes alike. So yeah, you got to, you know, if you're putting some verbal bullets in the pocket, then you got to make sure that they're used responsibly, I suppose. But there is something to like, I want a quippy kid, you know?

Speaker 2:
[04:24] Well, I mean, my least favorite quip right now is, he will occasionally call me Pat to throw me off my shit.

Speaker 1:
[04:34] He can't let the damage show.

Speaker 2:
[04:35] It's like, mm, mm, and he'll do like a sassy tilt and like throw his butt out the other way, like a full rotate.

Speaker 1:
[04:45] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[04:45] And like, Pat, I want some milk. And I'm like, no, this sucks!

Speaker 1:
[04:52] The damage, the damage, you can't let it show. I don't know what's going on. I just noticed that my camera's flickering and-

Speaker 2:
[05:02] Yeah, it's going a little crazy there.

Speaker 1:
[05:05] I'm going to... This feels like a more involved fix than we can handle live right now. So-

Speaker 2:
[05:13] Well, let's see if you degenerate into like a snowstorm.

Speaker 1:
[05:17] Yeah, I suspect that this is one of those... Have you been using it and nothing has changed about any setting at all for a long enough period of time? Let's fuck with that. Let's just-

Speaker 2:
[05:29] On occasion, on occasion, it's literally simple. Did you know that gravity affects your cables and it's just a little itty bitty bitty wiggled out because of time?

Speaker 1:
[05:41] Yeah, HDMI in particular. But this is an audio podcast, right? So who knows and or cares about any of that stuff?

Speaker 2:
[05:48] Well, I like to be able to see when you're talking, see when your eyes are big.

Speaker 1:
[05:52] The amount of people that are shook on Spotify just being like, I have not seen their faces in years. I can't believe this is what they look like now.

Speaker 2:
[06:00] It's so sick because I have the chops now. Once we started to do the Spotify video.

Speaker 1:
[06:04] It's like you've just been listening to this shit and you haven't even glanced half once.

Speaker 2:
[06:09] I mean, I listened to the Hotspot and the Giant Bombcast for a total of eight or nine years. The only time I'd ever see them is when I watched the live ones from E3.

Speaker 1:
[06:17] Fair enough, fair enough, I guess. Yeah, it feels like the medium has become something else these days.

Speaker 2:
[06:25] I don't need to see your face to hear your god-awful takes. No, no. I just need that, mm, oh, I disagree, oh, it's making me mad.

Speaker 1:
[06:35] Yeah, but every once in a while, the dreaded visual bit happens, and that's becoming more and more inevitable.

Speaker 2:
[06:43] So here's the thing, you definitely have that in reverse and so have I's when you run into, like at a con or on the street, somebody from the chat, and you're like, no, you've like, it feels like the name got put into a tube, and the tomb formed a full human around it. Because then you think about them and you're like, oh no, now I don't see a random name. I see a human being. Gross.

Speaker 1:
[07:13] Yes, I mean, like there's always the, again, there's always the caricature in your head, you know, like the version of me that is going to be run into at a con, I will always have a copy of Marvel on me at all times, and I'll playing it when you run into me, right? That's the expectation. Anyways, anyways, let's see. I had a bit of a week.

Speaker 2:
[07:38] Did you?

Speaker 1:
[07:39] Some things occurred.

Speaker 2:
[07:41] What?

Speaker 1:
[07:42] Let's take it from the top. There was the Twitch Rivals 2xKO Tag Throwdown.

Speaker 2:
[07:49] Congratulations on your big win.

Speaker 1:
[07:51] Thank you very much. You know, we put in not as much time as we needed to, but still managed to clutch it out. And I gotta say, you know, Bricky was awesome. Just, you know, didn't think, didn't know if we could do it, but we went all the way to 14th place.

Speaker 2:
[08:09] So that's all I got of what?

Speaker 1:
[08:11] Like 100 out of like 16. So you're not dead last. That's cool.

Speaker 2:
[08:17] Hey, that's all that matters.

Speaker 1:
[08:19] Hey, so, so here's what I will say. There was we jumped on and we're like, okay, what time are we going to get to practice? It's like maybe a little bit the night before, maybe not. But that's about it because he was busy and I was busy as well.

Speaker 2:
[08:36] He's always busy.

Speaker 1:
[08:37] Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2:
[08:39] We got these babies running around.

Speaker 1:
[08:41] Of course. And so then it's just like, okay, one day of let's just see what we can get going. Two, in the discussions happening inside the Twitch Rivals Discord, a certain gentleman's agreement was proposed by one Sejam, that perhaps every one of the coaches, which I had been set to be a coach even though I'm like, hey, I might not be in the right classification here, regardless, of all the coaches, it was that, hey, why don't we all play Akali since it's Akali day one? And we're like-

Speaker 2:
[09:19] That is such bullshit. He tricked you.

Speaker 1:
[09:24] So-

Speaker 2:
[09:24] He tricked you! So-

Speaker 1:
[09:28] That's not- That's not- Not intentionally. That's- But it- I was unfortunately bamboozled. Because there was a proposition that was, hey, why don't all the coaches run Akali? It's Akali day one. And a bunch of people in there were like, yeah, that sounds great. And I'm like, what a hype idea. That's really cool. We're all going to get a chance to show off the new character on day one. Fuck it. Let's go. I don't know how to use her. I'll go figure something out, which I did the night before and kind of was like, okay, let me get one or two combos down.

Speaker 2:
[10:01] Cool.

Speaker 1:
[10:01] All right, let's run it. And then apparently at some point, the day of, there was an update where someone went, wait, hold on, I'm not actually expected to do this, are we? And then it was like, oh, I guess not, but I guess some people might or something. And it was kind of just in this, you know, this nebulous state of sorts. It was like, I think some people are going to do it anyway. So I was like, fuck it. I let some new character, let's get hype. Let's show off what she can do on day zero, no less, you know?

Speaker 2:
[10:33] Did you show off what she could do, Woolie?

Speaker 1:
[10:36] I got one round on Sonic Fox.

Speaker 2:
[10:40] Okay, you know what? You know what? Hey, that counts.

Speaker 1:
[10:45] Hey, you know?

Speaker 2:
[10:47] You got fucked on.

Speaker 1:
[10:51] That is not...

Speaker 2:
[10:51] That's bullshit.

Speaker 1:
[10:53] It is not... Listen, this is not Sajab's fault. However, the gentleman's agreement was put out and some agreed to it, including me. And then there was a reneging of sorts. And I think that muddied the after effects.

Speaker 2:
[11:09] No, that's not the issue.

Speaker 1:
[11:11] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[11:11] The issue is, hey, I am a professional fighting game player slash full-time fighting game streamer. We are all obviously professional fighting game players slash full-time fighting game streamers, right? Right? You can... Everyone here can pick up a character in a day, obviously.

Speaker 1:
[11:38] Look, I think that a cool idea was proposed and it wasn't fully accepted by all, like after a period of time. But if we're running the bit, then yeah, I got fucked on. If we're running the bit, then absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[11:51] Like, Woolie, you're a fighting game aficionado old head variety guy.

Speaker 1:
[11:59] What I will say is...

Speaker 2:
[12:00] Your past week of streams wasn't four days of invincible and 2XKO.

Speaker 1:
[12:06] And it was really funny because we were talking to... At EVO, we were talking about streaming and stuff with Zafferito. And he was like, oh yeah, you can just run this set up with your stream. It's not that hard to get back warmed up for a tournament. You just run this for the week of and everything. And I remember I was like, oh, you think we run fighting games every single day and that we're a fighting game channel. We're not. We do it once a week and sometimes we miss those Saturdays. And he went, oh, there was a moment of, oh, shit, I thought you were like one of us.

Speaker 2:
[12:41] I thought you were up here at the peak of the mountain with me.

Speaker 1:
[12:43] But you're actually here, casually fucking browsing at the bottom, you know? And my mistake. OK, would you like to perhaps rescind your entry? No.

Speaker 2:
[12:58] This is like me looking at you going, well, Woolie, you stream Resident Evil, so you could just hop into any Resident Evil game with me and we just co-op that right now.

Speaker 1:
[13:05] Regardless, regardless of any of all of this, right? Here's what matters is I said, yo, Bricky, how do you want to do this? Right? Do we commit or should I switch back and run one of the characters of one of my mains or whatever? And Bricky said, fuck it, we ball, right? Let's go all the way.

Speaker 2:
[13:24] So he's a good sort.

Speaker 1:
[13:26] Yeah. And I was like, you know what? Let's do it for the hype. And the thought was maybe we would see a couple other, you know, people doing it for the hype in that bracket. No one did it for the hype. The diaphone came and said, that money is mine. Everyone fucking played for the cash, bro. But, you know, we ran into...

Speaker 2:
[13:49] I think literally every time there's any money on the line and somebody goes, hey guys, I have an idea. Don't listen. Don't listen.

Speaker 1:
[13:58] And it's not like it would have made much difference. But it was really funny. And in the end, yeah, so we did it. That was I was Kali, Hugh and Bricky Ren, Darius. And yeah, you know, it was I was like, OK, can I do some? Can I do some day one combos? And I'm like, I got a day one combo or two down. She is she's cool. It was fun.

Speaker 2:
[14:22] The thing with the thing around with her and I find her her. Oh, I don't know how to describe it, but her like launcher loop.

Speaker 1:
[14:29] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To timing for awkward the timing on her. Her car.

Speaker 2:
[14:34] I really like her whole kit.

Speaker 1:
[14:35] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[14:35] I think like as like a as like a scrub ass Guilty Gear character. I actually really think she's got tons of fun stuff.

Speaker 1:
[14:43] But her combos are just really weird and hard to do to do the advanced stuff like Marlin Pie wants. You know, you got to you got to really fucking get your fingers in a pretzel. I do, though. It's interesting to see a character like her where she can teleport, she can left, right, fuck you up, do all these amazing little confusing ninja tricks. But in exchange for that, her assists are dog shit. She's not a good partner.

Speaker 2:
[15:10] She's a point character.

Speaker 1:
[15:12] Yeah. Yeah. You don't use her for her assists. You use her for the fucking baked in smoke bomb mix up.

Speaker 2:
[15:18] Her standard assists has some value on wake up because it'll meaty super easy. I've been doing a combo and I want to extend it with her assist and it misses at point length.

Speaker 1:
[15:37] And so compare that to somebody who comes in and fucking body checks you off the wall.

Speaker 2:
[15:41] Or somebody like Blitzcrank who's just like, so you want to extend this to hell, go for it.

Speaker 1:
[15:46] Is this what it means to be mid-lane? Is that what the idea is here?

Speaker 2:
[15:51] I don't know about that.

Speaker 1:
[15:52] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[15:53] Because a Kali never help nobody but a Kali in League. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[15:57] So I was going to say, if you're a character that's not really playing well with others in League, is that what the mid-lane is for?

Speaker 2:
[16:05] I wonder if that's what some of the assist mentality was based off of? Because Darius is a bruiser, but he's a top laner, right?

Speaker 1:
[16:13] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[16:14] So if you're in mid-lane and Darius comes in, oh shit.

Speaker 1:
[16:18] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[16:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[16:20] Because Darius is a fucking amazing assist, right? When he shows up, both of them are super good.

Speaker 2:
[16:29] I'm like Teemo by extension, it's like when Teemo comes into your lane as a bonus, you're not like, oh, I'm fucked. You're like, fucking, this is so fucking annoying. Okay. You could mush them down.

Speaker 1:
[16:41] That's an interesting idea. So the mid laners convert into characters who are solid on their own, but don't really necessarily add much to your assists team-wise. Yeah, okay, keeping it accurate, right?

Speaker 2:
[16:53] I think it's crazy that Akali is not a mix-up character. I think that is so bananas that Echo and Yasuo get to keep their mix-up king fucking spot.

Speaker 1:
[17:05] No, she's got mix-ups in the sense that once the smoke is out, she can teleport behind you and really make it hard to deal with her left right.

Speaker 2:
[17:14] Sure, but she's not like floating fucking Time Wander on the fucking screen and crossing you up and fucking double-overheading you in a fucking hop.

Speaker 1:
[17:24] Also, I noticed that when you do her actual teleports, if the person is just mashing jab, they'll just jab in the direction that you appear in because it's not so fast that you're going to get to act first. That being said, man, she's so cool to watch and well-animated.

Speaker 2:
[17:41] She should have been in the game to start.

Speaker 1:
[17:43] she looks great.

Speaker 2:
[17:44] They agree because they're putting an extra character into the year's rollout.

Speaker 1:
[17:49] They're doing an extra sixth character.

Speaker 2:
[17:52] That is actually the last thing I would have expected from a game that fired half its staff.

Speaker 1:
[17:59] Every time she's like, the line, fine balance and death goes so hard, and then finding out that it's like, oh, she didn't have that much sass back in her original voice lines in the game. She was kind of a sassy ninja girl, but...

Speaker 2:
[18:13] Well, those lines are fairly limited.

Speaker 1:
[18:16] Yeah, it seems like a lot of this was developed after. Right? So, interesting. No, just interesting to see the conversions.

Speaker 2:
[18:23] That's my question.

Speaker 1:
[18:24] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[18:24] Because this is what's been kicking around. So 2XKO announced that they're going to have a sixth character this year.

Speaker 1:
[18:31] And a new fuse.

Speaker 2:
[18:33] And a new fuse. So here's the question. Is that a sign of the... Wow! I just saw your camera glitch out, and it was you from like last week. It was you with like non-purple lighting.

Speaker 1:
[18:51] What the fuck? Okay. All right.

Speaker 2:
[18:53] That's crazy. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[18:55] Then it's the camera itself, then, is what that's telling me.

Speaker 2:
[18:59] That's nuts. Is it because...

Speaker 1:
[19:01] My time.

Speaker 2:
[19:02] Hey, they tightened up the fucking work schedule or whatever. Or is it because, well, these are all the characters that had work started on them, and we're never going to get a fucking season two. So let's put them all out in this year.

Speaker 1:
[19:18] So, I mean, that's the, whoa, this game isn't canceled discussion version of it. And I don't think that doesn't seem to be what it is. I think the big...

Speaker 2:
[19:28] I hope not.

Speaker 1:
[19:29] No, because that big announcement was like, we got new stages, we're doing an extra character, we got a new fuse, we're doing all this stuff. And I think the point of that big, look at all the extra new shit that's coming this year as well, was to specifically signal, hey, we're making new things, actually. This is not the race to the end of content that was planned, that people are thinking it's going to be. I think they're specifically trying to signal the opposite to say, no, we've started working on new things because we don't want people to think it's like racing to end of service, you know? Because that is a perception because of the post.

Speaker 2:
[20:05] I would like that to continue, I'm just having a lot of fun with it.

Speaker 1:
[20:09] Yeah. But no, that was a fun little event. And, you know, again, a gentleman's agreement, moustaches.

Speaker 2:
[20:21] Gentleman's agreements only work when you're dealing with gentlemen, not fucking shitbag fighting game players.

Speaker 1:
[20:27] Woolie! We lived by it and we died by it, you know? We went down with the ship. So that was fun. And it's fun, too, because, like, yeah, I can see. The thing is, as you say that, I'm like, okay, just the way Bricky even talks about, like, picking characters in these games and stuff, it's like he's looking for the most disgusting shit possible.

Speaker 2:
[20:53] Yeah, no, the very first thing we discovered when he had me to, like, give him the basics was he wanted somebody with big, gross buttons. Which is why he's running Darius.

Speaker 1:
[21:03] War crime normals, right? So, in any case, good stuff, fun event. The other things I got around to were starting out Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney 2 and Justice for All. And...

Speaker 2:
[21:22] Justice for All.

Speaker 1:
[21:23] Justice for All. I'm going to keep saying and. It's too bad. In fact, they did the weird thing where, yeah, like, the logo that used to say Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney is now Ace Attorney, Justice for All.

Speaker 2:
[21:37] Yeah, and it's going to be Ace Attorney from then onward.

Speaker 1:
[21:40] So the words Phoenix Wright are not actually part of the title of the franchise.

Speaker 2:
[21:44] Well, then, because then you've got the other games that are actually Apollo Justice or, you know.

Speaker 1:
[21:49] Right, right, right, right. OK, so the Ace Attorney can be multiple people. True.

Speaker 2:
[21:56] I love how it's Ace Attorney. Not many of them are particularly good attorneys. Mia Fey was a good attorney.

Speaker 1:
[22:04] Yeah, she seems like fucking legit. And we're finding out, I guess, about her past and stuff. OK, we did the first case, which was with Wellington, you know, your tutorial crash out villain. And I will say, like, the only thing I'll say there is, like, OK, you got your kind of posh douchebag character that gets introduced right away. And it's so satisfying when you see those moments where Gantt or whatchamacallit, fucking other dude, Von Karma, are crashing out and having a, like, frame of, like, right, that guilt. But with this dude, you're not on that level. You're nowhere near that level. And your sweating and panicking just turns you into a fucking goofy animaniac character. Yeah, where he starts to come over the shit-ass cartoon character. And it's like, oh, you don't look cool at all. Like, the last guy leaned back and did, like, a soul bad guy dragon install, like, oh, lightning shock frame, you know, of rage and turned into a kuma. And you are here just melting into a puddle on the stand.

Speaker 2:
[23:27] Unfortunately, you're running into the issue that you have if you play them anywhere near to each other, which is you're going from the fucking peak, like final boss battle, into some shit bag who didn't pay his parking ticket, so that's why you caught him, you know, like.

Speaker 1:
[23:47] It's, the quality of the villain is also the quality of justice that is invoked, right? And there's even, and when you have those moments of like, you think you got me, but I got one left in the chamber, like that little, like you're squeezing through the cracks and narrowly escaping thing. It's like, you got a tall order to beat the last two from that first game, you know? So I can't wait to see what this series has in store, but I can say for a fact that like, the two.

Speaker 2:
[24:19] I can tell you conclusively that that tall order is absolutely met on every one of its final cases.

Speaker 1:
[24:27] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[24:28] Like people can argue about like, no, this one wasn't so good, or this wasn't wasn't so good, like that final case is always a fucking showstopper.

Speaker 1:
[24:37] I can, I can, but I can see the energy for this game is a lot of excitement, but also some trepidation and hand wringing and some, oh boy, oh boy, I can't wait for this case. And me and Reggie are kind of just like, what the fuck is, what are we in for here?

Speaker 2:
[24:59] Would you like the non-spoiler for general purpose stuff?

Speaker 1:
[25:01] No, no, no, leave it alone, it's fine, it's fine. There's an energy about this game that's kind of confusing and dark.

Speaker 2:
[25:09] There's some incredible cases in this game.

Speaker 1:
[25:12] Okay, okay, yeah, this.

Speaker 2:
[25:14] There's some incredible cases.

Speaker 1:
[25:17] So we will see where we go from here. I also was quite shocked to see the new, one, two new mechanics. One big is here is your stand, justice for all, the lock, clink, clink.

Speaker 2:
[25:38] Yes, cyclox.

Speaker 1:
[25:40] Right, and I'm like, we're out here in the world putting people on the stand?

Speaker 2:
[25:45] That way to gamify the point of the exploration stuff.

Speaker 1:
[25:48] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was like, okay, that's pretty sick.

Speaker 2:
[25:52] You can also do, the game also does some cool little tricks with cyclox.

Speaker 1:
[25:57] Okay. Yeah, I saw one or two things that seemed to be kind of interesting and hinted at.

Speaker 2:
[26:03] I think cyclox stay around for a long time. I think that just becomes part of the formula.

Speaker 1:
[26:08] Well, it's considering the fact that the whole magic bullshit was present ever since the first case, but always like a weird aspect to the world. Now it actually is like, no, no, no, magic is part of this game world and it's nuts.

Speaker 2:
[26:22] Oh, yeah. No, you always got a spirit medium or some bullshit just to cheat.

Speaker 1:
[26:26] It's never just the law. Yeah. And then the second thing, which is huge, is you can now present people in the case as objections, right? You can present people and not just evidence. And so that opens up a whole lot more in terms of how you think about these questions and their answers. That was something that was like not explicitly mentioned in the tutorial, but like there was a moment there where someone kind of mentioned, by the way, you can do this now. And it's like, oh, shit, that's big, you know? Yeah. So that's it. Good start so far. Started on that first case or second case rather. So we got to meet Morgan Faye as well, the fucking lady hype beast with her robes and such. And yeah, no, just, you know, well, not much else to say until we progress further, but good shit.

Speaker 2:
[27:28] You know, it's a weird detail. So I played these games a long time ago. I played them back when we first met, like in 2003, 4, 5, right? The only detail I remember about any of them is who the culprit is.

Speaker 1:
[27:46] Interesting.

Speaker 2:
[27:47] That's it.

Speaker 1:
[27:47] Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[27:48] So like I could go back and play, you know, Justice for All and be like, I know it's so and so. Fucking how? That seems impossible.

Speaker 1:
[27:58] So even now it's been one year and I remember the main piece of evidence that was used to like turn the case around. I don't remember the twists and turns of how we got there.

Speaker 2:
[28:10] I know that it wasn't Christmas.

Speaker 1:
[28:12] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You kept the piece of, you kept the cutout of leather with the handprint on it.

Speaker 2:
[28:20] Right.

Speaker 1:
[28:20] Basically, there's one item that's the turnabout moment item. The fucking video camera footage.

Speaker 2:
[28:31] Yeah. I'm like thinking about Case 5 and Ace Attorney 1, and I'm like, my brain's just like, Lana likes to eat lots of cookies.

Speaker 1:
[28:39] Sure. Sure.

Speaker 2:
[28:40] That's what I remember of Ace Attorney 1, Case 5.

Speaker 1:
[28:44] The blue blazer looks a whole lot like a vase in mid-air. It looks like a vase in mid-air. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[28:53] You're combining the blue badger with blonde blazer.

Speaker 1:
[28:56] No.

Speaker 2:
[28:57] And I was playing, I was playing fucking dispatch and I kept calling her the blue blazer over and over and over and over.

Speaker 1:
[29:06] Um, no. The blue badger?

Speaker 2:
[29:12] Blue badger. Yeah. Okay. It's a badger.

Speaker 1:
[29:16] Um, I, when you, I wasn't thinking of, of, of dispatch. I was thinking, I mean, I think that's Owen Hart actually. If I'm not mistaken.

Speaker 2:
[29:26] Wasn't he the blue bomber?

Speaker 1:
[29:28] No, blue bomber is Mega Man.

Speaker 2:
[29:30] Wait, hold.

Speaker 1:
[29:31] I think blue blazer.

Speaker 2:
[29:32] Wasn't he the blue meanie?

Speaker 1:
[29:33] No, blue meanie is another weirdo. I'm pretty sure blue blazer was Owen Hart.

Speaker 2:
[29:42] Blue blazer was Owen Hart. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[29:44] There we go. Blonde blazer, blue blazer, blue badger, blue meanie, blue bomber.

Speaker 2:
[29:49] Blue bomber. This is tough, man.

Speaker 1:
[29:53] Blue lagoon, blue nuie. Where are we going here?

Speaker 2:
[30:00] Blue's Clues. I thought we're not there yet.

Speaker 1:
[30:04] No. Took a little moment. Unfortunately, Reggie is feeling a little under the weather, and taking a minute to deal with that. Also, I don't want to... Fucking Phoenix Wright voice acting is demanding, so we want to be in tip-top shape for all that. So I took a minute, did some solo streams.

Speaker 2:
[30:30] There are some doctor-shrank nerds in our chats and in the CSB chat, and I would like somebody to reach out to me and explain why I can talk about bullshit for like five hours straight. No problem. Not a yawn, not a parched throat, not a cracked lip. But if I have to read something someone else wrote for X amount of time, I'm coming off scraped and raw and fucked on. I don't understand. Me and Paige have gotten distracted during a pre-stream and just gabbed for three hours. But I'll do an hour of voice acting reading and I'll be like, oh, where's my water?

Speaker 1:
[31:20] So I think it's a combination. After doing a bunch of long talking and long reading streams, I can say that it feels like a combination of every extra meg of RAM your brain is dedicating towards a task like reading. It becomes exponentially more tiring to do the rest of the things you usually do. Like all your automated processes continue, but the part where there's a big wall of text that you have to get through, it adds a lot of extra stress to it. Then I would say that you're also talking in a way that allows you to breathe naturally at your own pace and stop when you want to. But when you know there's an upcoming long glut of words to get through, you are forced to stop and then push further than you would want to naturally, so you don't take as many breaths as you would if you were in control of what you were going to say.

Speaker 2:
[32:18] That reminds me, I have a piece of parenting advice for you. So you may say the kid may become infatuated with Pete the Cat, or Curious George, or Pig the Pug. Big fan of Pig the Pug. Pig the Pug books are great. So you'll be at the bookstore, and you will see a compilation of eight Curious George stories, all in a big hardcover, and it'll be like 30 percent off compared to buying eight different Curious George books. You'll be like, fucking sick. That's awesome, right? So that's what you're going to pick up. You're going to be like, I'm going to read this girl to Curious George book before bed, and that's going to sleep her up, and that's great. But what you forget is that the child have eyes. So when you read Curious George and The Dump Truck, which is book, it's story three of eight. Well, the final page of Curious George and The Dump Truck on the opposite side of the fucking book has Curious George goes to a costume party. So you're like, and now we're done, and the child has the speed to go, that one, that one, read that one now.

Speaker 1:
[33:33] Oh no.

Speaker 2:
[33:35] That's how you get fucking trapped in a loop. And this gives you the, oh no, we're done with Curious George. It was like, we have read four Curious George's back to back. You need to go to sleep. No, no, that one. And you're like, no.

Speaker 1:
[33:50] The nefarious design of not putting a blank page before you advertise the next.

Speaker 2:
[33:55] They know. They knew.

Speaker 1:
[33:56] Oh, you son of a bitch.

Speaker 2:
[33:58] Bro, bro, me and Paige, we're George'd out right now, bro. It's a Curious George household right this second.

Speaker 1:
[34:09] God damn it.

Speaker 2:
[34:10] It's absolutely crazy how many times in a row you can read the same God damn Curious George story. Also, the man with the yellow hat is a fucking asshole.

Speaker 1:
[34:20] Oh, God damn it. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[34:21] The man with the yellow hat is a piece of shit.

Speaker 1:
[34:24] What did he do?

Speaker 2:
[34:25] First, he kidnaps George from Africa. He steals George.

Speaker 1:
[34:30] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[34:31] Okay. And to sell him to the zoo. That's how Curious George gets to America. Okay?

Speaker 1:
[34:39] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[34:40] George breaks out to go live with the man with the yellow hat because he loves him, because he was nice to him. So that's a bad start. But more than that, every single Curious George story is that the man with the yellow hat takes Curious George to a chocolate factory or a fucking firehouse or a department store and then goes, George, you wait here. I'm going to leave you a Capuchin monkey completely fucking unsupervised for like a half hour while I go around. I hope you don't get into trouble.

Speaker 1:
[35:09] Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Every single time.

Speaker 2:
[35:12] And then George gets in all sorts of wacky hijinks.

Speaker 1:
[35:14] Back to monkey business.

Speaker 2:
[35:14] And then the man with the yellow hat shows up at the end and goes, no, George, what have you done? Oh, I guess it all worked out in the end. But like it's irresponsible.

Speaker 1:
[35:24] I don't remember the other details, but I do remember he is regularly left unattended. So that hijinks may occur.

Speaker 2:
[35:31] Like the thing that gets me really bad is that there'll be these moments where like, you know, the department store head will come over and be like, that monkey ruined my display case. And everyone's like, well, he helped pack the other gifts for the children. So it's all fine. And I'm just thinking of like, I'm in a store and a man left an unattended fucking monkey in my fucking store. I'd lose my fucking shit, man. He's eating things off the shelves and touching people.

Speaker 1:
[36:01] So we're not going to get into the logistics of walking around town with a giant Titan red dog, are we?

Speaker 2:
[36:09] They get into the logistics for that a little bit.

Speaker 1:
[36:11] Because I have always looked at Clifford with fear and a sense of dread, because what do you do?

Speaker 2:
[36:19] They had to move, you know that? They used to live in the city.

Speaker 1:
[36:22] Yeah, and it's a puppy, so it's full of energy, and you're telling me that's not going to trample and ruin neighborhoods? Yeah, no.

Speaker 2:
[36:32] Clifford does, in fact, do a really significant amount of property damage throughout his books.

Speaker 1:
[36:39] I'm sure millions are adding up. It's kind of insane. That's a terrifying...

Speaker 2:
[36:44] No, no, no. Woolie, that's okay, because Clifford had a year as a movie star.

Speaker 1:
[36:51] He's got a good heart, and that's all that matters. But the idea of being trampled underfoot by this giant red puppy is kind of insane. If we're talking about what the fuck is going on in this children's book, at least the Dr. Seuss world thing is like, yeah, well, the laws don't apply here. You're in Seuss world.

Speaker 2:
[37:10] No, no, you're in the fantasy land where the undesirables that Dr. Seuss didn't like don't exist. It's just the who's.

Speaker 1:
[37:19] But whatever the logic is of everything, it can be upside out, and that's totally fine. But if you're trying to put this giant red dog in my neighborhood, what the fuck? How am I supposed to feel like I'm not going to die?

Speaker 2:
[37:33] They had a city apartment. I don't know what their dad did for a living, because they upgraded to a home in the Burbs, just so Clifford could have a dog house the size of their house next to their shit.

Speaker 1:
[37:46] And then there's just fucking Caillou.

Speaker 2:
[37:50] Caillou's a piece of shit.

Speaker 1:
[37:51] I will never allow my child to watch Caillou. Like, you have this monkey getting up to unattended antics, you have a giant Titan red dog, and then there's just this shit kid.

Speaker 2:
[38:04] Caillou's a piece of shit. Caillou, like, incentivizes children to act badly. Like, your child will pick up bad behavior from Caillou.

Speaker 1:
[38:15] I thought Caillou... It's funny too, because I didn't... Like, I remember when I thought Caillou was just a French-only thing that only we knew about.

Speaker 2:
[38:20] No, Caillou's everywhere.

Speaker 1:
[38:22] It was everywhere, yeah. Well, because the name, you know, you'd think, but...

Speaker 2:
[38:25] I remember, like, a lot... I just saw people talk... Lots of people think Caillou has cancer, because he's bald.

Speaker 1:
[38:31] Because he's bald.

Speaker 2:
[38:33] And I think the reason why they think that is they want it to be true. Because that means we'll live in a world without Caillou.

Speaker 1:
[38:45] Yeah, I think the idea was probably like, do you have a child that is shaping up to be a nightmare? Well, here, show them some Caillou, and that will be relatable, and then you can try to curb whatever is going on there. But what if you, in fact, just make them worse?

Speaker 2:
[39:06] What if instead you just had your child character model good behavior, like kindness and sharing and all that good shit?

Speaker 1:
[39:17] Yeah. No, I'm gonna have a moment to reexamine a lot of this literature and see where we're at now. Versus back then.

Speaker 2:
[39:29] I'm gonna bring this up every time it's even tangentially related. Arthur was right to punch DW. That shit was so outrageous. Me and Paige rewatched it relatively recently because our memory was a little off. DW's behavior is so out of fucking control. She breaks into his room, throws his model airplane out the window and it smashes to pieces. Then when he's like, what happened? She goes, you're plain stupid. It doesn't even fly.

Speaker 1:
[40:01] It doesn't even work.

Speaker 2:
[40:02] Like it's absolutely unbelievable.

Speaker 1:
[40:10] Arthur is funny because like that's when I... Yeah, I didn't end up watching it. Like I feel like it started later for me. So I didn't watch much of it. But I've heard this and I've seen the child, the terror child, his sister be an asshole. Whenever I hear DW, I end up thinking of Darkwing Duck though, and what the little girl would call him.

Speaker 2:
[40:33] No, DW wouldn't have done that. It's cool.

Speaker 1:
[40:39] Anyway, moving along, couple other things this week. Since I had a chance to do some solo streaming, popped in the Invincible Versus beta. So that happened.

Speaker 2:
[40:54] Show that game looks like trash, dude.

Speaker 1:
[40:57] Ah, man.

Speaker 2:
[40:59] That game looks like fucking trash. I watched a good bit of your show, and I checked out Diafony's breakdown of it, where he's like, here's how every character can do a touch of death, and how Omni-Man has a fully safe on block, invincible reversal on frame zero. So it's all this Kusouge nonsense.

Speaker 1:
[41:24] So mechanically and stuff, because the deal is that anyone, everyone that has a touch of death, you can break anything in the game, but you just have to not get called out for it. But excuse me, to go back to the beginning on it, I love, I really like invincible. I think I had a good time with the show. I love KI and the team. They made a good-ass fighting game. And everything coming together here, it's just, apparently the creator of invincible was the one who specifically said, I want to make this a fighting game.

Speaker 2:
[42:01] Yeah, Kirkman wanted a fighting game.

Speaker 1:
[42:02] Which is like, oh, you picked that yourself? Well then, I can't even, I can't say anything. I'm like, you wanted that for your idea, for your IP, so be it. You're allowed to do that. And that's cool. I like the fact that-

Speaker 2:
[42:15] I disagree with that.

Speaker 1:
[42:17] Well, I think that like, basically, I'm like, it's more than just, hey, someone picked this and it wasn't a good fit. I feel more like, if the creator chose that, then I'm like, eh, alright. I feel more-

Speaker 2:
[42:31] Then it's on him.

Speaker 1:
[42:32] Sure, sure. But I give it more leeway because it doesn't feel like someone misusing things or whatever the case is. It's like, you yourself picked it, right? And here's the thing is, too. The flying brick problem that we talk about of the characters are all very samey with their costumes and their movesets is, it's there, but I realized that that doesn't have to be the end of it in the sense that Dragon Ball Fighters has a lot of martial artists that have a ton of inspiration from the manga, but you can do a lot with how you design their movesets and what you do with them to make it more interesting and unique for each character.

Speaker 2:
[43:16] And did they do that?

Speaker 1:
[43:18] What's a bigger problem, what's a bigger problem is actually the fact that the animation itself is very stiff, right? And there's a lot of attacks that feel like they have no, like tweening to them. It's just a lot of snapping into the final keyframe, whether it's an uppercut, a left hook or a right hook. As a lot of characters doing this kind of like chest out pose, a left hook, a right hook, and occasionally one of these, and it kind of snaps into that, right? And like I know that like NetherRealm games are like the comparison point for like, yeah, it's like NRS style animation. NetherRealm has like these other shitty awkward kicks and stuff. This doesn't have that going, but it does just have a lot of like, not smooth moments when you're going from normals to specials to supers, et cetera. It just feels like you're snapping one frame into one frame a lot of the time.

Speaker 2:
[44:14] It looks like like a old style 2D fighting game that doesn't have enough key frames for its punches and kicks.

Speaker 1:
[44:20] And the thing is, is that like, in terms of how it looks visually outside of that animation, I'm super willing to give like a lot of leeway in the sense that Power Rangers Battle for the Grid is not an amazing looking fighting game, but it's a pretty, it looks fine, you know, it's clearly like not a super high budget one, but everything that is animated is animated great. It's moving in a way that doesn't look too stiff. Everything's smooth and there's a lot of cool shit happening between the characters and you know, their power slashes and swords pulling out their weapons, whether it's the all the different ranger weapons and the summons of the swords and stuff. They got style, you know, they move around and do things. And that could have been a thing where it was stiff because you have a bunch of characters all in their ranger outfits, you know, with their weapons kind of doing, you know, you could have had the exact same problem there, but instead you didn't. And they made the game flow and made the animation flow in a way where it doesn't feel stiff. So this has that problem up front. And it's always going to be the case that like it bugs me to look at.

Speaker 2:
[45:27] It also, it looks really... I'm watching like Max's stream right now, right? And it looks like when characters tag in and combos are happening, everyone is overlapped. And all of their effects are overlapped on each other that makes it look really messy.

Speaker 1:
[45:43] So tag games have this thing of like screen clutter. And thus it makes silhouettes of the shapes of the characters very important. It makes colors very important. And it makes like energy outlines.

Speaker 2:
[45:55] More or less the same silhouette.

Speaker 1:
[45:57] And it makes colored outlines very important too. 2XKO, Dragon Ball, a couple of these games do things to try to make it more visual. But here, yeah, you have a lot of characters in Viltrumite outfits that kind of slam into each other and look very similar. So you have that clutter issue for sure. But here's what I'll say is, I was also kind of trying to figure out the gameplay a bit, moving around. And I was like, this is a little bit slow, I'm not quite getting the movement. It's not feeling as snappy as I kind of want it to. And then Max showed up and went, yo, okay, go into training mode right now. Okay, you're using Alan? Pick Alan. All right, I want you to jump and press dash and the meter burn button. And I did. And he opened my eyes to an aspect of this game that I couldn't figure out beforehand, which is movement and the way this feels to play is there, but it costs resources. So it's like drive meter, essentially.

Speaker 2:
[47:00] Yeah, it's boost, I think.

Speaker 1:
[47:01] And you press the boost button. Yeah. So you start moving around with boost, and all of a sudden I'm like, oh shit, like you can go, you can do a lot of fast, crazy things and it actually like for the flying characters, it opens the game up massively, you know? And like, yeah, basically the max was just like, free your mind, you know? Like here, take this tip. And I didn't realize that that was there. And it made it feel a lot better to do that. You basically had the characters who could fly able to do a lot of airborne stuff. And then the ones who are on the ground could do more of it on the floor, but like they're more limited because they're heavier, big bodies and stuff, you know? So that was a big moment that kind of opened things up for me. And then he also showed me two or three other little tricks. The way combos work is you can do a very easy standard, stronger buttons. You do a light into a medium and medium to a heavy, all that stuff. You have a standard progression, etc. But it also has a killer instinct style combo system where you can do a punch into a Hadoken, back into a punch, back into a Hadoken. And you can essentially do what amounts to a killer instinct combo. It has a lot of freedom in terms of how you can extend things. And when you use meter in the middle of the combo or use your assist or tag out or whatever, use the mechanics, it takes the limitation that would force the combo to end sooner, and it lets you extend it and do more with it. So I'm like, okay, so if you use the mechanics and use this meter system a lot and stuff, you can move a lot faster, you can do more stylish combos, you can kind of improvise and do things in a much more open-ended way, gameplay-wise, right? And then the other way, they kind of, the things you just talked about, like touch of death and stuff, like what they allowed to happen is, you can do crazy wild tag into each other forever-ass fucking combos, but if the person you're, if you're on defense, you can do a combo breaker by calling in your partner to break you out of whatever you're getting hit by. So then you have this KI kind of system where calling in an assist leads to the person who's doing the combo, potentially anticipating that and trying to break it in advance. And so you have a nice little mind game to the way things are working there. It's very much like, what if they made a KI team game? How would their whole design philosophy expand into having multiple characters on screen? So I was like, I understand now. And he kind of, from just those little things, I saw, okay, there's some cool stuff here. And if you like the KI sort of combo system and you, and you know, the whole like, some of the, even the way that meter works in Street Fighter 6, where you've got drive that lets you move or drive that lets you do EXs and stuff like that. This is kind of like that too. So I towards the end, after kind of like learning about that and going and playing a bit more and testing it out, I was like, okay, there's some pretty fun stuff happening here mechanically. But it's like the visuals are still the visuals, you know? And I thought to myself too in advance that I'm like, the guys who made KI know how to make a good-ass fighting game. I don't have any doubt in my mind that the fun is not going to be there. Because like fucking Hunter x Hunter and Impact, it's like, yeah, guys, who knows, right? That's up in the air, right? There's been some misses there. Here, they know what they're doing. And when I started hearing from people that are like, yeah, gameplay wise, this is super sick. But you have this visual issue as well as the characters not being distinct enough from each other. That's going to unfortunately always be what people have to get through to get to this gameplay part that I'm talking about. But I'm happy to know that that's there as opposed to visually, it's not interesting to me and also the gameplay was lame.

Speaker 2:
[51:08] You know, this doesn't look anywhere near as fun to play as Killer Instinct.

Speaker 1:
[51:17] It's like, yeah, I'm going to have to.

Speaker 2:
[51:20] Like balance is obviously a part of it, right? So like when I when I beseech the sage Diaphonies on the mountain and their their their proclamation from Olympus is that this game has the most broken. It's like a like an impact level of broken shit.

Speaker 1:
[51:37] Diapahone.

Speaker 2:
[51:40] What's that?

Speaker 1:
[51:40] Diapahone.

Speaker 2:
[51:45] I will never pronounce their name correctly, but how do you pronounce an underscore?

Speaker 1:
[51:51] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[51:52] And like, but like I'll take your word for it, right? Like it's sick to play and like there's all this cool tech in it and like it's fun to play.

Speaker 1:
[51:59] I need to see the full final version, but there's interesting ideas.

Speaker 2:
[52:02] Let's say like thumbs up, like good game to play. I'm hearing like, hey, do you want to play a game that's as fun to play as Killer Instinct with shittier graphics and a much more boring roster? Because like, so I have no love for it. I don't know anything about Invisible. I see like clips on TikTok of like the, like the aura farming bits from fucking teenagers or whatever the fuck. Like 60% of that universe is Superman? Like 70%?

Speaker 1:
[52:36] Yeah, yeah. Capes, heroes and tights. Totally.

Speaker 2:
[52:38] Like, but like just, just strong man, guy who's strong and can fly?

Speaker 1:
[52:46] So yeah, cause the, the, the, the, you know, the bit that the, the, the, the story is built on is like, what if Justice League, but fucked up shit, right? Which also, I mean, you're, that energy is also in the ether right now because of the boys, you know, and Homelander existing. So like it's interesting that there, these are both things that got adapted now, years later from their original timeframes, which were what if Evil Justice League and-

Speaker 2:
[53:14] Yeah, I'm well aware that like it's a, it's a, like it's kind of a send up-y. I mean, cause like, they're called Viltrumites, right?

Speaker 1:
[53:22] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[53:23] Okay. So they're the mustache people, like literally.

Speaker 1:
[53:27] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[53:28] Cause this, you know that divot on your fucking lip? That's Viltrum.

Speaker 1:
[53:33] Oh, interesting. I didn't know that.

Speaker 2:
[53:36] Literally the race of the mustaches.

Speaker 1:
[53:38] Okay. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[53:42] And also, if you have a mustache in an old Cape comic, that meant you were the evil version of the guy?

Speaker 1:
[53:50] Clearly. I mean, some of them don't, but most of them do.

Speaker 2:
[53:55] But like, yeah, I'm watch, I'm watching footage here. I'm watching Max, and it's the guy who Seth Rogen plays that's orange.

Speaker 1:
[54:02] Alan the Alien.

Speaker 2:
[54:04] Invincible and his dad. And they're all just meat men throwing meat man punches. Yes. It's like, it's the most boring shit I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 1:
[54:13] Yeah. You're not going to get past that thing where when you look at a bunch of these other fighting games and even, I was almost like acting this out when I was talking to Reggie about it, but it's like you have like any of these, whether it's looking at Strive, looking at 2XKO, and you know what, I'll even say looking at Nen Impact, which is currently on the thing. A lot of moments of character silhouetting is being awesome. You have these moments of like a big stylish upside down, echoes turning upside down and flicking the fucking timewinder back at you, you know, and like you have these really just these moments where even if normals and buttons are kind of like snappy because the game is fast, when people are doing special moves and supers and things like that, there's still like a whole like smooth animation to things that kind of like flows, you know, a lot of love is put into that. And when you look at a fan game or a Mugen game that is trying to do like, what if everything versus everything go raw? They kind of struggle from this. They have the same problem of like, oh, you gave none of these animations any like attention because you just care about how many fucking fast, crazy hits you can land in one thing. And so like you're watching, yeah, we were showing that thing with like Vice versus Ryu or so. And you're kind of like, okay, you just did an air combo and Vice did like 15 different buttons and they all were keyframe snaps, flashes into each other. And it looks like a raging demon or something like is going off, you know? So you got to take a second to think about how cool things look when they happen. And when you let things squash and stretch and flow into each other, the impact means more. It took time, I would say too, for like some of Dragon, because like a Keiler Instinct, you know, the first season was a lot like gameplay wise and visually stuff, like things improved a lot over time. It got way better towards the end. Watching the way that Ultra Instinct, Goku flops and flips around and fucking swags on you all over that game is like exactly what I feel is missing from this, you know?

Speaker 2:
[56:33] So I'm glad you brought that up, because as I've been watching this footage, my brain went, I feel like there is more just even visual clarity differences of like watching the characters fight between three Gokus or three Mortal Kombat ninjas of the old style that were just the same sprite color, different colors as I am between the fucking bricks I'm looking at on the screen here.

Speaker 1:
[57:06] Yeah. I don't know how to describe, but if you, if, if, like, if person is looking, just going, dude, just shit on the shitty game, it sucks, an open ass dump on it. I'm being honest about what I played. And the truth about what I played is it looks like shit. I don't like the visuals. I don't like the fact that the roster has a samey super Superman problem. But I also discovered that the gameplay had more going on with it. Thus I'm going to talk about the good things about what I saw in addition to the bad. I'm going to be honest. I'm not going to lie to you. If you just want to hear me fucking Flanderize everything, then tune in to another show, dude. But I'm going to be real about it.

Speaker 2:
[57:52] But this is why I started with this is on Kirkman. So ideally, Telltale would have continued to exist, and they would have gotten that kind of thing. Or the folks over at Dispatch would have done that. I guess fighting games are back, that we can now get lame-ass licensed fighters again?

Speaker 1:
[58:21] Well, so no. I mean, a really solid point here of just like, yeah, the legacy of the MVCI thing, where Marvel Infinite, it's like, oh, gameplay was fun, but visually it would look like shit. You're like, yep, we're still here. And here's what I'll say is a game, when you have to fucking monkeys paw it, a game that looks good, but plays like shit will die infinitely faster than the opposite. It'll catch attention initially, but-

Speaker 2:
[58:55] Yeah, it'll sell 10 million copies and Ed Boon will get to present awards.

Speaker 1:
[59:01] But you can look at your net impacts for that. You can look at a random anime fighter of the day, whether it's a My Hero Academia game, a Kill la Kill game. And if you want to fucking start some shit, we can talk about a JoJo fighting game, right?

Speaker 2:
[59:18] I'm just thinking, if we're going to get stuff that's like kind of Kusouke, can we get stuff more long lines of like, I remembered something I had to go check, but in X-Men Mutant Academy 2, yeah, you're in a wheelchair in the wheelchair and he would do fucking floating combos on you.

Speaker 1:
[59:35] He would. And then I think the opposite issue is where you have a game that looks bad, but has a good thing going on behind it. And now you run into this like rumble verse and, and you know, well, this and the infinite thing as well where it's just like, I don't know what you expect to, I don't know how to make it sound any other way, except like this thing that has a good quality on it, it bothers me that it's being mired in this bad that is upfront on it. But it was genuinely surprising that I was like, oh, I didn't realize that this was going on here. And I can see why some people were going, oh, there's some fun stuff mechanically happening here. So I think what's going to probably happen with this is I think people are going to play it in the community at the very least for a bit. You know, I think it'll like whatever the rollout is and whatever their support time frame for it is, it's not like a KI thing where it's direct Microsoft or whatever. This is like skybound and they can just choose to be like, okay, we tried, we made our money or we didn't, we're out. But I think that at the very least, it's going to get a season or two of just people kind of fucking around with it mechanically because there's stuff going on there. And there are people that like play these that are like looking past that visual problem. But in terms of this being well received at large, or even by the invincible fan base at large as well, like, I don't know, you know, I mean, I think that we're also like fighting game fans and players that are looking for a specific type of thing out of that genre. I would be, it's hard to say whether what is being shown here is exciting for someone that doesn't care anything about the genre, but just loves invincible, you know? But I will say that those people showed up in fucking rage quit and they got their money's worth out of that demo weekend.

Speaker 2:
[61:38] Highly technical, like sweat ass tag game for the average TV viewer is maybe a mistake. Cause like, oh man, I love invincible. I can't wait to play the fighting game. I think like they're going to just die.

Speaker 1:
[61:59] If the alternative is some games should be made shallow and bad. Yes. I'm always going to say that I prefer a game that I personally find interesting to engage with. You know, I always prefer that. So I want video games to be released that I enjoy.

Speaker 2:
[62:23] Obviously, but like there's, this is just the 2x scale thing again, right? It's like, do you think that maybe going for the fucking most visually confusing, sweatiest, degenerate form of a fighter?

Speaker 1:
[62:36] Yeah. The moment you have to sacrifice the interesting visuals to get there, then that's the thing. Is that a real comparison? Is that a fair thing? Because yeah, are we looking at Dragon Ball Sparking Zero? Or like, look how fucking sick this looks. Who cares how it feels or plays, right? I don't know. I don't know. But I can't say personally that I want the team that made a previous game that I enjoy to make another game I enjoy. But oh, man, is it just not the sum of its parts here. But it did interest me at the very least enough to be like, you know what? When it releases, I'm curious. I want to, because I want to play Cecil, who is, you know, your boy. I want to play as him, as normal man with a very expensive tech, keeping up with these supermen. And I want to play as Conquest, who is the Broly of this world, basically. And I'm curious to see how that feels, because as a fan of those characters and just, you know, the fact that they might, they might feel a little bit different in this type of setup. I'm curious to go in and see if the mechanics are rewarding to me and such. But yeah, I don't know that this is going to like, particularly last. I just don't think it's going to die as fast as something like NENPACK did, you know?

Speaker 2:
[63:59] I kind of worry about a injustice issue where, man, look, we do have a varied roster, but all the really good guys are invincible, and his dad, and the wharf.

Speaker 1:
[64:21] Battle Beast. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that... Like, I was wondering if we were going to see like 15 invincibles on the character select screen, and at least with this demo so far, they haven't shown that to be the case. So, hmm.

Speaker 2:
[64:34] Shouldn't that be the assists for...

Speaker 1:
[64:38] Angstrom. Yeah. Yakub? Yakub, yes. Yakub will show up and have all his assists.

Speaker 2:
[64:44] He should play like Garganos and have the invincibles come out of portals.

Speaker 1:
[64:49] So, that could be a really interesting character to design gameplay-wise if they commit to it, and I hope they do. I would also love to see... There's some fun... If you know the lore, there's some fun picks in there. There's the invincible equivalent of Dr. Strange is a character called Seance Dog. And it's like, what if Dr. Strange... In the world of Invincible, he reads a comic called Seance Dog. And it's just Dr. Strange as a dog, casting spells and being your best friend, you know? And like, there's a... I guess, when the reveal to that in the story, there's a twist to it that would be super fun as well if they included that in the character. You know, I would love to see a seance dog. And you could have some characters that are like, quirky, weirdo picks that could be fun with it. But anyway, that's what's up with this, right? It's just another contender to the Marvel throne is around. And I wasn't super excited to get into this demo. I wasn't planning on jumping in initially, but I left with some un-eyebrow raise going like, okay, okay, you're cooking something. You're cooking something. But yeah, I also do think, too, that if you have a game where you are, you know you're looking at a very similar-looking roster, you gotta go extra hard in making all of their animations and all of the way they move and everything they do really unique. You gotta double and triple down on that aspect, you know? But that's it.

Speaker 2:
[66:28] What if? No.

Speaker 1:
[66:32] Okay. Well, sure.

Speaker 2:
[66:34] How's the rage quitting?

Speaker 1:
[66:35] Yeah. I mean, I collected at least two or three. It's quite fun to just pop on and be like, okay, some folks are here that, you know, this is not their genre and they're here to play their characters and-

Speaker 2:
[66:49] No, no, it's their genre. You're just playing like a bitch.

Speaker 1:
[66:53] The only way to play the game with other people besides training mode is to go into ranked online. You can't engage in any other way. So everyone is forced into the situation and motherfuckers are just getting salt as.

Speaker 2:
[67:06] You know what?

Speaker 1:
[67:07] Super mad.

Speaker 2:
[67:08] That's smart. Actually, I just realized they skipped out on the animation in the fighting game to make it more accurate to them skipping out on the animation in the show.

Speaker 1:
[67:27] That's smart. When the animation is bad in the show, it's an homage to those moments.

Speaker 2:
[67:33] Right?

Speaker 1:
[67:34] I didn't piece that together. Yeah, you don't even have to be sweaty to get a rage quit online. If you grab-

Speaker 2:
[67:40] Oh, man, that's awesome.

Speaker 1:
[67:42] If you just grab a character and do fucking light, medium, heavy launch, light, medium, heavy super a bunch of times and then they die, you'll watch your fucking game freeze up and then you'll get spit back out to the lobby or whatever. Like, you know, people are out here just like, and it's just, yeah, it's funny because when you rage quit in a beta, it's like it's just it's extra bitch for sure because it's the consequences are not even lasting in any remote way, shape or form.

Speaker 2:
[68:13] If you're top 20, you get to be in the credits.

Speaker 1:
[68:16] Oh, right. And that's where Diaphod was fucking raging hard because it's like this dude that's number one is just rage quitting on everybody. There's nothing, there's no fix to this. You can just make the game punish the quitter harder. You can make fun of them. You can make their head explode, put them in rage quit jail, et cetera. But it doesn't, in terms of like, oh, what can we do to, you can't, people hate losing. It feels bad and they're just going to, you know, they're just going to do it every time.

Speaker 2:
[68:47] Because if you did this in a, if you did this at a pool hall or a soccer field, you would be socially ostracized till the end of your days. You know, like, you would, no one would ever, ever forget. Hey, you remember that time you threw a tantrum like a baby and fucking threw the ball down the fucking lane?

Speaker 1:
[69:07] And ran away. Yeah, yeah. This is, you know, there's just, there's no accounting for it. And I've heard people talking about, they're looking, yearning for the days of yore on, you know, Call of Duty and such, where you'd be like, I loved getting on and getting toxic on Mike. That was how I got the stress out after I got home from work and school every day. You know, it was like, this is, this is what games are to me. They are a means to be toxic.

Speaker 2:
[69:31] People don't talk about what that level of toxicity with those old Call of Duty games. I played those games during the height of their, their peak toxicity. And one of the things that they don't talk about is that rage quitting is a problem in those games, too.

Speaker 1:
[69:49] In everything, I'm sure, yes.

Speaker 2:
[69:50] Hey, it's six on six. Did you guys win the first engagement? Cool, did you lose the very first clash? Three people left. Okay, enjoy running out the clock, getting stomped out.

Speaker 1:
[70:04] I can remember tons of Overwatch matches where that last slot on our team, the game was looking to find somebody to fill it because we did one engagement and lost it and the person just left. And they're like, oh, we're looking for a replacement, but good luck.

Speaker 2:
[70:22] You know what my favorite thing is about this kind of thing? Hey, I'd like to quick match. I'd like to quit match. Okay, I've been loaded in. I'm loading into six minutes to go and I'm replacing a guy who left. Yeah. Can't leave fast enough.

Speaker 1:
[70:40] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[70:41] I'm not picking this shit up off the fucking dirt. Fuck you. Fuck you for putting me into this bullshit.

Speaker 1:
[70:47] Also enjoy the mark on your fucking record as a result too. I will say for Marvel Rivals, super awesome that for anyone who disconnects unintentionally, you literally fucking turn your computer back on and load the game back up, and it's like, you're cool, you can rejoin. You can rejoin ranked matches that are still under way if you accidentally disconnect from them for any unintentional reason.

Speaker 2:
[71:17] Yeah, I've had power go out and just get right back in.

Speaker 1:
[71:19] That's awesome. Love that part.

Speaker 2:
[71:22] But this reminds me...

Speaker 1:
[71:23] That interrace quit.

Speaker 2:
[71:24] In 14, you'll queue up to do a dungeon or something, and there's an option in there that says, do you want to fill? Right? Do you want to matchmake for people who have dropped? And matchmaking for fill is a devil's gamble, because you can fill in and people are at the end, the end of whatever they're about to do, and somebody just disconnected. And you walk in and you spend four minutes, and you get all the rewards that you would do for 60 minutes. Or you'll fill in and it is 70 minutes in to a 10 minute thing. And you're like, oh, this is actually unwinnable. These guys just can't do it. And then you're like, well, I'm going to just leave and I'm going to take my fucking 30 minute penalty. I don't give a shit. Good luck on the next guy to fill for you.

Speaker 1:
[72:28] And now you're talking about the ethical reason to rage quit as opposed to the non-ethical reason to rage quit.

Speaker 2:
[72:33] Oh yeah, because there's the moment. There's the moment. So a standard dungeon in FM14 gives you 90 minutes to complete. They take 16. OK, that's a pretty big fucking gap. Sometimes you'll fill in and 70 minutes will have elapsed. And you'll go, oh, you'll do the poll. You're like, oh, this is just not going to fucking happen. All right, what's your step? Vote, abandon, so everyone, you know, everyone does the vote and then you all leave, right? And then the guy who is always the problem, always, invariably, the guy who's the worst or who won't listen goes, nah, man, we can do it. I ain't leaving. Right.

Speaker 1:
[73:18] Yeah, yeah. You know, I wasn't actually gonna linger this long on this game to begin with. I was gonna just mention it a couple of things and move on. But if we're on it and go in here, then the only other thing I have to say is like, when it comes to rage quitting, because it's such an inherent thing with just the nature of online gaming with people, you will never solve this problem. So all you can do is design for, do all the punishments for the person who does it and just design your game that it can withstand someone being a huge baby pooping their diaper and then making the game go, okay, someone threw a tantrum and was a huge baby and they pooped their diaper, so you win. And it's okay, we don't shut the game down and go, we don't know what happened, it's over. No, no, no, somebody quit. We detected that, we know what happened. Okay, it's cool. You won, they lost, whatever, right? Just allow the game to elegantly handle that thing. Because I think it's Mortal Kombat that their head explodes as soon as they rage quit.

Speaker 2:
[74:19] Yeah, their head explodes.

Speaker 1:
[74:20] Right. So if you did that, it wouldn't be as annoying because it wouldn't be like that low tier god style, you ain't getting my fucking points. It wouldn't be this thing of like you actually nullified the whole game we played and now you won by being a huge baby, right? You would at least make it that the person who did that takes their penalty and if their ego is whatever, then let them do what they need to do. But the person who was on the other end, the game should be robust enough to handle this type of thing now. That's the only thing you can do. It feels really silly that we're in a situation where that's still being addressed. And I know a big part of it is games with like high response time. Like, you know, you can't you want to have direct character player to player connections and everything with the rollback, etc. It makes it harder to have a server side verification of what exactly happened. But we know that it is possible. So just in any game, in any genre, if someone rage quits or disconnects, allow the person who's playing to not have their whole experience nullified as a result. And I'm fine with it, you know?

Speaker 2:
[75:29] You know a game I never encountered a rage quitter in once? Was the first version of Strive. And in my heart of hearts, the reason why that is, is because it took so long to get back into matchmaking.

Speaker 1:
[75:41] Oh my God.

Speaker 2:
[75:42] That no one was willing to rage quit.

Speaker 1:
[75:44] Oh, wow. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[75:46] It could take like 10 minutes to get back in.

Speaker 1:
[75:49] Right. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[75:50] So you'd be like...

Speaker 1:
[75:51] You alt F4 out and then you got to sit there and stare at that fucking Strive. Yeah. Checking your R code. Or how about chess? Because you just forfeit the match in Handshake, right? Like, that's what that is. Anyway, I took a bit of time yesterday to check out some demos that I've been curious about. One of which was called Bridgebourn. Have you heard of Bridgebourn?

Speaker 2:
[76:24] Bridgebourn. Here.

Speaker 1:
[76:27] So B-O-U-R-N. Here it is. Take a look.

Speaker 2:
[76:33] Oh, a Bridgebourn Ultimatum. Got it.

Speaker 1:
[76:37] It's an A-R-P-G and I...

Speaker 2:
[76:42] Oh, there's no E? Okay. Oh my God.

Speaker 1:
[76:45] You take a look here at this game and you will see a party running around. You'll see a life bar on one side of your bottom hud. That's a liquid filling up red.

Speaker 2:
[76:59] This is a Diablo.

Speaker 1:
[77:00] And then you see the liquid of your emana on the other side in blue. Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[77:05] Your hot bar in the middle.

Speaker 1:
[77:06] Hot bar in the middle, right? It is quite Diabling. And that's all cool. What might not be so obvious is when you look at the way the camera moves and when you look at every time it zooms in and zooms out, right? As you check out the trailer or so, nothing you're seeing is 3D at all. These are all sprites. And this whole game is 2D using Parallax effect. Everything you see is Parallax sprite scrolling.

Speaker 2:
[77:41] Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[77:43] That is incredible. I've never seen a game with such mastery of Parallax scrolling as this. It has dynamic lighting in certain moments when you see you're running through caves and stuff.

Speaker 2:
[77:58] OK, I'm watching them run away from the camera in 2D with just using Parallax. This is very impressive.

Speaker 1:
[78:05] It's incredibly impressive. There are moments where you are in the Grand Canyon almost, and you're seeing lifted up walls and then you zoom all the way out from that. You can play the game at map view, and you can go all the way into your character filling up the full screen to all the way out to looking at the planet, basically, like the fullest map ever. And it's all just like a seamless scroll, because there's no models, there's no 3D, nothing being loaded in, it's all just sprites. Yeah, I've never seen anything look like this or do this effect. It's absolutely staggering with how it's doing this visually. Gameplay wise, as a Diablo clone, I mean, I've never played Diablo, but I can just go off of what I got off.

Speaker 2:
[78:53] You never touched it, huh?

Speaker 1:
[78:55] Never touched it.

Speaker 2:
[78:56] That's crazy.

Speaker 1:
[78:58] Yeah, I wasn't allowed to.

Speaker 2:
[79:00] I mean, yeah, you're using one, two, three, four, left mouse button, right mouse button.

Speaker 1:
[79:03] Yeah, wasn't allowed to.

Speaker 2:
[79:06] Some of those games are really good.

Speaker 1:
[79:08] Mm-hmm, I know. I have queued up the possibility in the future of taking a closer look at them, but for now...

Speaker 2:
[79:18] Can you give me a phone call when you do that?

Speaker 1:
[79:21] This one is... It has the... Your full bar, you got all your different abilities. Here's your shield sword, here's your dash and such. But there was another aspect to it where, I guess, the sauce, quote unquote, would come into play, is you get your spells and you pick up a whole bunch of... There's things that are very Baldur's Gate about it, right? So you get your spells, you get your party member, and...

Speaker 2:
[79:49] Oh, there's the Parallax on the Grand Canyon. Wow, that's really intense.

Speaker 1:
[79:54] Yeah, go look up Bridgebourn on Steam, if you're listening to this, and take a look at that trailer. You get a party member, your party of different characters. And one, anytime the fight's happening, you press down on your D-pad, and then time stops, and you are now in tactical mode. So you are switching to each character, and you can cue up what their next move should be. So now I'm doing the Baldur's Gate style fight, of you do this, you throw this over here, you go this way and do that, and then resume. And now, it went from the full Diablo thing to, now kind of like simultaneous turn-based, you know.

Speaker 2:
[80:37] Oh, real-time with pause?

Speaker 1:
[80:38] Real-time with pause is possible while you're fighting, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[80:41] Wow, real-time with pause is a very unpopular control method.

Speaker 1:
[80:45] Interesting, okay. You can do it here.

Speaker 2:
[80:48] I like real-time with pause. It is remarkably unpopular as far as RPGs go.

Speaker 1:
[80:54] Pillars of Eternity does that?

Speaker 2:
[80:56] So Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 do it, Planescape Torment does it, Icewind Dale 1 and 2 does it, Pillars 1 and 2 do it.

Speaker 1:
[81:03] Okay. Now, the pause is optional. You never have to ever pause.

Speaker 2:
[81:07] But realistically in those games, you must pause because there's too many things going on.

Speaker 1:
[81:12] Yes. And so a good example is the second person who joins your party is basically like a perfumer.

Speaker 2:
[81:20] Oh, Woolie, Kotor is real time with pause.

Speaker 1:
[81:23] Oh, yeah, yeah. Perfect. Yeah, true, true. Kotor never feels like it though because none of your button presses directly correlate to an action. Right? Like, yeah, that's the thing. That's the difference between selecting your action from a list.

Speaker 2:
[81:38] It always cues up into the the the the background list of actions.

Speaker 1:
[81:43] Exactly. Whereas in this there is a slash your sword button. There is a hold to block button.

Speaker 2:
[81:49] And it's really interesting because usually if you have real time with pause and you want a different control method, people go to turn based. So like the Pathfinder games are real time with pause. But if you're fighting something that's like, oh, man, this is for real. You hit a button and you turn it to turn based.

Speaker 1:
[82:04] I can tell that this game is made by somebody who is like, loves all of the above and wants this game to have a little bit of everything and then some, right? So you have those moments where you're fighting and then you can, yeah, you hit down, you go, you pause the, you pause time and time is not stopped completely. It's doing the FF7 remake thing where things are moving slowly.

Speaker 2:
[82:27] Like real slow.

Speaker 1:
[82:29] And you can queue up, but you don't have forever because that monster is going to fuck your shit up in, you know, in a second. And so you queue up, you do your spells and another big part of what's happening. So your second party member that joins is like a perfumer. So they have poison gases that they can throw. They have like exploding shrapnel and they have like reagents that react to things that you combine with. And now you have them throw a reagent down and then you cast fireball and then your fireball reacts with that. And now you're fucking detonating and you're doing double techs constantly and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:
[83:06] Right.

Speaker 1:
[83:07] The game has a system in place where pretty much every element or like a type of every element or type of status interacts with every other element or type of status to create some unique effect. So lightning plus fire creates a massive explosion, right?

Speaker 2:
[83:28] That sounds like a very divinity original sin kind of system.

Speaker 1:
[83:33] Okay. Yeah. You throw the reagent down, but then you throw poison on it and now it's a healing gas for you and your crew. You get all these little like, you know, things where you're now, you're using the synergy with your team and what they're casting to work with what you're casting. Or if an enemy casts something at you, like lightning's coming at you and you fireball it, you detonate it midway through. And if you counter it early enough on, the area of effect of that explosion is a pretty effective counter attack, right? So you can counter casting with this particular spells to like have optimal shutdowns, you know? Okay, so it has that going on. You can then just press left or right on the D pad to just fully take control of anyone on the party as well. But of course your character has way more shit going on. And when you go to like level up, you kill every... Basically, you cast spells and they use mana. And when you run out of mana, you can still cast spells, but fucking what were they called? Like, death eaters basically appear and come after you, right? And the more you overcast, the more appear reapers. And you can basically desperately use your last bit of mana to get one cast out, but you risk stronger and stronger reapers coming after you. And you can fight them off as adds in whatever the... So if you're fighting a big boss and you have to cast a big spell, or you have to dash or get away or do something to teleport out of danger, you can get more adds coming on the screen by overcasting. And if you have confidence in your ability to fight them off, spend, overspend your mana and make the fight harder, and just fight them off and go, right? So you're basically, there's a proposition you're kind of facing of making the fight temporarily harder, or you can run from them eventually, build your mana back up and they'll go away, you know? But it's an interesting sort of system of like, you know, it seems as if by going further and further into like, overcast, I think stronger and stronger Reapers begin to appear to, right? So yeah, it's like, I like that just hitting zero is not just zero. You have an awareness that you need to keep in mind. And sometimes mashing results in accidentally summoning Reapers when you didn't want to, and you're like, oh, fuck that, true, don't do it. That was interesting. Then you get the leveling system where you build up levels as you kill things and whatever, attacking things rebuilds your mana in general. And you then go to essentially like a bonfire, essentially a tablet, and you sacrifice extra mythical or magical items you've picked up to convert those into particular types of stat increases that use your levels to cash out.

Speaker 2:
[86:45] Yeah, every single one of that action RPG, like Diablo style genre, has some kind of labyrinthine-like cash-in to become stronger like meta system.

Speaker 1:
[86:59] But is it normal that you go from level 5 to level 0 by choosing to increase these stats?

Speaker 2:
[87:07] No.

Speaker 1:
[87:08] Because you literally drop levels back down to 0 if you want to by spending your experience to give yourself more damage here, extra crit. You want 11% chance of getting a lightning after effect every swing. Okay, it'll cost 10 levels to do that.

Speaker 2:
[87:30] That's kind of like a prestige.

Speaker 1:
[87:32] And you drop back down to 0 and start again, but now you have those stat increases.

Speaker 2:
[87:41] That's weird.

Speaker 1:
[87:42] Very, right? Isn't that it? So I'm like, I'm putting this all out here because I'm like, I don't know how typical this is, but this stuff is really unique. It is interesting, you know? And yeah, I basically found that I died to a boss that ate my levels because there's a corpse run. And I was kind of thinking, well, fuck it. I might as well just level up and go back to 0 with better base stats if I'm going to just risk it all on this corpse run anyway. So you have an idea. And then, of course, getting back from the path from 0 to 1 is always much shorter than the path from 5 to 10, or 5 to 6, right? So you kind of have this like, what type of stats matter to you to sacrifice your level progression in order to get this buff? I thought that was something else unique about it. And then lastly, also, it's got four-player co-op, so people can jump in and take control of the characters.

Speaker 2:
[88:41] That genre is mandatory to have four-player co-op or higher. It's absolutely required.

Speaker 1:
[88:46] Is that Divinity that was doing that? Or Pillars, I forget.

Speaker 2:
[88:49] So again, Divinity is a turn-based RPG. We're talking action RPGs of your Diablo-like? Yeah, no, that's... If you put Diablo, Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Titans, whatever. Mandatory. You must be able to play with other people. It is absolutely required.

Speaker 1:
[89:09] It seems like the type of thing that can really benefit, especially from like, hey, put a reagent down. I'll blow it up, you know? Or cast something with wind, and I'll do my Earth attack, and then they'll fuse together and create the after effect of the attacks.

Speaker 2:
[89:25] It's just that the... Like, it's a grindy genre, and it's very much... It's like the reverse of a podcast. It's a podcast game, right? They're all podcast games, where it's not requiring enough of your brain in any given moment that you can't just chit chat and hold a conversation.

Speaker 1:
[89:51] Gotcha, okay.

Speaker 2:
[89:52] So, they kind of... If they didn't have co-op, they would all die.

Speaker 1:
[89:58] Well, I mean, this seems like... I mean, it's kind of goofy and light-hearted in its world and tone, but I can see these types of games being like, if this plot is compelling enough and the world is interesting, then you could just have a narrative that drives you forward, certainly. But it feels like, again, here, I really feel like I'm at the end of a series of fans of these genres that have pumped a ton of systems and subsystems into the thing, because the last thing I saw that was like, holy shit, is a literal custom spell shrine. And you go into it, and you go, okay, take your base ingredient, fireball, add a detonation effect, the grenade from earlier, right? Shrapnel. Every time you cast this fireball, shrapnel will explode inside of the fire as well. Okay, cool. Slide how often you want it to cast from every 0.1 seconds per second, casts per second, to one cast per second or more. It's gonna cost you more resources to create a spell that can auto cast much faster, much crazier. And you can choose the rate of fire, essentially, for this spell. Okay, now choose the thing you want to happen. Once the detonation is complete, you can create a third after effect, such as an earth spire shoots out of the ground. And you can then choose when it shoots out of the ground, it's gonna obviously combine with the fire. And whatever the previous thing I said was that would occur when earth met with fire, like let's say a ground lava storm, right? Shoots out in directions.

Speaker 2:
[92:03] Yeah, it has like Noita slash like Magicka stuff in it. There's a lot of influences here.

Speaker 1:
[92:10] Pick from the drop down list where you want that effective lava to travel to. Do you want it to go to the nearest enemy, to go in a full circle, to go in the direction that you were shooting the projectile from, to come back to you? Literally, choose the direction that you want that after effect to then travel back to, right? And that level of insane customization and sauce is so that you can allow it to further detonate and combine with other things that your party might be doing. So for example, there's a teleport dash that lets you get from one blip to another point. And it's like, that's really useful. It gets over gaps, et cetera. But if you choose to use this like, running dash instead, you can spread the smoke or the poison or the reagent to spread the effect over all the spells I just described, so that they start recasting on each other. And if you ignite it all, it all comes together in one big insane cacophony and a fucking nuke goes off. And it's really expensive to do the kind of spell that I just described. But you can put together everything in your inventory and it creates one final item that you can put on that quickbar and go, it's going to cost your whole fucking mana bar to use this, but you can cast it.

Speaker 2:
[93:31] And all these materials.

Speaker 1:
[93:33] And your materials, but you get one cast, here you go, use it. Oh, by the way, you can cast it again, but a fuck ton of reapers are about to appear on your ass. That's super cool. That's a really unique system. I don't know. I've seen it. I don't know anything about these, right?

Speaker 2:
[93:50] No, no, no. There's a lot of bits and bobs and complicated systems from other genres being jammed into your standard action RPG loot game.

Speaker 1:
[94:03] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[94:04] You're describing something that is significantly more complicated than most of the games in the genre.

Speaker 1:
[94:10] Yeah. And I can see that there's even... So, the basic level of this was earth pops out of the ground, like earth bending, water bending, fire bending, etc. That type of thing, just your usual casts. But then there was stuff where it's like put down a... I forgot what the word was, but it was like a proxy or something. And it's essentially like a fucking pylon from the Protoss. And it would zap a beam of energy between it and another one of itself. And you combine that with the elements to then create a... I imagine like a fire line or do whatever you want to disrupt the effects that I was previously describing. Or you could put a thing down where it's like, it creates a line on the ground and if any enemies cross it, you teleport to it and automatically do a big slash on them. And I'm sure again, you can combine this with every element, with every direction and every other option I just described.

Speaker 2:
[95:08] So I just lost...

Speaker 1:
[95:10] Warp in, fucking slash, electricity shoots out in all directions and I have, I tell that electricity to bounce back towards me, you know, and whatever, whatever. Customize your spell. Sit there and figure it out, you know. It's really cool. You're frozen, I didn't realize.

Speaker 2:
[95:29] God damn it.

Speaker 1:
[95:31] Oh my God. All right. BRB, let's see what's going on here. Hi, how you doing? Nice to see you. Thanks for sticking around. Well, you're seeing me, and you're seeing me alone, so, uh-oh, what does that mean? Yeah, unfortunately, it looks like major internet issues are happening on the other side of the country, and yeah, router's dead. So we just got to wrap it up for now, unfortunately, and have a pre-mature end to the podcast. So we will, of course, you know, I don't know what's going on. Hopefully, things work out well, and I'm just, you know, we'll stand by to hear what else is going to happening with Pat and the schedule for the rest of the week. That's a doozy, that's a bummer. Sorry about the technical difficulties, everybody. In the meantime, I'll just be ending it here, and this will just have to be the awkward fucking preemptive end to the cast. So, yeah, obviously, stay tuned to, you know, Pat's Stairs At for the updates on when or what's gonna be happening with the stream and the schedule over there. And to Woolie Versus for what I've got coming up this week on the schedule, I'm likely gonna just continue with more Phoenix Wright and Legacy of Cain, so catch me over on Woolie Versus on Twitch and on YouTube, everybody. Yes, we have some sponsors, and I am going to, ooh, goddamn, that is, that is some issues. I have, there are, this podcast is sponsored by some sponsors who you need to hear about before we end. So, cheers for that. This week, Castle Super Beast is sponsored by AG1. That is your daily health drink. That is a solid solution to if you're out there and you're like me and you're trying to figure out how to get more greens in your diet. I love meat. I love meat and I should be eating more veggies. And I do like my veggies, but there are times where I'm just not getting enough in my system. And I know that I'm also getting older and I've got to think about my vitamin intake and my probiotics and all that stuff that comes with paying attention to your gut health. So after learning about the difference and after feeling the difference of what happens when you don't take care of your gut and your gut health, I'm like, okay, no, don't want to make that mistake again, especially fiber and stuff like that. I'm paying attention to things I originally wasn't. So AG1 is a really solid way to get a daily dose. You got your 75 plus ingredients with clinically studied, proven five probiotic strains. So AG1 is basically replacing your need for a multivitamin for your probiotics and more. And yeah, besides getting all the superfoods and vitamin B and every nutritional support that you should be keeping on top of, it also tastes really good. So it's quite easy because you just grab a scoop, mix it in with some water, or they've got the pouches where you can have the exact amount that you need. And as soon as you drop that in, you shake it up, and you have exactly what you need for your daily immune support. And antioxidants, probiotics, functional mushrooms, all that stuff, you're getting the benefits of it. I really like the taste of it. You got a lot of different flavors to pick from. And there's a flavor sampler you can try out to see which one you like the best. But it was quite nice to know that something that tasted this good was also good for you. So, yeah, get in there. Go to drinkag1.com/superbeast to get an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 for free in your AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's a $72 value. Yours free only while supplies last. Go to drinkag1.com/superbeast. Thank you, AG1. And also this week, the podcast is sponsored by Shopify. That is your go-to solution if you are getting your business online, if you're taking off and getting started, or if you've already established your business and you just want to figure out what's next. You got a lot of complicated steps to figure out how to reach people, how to track things and how to run the back end of your store. And yeah, as much as it can be intimidating, Shopify can make it a whole lot easier. I know it certainly helped when we were getting our t-shirts off the ground and trying to figure that part out. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and you can see them everywhere. Every time you see that little shop pay button, that little purple button on tons of websites as well, that makes it easy to check out. Number one, check out On The Planet. If you are getting your shop built, you have tons of ready to use templates. You basically have your own design studio to build your online store that matches your brand style. You've got award winning support for you as well. Whatever you need, 24-7, they've got you covered as you are building out that site. And you've got the ability to track things like international shipping. If there's returns, you have to deal with your inventory and all that. As it gets more and more complex, Shopify is perfect for tracking all of that information. You can get it hooked up to your social media as well, so you can promote where you want to. You can also see where people are browsing and finding out about your shop. And yeah, it just helps you grow from that first to that millionth sale. Wherever your business is at, consider getting Shopify on the back end to help you out. So time to turn those what-ifs into cash with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/superbeast. That's shopify.com/superbeast. Thank you very much, Shopify. Appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you all, everybody. We're going to call it there and we will be back once we have sorted out what's going on and then we can find out the biggest mystery of all. What the fuck happened in Pat's week? Did he have a week? Who the fuck knows? As far as we're concerned right now, he did not. So time has stopped. We'll see you next time, everybody. Peace out. You know, sorry to disappoint, if I may. Just, we'll have to, just, we'll be ending the podcast preemptively with a solid two hours of podcasts as opposed to your usual four to five. Whereas, you know, most podcasts out there last about 59 minutes and 10 seconds, as far as I can tell. So, sorry to only offer two hours of podcasting this week, everybody.

Speaker 2:
[104:14] God damn it.

Speaker 1:
[104:15] You know, we could, we could cut any one of these episodes into four or five. Do you know we could do that, by the way? Are you aware? Go find another podcast. They record for 59 minutes, y'all. We spoil you, just so you know. Just so you know, we spoil you. God damn it. All right. That's it.

Speaker 2:
[104:38] Take care.

Speaker 1:
[104:43] Where was I? Yes.

Speaker 2:
[104:47] You were talking about Bridgebourn.

Speaker 1:
[104:52] So Bridgebourn, in conclusion, pretty fucking cool.

Speaker 2:
[104:57] Bridgebourn is the land of extremes.

Speaker 1:
[104:59] The name is unfortunately a little bit of the slot machine going on with the title. However, mechanically, that was insane parallax scrolling sprite majesty that I've never seen in a game before. Real time with pause. Awesome. Love that ability. Switch between your team at any time. Co-op and that spell synergy shit was nuts. And also choosing to level down in order to increase your stats. These are all really awesome, unique things that come together for a really great first impression of a game. So yeah, Bridgebourn is cool. All right.

Speaker 2:
[105:44] Well, man, let me tell you some bullshit. my fucking router just fucking died, wouldn't even power on. So I had to pack that shit up and fucking grab a cab and haul my ass to the local fucking Roger saying, can I have a new router? And they're like, maybe, I don't know. Where's your photo ID? We need to make sure it's yours. So then I come back here and I had to fight a fucking application to fucking install it. Just turn it on. I plug the internet into the fucking router. Just turn on.

Speaker 1:
[106:17] So remember how the show started with me describing that the leaving a camera in place and never touching it or doing anything to it still results in occasional flickering because you yourself. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[106:29] Which is not doing anymore by the way.

Speaker 1:
[106:31] Oh good. I fixed it. Wonderful.

Speaker 2:
[106:33] Well, did you even fix it or did it just stop doing it?

Speaker 1:
[106:35] I actually fucked around to do stuff and try to fix it. But hey, technology, right? You stare at it and it breaks sometimes and...

Speaker 2:
[106:46] Well, that wasn't even an old router. That router was only like seven months old.

Speaker 1:
[106:49] I remember the last time it exploded. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[106:52] Well, that was the network, which I had no control over. Yeah. So at the very least, this time, I was able to go, oh, it's a dead piece of fucking equipment. I'll go get a new piece of equipment. Now, I got to mail the other piece of equipment.

Speaker 1:
[107:09] Is it a hybrid router modem?

Speaker 2:
[107:11] Yeah, it's everything.

Speaker 1:
[107:12] It's one of those all-in-ones. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2:
[107:14] So that, that sucks, because you just decide to do Wi-Fi password. And I'm like, I don't want to decide a new fucking Wi-Fi password, man. I got, I like, I know my old Wi-Fi password.

Speaker 1:
[107:24] Yeah. I also, I rather the, the, the splitting be separated as a function from the like raw internet, because then you can just be like, okay, cool. There's a problem with this relay or whatever the case is, this port, some bullshit. But I know that the plug in from outside the house is fine. Putting them together is, yeah. Anyway, here we go.

Speaker 2:
[107:45] Because the thing wouldn't fucking power on.

Speaker 1:
[107:49] Oh, the lights, no lights at all.

Speaker 2:
[107:51] Yeah. It was like, it just died and the light was on. I'm like, oh, I'll give it five minutes. So I unplug it and you wait. Plug it back in, no light. So I'm like, oh, this thing is fucking dead.

Speaker 1:
[108:02] Absolutely kaput, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2:
[108:04] This is not a technical failure. This thing is for the heavens.

Speaker 1:
[108:07] Well, that's actually easier to understand then, you know?

Speaker 2:
[108:10] Well, yeah, because I knew what the problem was. But I was terrified, I was terrified that what I was gonna deal with was go down to the shop. Hey, can I get a replacement router? Well, you have to call and then we have to ship it to you. Yeah, and that can be 5 to 12 days.

Speaker 1:
[108:32] I'm a huge fan of calling the support for your fucking service, and you're talking to the tech support person where you know more steps ahead than they do.

Speaker 2:
[108:41] Always fun.

Speaker 1:
[108:43] You know, and you're like, no, no, keep up. I already did steps one through four, and we held the reset button, did the whole thing. See that third light? Okay, it's blinking. I know exactly what you get. It's you guys. It's you guys. What does the number say? Give me the service number. Give me the fucking service number. Let's go.

Speaker 2:
[108:59] I was calling customer support so often, and there were so many guys coming out to my house when the Internet trouble started. Your camera is doing the thing again. Back in October, through October, November, December, January, for a good six month period, that one of the guys gave me his fucking cell phone number.

Speaker 1:
[109:22] Oh my god. Oh my god. Okay. That's unusual. Wow.

Speaker 2:
[109:29] I would call him up once a week and go, how's it going? He's like, we've tracked the issue five blocks this way. I think we're coming in. You remember my Internet used to be super spotty like six months ago. So what it was is there was one node with a fuse or something out inside one of those mega, you know those telephone poles that have like 400 boxes attached to them? There was like one fuse in there that was off, but it wasn't listed as it wasn't reading as off in the fucking diagnostic. So every 30 minutes, it would cause everyone in my neighborhood to go down. Like on my street. And so they had to go to the box near my house, wait 30 minutes, check each box every 30 minutes to go, did it blip on this one? And then they traced it out of my neighborhood to find the junction. And then they had to have like 10 guys just stand by a big pole and go, okay, monitor these ones. Did it go off? No, monitor these ones. Did it go off? And eventually they found, oh, yeah, there's a little something flickered button. Thinking about the internet in terms of machines instead of in terms of programming or digitization is scary.

Speaker 1:
[111:01] The analog shit, the actual...

Speaker 2:
[111:03] The analog part of the internet, where it's fuses and semiconductors that can just fail random.

Speaker 1:
[111:12] I don't miss the era when we were rapidly speeding up from dial-up into DSL, into cable, into fiber. And every time a new type of service or a new version of it came out, and you were getting pulled around by all these providers and kind of being upsold on whether it's Videotron or Bell or all these fucking companies. And there was always a promised with a speed and some sort of new thing that was a carrot, but there was new problems you never knew existed that were going to come with this upgrade, right?

Speaker 2:
[111:46] I'm going to say something controversial. There was one upside to 56k modems.

Speaker 1:
[111:54] From the 28.8s?

Speaker 2:
[111:56] No, just general, like dial-ups.

Speaker 1:
[111:58] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[111:59] And that was, we had like a hundred years of expertise on telephone line infrastructure to manage.

Speaker 1:
[112:07] To solve the problems.

Speaker 2:
[112:08] Sure, sure, sure. Is there a problem with my phone line? Don't worry, a guy will be out there in 20 minutes and replace the whole phone line and you'll be good to go.

Speaker 1:
[112:18] Also, you have a landline because who the fuck doesn't? So it's all good.

Speaker 2:
[112:23] I don't know even one person with a landline.

Speaker 1:
[112:26] Nowadays. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But our first dial-up was 14.4. Or whatever the case was at the time. It was just like each time you'd go like, hey, we got the new one, it's faster, etc. But here comes brand new shit, brand new problems including like, oh, it's faster. You switch over to cable here and it's faster, except during peak times when everyone in the neighborhood is also on it, in which case actually shit slows down.

Speaker 2:
[112:57] I use my internet the most during peak times.

Speaker 1:
[113:01] Why should it matter when other people are, oh, because everyone is sharing the same pipe? Okay, cool.

Speaker 2:
[113:08] Hey, I got one for you. There's this new way to raise your kids. You barely have to do anything. Just give them the educational tablet, the iPad.

Speaker 1:
[113:20] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[113:20] They'll learn how to use technology and they'll become super smart. You don't even have to discipline them, just give them the iPad and they'll be quiet.

Speaker 1:
[113:28] We have not yet seen anything wrong with this new technology.

Speaker 2:
[113:31] There's definitely no problems as a result of that.

Speaker 1:
[113:36] Oh, man. Yeah. I even just recently redid a bunch of my cable setup in here simply because the cables I was using were still like Cat 5 and not like 6 or 7 or whatever. There was a point where I was just like, you know what? Let's just get the better cables because these are the old ones I've been holding on to forever because I knew I had this one trusty fucking 60 footer whatever cable I would drag out to lands whenever I needed it. But that shit's like 15 or however billion years old at this point. Anyway, we...

Speaker 2:
[114:15] So I got stressed out, so I made myself an oversized cup of coffee. Did you know that no matter how much coffee you put into this jug, because it's one jug, this is technically one cup of coffee? This is one cup of coffee. It's just a big cup.

Speaker 1:
[114:34] Is that Irish coffee? Is that just coffee?

Speaker 2:
[114:36] No, man, it's just coffee.

Speaker 1:
[114:37] It's just coffee. Yeah, okay. All right. Well, excuse me.

Speaker 2:
[114:42] That's how it works, man.

Speaker 1:
[114:45] One container even, one container of coffee. I was going to bring up another thing just after Bridgebourn. I decided to take out, to check out the demo for The Eternal Life of Goldsman.

Speaker 2:
[115:01] That is the best animated thing I have ever seen in my life.

Speaker 1:
[115:05] Point blank, period.

Speaker 2:
[115:07] Not game, not interactive medium, period.

Speaker 1:
[115:13] Once upon a time, I remember it used to be like, yo, Fantasia, have you ever seen it? It's fucking insane. Disney went hard and went nuts in the level of mastery over just the water animation.

Speaker 2:
[115:25] I think Fantasia is so impressive because they went nuts on it and it was like, what? Fucking 38 or some nuts?

Speaker 1:
[115:30] Yeah, shit. Life was black and white when they did that, you know? It was batshit. And then there's all these other little things that go really hard over the years of just classical animation. And in fact, like we've dialed it back. We've gotten simpler with animation because we were going way too hard back then. So you're seeing the levels here in Goldman that really are, like, I kind of freaked out watching that intro, seeing how hard it went because you're like, okay, the animators are flexing. They don't have to flex this hard. But now after a few minutes of playing, what is the simplest gameplay in the world? It is fucking DuckTales. It's crazy how, you know, inside, when you go hard on animation, you can go full Cuphead, where you're like, this is for freaks. This is for people who want to fucking feel the skin of their teeth, like, on every single run. And then there's this, which is just, yeah, it's platforming, man.

Speaker 2:
[116:28] I assume it's gonna ramp up.

Speaker 1:
[116:31] For sure. For sure. But at the very minimum, it's the most basic platforming with the most insane level of detail. And it gets to the point where I'm like, this is so insanely gorgeous that I am now concerned for the health of the animators. And I am concerned that their effort is at detriment of other things in their life. Do you know what I mean? You ever see, I know, I know, but sometimes you see something where you're just like, this is so insanely lovingly done that it makes me wonder if it's done because the person doing it is like, I have to do it like this.

Speaker 2:
[117:11] You go to a nice restaurant and you have a meal so good that you're like, the cook must be a drug addict.

Speaker 1:
[117:18] They're the home life sucks.

Speaker 2:
[117:19] They have to be on cocaine.

Speaker 1:
[117:22] They're neglecting a wife and child in some way, shape or form to master-

Speaker 2:
[117:26] Now that's their decision.

Speaker 1:
[117:27] To master this fucking meal.

Speaker 2:
[117:29] Sometimes you got to make a good video game and the wife and child just got to get you through the window, say come on, please come inside, don't fight that bull. I'm sorry, I got, I watched the Karate Master 2 Knockdown Blow trailer a few days ago. I always think of your description as the game you play when your wife is crying to come home and not have to fight the car or the bull or whatever.

Speaker 1:
[117:56] Knockdown Blow. I mean, it really does look like you, yeah, there's things in your life that you have chosen to ignore in order to perfect your animation skill to this level and show everybody.

Speaker 2:
[118:11] It could have just taken a while and be very talented.

Speaker 1:
[118:15] What an insane detailed, every aspect of it, everywhere you could have taken a shortcut, you went, no, no object on this menu is simply going to just exist. Everything must be hand animated, hand rotated. Everything that could be a 3D object spinning is hand drawn to spin a cane, to show you different parts of a cane. You know, every transition when you go from one island to another, there's a tree.

Speaker 2:
[118:42] It's not just like the quality, it's like all the little pieces that would never ever ever ever ever be animated in anything else, because who cares?

Speaker 1:
[118:52] I don't fucking care. And shut up, woman, get that kid away from me. I have to draw. You know, there's a thing, there's a tree that is upright. And in any other video game, it has to fall into the water. And you're like, how many times have I seen something get hit in a way where it goes like this? It just rotates and falls into the water, or it gets hit like this and drops off screen, or it just flashes until it's gone. But in this case, the tree has to kind of spin and fall towards you and show you new angles of the tree that you did not see before with frames that did not exist before, specifically because you have to understand every aspect of the tree from the back front and side, because fuck you. I don't care. Shut up. Leave me alone. I need to get this frame right. Stop that baby from crying. Look, this is a dark narrative. It's about to work. This is a dark narrative to go down here, but it's so fucking pretty.

Speaker 2:
[119:54] See, it's funny that you mentioned that, because Goldman had... Like, I played the demo right up until I got a taste of the in-game dark narrative.

Speaker 1:
[120:05] Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 2:
[120:06] I got just the tiniest taste and was like, okay, there's something more real than usual. Because there's always like, oh, here's the behind the fiction. There's the behind the curtain kind of Wizard of Oz kind of thing. But like the discussion being had about a mother telling her child to shut up and stop talking about that time, I called you an accident.

Speaker 1:
[120:32] Oh, man.

Speaker 2:
[120:34] Like much, much more intense than I was expecting.

Speaker 1:
[120:38] And the mother is cast as a mean mom voice. It's not like a nurturing son. It's a sad, it's a tired, aggressive, mean mom. And you're like, I don't know if you're just mean or exasperated from taking care of a sick child, right? I don't know. And I can't say enough to fill in the blanks on it. But right now you sound like you're being very mean to your kid who's sick. And on top of that, every time the world of the lore goes more in depth and goes, here's a berry that's attached to another berry that has a lore to why it exists. And here's a type of game that... And it's zooming in and zooming in. And it's like, my brain doesn't want you to zoom in, it wants you to zoom out. Like, you're talking about this, the island and the lucky ones and the person who went missing and, you know, the relationships between the characters on the island. And I'm like, no, no, what's, what the fuck is going on with this narrative outside the Animus? You know? And there's even one point where you meet the Frenchmen, where, like, it literally interrupts and goes like, oh my god, enough with the talking. Like, what was, what happened next? Let's get, let's get to the next exciting part, you know? And it's almost like, yeah, kid, like, actually, what is, let's find out more about you and this top layer of the game, because the more you zoom in, the more I want to zoom out.

Speaker 2:
[122:05] I, I know this is a segue, but you mentioned the animus, and all I can think of is, hey, remember when we were building up this meta-narrative and building it and building it and building it and building it and then just quit, just quit it, just quit, and then, and then we're like, shit, there's nothing tying this shit to, and they started it the fuck back up all half-assed. What an unbelievable fucking fumble.

Speaker 1:
[122:32] Well, this is what happens.

Speaker 2:
[122:33] What an unbelievable fucking fumble.

Speaker 1:
[122:36] Well, it turns out when you have 1,400 cooks in the kitchen, and about half of them hate everything to do with Desmond, and a lot of them are listening to the players that also hate everything to do with that aspect of the game and just want to focus on the past. And the others are like, no, this is the most important part of the game. We need to lean into it. You end up with whatever the fuck happened with that ending in 3.

Speaker 2:
[123:02] I was an animist true believer, by the way.

Speaker 1:
[123:04] I was too.

Speaker 2:
[123:05] The the modern hook and the fucking, oh, we're going to build it to a game in the modern day.

Speaker 1:
[123:11] The truth.

Speaker 2:
[123:11] That was the explicit promise.

Speaker 1:
[123:14] The truth.avi at the end of Assassin's Creed 1 got me. 100% got me. You're building up this little glitch of like two seconds of footage, two seconds of footage here and there. You're hearing about the Apple of Eden and the fucking pieces of Aiden and the weird shit. And you're like, what are we doing, right?

Speaker 2:
[123:35] What's the back and forth that mattered? I liked 4, which is after they botched it, the first game back after they fucked it up, they took a weird angle where you go test Assassin's Creed 4 and Ubisoft.

Speaker 1:
[123:48] Yeah, yeah, in the lab.

Speaker 2:
[123:49] But they're evil, which is no different from the real world.

Speaker 1:
[123:54] I just, I remember that hit of seeing like the two characters escaping, crawling around whatever, and then they go, Adam, Eve. And you're like, you know, what is this lore? And it seems so much more interesting, and then you fucking abandon all of that. I even had, there's a moment in that dogshit that they went with three, where, you know the fake ending where they go, this is what could have been if you, if you Desmond decided to leave a message for the world, right? There's a moment in this, that whole cut scene where I thought it was interesting where they went, it doesn't matter, no matter how much you understand the past, if you try to write a Bible for the future right now, if you try to write a message to the people of the future, you can't say anything that would not get twisted into evil in the future, no matter what you said. You could try to word it however you want to, you could put as many stipulations as you can, you will never defeat human evil and you will never defeat the inner greed that will warp this into someone's machinations and authoritarianism in the future.

Speaker 2:
[125:07] And we know that because we fist fought the Pope a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 1:
[125:14] The porches, you know, and all of that. And you know, even the little like, I'm like, it wasn't anywhere near the level of it, but like the whatever, talking past Ezio, your whole life was to just have this weird alien talk to someone else who's not you. You know, you're like, OK, OK, sure, you're setting that all up. And I never played anything after that fourth. So I'm just like, I don't even know what they did with that testing the animus thing at all.

Speaker 2:
[125:45] Like, you know what, man, they absolute the the the writing was on the wall that they didn't believe in their own story when Assassin's Creed Brotherhood came out for Ezio, because the big reveal of two is your whole life is a trick. So I can fucking teleconference with someone in the future.

Speaker 1:
[126:08] With someone else, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[126:09] And like, oh, yeah. But also you did tons more, you did two more games of really important stuff.

Speaker 1:
[126:15] You did a bunch of shit after that.

Speaker 2:
[126:16] Because the player loves you, Ezio.

Speaker 1:
[126:18] You super, you're cool. Everyone thinks you're the best. I have to imagine that at some point, the game plan was that a game like Watch Dogs, for example, was actually going to be, this is just bullshit, I know it's not, but I would imagine at some point they were like, we're going to make a game that's modern day, Assassin's Creed, all in real modern day mechanics, right? And you got a hint of it because there was a Desmond sneaking around, taking out the guards in the modern Italian villa for two seconds at the end of the game, right? So you know that they wanted to build up to that, but the more they did that, the more people were like, we could not want to get further away from modern day.

Speaker 2:
[126:59] So, you know, I don't think I ever told you this, but I always had my vision for where Assassin's Creed was going to go, which was the games in the past, and then three or four or whatever would be the modern game, right? And then at the end of the modern game, Qwilak from the year 2800 stops their Desmond simulation, and you do your future Assassin's Creed game in fucking space.

Speaker 1:
[127:40] Or we warp or we go back to Persia and we jump into The Prince. I mean, yeah, I think that like, like in an alternate dimension, they would have, instead of being cowards, they would have gone straight to Japan, right?

Speaker 2:
[128:03] Back on like five.

Speaker 1:
[128:05] Right away.

Speaker 2:
[128:05] France? No, Japan.

Speaker 1:
[128:07] They would have went straight to Japan, and then maybe even the Russia one. And then you go to your, because the mob running on the fucking Kremlin is such a cool idea, and it only worked in that comic book. And then, what?

Speaker 2:
[128:26] I'm gonna make a call for emails. I usually don't do this over at castlesuperbeastmail.gmail.com, because I legitimately can't think, we've talked about that one for years and years, right? There was the comic books and the little baby spin-off games that were like Russia, Japan, and India, I think it was. I can't think, oh, and China as well.

Speaker 1:
[128:50] China, China, China, China.

Speaker 2:
[128:51] I can't think of any game series that decided to say, hey, you know the coolest thing that could ever happen? We're gonna put it into a book to make sure it never happens.

Speaker 1:
[129:05] Ever, ever.

Speaker 2:
[129:06] In the real thing.

Speaker 1:
[129:07] God.

Speaker 2:
[129:08] That one's the worst. AC Russia being relegated entirely to a comic book series is shocking.

Speaker 1:
[129:16] Yeah. No. Let's workshop. I mean, okay, we're off of... Goldsman was incredible. We're serving segments here.

Speaker 2:
[129:24] I don't have much to say. I can't wait for that to come out.

Speaker 1:
[129:28] Alternate reality timeline, Assassin's Creed 1, Altair, Assassin's Creed 2, Ezio, right?

Speaker 2:
[129:37] Assassin's Creed 3, Ezio's come. We did this. This was done.

Speaker 1:
[129:46] We go right past Connor Ratonhagaton to Black Flag, right? So Assassin's Creed 3, you go straight to Black Flag. Then 4, you go to Japan. 5, you go to Russia, but now we're going future-heavy on the outside, the Animus stuff, right? And then the next one, full modern, wraps up the story, call it a day.

Speaker 2:
[130:16] Yeah. I think the single best writing that was ever in Assassin's Creed ever, I think it's in the British one, was a file you can find of Animus engineers arguing with each other about implementing cars into the Animus and describing how driving a car is so automatic for most people. They don't actually form memories of it. So every time they try and put it in the Animus, the thing just completely freaks out.

Speaker 1:
[130:49] Their cognition shuts down. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[130:51] It's like, oh, that's why Assassin's Creed games don't have fucking cars. Not just because it would suck, but the in-universe robot can't do it.

Speaker 1:
[130:59] Even though horses completely serve that purpose for people.

Speaker 2:
[131:03] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[131:05] No. You have that Russian one. Yes, you have that Russian one take place while jumping back to World War 2, if you want to even. Do the things that people get excited. Everything that people would have an excited thought about going, what periods of history would be interesting to jump into and play as and be mechanically fun while sortering into the modern day thing. Give people exactly what they're thinking of and deliver on that. And if you need to, you have a franchise that you can then do other things with or whatever the case is. But that's where you don't have to do this reboot now, where we start trying to salvage the series again.

Speaker 2:
[131:42] Is that the series I was the biggest fan of that I now hate?

Speaker 1:
[131:49] That you were all in on?

Speaker 2:
[131:51] No, there's a different one. It's the Destiny. But Assassin's Creed is close. It's close.

Speaker 1:
[132:01] Yeah, the highest high to the lowest low and then ultimately not paying attention, it doesn't help that if you stop...

Speaker 2:
[132:08] The apathy is the cruelest end point.

Speaker 1:
[132:12] But every time you look away from it, like two more come out, right? That was the thing at the time, was you're not paying attention and then like a handheld one and a console release and a half just dropped on you. So I know you came back and checked out the Egypt and Greece and so on, but like and I just, you know, they were solid, but they weren't solid enough. It was always just the fucking, I was so in and you drop the ball so hard and made it so uninteresting.

Speaker 2:
[132:43] And I loved AC4 so bad, I gave myself frozen shoulder.

Speaker 1:
[132:51] Going too hard in, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[132:53] I just went too hard on it.

Speaker 1:
[132:55] You invent, I didn't know that I needed fucking sailing in my life. I grew to enjoy even the boring parts of Wind Waker and such. But this little section of three where you control the boat for two seconds was such a fucking pop-off.

Speaker 2:
[133:14] Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something. When I was a child and my dad would take me fishing, I was like, man, this is boring. There's nothing to do out here. And now that I'm 40, the idea of going out on a boat and it's really boring, there's nothing to do out here. Man, that sounds fucking lit.

Speaker 1:
[133:33] I'm telling you, man.

Speaker 2:
[133:35] Sometimes the boring stuff is the best part.

Speaker 1:
[133:38] Dredge hits different in the 2020s as opposed to how it would have hit in the yachts. That game came out exactly when it needed to. Anyway. I have continued playing some Slay the Spire and I think I answered some of the questions I was having last time about what builds work and what don't work.

Speaker 2:
[134:05] That will change, too, because you're playing the first variant, right?

Speaker 1:
[134:10] I am. I haven't done the prestige runs and stuff yet, but I did beat the game with the Necrobinder and I did so with a Doom build. It seems like instead of trying to find... Again, you have to just lean into their best types of builds to get your best odds with the characters. I was like Doom is one setup, but I wanted to find others and it was like, no, no, just run Doom. Doom is the best with her. It'll make it all possible. Then I went back to the defect and was trying to set things up and I had a pretty solid setup with them, which is you have a card called Uproar, which plays two damage and then grabs a random attack from your deck and uses that. Then you just delete. Here's a case for teaching you how to delete cards, because I know you said you were struggling with understanding how and why.

Speaker 2:
[135:02] I always struggle with delete move.

Speaker 1:
[135:07] For the defect, for example, when you go to a shop, deleting a card is the most important thing you can do. So here's an exact case for why you'd want to. The defect with the robot, the robot with the little orbs and all that stuff. There's a card you can pick up randomly in random common fights called uproar. What it does is it'll do five damage twice, and then grab a random attack from your deck, no matter what the value is, and play it for free. So you see cards that you can buy or pick up that are going to be five cost cards. Insane damage to all enemies, gives you a ton of resources. However, you need to somehow magically get more points than your turn even starts with.

Speaker 2:
[135:51] Right.

Speaker 1:
[135:51] Okay, cool. Don't bother. Just put these cards that are unplayable in your deck, delete every one point attack from your deck, and every time you play uproar, it's going to grab either another uproar to do the same thing again, or one of these super cards that you can't otherwise play. So thus deleting every basic attack and leaving yourself with only super attacks makes the whole build work. And then all of a sudden you're flying through the game, like just crushing things. And before you know it, you're going uproar into uproar into uproar into nuke, fight over. So things like that are a really good tutorial in thinning out your deck. Good shit. Also, there's a boss called Queen. Holy shit, fuck the Queen. It's an Act 3 boss that just is insane because it like makes it so that you have, you have an add that gets stronger with every swing. It buffs every turn. It's got like a ton of HP. And it makes it so that you can only use one of your cards per the first three that comes out every hand. It's so fucking brutal. No matter how good your deck got built out, that thing is just a fucking menace to fight. I hate it. Yeah, a redo of the Collector, essentially, right? Anyway, yeah, Sleigh of the Spire. Fun stuff. But still finding my way around the ropes. But I kind of get it a little bit better now. This week, I'm going to be playing either more Phoenix Wright if Reggie's feeling better or Legacy of Cain. But if not, then I'll be doing some more one-offs and checking some stuff out that's demos and or just single-player stuff that I wanted to take a look at. So keep your eyes peeled on the schedule for what's going to be going on Wednesday and Thursday. Actually, no, sorry, Thursday is off. It's just going to be Wednesday. Then on Saturday, I am doing a sponsored stream of Pragmata.

Speaker 2:
[137:56] Oh my goodness. I've heard good things about that Pragmata.

Speaker 1:
[138:00] It's quite cool so far. All caps, by the way. Pragmata.

Speaker 2:
[138:05] All caps. All caps. Very important. All caps. Do not use minor caps.

Speaker 1:
[138:10] Oh, does that imply?

Speaker 2:
[138:11] Don't do it.

Speaker 1:
[138:12] I see. Are you going to be using all caps in the near future?

Speaker 2:
[138:16] Absolutely. On my sponsored stream of Pragmata, all caps on Friday.

Speaker 1:
[138:22] On Friday. There you go.

Speaker 2:
[138:24] Maybe there was a reason I fucking crashed out so hard. My fucking router died an hour ago.

Speaker 1:
[138:32] Okay. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[138:33] I'm like, no. Today. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[138:38] I asked them to kick it forward a day because I usually take Fridays off. But there you go.

Speaker 2:
[138:43] Hey. So the best thing about it is one, I like Capcom games. You like Capcom games. The second best thing about it is the money. The third best thing about it is it's reviewing extraordinarily well, but also we both played the demo a bunch of times. It's got some juice.

Speaker 1:
[139:00] It's quite good. Very enjoyable. I think I saw someone say that it's the biggest flaw they had with it, because I think the review bar goes up. The biggest flaw they had with it was that the story plays it safe.

Speaker 2:
[139:14] Yeah, sure. I saw some people say that it's actually a really uplifting, positively oriented dad game, which all other dad games are not. Dad games are overwhelmingly sad revenge focused.

Speaker 1:
[139:30] Well, to be fair, Death Stranding is uplifting, but first it has to terrify the shit out of you before it gets uplifting.

Speaker 2:
[139:43] I played that second one.

Speaker 1:
[139:44] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[139:46] To this I say 6-7.

Speaker 1:
[139:48] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[139:50] That's...

Speaker 1:
[139:51] At least the first time around, they had to scare the shit out of you and then it got uplifting.

Speaker 2:
[139:58] I think that Death Stranding 1 is a significantly better game than Death Stranding 2.

Speaker 1:
[140:03] That being said, hey, what if the baby could hack and fight back?

Speaker 2:
[140:09] Oh, my baby can do that already. Oh.

Speaker 1:
[140:13] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[140:13] Yeah, he's super good with his numbers. My baby better than all babies.

Speaker 1:
[140:19] Okay. Is your baby doing Bioshock pipe puzzles while mid-third-person action?

Speaker 2:
[140:25] No, that's too easy.

Speaker 1:
[140:27] Okay. Pragmata. Coming up.

Speaker 2:
[140:31] I don't know how to pronounce it correctly. I got to be honest.

Speaker 1:
[140:33] I'm going to say pragmatic, pragmata.

Speaker 2:
[140:36] I'm saying pragmata.

Speaker 1:
[140:37] Yeah. But then again-

Speaker 2:
[140:38] Pragmata, but practically.

Speaker 1:
[140:40] Yeah. But I've also been saying razel, raziel, raziel.

Speaker 2:
[140:46] That's a biblical term.

Speaker 1:
[140:49] So, you know.

Speaker 2:
[140:50] It's the tree of knowledge. You should know that.

Speaker 1:
[140:54] Oh, fucking. What am I? I'm a Kabbalah up here?

Speaker 2:
[141:00] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[141:00] Yeah. Yeah. Sephirot with a T. The. Yeah, I like it's like they say it every cutscene. What the fuck? And it's like, yeah, a couple of times.

Speaker 2:
[141:14] Well, is it not so this reminds me of it? I mentioned this just the other day of a very specific annoyance I had from a guy named Patrick, who used to be on the giant bomb cast. His name was Patrick Klepek or he's alive. His name is Patrick Klepek and he was talking about Tomb Raider. And every single time he talked about Tomb Raider for multiple weeks on the podcast because I think it was during the reboot series, he called Lara Croft, Laura Croft.

Speaker 1:
[141:43] Laura, Laura, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[141:44] And got like audibly pissy about everyone correcting him. And he's like, whatever, it's like the same name. No, it's not. Those are both real names. Also, your name is Patrick. There's a bunch of ways to fuck up the pronunciation of the name Patrick. Is it Patrick? Is that you, Patrick?

Speaker 1:
[142:10] It's funny. It sounds more normal to me because my brother growing up always said Laura Croft. Whenever we talked about your brother's a dick, he always did. That's what it was. We played PC games and he would say Laura. And I was like, I guess that's what it is.

Speaker 2:
[142:23] Your brother doesn't know how to spell.

Speaker 1:
[142:25] And then now all I see on him, all I hear is the reboot. But yeah. Razel? Raziel? Razel?

Speaker 2:
[142:36] Raziel.

Speaker 1:
[142:37] Raziel. Raziel.

Speaker 2:
[142:39] They do say it like every cutscene.

Speaker 1:
[142:41] And there aren't as many cutscenes as you remember.

Speaker 2:
[142:44] There should have been.

Speaker 1:
[142:45] Everybody thinks that this is a huge, intensive story game. It's not. You're pushing blocks for four hours. And then there's like two seconds of 30 second cutscenes that go off.

Speaker 2:
[142:56] Bummer, because like the direction of the voice acting is just so, so good. But yeah, no, there's only like 40 minutes total, probably.

Speaker 1:
[143:06] There's not. People remember a lot more story than there actually was.

Speaker 2:
[143:11] It came from the era of the back of your working designs. JRPG box said almost an hour of anime cutscenes on the back.

Speaker 1:
[143:25] I mean, I realize that like in the Eidos era, there this I think I'm repeating myself, but like swimming through fucking water tubes and pushing blocks equals gameplay. That is what a video game is. You weren't there was no part of you.

Speaker 2:
[143:41] Exploratin.

Speaker 1:
[143:42] Yeah, that's dungeon. That's explain you're doing Indiana Jones things. Whatever Indiana Jones does, that's what a video game ought to be. This is the definition of an adventure. And who are you to complain otherwise? Until now, where you're just like, bitch, you're gonna have me push a block one square at a time from the third room back to the first room and then rotate it because it was the wrong orientation by dragging it back to the second room. And this whole thing...

Speaker 2:
[144:09] This is hours on the clock.

Speaker 1:
[144:10] And even if you had the answer in your brain and you could have solved it in about 60 seconds, the dragging time minimum requires you to do it for 10. You know, like... Anyway, I don't know how...

Speaker 2:
[144:26] Bro, I am about to crash out. I have... When I turn this computer on, Steam loads up with it in the background, right? Because I'm always using stream. Hades 2 is updating right now with more story content.

Speaker 1:
[144:39] Yeah, it is. Of course it is.

Speaker 2:
[144:44] You absolute... Many characters will have new things to say at various points during the story.

Speaker 1:
[144:50] Pat. You! I have bad news for you. Your child is updating with new story as we speak right now. There is new content being updated to your child right now in the background. The next time you go, things will have upgraded.

Speaker 2:
[145:09] No. You know what sucks, dude? You know what absolutely sucks shit when he says a cool new... Okay, so he was eating his Cheerios and some yogurt in a baby dish. And I was like, hey, man, are you all done? He's like, yeah, dad, I'm all done. And then he picked up his little thing and lifted up and went, I made a mess though.

Speaker 1:
[145:34] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[145:35] And I'm like, wow, okay. And then I ran to tell Paige. I'm like, Paige, Paige, Paige, he said this. She's like, oh yeah, he's been saying that lately. I'm like, oh, is that when I'm doing dad show? She's like, yeah. I'm like, oh.

Speaker 1:
[145:53] Oh, yeah. That's an incredibly aware statement. Yeah, I know. I mean, just now, I got a little shout that like, hey, she's loving the chicken. I'm like, oh, cool. Nice. There's some meals that I want to see the reaction to.

Speaker 2:
[146:16] I'm so excited. In three-ish years, there are going to be the most depressing ass fucking dad streams of all on dude's first day of school. It's going to be like, and the whole schedule is going to switch to accommodate, right? It's going to be like nine to two or something, and it's just going to be like death stare at nothing. Just, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[146:47] Yeah. You know, I mean, literally, we're just discussing how daycare is coming up at some point, and what that means, and the implications of, oh, so she goes over there, huh?

Speaker 2:
[147:04] You or the wife need to have a discussion with the daycare because there is a unwritten rule about daycare, genuinely, and you need to ascertain whether or not your daycare agrees to the unwritten rule, and that is really simple. It is, oh my god, I'm so proud of her. She's asking, she's saying please at the end. It is up to the daycare professional to not say, oh yeah, she did that yesterday when you weren't here. No, everything happens for the first time with mom and dad. Daycare people, for sake, unless it is a safety issue or fucking whatever, all first steps, words, concepts, et cetera, didn't happen at daycare.

Speaker 1:
[147:56] You didn't see it, just lie to me.

Speaker 2:
[147:58] There is no benefit to hearing that your infant took their first steps at daycare.

Speaker 1:
[148:05] Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2:
[148:05] What, who the fuck does that help?

Speaker 1:
[148:08] Just lie to me. That's pretty good. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[148:14] Now luckily, I got a couple of these things for when the baby's at school.

Speaker 1:
[148:21] That motherfucker solved some calculus while you were away. What, you didn't know?

Speaker 2:
[148:25] Nah, man. That can backfire because there are daycare stories of children who can complete tasks and or speak languages outside of the view of their parents. Then they will fake not knowing how to do those things because they don't want to do it.

Speaker 1:
[148:45] I saw fucking baby race the other day. Baby races where they like you crawl, right? Come, come, come. I saw one where it's like, oh my God, oh my God, this one kid is standing and walking for the first time. In the middle of the race, look at him go. Even though that's illegal, you can't have walkers or whatever.

Speaker 2:
[149:03] Yeah, you gotta knock that kid over.

Speaker 1:
[149:04] But it was the first time ever and totally not rehearsed, even though this kid is hoofing it and doing the Usain Bolt at the end. Yo, he's fucking breaking records and doing a spinner-oony. But wow, oh my God, the first time ever. Fucking cheating pieces of shit. Like asshole parents, bro. You can't even have this one thing be honest and earnest with everybody. You have to fucking, you have to cheat. God, anyways. Can't wait for them.

Speaker 2:
[149:37] No one's going to kick a baby out for cheating, dude.

Speaker 1:
[149:41] Yeah. Well, whatever. I thought you were going to say the rule is like when you get the update that says like, what happened today? And it was like, oh, well, little Timmy over here was being a little physical and lashed out a little bit. You go, oh, okay, cool. So where's he at? So we get what?

Speaker 2:
[150:08] You're not quite there yet, Woolie. You're not quite there. But you're about to encounter-

Speaker 1:
[150:14] We get our equalizer, right?

Speaker 2:
[150:16] You're about to encounter a cognitive dissonance, which is, they're just kids, man.

Speaker 1:
[150:24] I could. I could do it.

Speaker 2:
[150:25] They're just kids.

Speaker 1:
[150:26] I could do it.

Speaker 2:
[150:27] How could you judge a two-year-old right up until that two-year-old that you're not going to judge gets within ten feet of your two-year-old and acts like a fucking little piece of shit?

Speaker 1:
[150:44] If I Electric Wind Godfist low enough to the ground, I think I can get some nice depth to it, you know? Cause you don't want to whiff overhead. You want to get nice and deep before you come back up with a dorya. So I'm just like, how low, how low do I need to buffer that step before we come back up? You got to get like at least knee height. Otherwise you're just, you know, it's error. Otherwise. So yeah, we're going to see.

Speaker 2:
[151:14] There are some, there are some toddlers at my local place that I would fight. If I lived in a world with no consequences.

Speaker 1:
[151:22] You know, again, I just, I want to remind everybody of what happened in Tatsunoko versus Capcom when Street Fighter's very own celebrity, Alex, would land a stun gun headbutt on Roll. He would jump across the screen, grab the child and then take a knee. He'd get nice and low and then just do a little, just some chops. Just get some flash chops on the child.

Speaker 2:
[151:48] Alex Street Fighter is not big on societal approval or boundaries.

Speaker 1:
[151:53] On norms, you know?

Speaker 2:
[151:55] Yeah, no, Alex does not care for your social norms.

Speaker 1:
[151:59] Yes, Roll got flash chopped just real nice and low.

Speaker 2:
[152:04] A bunch of times.

Speaker 1:
[152:04] A bunch of times, yep. Yep, everyone gets it. Everyone gets these hands. Everyone can catch them. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[152:13] My wife just discorded me. You guys talking about beating kids? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[152:23] So the policies of the daycare will be written on the wall. We'll find out what happens. Anyways, that's what's going on. Let's-

Speaker 2:
[152:38] We should thank our sponsors.

Speaker 1:
[152:40] Already did that when you weren't here.

Speaker 2:
[152:42] That's very smart of you to do that.

Speaker 1:
[152:45] Nah.

Speaker 2:
[152:48] That's very smart. Because when I texted you, the shit was fucked. There's a definite possibility it wasn't coming back.

Speaker 1:
[152:54] I ended the show and called it done.

Speaker 2:
[152:56] So this is a bonus show.

Speaker 1:
[152:58] So this is just some weird bonus shit that people were not expecting. That's why half of the comments are people going, wait, why are they back?

Speaker 2:
[153:06] Can I talk about my week a little bit?

Speaker 1:
[153:08] What did you do?

Speaker 2:
[153:10] So I did mainly two things. One was I checked out the demo for a cozy game called Neverway. I would highly suggest you look at some screenshots of Neverway as I described this. Neverway is out of Brazil, I believe. The trailer for it showed up a while ago, and it looked like a monochrome, like cozy, Stardew kind of game. You're doing your crops, you're engaging with townspeople.

Speaker 1:
[153:40] Love these colors.

Speaker 2:
[153:41] But the description is, after quitting her dead-ed job, Fiona starts over on a farm and becomes the immortal herald of a dead god. Make friends, fight through horrors, and pay your debt in this nightmarish, cozy RPG.

Speaker 1:
[153:56] Nothing about the face of this main character or the energy of these screenshots appears to be cozy.

Speaker 2:
[154:02] So, it's the cozy gameplay rapper, right? Over something very different. So right off the bat, I don't remember these people's names, I am sorry. It is the pixel artist of Celeste, and the person who did the soundtrack for Hyper Light Drifter. Oh, cool. So, this is a very strong audiovisual pedigree right away.

Speaker 1:
[154:32] Disaster Peace and Cold Blood.

Speaker 2:
[154:36] The game is in monochrome, but what colors the monochrome are changes per scene, right? It's like extremely strong primary color with an accent for nearly everything. So, the prologue is out, is what I played, and the prologue is you are so depressed, you have not been to work for five days and you are fired, and your job is to go down to work and get your stuff. And on the way home, you get the status effect, tired and disassociated, and trip the fuck out and have a psychedelic episode on a train, at which point you decide, I got to get the fuck out of here, and decide to move to essentially a Stardew Valley style, like frontier rural area, and kind of homestead it. And that's the very, very beginning of the prologue. And then it kicks you into a second part of the demo, which is later on at an unknown time, which is nearly exclusively gameplay. But I thought it was going to be planting crops and talking to townspeople and shit. No, it's hyper light fucking drifter.

Speaker 1:
[155:56] I'm looking at combat right now in the trailer.

Speaker 2:
[156:00] It is in a bafflingly VR style environment. It has a dash and a hook shot. It has a three hit combo on your sword attack. It also has, I learned a new ability where if I dash, it leaves shadow clones behind me that attack for me after two seconds. But then I have to gather enough materials to do my woodworking in order to fix a bridge, like you would in Mystery or Stardew.

Speaker 1:
[156:33] You know, cozy can be inserted into any genre. It's just a series of management.

Speaker 2:
[156:38] It's just the progression trappings and the good vibes on building something up.

Speaker 1:
[156:42] That's it.

Speaker 2:
[156:44] Feels good, looks good, sounds good. Very weird concept, like very much like, I don't know what is happening. I don't know if this is real, I don't know if this is fake, etc. Super exciting looking. Your main character is like canonically depressed and often gets like the depressed status and there's all these little touches to the cozy end of like, do you want to go to bed? If you just go to bed, you get crash out. Like, it's not sleep, it's crash out.

Speaker 1:
[157:15] In the original parlance of the term.

Speaker 2:
[157:18] And the downside is you gain a random negative status effect the next day.

Speaker 1:
[157:23] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[157:24] Unless you walk over towards your dresser and change into your pajamas. Doing that takes five seconds, but then when you go to your bed, instead of crash out, it says sleep.

Speaker 1:
[157:37] What crashing out used to mean.

Speaker 2:
[157:39] Yeah. Which like, so very, very like little bits and pieces. Very cool. I'm expecting it to be a 60-40. So the way Stardew works is there's five pillars and one of them is combat. Right? In Stardew, it's farming, foraging, farming, foraging, mining, and then animals, and then combat. Right? And no, fishing and combat. My mistake. And I expect that to be similar, but instead of it being split 80-20 of everything and then combat, probably like a 60-40, because the combat in this game is really involved and really excellent.

Speaker 1:
[158:30] In my brain, farming, fishing, foraging, and like, those are all the same thing, because it's going to a resource and collecting the resource and waiting for it to replenish.

Speaker 2:
[158:44] You would think, but no, they are different.

Speaker 1:
[158:50] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[158:52] So yeah, no, Neverway looks extremely promising.

Speaker 1:
[158:55] Yeah, this looks great.

Speaker 2:
[158:57] The devs are also very nice, because when I was talking about it, they hopped on on social media. We're like, Oh my God, thank you for talking about our game. You know, that kind of indie, indie like appreciation. The new thing where I'm definitely going to cover it when it comes out.

Speaker 1:
[159:09] Well, we're in an era where back in the day, we would just pop in a random game and LP it. And nowadays halfway through, they're like, Hey, the devs are in the chat.

Speaker 2:
[159:16] And you're like, Oh, and then, and then you mentally Rolodex the amount of shit you've talked in the last hour and hope it's zero. I have been playing a game.

Speaker 1:
[159:28] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[159:29] And gone, what fucking idiot did this, this or that? And I hope they're not in there when I do that. Cause that's embarrassed.

Speaker 1:
[159:36] And you're you on that, right? And that is, that is, hey, to some degree, I have to keep it real. That's brand, right? I will say that I automatically put some kid gloves on for indie games. I just do. I always have, I always have, I'm like, you're not a giant studio. You're doing what you can. So shortcomings are reasonable given the scale and size.

Speaker 2:
[159:58] Honestly, I would have to agree that for indie games, I also put on, let's say, let's say I put on one kid glove.

Speaker 1:
[160:04] Sure. Unless the whole point of the stream is to look at this jank ass shit.

Speaker 2:
[160:11] Yeah, and then it's like, come on.

Speaker 1:
[160:13] And then our tone has been set from the jump.

Speaker 2:
[160:15] I gotta hit my numbers here. I gotta talk some shit. Anyway, so yeah, Neverway looks super good. Like very, very impressive. I also played a game called Kingdom Hearts 2, which people like, people over the years have liked.

Speaker 1:
[160:30] Speaking of indie games.

Speaker 2:
[160:32] Yeah, speaking of indie games, maybe like, well, the Kingdom Hearts 2 is like the peak moneyed game from a peak moneyed era of a peak moneyed company, which is 2005 Square Enix on the PS2.

Speaker 1:
[160:49] Hold on a minute. Did Kingdom Hearts cost more than Final Fantasy proper?

Speaker 2:
[160:54] I don't know about that because the Disney stuff makes it really complicated.

Speaker 1:
[160:58] It does.

Speaker 2:
[160:59] But they invented, so Square Enix invented their lip-syncing technology for Kingdom Hearts 2.

Speaker 1:
[161:07] Yes, they did. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[161:08] And they use it a lot in that game. It's also a game that you can really, so Kingdom Hearts 1 is like this as well. When you're playing 2 and you're like, they use every part of the digital buffalo in a way that's super impressive. You go to a world and the world's like cut scene, go down this essentially big broad hallway with a couple paths to fight enemies and get to the end. Cutscene, go back across the fucking same room you just did. Cutscene, go down the other path, wide open area, get a little lost, do a battle. Cutscene, specialty encounter, defend the area, grab the item. There's a good one, for example, in Pirates of the Caribbean, you can only damage the pirates in the moonlight. If they're in darkness, they're invincible because the curse is on them. But in the moonlight, they're the skeleton form, so you can fight them. Cutscene, boss, end of world, off you go. The levels are more, are usually really fucking small. Five, six rooms, tops.

Speaker 1:
[162:28] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[162:29] You saw...

Speaker 1:
[162:31] I saw Agrabah, and I saw Tarzan, right?

Speaker 2:
[162:35] So those two are actually pretty appropriate for the whole franchise. It's like...

Speaker 1:
[162:44] Yeah, you drop in and you spend, you spend some time doing a bunch of stuff in this fucking jungle.

Speaker 2:
[162:50] Yeah. But the actual amount of rooms is fairly small, right? And they use that to vary it up. Kingdom Hearts 2's big thing. I'm not gonna...

Speaker 1:
[163:01] I'm...

Speaker 2:
[163:04] It starts... Do you remember that period after 2001, where every single time you started a game, you didn't know if the character you were playing as, you were gonna play it for the whole game?

Speaker 1:
[163:20] Oh, that was a period, huh? Are you...

Speaker 2:
[163:24] That was like a bunch of fucking games.

Speaker 1:
[163:27] Are we actually starting the game, or are you trying to be a fucking clever right now? Are we doing a little... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[163:34] So Kingdom Hearts 2 has the second best one of those.

Speaker 1:
[163:40] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[163:40] The first best is obviously Metal Gear Solid 2, because... And I'll give it to that just because we didn't know. It was actually completely unknown at the time. But on top of that, KH2... This is the final mixed version. I've not played it since 2005, and I definitely didn't play it right after playing Kingdom Hearts 1. The first thing you notice if you look at any screenshot, the camera has been pulled way back. Like in KH1, Sora's shoes were almost at the bottom of the screen. Now, pulled way back. Why? Because you need a wider camera, because you're going to fight way more dudes. The focus on more moves, more types of enemies. There's now something called a reaction command, which is if the enemy is doing a special goofy thing, you hit triangle and you respond. It's very similar in effect to Nero's Devilbringer, so that Sora can have a bespoke reaction to every single enemy in the game.

Speaker 1:
[164:37] A context button.

Speaker 2:
[164:38] Yeah. They re-did how magic works. In KH1, fire was a shot, blizzard was a different shot, lightning was a dropping shot. Here, some of them are shots, some of them spin around you with flame, all sorts of different things you can do it. They replaced arrow, which was damage down shield, with reflect, which is just a parry. It's just a parry. It will parry attacks and retaliate. On top of that, just the general feel and the amount of moves is so massively improved. It's like a DMC1 to DMC3 kind of jump in feel. And the best way to explain that to a guy like you is that one of the first abilities you get is tap square during a combo to hit your launcher.

Speaker 1:
[165:32] Nice, okay.

Speaker 2:
[165:33] And then you can jump up and follow them with your air attacks.

Speaker 1:
[165:40] Are you still psycho-crushing from enemy to enemy?

Speaker 2:
[165:45] Psycho-crushing.

Speaker 1:
[165:46] I feel like my memories of KH1 were like you swing a bunch on one dude and do a couple of things and then you spin psycho-crusher over to the next one.

Speaker 2:
[165:54] Oh yeah, the aerial spin. Yeah, yeah, no. Not really.

Speaker 1:
[165:59] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[166:00] You're juggling a lot more guys.

Speaker 1:
[166:02] And what are Donald and Goofy doing?

Speaker 2:
[166:05] So I'm playing on critical, which is the hardest difficulty. It does a lot of things under the hood but the long short of it is it's the hardest difficulty but they give you so much AP that you can turn on any ability you want. So it turns the game less into an RPG and more into an action game. So as a result, Goofy and Donald are dying. They are dying. They're dying instantly in every fight. Unless I put Goofy inside me. So Kingdom Hearts 2, one of its big mechanical changes is something called Drive. And what Drive is, is hey, is Goofy alive when you have a full drive meter? You can turn into red Sora, which has two keyblades. Goofy will leave the party. And for 30 to 50 seconds, you get to play two keyblades Sora.

Speaker 1:
[166:57] That's what that is. I've seen the artwork of that one. He's got more edge.

Speaker 2:
[167:03] Yeah. Do you want to play as, that's Valor. Do you want to play as Wisdom? Okay. Donald will disappear and Sora will be replaced with a version, with blue Sora. And blue Sora ice skates, and his default attack is him holding the keyblade like a gun and shooting magic. And all of your spells have been massively improved. And there's more forms past that. It's much more mechanically complex. It's a much, much better action game. And the final mix version really nails that home, because the final mix version added like 25 extra bosses in one Coliseum type thing or just like spray. So everyone that got killed in Chain of Memories is back as what's called an absent silhouette. So, for example, I was in the Pirates level, and you get off the boat in the Pirates level, and there's a floating icon in front of you. And so I goes, what's that? Oh, it's an absent silhouette, right? And then you fight it, and it is the boss that people were complaining at me for 90 minutes last night. Dude, just leave, you can't beat her. And I'm like, no, I'm making progress though. I think I saw the second phase.

Speaker 1:
[168:35] I see.

Speaker 2:
[168:37] They are all super bosses. Everything that was added was all like fucking super bosses up there with like a Virgil. And it is every single member of Organization 13, some of them twice because they died in Chain of Memories, as well as Sephiroth again and some other super bosses on top of that.

Speaker 1:
[169:01] Without cards to...

Speaker 2:
[169:02] No, yeah, you wanna fucking fight them? So there's a clip of me fighting Sephiroth that was going around when I did KH1, in which I'm like, all right, let's go. And he swung his sword once and it hit me and I instantly died within one second. That happened again yesterday, where I was like, I can take this bitch. And within 40 frames of loading into the fight, I got hit by lightning and died. Like these are absolutely crazy level super bosses. And I beat one under level, and I don't think I can get that second one. But there's just tons of shit in this thing. Like the final mix also added hundreds of puzzle pieces. They're just collectibles. But then when you get the collectible, you have to actually make the photo that the puzzle pieces make. And one of them is like 50 pieces. I'm not good at these types of puzzles.

Speaker 1:
[170:00] Sly puzzle?

Speaker 2:
[170:02] No, just a regular puzzle.

Speaker 1:
[170:03] Okay, just put the pieces. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[170:06] So yeah. And on top of that, like the... So if Kingdom Hearts appeals to people around our age, honestly, most people got into it around KH1, which means that as the games kept going and new movies kept getting inserted in by Disney, then some people started to fall off. And like, Kingdom Hearts 2 has Tron and Lion King and Beauty and the Beast and Mulan. And it's like, no, these are the ones, man. Like this, these are the good, good picks.

Speaker 1:
[170:44] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[170:45] It's a great fucking game. It's an incredible fucking game.

Speaker 1:
[170:49] Did you get through it?

Speaker 2:
[170:53] No.

Speaker 1:
[170:54] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[170:54] I've spent, I've spent, up, as of now, I have spent a full stream split between two bosses I couldn't beat because I bet I could beat them at level 20 when they're, you're actually supposed to beat them at level 50. But I thought I could do it. No, I'm not, I'm not even a quarter.

Speaker 1:
[171:15] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[171:15] Through KH2.

Speaker 1:
[171:17] Why, I mean, I guess this is one of those questions, but why is Squall Leon?

Speaker 2:
[171:25] I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[171:26] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[171:28] So Squall is Leon and Cloud is Vincent.

Speaker 1:
[171:33] Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, the second one I heard is just like they wanted it to be him, but then they said no, so let's just mix the two or whatever. But I was just like, what was the actual reason for the name switch?

Speaker 2:
[171:46] One of the funnier things, like genuinely, is if you look at, if you look at, what's her name, Yuffie in Kingdom Hearts 1, which I'm pretty sure you saw, she was supposed to be Riku. That's why her outfit is wrong, and it's much closer to Riku's outfit. But they didn't put Riku in because they didn't want to be confusing because there's a different character named Riku in Kingdom Hearts.

Speaker 1:
[172:20] He's the most important person in Kingdom Hearts. Yes, that would be a problem.

Speaker 2:
[172:25] You can't do that. Right, right, right.

Speaker 1:
[172:28] Yes, no, obviously Squall's name, Lionheart, like that's known, I'm just saying why, like Cloud is not calling himself Stry.

Speaker 2:
[172:36] Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[172:37] Why is he using that as his name is the thing? I guess you play it and you find out.

Speaker 2:
[172:42] What's weird is that Leon's an adult, but Cypher's still like 14.

Speaker 1:
[172:50] Oh yeah, I feel like I've seen the models have the weird proportion changes for them and stuff. True. Hmm, I have questions. I wonder about the Final Fantasy aspect of these games, but whatever, I guess you find out eventually.

Speaker 2:
[173:06] You do. Yeah, no, A plus shit. And also, man, there's... It's really great to do a stream and just be able to sit around in a big group and be like, man, I fucking love Winnie the Pooh. Winnie the Pooh is so great. I wish I could hug Winnie the Pooh and help him get some honey. He's such a good guy.

Speaker 1:
[173:28] He's cool. He's cool.

Speaker 2:
[173:30] Oh, you don't have any love in your heart for Winnie the Pooh?

Speaker 1:
[173:33] I do. I just love Tigger more.

Speaker 2:
[173:35] Yeah. Okay. Well, the whole, the gang of the Hundred Acre Wood, they're a good bunch of guys.

Speaker 1:
[173:41] Absolutely. Yeah. Eeyore is the shit.

Speaker 2:
[173:44] Fuck Eeyore.

Speaker 1:
[173:45] Eeyore is cool, man.

Speaker 2:
[173:47] Oh, man. I fucking hate Eeyore. Eeyore in the modern world is on the fucking Reddit getting blackpilled.

Speaker 1:
[173:59] You just said the gang at the Hundred Acre Wood and then immediately you immediately want to include him.

Speaker 2:
[174:06] All right.

Speaker 1:
[174:07] Well, in any case, I don't know, Pooh.

Speaker 2:
[174:11] Maybe it's the Foids. Fuck you, Eeyore. Shut up. Go outside.

Speaker 1:
[174:18] Don't put that shit on my boy.

Speaker 2:
[174:20] That's too late. I already did put that shit on Eeyore in the Kingdom Hearts 1 shit that I did. I did that already. No one could stop me.

Speaker 1:
[174:28] Eeyore is not fucking Man-A-Sphere-Pilled, all right? We need to chill.

Speaker 2:
[174:34] His tail represents his manhood stolen away by females.

Speaker 1:
[174:42] You ever been to Romania?

Speaker 2:
[174:45] See, it's fun. It's fun.

Speaker 1:
[174:49] Well, now because you set up the stupid bit we do, which is combine A with B, so now you have to go forward. Even though I disagree with the bit, I'm still trying to find ways to work Piglet into fucking...

Speaker 2:
[175:02] Oh, Piglet just has an anxiety disorder.

Speaker 1:
[175:05] Yeah, well, you know, and I'm trying to see if I can work that into a Kermit voice and then just push it to the logical conclusions because that's the same stupid one bit. There's one bit we do here.

Speaker 2:
[175:14] But yeah, KH2 is a good game. It's real good. And this week I'm going to play more of it. Shocker, I'm going to play more of it tomorrow, on Wednesday, and on Saturday. Thursday, I'm going to be playing Rondo of Blood, which I've never beaten, not even close.

Speaker 1:
[175:32] Just out of nowhere?

Speaker 2:
[175:34] Well, not exactly just out of nowhere. See, next week's my birthday. I'm turning the 4-0, which means I'm going to die soon. So as a result, I'm going to do a 24-hour stream, and I'm probably going to do a fucking run through of Symphony of the Night. Just go the whole way through.

Speaker 1:
[175:53] Well, you know, I've been 40. I'm still alive for now. Also, you keep forgetting that I'm older.

Speaker 2:
[175:57] I saw that thread.

Speaker 1:
[175:58] I saw it. Strangely. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[176:01] And I know what the answer is. Why do I forget every year? It's because I'm Baldur and Wrinkler-der. And I've always been Baldur and Wrinkler-der-der than you.

Speaker 1:
[176:16] I'm 40, bro.

Speaker 2:
[176:17] Always.

Speaker 1:
[176:20] Well, hey, look, good timing on that because, I mean, the new shit they're showing off with Belmont's Curse looks pretty fucking sick.

Speaker 2:
[176:29] Did I tell you that when the Belmont's Curse thing got announced, like every time somebody asked me if I'd seen the new Castlevania for like a full week, I would go, have I? And then I would stop the stream and pull up the YouTube video to watch the trailer again.

Speaker 1:
[176:41] Yeah, okay, okay. No, the new one with the commentary over it with them just going like, yeah, we had the audacity to set this one in France. You know, it was like, yeah, and in the meantime, like all this, in the meantime, while they're talking over it, you're just seeing dead cells in Castlevania world happening.

Speaker 2:
[177:00] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[177:00] You're seeing dead cells level ups and like platforming and just crazy cool looking shit in the background.

Speaker 2:
[177:07] It's different in a very specific way. So like there are some Castlevania old heads that are wrong, that are like, I can't believe Sonya hangs in the air when she throws the whip instead of just falling according to her old momentum. It's like, yeah, cause that's better. Cause that's a better way to fucking use the whip as platforming. Shut up.

Speaker 1:
[177:32] Oh man. I have none of that in my soul. I have none of that dude. But I do.

Speaker 2:
[177:39] I have lots of it, but I'm on the other side of it.

Speaker 1:
[177:41] But I understand though, because to be fair, it's like, when Mega Man X got his dash, the dash is head first, and Mega Man's dash before was feet first, like a football slide.

Speaker 2:
[178:00] That's right. That's right.

Speaker 1:
[178:01] Instead of soccer sliding, he's dashing forward, and it's like, well, that's not what it's supposed to be. That's wrong. That's incorrect. It's like, no, but it's fucking cool. It's cooler.

Speaker 2:
[178:09] Yeah, because he's a more dynamic.

Speaker 1:
[178:11] It's cooler to lean your head forward and anime dash forward. So shut the fuck up and just take it. It's fine. It's sick. It looks awesome. And you just accept that. And now when he dashes, yeah, the head forward, is that, that deletes all, the first time you dash head first through a boss door as X and it slowly moves forward while the whole screen scrolls over, you're like, yeah, fuck the, the soccer slide, we're done with that forever.

Speaker 2:
[178:38] So I'm going to be dramatic here. I don't really care about the soccer slide from classic Mega Man.

Speaker 1:
[178:43] No, no, but it was when you never had any movement, it was like, oh my God, holy shit, movement, right? It was a thing. But yeah, but this, this and then the shadows and then the first time you kick off a fucking wall, are you kidding me? Shut the fuck up. That shit's insane.

Speaker 2:
[178:59] Kicking off a wall in Mega Man X is so good.

Speaker 1:
[179:02] God damn it, that fucking game rules, dude.

Speaker 2:
[179:04] That it altered the course of Hero Academia.

Speaker 1:
[179:07] I'm so mad. It's so awesome. Mega Man X is the shit.

Speaker 2:
[179:14] Isn't it really crazy how you look at a game like Mega Man X and you think about the wall kicks and you think how like nearly every single game to ever have wall kicks after that is just aping Mega Man X because it nailed it on the first try.

Speaker 1:
[179:28] First try, hold, kick, off, on, kick, kick, kick, kick in the fucking tutorial level. God, someone sent me a thing going, you talked about X3 the other day and the shitty Xero system in that. Here's a mod where someone changed it and fixed the game so that you can play as Xero as much as you want the whole time, starting as him. And they edited the whole intro cut scene so that after they both jump up and take down the giant machine, the X zooms away and you just stay as Xero the whole time. And I'm just like watching it and I'm like, I got time. Fuck it. Yeah, let's go. Run it. Let's just watch this run. You know? God fucking damn it, those games ruled. And so that's all this to say that if you do the thing that's blasphemous or wrong compared to the way it used to be, but it rules, shut up. Who cares? That's what it is now.

Speaker 2:
[180:24] As a Castlevania person, right? There's a really specific type of developer interview that you get pretty rarely when it's just asking some basic questions, but every time they answer the question, they answer the question perfect. Like they say just the right thing. So, hey, in that interview, hey, how does the whip feel in Belmont's Curse? And the gentleman says, well, we wanted it to feel like Super Castlevania 4, yes, that's the one, but not as wiggly.

Speaker 1:
[181:05] Yes, that's the only problem with the whip in that gig.

Speaker 2:
[181:09] You know, you nailed it. That's the perfect answer.

Speaker 1:
[181:13] Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Which is why they got the gig, right?

Speaker 2:
[181:17] Yeah, that's why they got it, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[181:20] Nice. Okay. All right.

Speaker 2:
[181:22] That's it for me. Go down to twitch.tv/patstairs at the youtube.com/patstairsat/live. I'm going to do streams. They're good.

Speaker 1:
[181:33] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[181:34] Check out the ProgMata one on Friday. It's going to be fun.

Speaker 1:
[181:37] Yeah. It's also got to have its conditional little shorts to go alongside it too.

Speaker 2:
[181:48] Have you done one of those yet? That's a yes no, man. That's a yes no.

Speaker 1:
[181:54] Yeah. No, but it's part of the thing this time.

Speaker 2:
[181:57] Let me tell you. Maybe you're not enough of a shit bag to do this.

Speaker 1:
[182:03] I haven't done them yet.

Speaker 2:
[182:04] But because for No Man's Sky, I had to do one. And so right in the middle of the sponsored part of the stream, I was like, okay, guys, guys, I'm going to record the TikTok. And I just did the TikTok. And then I cut it out with a Twitch clip thing and then exported it to TikTok.

Speaker 1:
[182:24] You know what? This is the move. This is the way. Yeah. Okay. I see that. I see that. All right. News stories. There's a couple of things that happened this week. Let's roll through them quickly.

Speaker 2:
[182:35] Bloodborne fans continue to eat a gun.

Speaker 1:
[182:39] It's crazy. It's crazy.

Speaker 2:
[182:43] It's never been like this.

Speaker 1:
[182:45] Before any news of anything relating to playing the game ever again happens, Sony is making an R-rated Bloodborne animated movie with Jacksepticeye, which, I mean, there's a Bloodborne movie happening before the game is back?

Speaker 2:
[183:04] Listen, if this movie does not release with some kind of patch at least, so it's time to pack it up.

Speaker 1:
[183:14] This is it, right? If you want a glass half full of this, which, you know, I'm an optimist, I believe, right? Here's what you do. You go, the new brand-related product is going to give the company an excuse to do something. And that something might not be the thing we all want, but it certainly might not be nothing. And realistically, I suspect it would be more likely that a bunch of Bloodborne content would drop into Night Rain than I think it would be likely that they would actually fucking update or release anything that we can play. I would sooner imagine a Bloodborne Night Rain pack for everybody for the promotion. Yeah, from the iconic film upcoming movie, you know?

Speaker 2:
[184:05] Brud.wav, man. That's how I feel about that. Fuck.

Speaker 1:
[184:12] With the echoes behind it.

Speaker 2:
[184:13] Yeah. What is that? I don't know, but it's funny every time.

Speaker 1:
[184:16] It's a... Anyway, it's TikTok.

Speaker 2:
[184:19] So there's that. That's good news, I guess. bullshit.

Speaker 1:
[184:26] On that note, if you are attending a card game expo, fuckin watch your back, protect your neck and keep your head on a swivel, because apparently there was a big event where a few vendors came outside to discover that GPS tracking devices were placed on their vehicles. And after contacting the police, they checked all the vehicles and noticed a suspicious car in the parking lot with no license plate. And as they approached it, it sped off, jumped two curbs and fled into the night.

Speaker 2:
[185:12] That's no good.

Speaker 1:
[185:13] So people are out here trying to get at these Pokemon cards, y'all. I like crime. Crime is happening for these cards.

Speaker 2:
[185:23] And I'll say it again. Do you remember when Super Potatoes got raided by Whites?

Speaker 1:
[185:28] Oh, in Japan. In Akiha.

Speaker 2:
[185:32] And the Whites descended upon them to fill up their eBay listings?

Speaker 1:
[185:36] Right.

Speaker 2:
[185:36] That's a recession indicator, right? Criminal tracking of people that may have high value baby cards.

Speaker 1:
[185:45] That are not cash.

Speaker 2:
[185:47] Recession indicator.

Speaker 1:
[185:48] Things that you can translate value into that are not cash, that you can hold stock in.

Speaker 2:
[185:55] Yeah. The Americans. It's a sign of the American economy that I don't know what to do. I'll hustle baby's card games.

Speaker 1:
[186:06] Yeah. Like the fact that there's just... We're now in an insane world where it's like one real terror that exists is, you know, like women have to check to see if air tags are being dropped into their luggage. And thankfully, there's a thing you can use on your phone to scan the area to see if air tags are nearby. By the way, if you don't know about that, you should know. And then, right second place is now people with a lot of Pokemon cards. Yeah, if you have a particularly good showing at the tournament, fucking, you know, don't leave through the back.

Speaker 2:
[186:52] A bunch of shit.

Speaker 1:
[186:54] All right. What other crimes are happening?

Speaker 2:
[186:57] Send any good emails lately? Forget to take off some of the attachments? Oh, you don't know about this one?

Speaker 1:
[187:10] What happened?

Speaker 2:
[187:11] So, you know, there's that new Avatar movie about Aang and the gang when they're adults?

Speaker 1:
[187:16] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[187:17] Would you believe it's just out now?

Speaker 1:
[187:20] The whole thing leaked?

Speaker 2:
[187:22] Yeah, because somebody sent an email with a Google Drive link in the email.

Speaker 1:
[187:27] Oh, my God.

Speaker 2:
[187:30] And then if I remember correctly, somebody hacked the Nickelodeon YouTube account and uploaded the whole fucking thing.

Speaker 1:
[187:35] Oh, wow. It's the animated adult. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[187:39] I've seen some clips. The animation is really good.

Speaker 1:
[187:43] Didn't this happen recently with something else where they were uploading it as a copyright protection for YouTube, and then instead the whole thing went up?

Speaker 2:
[187:54] Yeah, that could happen.

Speaker 1:
[187:55] Yeah, like something happened recently where like they just, they had to upload it as a thing to look out for to scan.

Speaker 2:
[188:02] But they accidentally uploaded it to go live.

Speaker 1:
[188:06] Ava. It was Ava, right? Yeah, exactly. Holy shit, man.

Speaker 2:
[188:11] Whoopsie doodle.

Speaker 1:
[188:12] That's a fucking poopsie. Well, speaking of leaks, if you hear any Nintendo leaks such as there's a Luigi's Mansion movie coming or a new classic Star Fox game on the Switch 2, or a Ocarina of Time remake, or a new 3D Mario delayed until 2027, these are all fake leaks Nintendo is putting out there to try to identify who's leaking what internally.

Speaker 2:
[188:40] I got to tell you. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[188:41] Yeah. No, no. Read my mind on this. Go ahead.

Speaker 2:
[188:44] Okay. You and I spent days over time, and I talked to fucking people way up at Capcom USA, and I've talked to people at Sony, and it's so fucking funny that they were never, ever able to find out who was leaking Capcom stuff. They still have not found out who's leaking Capcom stuff. The last time I spoke to somebody, they're like, it has to be someone in the Sony brand team, because we can't audit them, and they all share information with each other. Fuck. It's so fucking funny that they tried this. They tried this thing, and it got to a different company that they had to tell things, and that's where the trail went cold.

Speaker 1:
[189:39] That's where it went cold.

Speaker 2:
[189:40] They never found it.

Speaker 1:
[189:42] I will take this over the fucking, the alternate version of leaks, which is like, oh, ransomware is happening. Like hackers fucking took everyone's passport.

Speaker 2:
[189:51] Apparently, that's happening to Rockstar right now.

Speaker 1:
[189:54] Exactly. Rockstar is literally getting hacked by...

Speaker 2:
[189:56] That's not fun. I want somebody on the inside.

Speaker 1:
[189:59] Yeah, there's no dirt with that. That's just people's livelihoods as in getting fucking put at risk and doxing.

Speaker 2:
[190:05] For Capcom specifically, there's a really, really clear through way of how to get the leaks out. I work at Capcom. I message Dusk Golem. Prove that I work at Capcom. Tell Dusk Golem that Dusk Golem goes and says, hey, this was coming out for Resident Evil over the next couple of years. That's it.

Speaker 1:
[190:27] To me, the funniest thing about Nintendo's defense here is they're using fake news that everybody wants to be real.

Speaker 2:
[190:36] This is the worst part.

Speaker 1:
[190:38] You are de-confirming things that people are genuinely excited for and saying we are not making a new classic Star Fox game on the Switch 2. We are not doing Mokorita of Time. There is no Luigi's Mansion movie, and there is no 3D Mario.

Speaker 2:
[190:55] What if their master plan is that three are fake, but one is real?

Speaker 1:
[191:04] Ah, three lies and a truth.

Speaker 2:
[191:06] Yeah. So I'm kind of shocked that we haven't seen more game companies just flood the channel with complete nonsense.

Speaker 1:
[191:16] Flooding the zone is a tactic.

Speaker 2:
[191:20] Like, it helps. There is the... and you've described the problem adequately. The problem is when you flood the zone with rumors, people get mad when the rumored things that kick ass don't happen.

Speaker 1:
[191:32] Everybody wants to know who's coming to 2XKO? How about 15 different character leaks? Simultaneously, all coming from the official channels. And then one of them happens. And who knows about the rest? And then you just make it so that the second character that comes out after that big giant leak list is someone that was not on that list at all, right? Someone that was nowhere in that 15 drop second and then everybody loses their fucking mind. Yeah, run it.

Speaker 2:
[192:12] Genius.

Speaker 1:
[192:13] Brilliant.

Speaker 2:
[192:14] But also if you report on the fake leak, they send the Nintendo ninjas to your house to fucking kill you.

Speaker 1:
[192:21] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Cap Cops are out there, you know.

Speaker 2:
[192:24] Cap Cops are weak.

Speaker 1:
[192:27] By modern standards, yes. Back in the day, right now, they would have Maximillian in the triggers, in the sights. But he's getting away with shit like putting up 10K for a rollback bounty on Marvel 3.

Speaker 2:
[192:40] Woolie, back in the day, if Capcom knew that I knew any of the stuff that I knew, they would have shot me. And now they're paying me to talk about Pragmata next week.

Speaker 1:
[192:51] You're damn straight. You're damn straight. It's also because, like, okay, we know a bunch of Capcom stuff, but it's also like the juiciest, you know? Like, the tea is so sweet.

Speaker 2:
[193:03] The sweet is the sweetest. The sweet tea is so sweet.

Speaker 1:
[193:06] It's so dramatic. Every time, every time I catch the fucking drip of the Capcom tea, it's like, ooh. Oh, it's so good. Yeah, yeah. Nothing like, I heard dirt from other companies at times where you're just like, oh, yeah, okay, well.

Speaker 2:
[193:24] Such and such is a jerk or mummabubba.

Speaker 1:
[193:27] This, this, that, whatever. And like out here, you're like, what? He took the money?

Speaker 2:
[193:36] What? What are you talking about?

Speaker 1:
[193:40] That's crazy, bro.

Speaker 2:
[193:41] That's, that one was crazy. And he got away with it?

Speaker 1:
[193:47] Oh, Oh, man. So hey, you know, talk about put your fucking money where your mouth is, bro. You know, Max has successfully done this in the past and it's time to do it again. Marvel 3 has been relegated to the community of people connecting on Parsec long enough. So a bounty is out there. If anybody can work some netcode in to make the game run on rollback, there's a bounty for 10k out now. Announced on TNS this week. Fucking awesome. Just Max, what a champ. Love that. You love the scene and the game that much. And here's the thing. This type of thing is absolutely possible because, I don't know if people remember, but about five years ago on Get Into Fighting Games, I had a dude on my stream called Fizzy. And he is known for being the one who created Slippy, the Melee emulator that lets you play Smash Brothers with Rollback. Perfect Rollback. And that is the standard of like online play. It is a perfect encaps... It does... It runs better than anything. And he just, yeah, you can absolutely develop around an existing games framework and do this. So, you know, I saw some people like going like working on it, trying to get there, trying to set it up already. Awesome. Love that.

Speaker 2:
[195:17] Do you mind if I make a snide comment about Max's bounty?

Speaker 1:
[195:22] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[195:23] Max spent all that time and money and social capital to fix up and make Marvel Infinite look real nice and real presentable. And then went, can somebody fix Marvel 3 so I can play that instead?

Speaker 1:
[195:43] No, no. I mean, yes, but also because it's a different awesome game. And now that you've got the community edition, especially, it's like, yeah, we need a fucking way to play that thing without having to parsec it. But sure. It's like, I got my wishes. The thing I wanted was done.

Speaker 2:
[196:00] You know, you spent all day modding Skyrim, and then you start to play.

Speaker 1:
[196:05] And now back to Oblivion.

Speaker 2:
[196:07] I don't even, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[196:10] Now back to the wall. No, I think it's fucking, I hope this happens because it's a really clear case of like, Capcom is not going to fucking do it.

Speaker 2:
[196:25] Well, are they going to compete with fucking themselves?

Speaker 1:
[196:29] Well, at this point, if there was a thought towards it, they look and they see the reddest ocean of like, every other tag fighter trying right now, and they're just like, nah, I'll come back later.

Speaker 2:
[196:41] We got 2XKO and Tokon, you know, punching each other in their wieners.

Speaker 1:
[196:47] I mean, it's a bad time for Marvel to come, to walk back into the room with the pizza.

Speaker 2:
[196:51] Now's the time for Capcom versus Capcom, come on.

Speaker 1:
[196:54] With the pizzas, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[196:56] Also known as, honestly, Street Fighter 6 right now.

Speaker 1:
[196:59] But we'll wait for the next season. I mean, again, that leak list from way back in the day said Tokon is not Marvel 4. So anyway.

Speaker 2:
[197:12] You know, some of those things didn't happen. Apparently, the FF9 remake just didn't go. Or it's not going to happen.

Speaker 1:
[197:19] Or it went until it stopped. There's rumors that it's not that it doesn't exist. It's that it's not getting released.

Speaker 2:
[197:30] Do you have any other news you want to talk about this week?

Speaker 1:
[197:32] No, not really. I mean, we were also talking about leaks. There's a screenshot of something from Season 3 of Daredevil, Born Again. And if anyone cares, there's some stuff there that's interesting. But nah, not much.

Speaker 2:
[197:45] The only thing I got is that a 14-ton shipment of steam controllers just landed stateside.

Speaker 1:
[197:56] So the new ones.

Speaker 2:
[197:57] That shit's gonna get just shadow dropped.

Speaker 1:
[198:01] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[198:02] Any fucking day now.

Speaker 1:
[198:06] There was a-

Speaker 2:
[198:06] I'm very excited for a steam controller that has the steam deck shit on it.

Speaker 1:
[198:12] Let's get the hands on and see what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. That is a contender for biggest glow up of a controller. But I'm so used to the DualSense at this point though, that I'm satisfied with what I've got.

Speaker 2:
[198:24] So here's the thing.

Speaker 1:
[198:25] It's gonna take a lot to pull me away from it.

Speaker 2:
[198:27] This touch pad on the DualSense, it's okay, but it's in an awkward spot. The projected touch pad things on the fucking thing, on the Steam Controller 2, man, that's gonna help with a bunch of games that just don't quite work perfect with the controller. And the reason why they're pushing this thing is Deadlock.

Speaker 1:
[198:49] Okay, okay, okay.

Speaker 2:
[198:50] This is the Deadlock controller, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[198:53] Also, now that I'm two generations deep on it, I can say that elite controllers that have rubber backing actually suck.

Speaker 2:
[199:01] Once you have them for a while.

Speaker 1:
[199:03] The rubber always peels off. It peels off on my...

Speaker 2:
[199:05] And also they get really gross because your hand sweats.

Speaker 1:
[199:08] On the Xbox Elite, it peels, and on my DualSense, it peels. And I'm like, oh, this feeling is great for the first month. And then it starts to get a little grimy. And then before you know it, it's starting to just come off as a separate section. And that sucks. So those need to stop. Here, one other thing. Shoutouts to Mom out on Blue Sky. But a little game that you can play here. I don't know if, did you play the game?

Speaker 2:
[199:36] I play some games sometimes. Probably not this one. I didn't see it.

Speaker 1:
[199:39] Okay, so Mom has a little thing saying, do you want to giggle? Here, I'm going to send you a link to a game on Steam. It's called Dude the Dark Army. Before you click, as soon as you click on this, scroll all the way down to the bottom. Don't look at the screenshots or any footage. Just scroll all the way to the bottom.

Speaker 2:
[199:58] All right.

Speaker 1:
[199:59] Conjure and then read the AI disclaimer. Right? There's an AI disclaimer on this saying that the game uses it. And then you go scroll and you read that. And it talks about everything that the game uses to generate. Once you've done that, scroll back, conjure a mental image of what the game might look like mechanically and visually with that long disclaimer. All right, all right. And then scroll back up to the gameplay footage and look at it.

Speaker 2:
[200:26] Toss me the store page or the link.

Speaker 1:
[200:28] It's right there. Oh, wait, hold up.

Speaker 2:
[200:31] No, you said to somebody else.

Speaker 1:
[200:32] Yes, I did. Here you go.

Speaker 2:
[200:35] OK.

Speaker 1:
[200:36] Scroll down.

Speaker 2:
[200:38] OK, I scroll down. OK, here's the developers describe blah, blah, blah. Of course, we used AI tech to speed up our business processes and produce higher quality and better performing games. We used Claude for code development, ChatGBT for visual production, created the game's cover art with ChatGBT, and wrote the game's overall code architecture with the help of Claude. These AI significantly sped up our work, but absolutely do not think the developers produced this game without any hassle, only a single prompt. This thought is completely wrong. What actually happened is we gave these AI some of the tasks we would have done ourselves and did them in stages to speed it up. Even with this process, it took six months.

Speaker 1:
[201:12] Of course.

Speaker 2:
[201:13] All right.

Speaker 1:
[201:14] Increasing the speed of game development.

Speaker 2:
[201:15] So I'm expecting open world. I saw a guy with a gun. Yeah. So I'm going to I'm going to I'm expecting like a open world boomer shooter that just looks like shit.

Speaker 1:
[201:28] OK.

Speaker 2:
[201:33] Oh, my God.

Speaker 1:
[201:38] If you want to play along at home, audio listeners, that's dude, the dark agent on steam.

Speaker 2:
[201:49] I mean, I know for a fact, like four people over at Newblood could bang this shit out in one day.

Speaker 1:
[202:01] What? Bro, one hour, one hour, 30 minutes.

Speaker 2:
[202:07] Well, no, they still can draw off the assets.

Speaker 1:
[202:09] I mean, like, do you?

Speaker 2:
[202:13] I genuinely think that, like, Samansky could put this together by end of day by himself.

Speaker 1:
[202:17] This is a 45-minute fucking code and compile in my brain.

Speaker 2:
[202:22] This is, um...

Speaker 1:
[202:23] And these fucking, this thing is like...

Speaker 2:
[202:26] This is crazy.

Speaker 1:
[202:27] We needed AI to do nothing. Just hang it up, hang it up and walk away from the dream, you know?

Speaker 2:
[202:41] Like, making a complete piece of shit has value because you learn things when you made it. And the effort is worthy in and of itself. But making a complete piece of shit that took literally a thousand times longer, and also you didn't even do it, you just wasted everyone's time, you probably harmed your own brain. Fucking crazy.

Speaker 1:
[203:08] Remember, creatives were gatekeeping output.

Speaker 2:
[203:14] They weren't, man, you could just, you could do a thing.

Speaker 1:
[203:18] CastleSuperBeastMail at gmail.com.

Speaker 2:
[203:21] That's... CastleSuperBeastMail at gmail.com.

Speaker 1:
[203:26] All right, Jonathan says, Hey, Pat and Woolie, I've been recently enjoying one of my favorite games, Soma. And I've marveled at how actively stupid Simon is throughout the story. To be fair, he suffered some traumatic brain injuries.

Speaker 2:
[203:39] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[203:39] But he's told time and time again what the deal is, and he refuses to understand. Who are your favorite stupid protagonists? I'm sure...

Speaker 2:
[203:48] Okay, so first of all, the thing with Simon is that I've met people that would not be able to correctly encapsulate what's going on in Soma. Right? And I know you have, and I'm pretty sure everyone in the chat has heard that as well. I've met people that would not be able to get it. My favorite stupid protagonist, without a doubt, especially right now, is Sora, Kingdom Hearts.

Speaker 1:
[204:18] Oh yeah.

Speaker 2:
[204:19] There is no dumber than I can imagine. Aggressively braindead. Absolutely unbelievable.

Speaker 1:
[204:31] Again, it's like you have to have bigger heart than brains in order for it to work.

Speaker 2:
[204:38] Well, luckily he's in a game called Kingdom Hearts.

Speaker 1:
[204:40] Yes. That's why Kiryu works and so on.

Speaker 2:
[204:43] But should I tell you that Goofy is the smartest person of that trio?

Speaker 1:
[204:49] That's crazy. That's awesome.

Speaker 2:
[204:50] It's dire, man. That's awesome. It's dire.

Speaker 1:
[204:53] Well, I'm surprised Donald is a mage to begin with, considering he's so angry. You know?

Speaker 2:
[204:57] So, not really.

Speaker 1:
[205:01] I would have thought they would have made Donald a more aggressive archetype, considering-

Speaker 2:
[205:06] He's not a fighter, man.

Speaker 1:
[205:07] But he's all mad and shit, you know? So?

Speaker 2:
[205:10] Black mages are mad.

Speaker 1:
[205:11] And he's a sailor. He's an angry sailor. That doesn't scream mage to me.

Speaker 2:
[205:17] How does a sailor shoot a gun? With his gun? Magic is the closest thing you can get to him shooting a gun.

Speaker 1:
[205:25] An angry sailor is going to pop by his way through the solution, you know?

Speaker 2:
[205:30] Because Donald's a pussy.

Speaker 1:
[205:31] Well.

Speaker 2:
[205:32] Donald talks to him. Also, it turns out that Daisy in Kingdom Hearts 2, and she talks normal. So what the fuck is going on with Donald?

Speaker 1:
[205:41] Yeah, I just, I would have, you know, again, the fucking sailor that's stomping on his hat and going, is going to like fucking deck somebody and go aggro.

Speaker 2:
[205:49] Oh, you know why? Do you know why he's a mage? Why? Because dragons in Final Fantasy use magic, and the male duck is a drake.

Speaker 1:
[206:02] Thus, it's a fucking joke. It's a pun.

Speaker 2:
[206:05] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[206:06] Sure. Sure. Sure. I don't like it. My favorite dumb protagonist is Harry Dubois, because the reasons why are much more complex. It's not about him being dumb, it's about the weight of the fucking world on his shoulders.

Speaker 2:
[206:29] Can I give a shout out to whoever you're controlling in a Metal Gear game? Not the character, but whoever the player has latched on to, the camera, becomes the dumbest bitch around.

Speaker 1:
[206:41] I speak in questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. We'll take one over here.

Speaker 2:
[206:50] Oh, someone in the chat said Kratos. Oh, man.

Speaker 1:
[206:55] Kratos in those games is so stupid. Kratos is not a favorite dumb protagonist. He's the worst dumb protagonist.

Speaker 2:
[207:03] Yeah, but he is so stupid.

Speaker 1:
[207:07] He is so dumb. In an upsetting way that makes you actively root against him, which not many games have made me root against the protagonist. It's kind of insane.

Speaker 2:
[207:20] I remember before God of War 2018 came out, we had a really long talk on the podcast about the only way it's going to work is if the game spends its entire runtime dogging on Kratos for being the dumbest piece of shit in the world.

Speaker 1:
[207:33] Then it totally did. Then it did. Then it actually did. Yeah. He's like, God damn it, I suck. It's like, yeah, man. Okay. Just checking. Yeah. I think the first moment in the trailer everyone got it was like, he gets angry and then calms down talking to Atreus and you're like, ah. Oh. Yeah. Let's see. Over here we got one.

Speaker 2:
[208:02] Oh, no, I got another one.

Speaker 1:
[208:05] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[208:06] In FF7 Remake, there's one moment in the game where the girls leave the party and Cloud and Barrett are left to their own devices in the second to last level of the game in which they are trapped inside the Shinra Tower. Aerith and Tifa and Red find a security camera and they look at the boys and the boys are standing in front of the biggest door you have ever seen. It's like ten times the size of like a vault door from Fallout. And Barrett and Cloud are kicking it and just clanging their sword against it. Like, boy, total Neanderthals.

Speaker 1:
[208:43] Boys, boys, boys, boys, boys, boys, boys.

Speaker 2:
[208:45] It's so, it's so funny.

Speaker 1:
[208:47] Boys, boys, boys, boys, boys, boys.

Speaker 2:
[208:50] Like, Locke just clangs the sword on it, and it bounces off so hard he almost falls over, and Barrett, like, is kicking it with his foot.

Speaker 1:
[209:00] Yeah, you gotta faff near that door down, it's the only way, man.

Speaker 2:
[209:03] It's so fucking funny.

Speaker 1:
[209:05] Boys! They get collectively dumber when left around each other. Yes, yes. Here is another one.

Speaker 2:
[209:16] Like me and Paige are watching One Piece and she's like, why are they doing that? I'm like, because every man on the ship is an absolute fucking moron, Paige. Nami is the entire brain for the entire crew until Niko shows up. Then they can share the brain.

Speaker 1:
[209:32] Yeah. Good bit. Here's one. Name not given. Hey, I feel an ill, so keep it simple and clean. What's the worst case of getting to finally play the bonus campaign slash DLC epilogue level where they let you play as the rival or companion character that was cool, except they actually sucked to play or it was half-assed?

Speaker 2:
[209:58] For me... Not like you're solid VR missions playing as the ninja.

Speaker 1:
[210:02] Oh, fuck, I wish you could do more. Okay, I can...

Speaker 2:
[210:07] Yeah. I finally get to play as the ninja. Oh, cool, it's in this fucking floating bullshit.

Speaker 1:
[210:12] And you use the punch button to swing the sword, and you barely get to do anything. It's just ninja's combo. It's Snake's combo, but he's got the sword in his hand while he's doing it, instead of getting to swing. And then you never get to actually properly use the sword until the end of two. Yep, for me, it's the end of Jedi Survivor. You play as Deborah Wilson's character for one level, but she has one style, and it's an awkward mashup of four moves.

Speaker 2:
[210:36] Oh, yeah, she's not good. She's not good to play.

Speaker 1:
[210:38] From the normal main character's kit with animations that look more composed, also are slower. A good example of would-be power fantasy that actually makes you feel like you got nerfed.

Speaker 2:
[210:48] Uh, yeah. I have two more. Elizabeth in Burial at Sea is the worst playing shock character. She just doesn't have lots of the stuff that even Booker had in the other game. And Virgil from the DMC Devil May Cry bonus DLC, where he is a shitty character in a shitty campaign.

Speaker 1:
[211:12] The first time. Until they fixed it. Definitive Edition, they did more. I mean, I've talked many times about Onimusha and that last character switch over to What's Her Face at the end, where you're just infinitely worse.

Speaker 2:
[211:29] Hey bro, wouldn't it be so cool if you played Onimusha and you constantly switched characters that were less fun to play and it was called Onimusha 4 Way of the Sword? Thanks, Mr. Ono.

Speaker 1:
[211:42] Don of Dreams?

Speaker 2:
[211:44] Don of Dreams, whatever. Way of the Sword is the new one. I have whatever. Onimusha has three good games.

Speaker 1:
[211:50] Yeah. I mean, hey, I got one, but it's almost intentional in a way. It's not quite the same thing, but playing as Dormin in Shadow of the Colossus.

Speaker 2:
[212:00] Hey, just did that a couple weeks ago.

Speaker 1:
[212:01] Yeah. It's a sick moment of like, oh, fuck, here we go. Oh my God, I suck. I can't do anything.

Speaker 2:
[212:09] Oh, wow. I'm having a really hard time hitting these little guys. Oh.

Speaker 1:
[212:14] This is awful. This feels bad. He's getting away. They're getting away. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh shit. I see. Yeah. It's almost like in SNK games when they have the boss become playable and they're like, oh, they didn't even program a crouch. This character was never meant to be controlled. They have less than half of the moves that a regular character does, and every button just does one of their spells or whatever and that's it.

Speaker 2:
[212:43] I think the coolest version of that that I ever saw was when people hacked apart Dark Souls 1 and discovered that the bosses in Dark Souls 1 are actually attached to a controller's moveset.

Speaker 1:
[212:52] Yeah. All the attacks are coming off of one of their inputs.

Speaker 2:
[212:57] They're acting as player entities. They just have different bodies and different hitboxes.

Speaker 1:
[213:02] That's so interesting. Last one over here, Pumpkin Spice Pepper says, Hello Donald, Goofy and Sora. In the fishing JRPG Game Boy game Legend of the River King, a young boy is tasked with catching a legendary fish that could cure his sister's illness. Once you make your way out to the second village over, you're made aware that a bear has been terrorizing the area, and the game tasks you with killing the bear despite the fact you're an unarmed prepubescent boy with no actual superhuman powers that hasn't fought anything more dangerous than a bee or a snake at this point. What's the most insane thing that would be asked of a player character if it wasn't in the context of a video game? I mean-

Speaker 2:
[213:44] I can just say the Like a Dragon series in totality.

Speaker 1:
[213:49] The ask, but I mean, he's clearly got the capability.

Speaker 2:
[213:53] You fight some stupid, stupid shit in some of those later games, Woolie.

Speaker 1:
[214:00] I mean, I go-

Speaker 2:
[214:01] It really strains the reality of the scenario.

Speaker 1:
[214:07] Shinji getting in the robot is still the most insane proposition of anything. It's like, child, pilot this fucking warfighting plane. Get in and go now. And it's like, you're dead, man. Why the fuck would this 14 year old get in there? Like that's insane. That's ridiculous. And the fact that big burning shonen anime were all about that energy was always insane to begin with. I think that proposition is nuts. Most like kid get in the robot Gundam or brave Yusha ass things are just like... Imagine saying that to a... Imagine taking a 14 year old and going, get in that tank now.

Speaker 2:
[214:53] You know what?

Speaker 1:
[214:53] Alone, go.

Speaker 2:
[214:56] Captain Britches in the chat is very correct in saying that Ethan Winters in RE7 and RE8 is the only fucking regular dude that you ever play as in the Resident Evil series been thrown into that. He's not a military guy, he has no formal firearms training, he's not a cop, he's just some fucking guy going through it, fighting a bunch of bullshit.

Speaker 1:
[215:26] Fair enough. You learn eventually. Hard times, whatever.

Speaker 2:
[215:32] I'm gonna go with Heather Mason fighting the devil with a samurai sword.

Speaker 1:
[215:37] Killing God. Yep. Teenage girl kills God with a samurai sword and no training whatsoever. But the Mason bloodline.

Speaker 2:
[215:46] With a little help from Plan B.

Speaker 1:
[215:50] It's just the Mason bloodline, you know? That's it. Yep.

Speaker 2:
[215:55] Oh! Heniko Silent Hill. Heniko is so strong. And there's that pipe, dude.

Speaker 1:
[216:04] And there's no reason for it.

Speaker 2:
[216:07] She's got a blood-borne dash because she does track in high school. But that's it, man. She's so strong.

Speaker 1:
[216:19] Okay. There you go. I think that about does it.

Speaker 2:
[216:24] All right. Well, we got to get out of here. It's been a technically long podcast.

Speaker 1:
[216:28] Again, as I said, I said in the stopped time between of them, I'm like, oh no, unfortunately, your five-hour podcast has been shortened to two. Meanwhile, every other podcast you listen to is 59 minutes and 10 seconds.

Speaker 2:
[216:43] Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1:
[216:44] We spoil them, god damn it.

Speaker 2:
[216:45] Yeah, we do. Well, we're gavers. We can't help it.

Speaker 1:
[216:48] And then you're going to hit that mute, trim silence button to speed shit up. You fucking jerk.

Speaker 2:
[216:55] Don't listen to this at four times speed.

Speaker 1:
[216:57] That's for weirdos. Too late.