transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:38] Hello, good afternoon, Woolie. How are you?

Speaker 2:
[00:41] Sleep, regression, sleep, sleep, regression, sleep, regression, sleep, sleep, regression.

Speaker 1:
[00:47] You did it! You're doing it! You're fucking in it now, boy!

Speaker 2:
[00:52] Oh yeah!

Speaker 1:
[00:55] Oh, it's fucked! Dude, I got, that's, you know what? Reminder, I went from being a scrub to hitting master rank with bison because of sleep regression. So, we'll use this, this baby as a stand in. So I was, I had, you know, just, it's fucking 2 a.m. and I got into fucking nowhere to be because this motherfucker just looking at me like, ah, all right, scissor kicks.

Speaker 2:
[01:25] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[01:25] Scissor kicks.

Speaker 2:
[01:27] Well, I mean, we're doing it, we're keeping her in the dark in her room and trying to, you know, minimize, but boy, oh boy, does it just feel like it's like, hey, I know it's nighttime, but it's not. The day continued. You just don't know it yet. Inside baby's head, it is still daytime. Everything continues as normal. And you and your weak fucking need for sleep is some bitch made shit. You better fucking step it up. Cause I'm bored down here.

Speaker 1:
[01:56] Like, okay. So at the same time, tiny tyrant person, you know, being anthropomorphized in this adult speaking conversation, you, what are we talking, 10 months?

Speaker 2:
[02:09] Less, but she's-

Speaker 1:
[02:10] Okay, nine months? Okay.

Speaker 2:
[02:11] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[02:13] Literally sleep like 14 hours a day. Like, like, like literally, like not exaggerate. Like, girl, you sleep in all day.

Speaker 2:
[02:22] So-

Speaker 1:
[02:23] Yeah, you can pick when the you wanna be awake.

Speaker 2:
[02:26] She's not a big, she's not a big, big sleeper. She's a, she's a, she's a nap napper. And she's taking her little-

Speaker 1:
[02:32] Oh my God, I was also not a big sleeper.

Speaker 2:
[02:34] Yeah, she's taking her little nap naps. And like we can force and manipulate to try to be like, no, we're gonna crunch these five naps down into three. You know? And like we were kind of like stretching out wake windows and there's moments where it's like, okay, eyes are being rubbed and starting to get tired and we're like, mm-mm, not yet, kid. We're not finished yet.

Speaker 1:
[03:01] Like an infant child can stay at 99% being almost asleep for an entire calendar day.

Speaker 2:
[03:09] I mean, the funniest thing is just watching like, if I can replicate this, like, this is a rattle and it's just like, it's like I'm half asleep and dead and I'm just going. And I'm not, my heart is not in it, my soul and my spirit is not in it, but I'm still trying to play because this is in my hand and that's what I'm supposed to be doing right now.

Speaker 1:
[03:31] I've got one for you because they, so my guy still does this. He hates, like, so I'm not, he has asked to go to bed twice in his entire life. He said, mommy, daddy, I want to go upstairs.

Speaker 2:
[03:45] Straight up, okay.

Speaker 1:
[03:46] So I go to bed, I'm like, twice.

Speaker 2:
[03:48] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[03:50] About 30% of the time, okay, Curious George, you know, Pete the Cat, you know, whatever the book is, you know, Some Hugs and Kisses with Mama, okay. Bam, full song number. Full number, okay, all right, you're done, okay, good. All right, we're snuggling, you're going, okay. Quiet, deathly quiet, for 40 minutes. What's a cow? Okay.

Speaker 2:
[04:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[04:29] And so here's my favorite part. That wakes up mom and dad, who fell asleep waiting for him to fall asleep, right? And then the real fallout when he's like, you know, rubbing the eyes, when he really wants to go for it, you know what he does?

Speaker 2:
[04:51] Oh, the hits, the hits.

Speaker 1:
[04:53] Straight up slapping his cheeks. Straight up slapping his cheeks and his forehead, like, no, no, stay awake. And you're like, I can't believe this.

Speaker 2:
[05:04] It sucks. It's like the, so the craziest part, and like I see why the word regression is used because it literally is going backwards in progress because like she was starting to get to a point where she would wake up when things are going fine and she would like not even start crying right away. I'd be looking at the monitor at like, you know, whatever, like two in the morning. And she would kind of go like she'd stir and then kind of wake up, look at her hands for a bit and then turn on her side and kind of like just go and go back out. And I was like, you're getting it.

Speaker 1:
[05:42] That's good. That's that's what we do is getting made on sleeping through the night.

Speaker 2:
[05:46] Change your position, get more comfortable, kind of look at your hand a little bit, do what you got to do, get your brain off of it, and then try to settle in. And we actually saw that, you know, and then somehow it just turns into go fuck everything, fuck all of this. And what? Yeah, because so we're just like doing like, hey, gonna come down, try to do a hold till she drifts off and then transfer. And it fails naturally. And then every hour got to go back down.

Speaker 1:
[06:16] And it's just kind of like there were, I would say probably 50 or 60 nights that I was like, fuck it. I don't even care. I'm just gonna put him in my arm. You just got to go downstairs and just fucking watch TV and play games until Paige wakes the fuck up, transfer him back over, sleep for two hours, and then just go about my rest of the day as a scorched freak. Because getting up and down and up and down and up and down and the fight and the transfer, failing the transfer failure. I only failed the transfer twice.

Speaker 2:
[06:54] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[06:55] Yeah. I refused to attempt to transfer a third time. I'm wasting my time. I'm wasting Paige's time. I'm wasting the baby's time. Fuck it. He's not going to transfer.

Speaker 2:
[07:05] I do three transfers. The thing is, but I don't count it. There's a botched transfer, and then a failed transfer.

Speaker 1:
[07:17] Yeah. No. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh.

Speaker 2:
[07:21] There's a difference.

Speaker 1:
[07:22] The one that got me the most, dude, it made me so mad and mad enough to scream, but it's two in the morning and it's in a dark room with your child. It's your fault. Don't yell. You'll defeat the purpose.

Speaker 2:
[07:32] Of course.

Speaker 1:
[07:33] Is when I forgot, I would transfer and he'd be perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect, and then I would slide my hands out and then his feet would drop and his ankle.

Speaker 2:
[07:43] Boosh. Idiot.

Speaker 1:
[07:45] You fool.

Speaker 2:
[07:46] You fool. You forgot the feet. You forgot the feet. Yeah. No. The transfer, that's the thing is like, for anyone, you have to understand, getting the baby from your arms down into the crib softly enough that it doesn't wake them up, it is, there is such an art to this and it's so delicate. And in particular, getting it into, so what I do is I go a little bit head first, cause that's where the weight is and then you kind of unfold, you unfold, you know, the burrito. And then your head, the thing is that you get your hand out and you have your head kind of, your hand stuck underneath and pulling the hand out, you got to be careful about that because it kind of like that's friction, that's noise, that's where they feel it, et cetera. But yeah, the botch transfer is where exactly you do something that makes noise, you know, and then they're like, it was my fault. You completely woke them up with that and now you fucked up. Right? A regular failed transfer is you got them down and you're walking away and then they're just like, I'm kind of still up though, you know? Yeah, so that I'll do about three times until it's just like, this, you got it.

Speaker 1:
[08:54] Fucking, I have paperwork I can catch up on.

Speaker 2:
[08:56] Contact naps and stuff are a part of it too. Or just like waiting until she's fully, fully asleep.

Speaker 1:
[09:05] That dude got a lot of contact nap time, like a lot.

Speaker 2:
[09:12] And it's just a give up nap, right? It's just a complete like, all right, whatever was, it's just like, yeah, fuck anything else. This is how you do it. It's just, it's not worth fighting it at this point. But yeah.

Speaker 1:
[09:27] I miss it.

Speaker 2:
[09:30] Oh boy. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[09:33] Okay. It's dude. It's one of those things.

Speaker 2:
[09:37] Looking for a light at the end of the tunnel.

Speaker 1:
[09:39] It's one of those things that when you're in it, you're like, get me to that fucking toddler stage while they'll just go to sleep. But now, I'm like, what if I do, oh my god, your little bimby. Now luckily, I have this and the cat.

Speaker 2:
[09:54] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[09:55] That just fulfill that role exactly.

Speaker 2:
[09:58] It is. No. See, it is currently Infinite Crash Outworks. But the things like, for example, like I said, I do a night time bottle. And that's a big deal. And it is one of those things where I want that to continue as long as possible. And it is not going to. I'm aware of the fact that there is going to be a full, unlike last night, for example, she just skipped it. But it is one that I'm like, okay, if I can get that in there, that's a nice nightly moment. That's a nice routine.

Speaker 1:
[10:38] You never know what time is the last time you're going to do something. I guess that's the thought.

Speaker 2:
[10:47] But I don't want to hear that shit right now.

Speaker 1:
[10:48] I didn't know what the last bottle was, right? But then it came and went, and it was like a week later. By the time it was like, oh, we're full on sippy cups now. The bottles are gone.

Speaker 2:
[11:05] And again, we're looking at the calendar, and we're aware of the fact that like, okay, at certain milestones, certain things happen, and at certain ages, certain daycare things happen and stuff, and you got to figure this stuff out. But there are little feelings like that. Like for example, the SNU, which we discussed on the show before, the rocking white noise little bassinet, super useful. That's only for the first six months.

Speaker 1:
[11:32] Yes. And you will pay for it when that six months is over, with what we are describing right now. But me and Paige made this decision, and you and Punch Mom definitely made the same decision, which is, but that first six months is when I needed to help the most.

Speaker 2:
[11:48] You're buying time. You're investing in the future with dividends.

Speaker 1:
[11:51] I am sowing now and must reap later. But I don't want to reap right now. It's hard right now.

Speaker 2:
[12:00] You are fucking crow countrying. You are reaching into the fucking future and ripping resources out. But the idea of the whole SNOOZE setup thing is that, yeah, after, at six months, her head is touching the top of it and her feet are touching the bottom. It's just goofy to even continue trying to fit. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[12:24] Too big. Big baby.

Speaker 2:
[12:26] So yeah, eventually it's like, okay, well, let's pack this thing up and move it out of the room and downstairs. Then there's a space there where that used to be a baby now, and Punch Mom's like, oh, yeah, this part of the room, that was where she was, and now time has passed and she ain't there anymore, and that's a thing. There's these moments, and I know that those are going to start increasing and hitting, and you fuck, literally, whatever, cats in the cradle, the entirety of every piece of media I've ever experienced about anything relating to this has been happening and hitting.

Speaker 1:
[13:01] At some point, guy is going to have to go sleep in his own room, and when that happens, the sleep we're going to get is going to be so good.

Speaker 2:
[13:12] So this is-

Speaker 1:
[13:13] So good?

Speaker 2:
[13:14] Well, and this is where our paths branch, because we're already there.

Speaker 1:
[13:18] Oh, you're already there?

Speaker 2:
[13:19] We're already there, but we're doing a different thing. We went straight out of SNU into you're in your room. But of course, this is the thing where when there is a regression, it's not a turnover and let's solve this problem. It's a, here we go.

Speaker 1:
[13:43] Yeah, so that was not, that was just never going to happen. Waking up at night, needed momma, needed momma in one second. Not five seconds, not ten seconds.

Speaker 2:
[13:57] Now, what we are, what I did learn as a result of our setup, though, is there's some tech. I mean, baby monitor, microphone, right? You make a little, hey, yeah, a little bit of like, hey, you can hear my voice, okay, cool. You know, throw in a little wheels on the bus coming out through the microphone, you know, just to distract the like, where the fuck you at moments. Yeah, it does work. And there's like a looking around for the, it's like voice of God almost, like a what?

Speaker 1:
[14:27] Yeah, a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[14:28] Where is that coming from? But like it does delay and calm the fret down a little bit.

Speaker 1:
[14:36] We have too much self-aware, we're almost a three-year-old toddler. So when we've tried to use that to get him to go back down to his nap, because like, you know, naps like an hour and a half, but he'll pop up after 40 minutes. He's too aware. So he'll be, you'll be like, I'll go back to sleep, honey. And he's like, where are you?

Speaker 2:
[14:55] I want you here now, like literally, like the concept of your. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[15:00] So like, no, it's not enough.

Speaker 2:
[15:03] Not enough. Yeah. Fucking getting my voice into trying to hit Miss Rachel fucking pitches.

Speaker 1:
[15:14] Hi. You can't. No, that is a, it's not doable.

Speaker 2:
[15:22] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[15:24] But make good decisions, Woolie. Just, you know. I was scrolled through TikTok and I hit Rachel and she just looked at me and went, hey, you're doing a good job. And I was like, eh, you're doing a good job.

Speaker 2:
[15:44] Anyways, there's your dad slop for the podcast, your weekly.

Speaker 1:
[15:52] Not exactly. There was a dad moment that got clipped out and is making the rounds. He was my little guy. Do you know what he did?

Speaker 2:
[16:00] Where is it? Where is it?

Speaker 1:
[16:02] Oh, it's on Blue Sky. It's on the subreddit.

Speaker 2:
[16:04] Oh, where is the object that should be kept under glass and lock and key protection?

Speaker 1:
[16:10] Trash, dude, it died.

Speaker 2:
[16:11] Oh, well, okay.

Speaker 1:
[16:14] It was a dandelion. It's ephemeral.

Speaker 2:
[16:16] Yeah, I know. But you put it in a thing for a minute.

Speaker 1:
[16:18] All right.

Speaker 2:
[16:18] Well, you know.

Speaker 1:
[16:19] No, man. There's plenty of dandelions out there. It's the thought.

Speaker 2:
[16:22] It is. Of course. But that's my point. That's my point. Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[16:28] But yeah, my little guy was picking flowers for me and was hanging out waiting outside the office going, I would wait for Dad to give him this flower.

Speaker 2:
[16:36] That's that's amazing.

Speaker 1:
[16:37] That's amazing.

Speaker 2:
[16:40] Shut the fucking stream down. Everybody go away.

Speaker 1:
[16:44] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[16:45] Urgent business is occurring.

Speaker 1:
[16:47] I also I also encountered the first example of the nightmare, which is hanging out in the kitchen two, three days ago. I was making a coffee and he said, Dad, don't make your coffee. And I went, why? He went, when you make your coffee, you go dad show and I don't want you to go dad show. I want you to stay and hang out.

Speaker 2:
[17:11] And I was like, yeah, that's right. That's right. I'm telling you. No, I mean, look, I don't know how well people caught it, but when it occurred, but like some of her first laughter started occurring just off mic. And I was like, shut the fucking stream down, be right back.

Speaker 1:
[17:32] Here's the worst part, right?

Speaker 2:
[17:34] And I hit him with the shut the fuck up, be right back screen.

Speaker 1:
[17:37] We're so lucky. We're so lucky because our kids are like over there.

Speaker 2:
[17:42] They're right there. They're right there.

Speaker 1:
[17:44] They're like that way. Yeah. 40 feet from us or 30, whatever it is.

Speaker 2:
[17:48] No. Right? And that's going to, as time goes on, that might become a problem.

Speaker 1:
[17:53] Right?

Speaker 2:
[17:53] Like, I am within earshot.

Speaker 1:
[17:57] Fuck your show, dad. Yeah. All right. Come on.

Speaker 2:
[17:59] We need to. Yes. And I.

Speaker 1:
[18:02] But like, for example, like, my dad missed out on fucking most of it because he was at work.

Speaker 2:
[18:10] My dad worked six days a week and he left at 530 in the morning and he got home at 6 p.m. And something that I remember thinking about a lot was the fact that, like, there is the effect of, like, like, oh, shit, dad's coming home, you know, like, big hug, like, yeah, excitement. Right. And I know that every time I've seen stuff like that, I've always felt like I'm like, oh, that's a that's a cool thing. And that's wholesome. It's wholesome. And I know that, like, that's not the type of situation I have set up here. But it's like, no, that's not true, actually, because you come in and come in from where I record, coming from the studio down into the room, you get the same effect, you know, or even just waking up in the morning after because doing the night ship. Yeah, you get the same effect of like, hey, it's you. And I'm like, yeah, you know, so it doesn't matter if it's like working at home or not, actually, because it's the point is, is that if you're not seeing them, you're still going to get that effect period, you know? So that's cool. I'm glad that that is not something that's been robbed from this. But no, super lucky being with this, with this.

Speaker 1:
[19:22] Very, very lucky.

Speaker 2:
[19:23] And again, a couple of years time, we'll see what's happening when, yeah, I'm getting my shit echoed back at me. I like, I don't need her to just reflect her, any of the things happening up here, back at our direction.

Speaker 1:
[19:38] You want to hear the ultimate? I came over here to set up, you know, turn a game on and get the settings right before I was going to stream later that day, right? And Paige was asleep. She was sleeping in because she had a rough night. So I was like, all right, bud, you want to come over to me? You want to go to the office, set up dad show?

Speaker 2:
[19:56] And he went, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[19:57] Right? We come over to the office and he runs to this chair before I can get to it and climbs into it and goes, when's my show? Dad's show is doodah. And I'm like, I wanted to say fucking never. But I said, no, never. I want to talk in to it. And points to the mic and was like grabbing the microphone. I'm like, okay, okay. Here you go. What do you got? And he says-

Speaker 2:
[20:32] You're on the mic. What's your beef?

Speaker 1:
[20:33] Pretty tricky. I don't know. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. It's hard.

Speaker 2:
[20:42] Nice, nice. Hot seat.

Speaker 1:
[20:44] Let's go.

Speaker 2:
[20:45] All right.

Speaker 1:
[20:46] All right. It's tough to do.

Speaker 2:
[20:48] Interesting.

Speaker 1:
[20:50] Well, that's one of my favorite things Paige did was things aren't hard. They're not too tough. They're just tricky. So he'll be going to put his shoes on and he'll have a trouble because it's like a new pair of shoes. He'll be like, dad, can you help me? My shoes are being pretty tricky.

Speaker 2:
[21:08] Tricky. That's good.

Speaker 1:
[21:09] I'm like, oh, that's so cute.

Speaker 2:
[21:11] That's good.

Speaker 1:
[21:12] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[21:12] So hey, look, Dad Slop is a segment, but it is also a genre.

Speaker 1:
[21:18] It is a genre now.

Speaker 2:
[21:20] I am very invested in it because, yeah, shit hit different and it's good. It helps.

Speaker 1:
[21:27] Taking the Internet by storm in a way that I wish everyone would just be quiet. Pragmata is out this week.

Speaker 2:
[21:34] Yeah. I mean, to be perfectly honest, it helps when the Dad Slop, as I'm describing, is also a very good game to play.

Speaker 1:
[21:46] Excellent game. Oh, hold on. We were both sponsored to play Pragmata last week and run TikTok ads for it.

Speaker 2:
[21:54] Hashtag sponsored. Which are ongoing concurrently.

Speaker 1:
[21:57] So these are, I would say, quite generously sponsored opinions.

Speaker 2:
[22:04] They are. However, I will say that the... I played the demo before that happened.

Speaker 1:
[22:11] I also did, yeah. And I like the demo.

Speaker 2:
[22:12] I was very much impressed by it there. And the fact that they sent a fucking microwave to my house.

Speaker 1:
[22:21] It was a microwave?

Speaker 2:
[22:23] The fucking giant... There's the whole press kit thing that's just insane. And I'm like, what is this? And it opens up and goes... Fuck it. And it's like... It's this insane light and sound setup thing to just give you some keychains and some stickers.

Speaker 1:
[22:41] I'm really glad I passed on that.

Speaker 2:
[22:46] It is the size of a microwave. You press a button on it, it lights up and goes...

Speaker 1:
[22:52] That's ridiculous.

Speaker 2:
[22:52] And then you get some markers and some keychains and some stickers. And it's cool little merch, but I'm like, this is insane.

Speaker 1:
[23:01] I feel like every time I have to have that discussion with somebody, like, oh, you want to sign up for the event or the press kit? And I'm like, nah, just send me a code.

Speaker 2:
[23:11] Yeah, for me...

Speaker 1:
[23:13] No, I don't. I don't want it.

Speaker 2:
[23:15] For me, it depends on if I think I'm gonna care, right? And in this case, I'm like, I like this, this is gonna be cool. I think I'm gonna care. And like, for example, well, metaphor, right? That was worth it. There was some cool shit.

Speaker 1:
[23:26] Yeah, I got a box back there.

Speaker 2:
[23:27] Yeah, the metaphor one was super dope, right? I'm happy with that.

Speaker 1:
[23:29] Yeah, it was all right. Yeah, I mean, the end state of the metaphor special edition press kit is it's literally just sitting behind me in this room in the corner.

Speaker 2:
[23:39] Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, to be fair.

Speaker 1:
[23:41] To fill space.

Speaker 2:
[23:42] Yes. I got rid of the box and stuff after a point. It's just a jacket. The Ghost of Tsushima box has become a crate for putting some pictures on and stuff. It's literally next to my TV as just a little like, yeah, we put a little board on it and pictures and stuff. But in any case, some of those, this is one of those ones where you're like, for what comes in it, this is insane. Game itself, how, so yeah, did you do anything beyond that first two hours?

Speaker 1:
[24:18] No, I did not.

Speaker 2:
[24:19] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[24:20] I have a lot going on and Pragmata seems super hot. So I figured, you know what? It can keep a week or two.

Speaker 2:
[24:25] Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[24:27] That being said, that first two hours was super solid.

Speaker 2:
[24:30] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[24:30] Including going through the demo area again.

Speaker 2:
[24:33] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[24:33] It was completely different.

Speaker 2:
[24:34] Yeah, I was going to say, you fought the boss in the demo, but the area leading up to it and everything around it was not at all the same.

Speaker 1:
[24:41] Yeah, it's the same like architecture, but you go through the rooms in a different order and fight different enemies.

Speaker 2:
[24:46] And the demo gives you an impression of what the bonfire sort of system is, but it's not that at all.

Speaker 1:
[24:53] It was going to be the game at all.

Speaker 2:
[24:55] Yeah, but it's not what you thought. It is a come back to the checkpoint and heal up, but it's really a full-on return to base, and do everything in your little hangout club space.

Speaker 1:
[25:09] Yeah, do the little social events with Diana.

Speaker 2:
[25:12] Hang out with, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[25:14] And talk to Cabin, who's a freak and I hate.

Speaker 2:
[25:18] Ah, okay. Cabin, I'm like squinting at you, because I'm like, how do I know you're not connected to Edis? There's nothing here that says you're not connected to the evil AI system that's destroying everything in this game that we're trying to kill. And then Cabin cracked a joker too and his hat came on and he had a bingo system and I was like, okay, Cabin, you're in.

Speaker 1:
[25:40] So I don't think Cabin's like Nefarious. What I do think is that, I don't know, he's just a little unsettling, I just don't like it.

Speaker 2:
[25:48] I like how his face goes from Tate to, you know, so he goes from side scrolling mode to fucking vert shooter.

Speaker 1:
[25:57] And I did note, I was like, I was going through my menus and I heard Mega Man sound effects going off.

Speaker 2:
[26:02] Oh, I didn't hear that. Interesting.

Speaker 1:
[26:04] Like I turn and he was playing the Progmata version of Mega Man on his own face.

Speaker 2:
[26:09] Ah, shit, I got to see that. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[26:11] Because like I was looking at Diana, I'm like, this is a send up to Rock and Roll. Like it is Roll in a blue bomber jacket.

Speaker 2:
[26:20] Yeah, I mean, you can put as much of that on the game as you want and not to mention the fact that you're dealing with the moon, you know.

Speaker 1:
[26:28] I'm on the moon.

Speaker 2:
[26:29] But what I do really like actually and was not expecting, given the setting, given the system, given what it all is, it's so simple and like so far almost like light on, it's light on like some of the lore for now. It's light on a lot of things.

Speaker 1:
[26:54] The premise is like overwhelmingly simple.

Speaker 2:
[26:57] That intro sets it all up, right?

Speaker 1:
[27:00] The AI, oopsie, there was a quake.

Speaker 2:
[27:03] The most important detail in the background is there's a giant 3D printer.

Speaker 1:
[27:09] Yeah. That's it. 3D print anything.

Speaker 2:
[27:11] You can 3D print anything. Then there's these 3D printers that are human sized, robots that are all around the base printing out enemies.

Speaker 1:
[27:19] 3D printing human sized robots that don't like you.

Speaker 2:
[27:22] You know? And you're like, okay, go. That's it. But you know, you kind of just are like, okay, you meet Diana, you hang out, you establish a little little fun relationship and chatting with her. She's a goober. And she's-

Speaker 1:
[27:35] Diana is great. I have, it's been a while since I played a game in which I'm like, whoever wrote this slash directed it has kids for sure.

Speaker 2:
[27:44] I saw it because I saw there's a couple of moments, one where it's like she's walking and it's like that, like you've been walking for a little while now, but you don't quite have it down yet.

Speaker 1:
[27:52] I don't quite got it.

Speaker 2:
[27:53] And there's those steps of uncertainty where you're like, you're going to fall on your face any second now. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[27:58] For me is when she goes, oh, Kitty and nearly kills herself launching into a death.

Speaker 2:
[28:03] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[28:03] Like an infinite pit.

Speaker 2:
[28:04] A million percent, right? Not to mention.

Speaker 1:
[28:08] But Kitty. And I have legitimately gone through this identical scenario.

Speaker 2:
[28:14] Not to mention Hugh being like, yeah, I don't like kids. And it's like, yeah, we'll see about that, idiot. That's the perfect kind of guy to have this adorable kid on his back, hacking and whatnot. Also, you're hanging out with your crewman, Ken, and I forgot what the other one's name was.

Speaker 1:
[28:34] The guys who don't pull their masks up so you know they're going to die in a second?

Speaker 2:
[28:38] The ones without faces, exactly. And you're like, Hugh is not a protagonist's name, but it's a dad name.

Speaker 1:
[28:46] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[28:47] And that's what's important here, right? There's a very, very clear energy to that that is paternal. And one of the big things that did it to you was like when he was like he was holding her or something and she kind of did this at one point, like from the side, she kind of did like that, like on his face. And it was one of those things where I was like, that happens all the time.

Speaker 1:
[29:08] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[29:08] That's super real.

Speaker 1:
[29:10] Right?

Speaker 2:
[29:10] She kind of just like-

Speaker 1:
[29:11] You're touching my face in a way that would be wildly like aggressive or weird if an adult did it. But you're cute. You're just a baby. You're just a baby.

Speaker 2:
[29:22] I saw in Death Stranding as well, Bibi did that and that thing with that. I was like, yeah, the face grab is super real. No, it is cool to have that aspect to it. It feels a lot better that she's on your back, behind you and not like in front. Even though it's a robot child, admittedly.

Speaker 1:
[29:45] There was a version of the game where she was like running around and it just caused like the player to accidentally shoot her like a hundred times.

Speaker 2:
[29:54] I mean, there's no tactical role to worry about, so you're not going to like bonk every time. But yeah, it does feel interesting to kind of like, I'm like, OK, this between this and the way I saw that intro to Death Stranding 2, none of that unease, you know. And then but like, yeah, you have this and you have Donkey Kong and you've got Death Stranding and you're just like, OK, we're in an era right now.

Speaker 1:
[30:17] We're in an era of like, that's like a legacy continues to make you're not.

Speaker 2:
[30:23] We will pay you to use Tinder. We will fucking pay you get on the apps, kids.

Speaker 1:
[30:31] So one of the things of note. So first of all, I want to point out, I've seen people say dead space. This is the this is the best. This is the best fake name for the game genre. I've seen solid that space is a plus. But I've seen like a fair amount of discussion. And I felt it too. Where like we had the era of the sad dad, the sad dad era, like emphasized by like Joel and Kratos. And it, there's this weird like, there's a type of guy out there who fantasizes about defending his family.

Speaker 2:
[31:22] Let's go. Hit it. Hit it. Yep. Yep.

Speaker 1:
[31:26] I kill anyone to defend my boy. I kill anybody who looked at my daughter. Okay. Well, would you pick them up from school and go to their soccer practice?

Speaker 2:
[31:36] Running through your head, you're like, what are you thinking about? Just hands over the over the wheat. Hiya. Hiya. The gladiator music, you know, thinking about the Roman Empire specifically so that you can draw, thrust at the enemy in child in hand.

Speaker 1:
[31:55] Those games, like particularly The Last of Us, like plays directly into the family revenge, family protector, like power fantasy.

Speaker 2:
[32:06] You read my mind on this. Go.

Speaker 1:
[32:08] Donkey Kong and Pragmata do not.

Speaker 2:
[32:12] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[32:14] Donkey Kong and Pragmata are you and your buddy going on an adventure and y'all, I want to keep them safe, but it's not about, oh, get off, like Hugh isn't going, oh, kill any robot that looks at this. Like, no, that's fucking weird.

Speaker 2:
[32:31] Right. And I'll even say-

Speaker 1:
[32:32] Instead he's like going, get behind me, get behind me. I need to protect you.

Speaker 2:
[32:37] And there's obviously those moments of like, and then you kind of see like, oh, how's it going to handle something like, they're being taken away or being threatened, right? But something that is in the former category is going to make it all about that energy. The like, the like, warrior revenge, LARP dead energy in a way. And there's a huge difference between how that feels, especially beforehand playing it as someone who didn't, you know, when you don't have a kid or anything like that.

Speaker 1:
[33:01] And- I remember when I played Last of Us 1, I didn't like Ellie at all. I thought Ellie was really annoying.

Speaker 2:
[33:09] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[33:09] And she pissed me off.

Speaker 2:
[33:11] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[33:11] Because I was in my 20s.

Speaker 2:
[33:13] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[33:14] And I nicknamed Ellie garbage.

Speaker 2:
[33:16] I do remember that.

Speaker 1:
[33:17] And would refer to her only as garbage. Right.

Speaker 2:
[33:20] Right.

Speaker 1:
[33:21] But then I got to the last scene in the game, and I was like yelling, I'm going to get you garbage. And then I went into the room and I just started shooting every doctor in there.

Speaker 2:
[33:31] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[33:32] Going, you don't get to do this.

Speaker 2:
[33:34] Right. Right. Right. Yes.

Speaker 1:
[33:36] And then it's like, OK, so it was in there. So I like it was it was in there underneath.

Speaker 2:
[33:43] I really liked Ellie.

Speaker 1:
[33:44] So all the annoyance.

Speaker 2:
[33:45] I didn't I didn't have that. I was fine with, you know, from the jump. I was like, OK, yeah, this energy works.

Speaker 1:
[33:51] But that's my garbage. That's mine.

Speaker 2:
[33:54] But there is something different. There is something different to the like you said, like, yeah, it's the revenge fantasy and or the like save them fantasy, you know, it's the Mad Max Lone Warrior. Nothing to lose.

Speaker 1:
[34:10] Sigma male. Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[34:11] Just going right, right. Versus the one where it's like, actually do it now. We're here. They're here. Take care of them now. And, you know, while while adventure is happening.

Speaker 1:
[34:24] I think the best summation of that attitude was like, would you kill somebody to save your family? Yeah, absolutely. Would you suck a dick to save your family?

Speaker 2:
[34:36] All fours. Get the spit out. I mean, because and not only that, right, but think about the whole like protagonists that are like good at fighting and good at adventuring, but bad at being parents. You know, you're Joe Turo, the idea is you're Josephs and you're Goku memes. And it's like, okay, but what if like you had to really do a bunch of all the things you were doing, all those adventures with the kid in your hand or like with you, you know?

Speaker 1:
[35:08] Well, don't ask Goku that.

Speaker 2:
[35:10] But that's, you know.

Speaker 1:
[35:12] Like he's the work.

Speaker 2:
[35:13] How does that change the entire adventure? If you if like Gohan was there with Goku from fucking Raditz all the way through Namek, you know, there was no division and split up there. What if?

Speaker 1:
[35:28] So yeah, Pragmata also has some of that where it's like, well, Diana can can help you. She had she has to help you, in fact, because you're a team. And it's like when I do dishes now. My dude, I don't have to bend down to get my dishes anymore, by the way.

Speaker 2:
[35:43] OK, OK.

Speaker 1:
[35:44] My little man goes in and the only thing I do is like, OK, steak knives. Dad, dad takes all the steak knives out first because they're sharp, you know. But then I do that. And then he hands me every fork and every knife and every spoon. And then he gets distracted when he gets to the spoons because spoons make great drumsticks.

Speaker 2:
[36:05] They do. They really do.

Speaker 1:
[36:07] But then he hands me every plate and every glass in that dishwasher.

Speaker 2:
[36:11] Nice. OK.

Speaker 1:
[36:11] It's like he's hacking a robot for me to shoot.

Speaker 2:
[36:14] You got a little opera. That's cool. OK.

Speaker 1:
[36:16] So start them early. Start them real early. This kid puts his clothes in the washing machine. He does his dishes. He puts his dishes away in the sink. He helps his mom make muffins.

Speaker 2:
[36:29] Oh, I mean, dude, when I said she like really responds to sound, yeah, she's clapping like three months ahead of schedule. She's really, really ahead on that. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[36:42] Before I forget, this is really important because I know I know your personality. Some milestones, they will be way ahead and some they will be way behind. Unless they're like a year behind on those milestones, fucking don't worry about it.

Speaker 2:
[37:00] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[37:01] All their skills are lopsided. There's no normal child for their milestones.

Speaker 2:
[37:06] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[37:07] Except for the really basic ones like walking and talking.

Speaker 2:
[37:11] Some of it's just random in the sense that, because yeah, we talk about tummy time and how that strengthens the back, and it's really good and everything, and she got really, really good at it. Now, she's just hating it and just doesn't want to do tummy time anymore. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[37:30] I hate tummy time too.

Speaker 2:
[37:31] Yeah. Tummy time then leads to crawling, but it's like she's pulling back from that, while also getting more confident about being more standing up, and having these, and sitting down, and balancing, and things like that. So yeah, it's all swerving, and ultimately, it's like, okay, I didn't care about that milestone as much as I'm going, I noticed that she's old enough now to look around the room and want to get to stuff, and is frustrated that she can't get to it yet. So I'm like, ah, I can see.

Speaker 1:
[38:07] My body isn't doing it. Well, how do I do it?

Speaker 2:
[38:09] Exactly, I'm like, I can see that you're getting frustrated at your limitations, and you want to be able to move over there, so let's try to encourage that, you know? That's the speed at which it makes sense to go for me.

Speaker 1:
[38:22] I'm going to hold up my hand. There's a comment that I just saw that I want to respond to, because I think it's funny. Someone says, don't forget about the gifted child to burnt out adult pipeline. Someone says, has Pat ever talked about that? I would love to hear his thoughts. Most of you weren't gifted. Your parents just gassed you the fuck up.

Speaker 2:
[38:44] Probably.

Speaker 1:
[38:44] Sorry.

Speaker 2:
[38:45] By the numbers? Sure. I mean, I got the records to prove it. I literally skipped a grade.

Speaker 1:
[38:53] Yeah, me too.

Speaker 2:
[38:54] But so, you know, like.

Speaker 1:
[39:00] But, but yeah, no, yeah, most of you weren't gifted. You were just, like, normal, and your parents, like, gassed you up and didn't teach you to work hard. You learned that you had to work hard one day, and you were like, oh, this sucks.

Speaker 2:
[39:16] And how were you rewarded? Were you rewarded by being told that, like, wow, you're so smart, or were you told, like, that you worked hard?

Speaker 1:
[39:22] You worked really hard, yeah. I was told, man, you're so smart. You're smarter than the other kids. You're better. I'm like, oh, okay. Wait a second. I didn't just get a hundred without trying this time. What happened? Does that mean I'm stupid?

Speaker 2:
[39:39] Yeah, exactly. She's like, hey. So the take to take us back to it now. You're running through and I don't know if you got. Okay. So did you get to the area, the second area of? Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[40:00] The New York area.

Speaker 2:
[40:01] Exactly. You get to the city, right? And shit opens up. You start to see like this wider zone. You start to see the environment and pragmata that is from the trailer where you see them in the city. Because I was like, oh yeah, the first promotional material looked like in Times Square. And so you get to that sort of area and see what's going on. Something really cool about the passage of time in our era is that new things that can be used in fiction are very contemporary. Like if you've ever seen something 3D printed, then you might have seen how something looks when it goes wrong or when it's in the middle of printing and how fucked up and stringy it gets.

Speaker 1:
[40:47] I think... I'm really glad I was able to get to the New York section during the sponsored segment because the art style at the beginning of Pragmata is pretty stock.

Speaker 2:
[41:02] It's sterile. You're in a space station.

Speaker 1:
[41:04] A lot of really good reflection work.

Speaker 2:
[41:05] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[41:06] But you're in a fucking spacesuit and you're in fucking space and there's robots.

Speaker 2:
[41:11] And it's clean space. It's not space that's been abandoned for a long time.

Speaker 1:
[41:15] But you get to that New York section and the first thing you discover is the robots are starting to look deliberately non-standard. I guess that's how I'll describe them. But also you get this Capcom team's opinion of what they think about AI generated slop because you are walking through a 3D printed slop space where everything looks really pretty from a distance until you get close and everything's mashed together like shit and nothing's contiguous properly.

Speaker 2:
[41:52] You look through a window right before you get there and you see a taxi, a New York City yellow cab being 3D printed. You're like, what the fuck is that? Then you see its application or it's just like, yeah, this is a basic scanned vibe of what New York is. The idea that, well, sure, because this data was probably just like, oh, I don't know, we sent in some Google cabs to do Google Earth and then they just took all that, uploaded it and now we spat it out on the 3D printer and filled in the blanks with what AI thinks.

Speaker 1:
[42:25] Some of the printings have also failed.

Speaker 2:
[42:27] So you're seeing this really kind of interesting thing of like, yeah, it looks, there's parts of the city that are breaking into the station underneath it and you're just kind of printing out onto the space above. And you see where the errors occur, it looks like 3D printing mistakes. That's a new thing that's a new thing that I've never seen in any fiction before because it's like, this is now that we know about 3D printing that we could use that, right? There's a new medium and with a new medium comes new techniques, sounds and visuals and errors. And the way the stringy parts of the material kind of like rip into these fabric-y like sinews, you know, is like, oh, fuck, that's someone that's looking at when printing goes wrong. And then you can use that to like give a kind of like horror-y fucked up effect, especially like the areas where you're not supposed to go yet. It's not just like a like, oh, it's like, it's giving the same energy of like a crystal that says break this later in the game to get through.

Speaker 1:
[43:31] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[43:32] But it's fucked up 3D printed, you know?

Speaker 1:
[43:34] I was really happy to see that 3D printed progression blocking bullshit because like, oh, oh, this is a larger scale of exploration than I was expecting. And then I finished that section and it was like, you got 52% of the shit in this level. And I'm like, what? I didn't see enough room for 48% more level.

Speaker 2:
[43:59] I found a couple of corners and areas that were tucked around that you could admit you could miss running through it.

Speaker 1:
[44:06] I found an invisible wall, which made me want to shit.

Speaker 2:
[44:10] Because it's interesting how...

Speaker 1:
[44:12] Sorry, illusory wall, not an invisible wall.

Speaker 2:
[44:14] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Because yeah, I get the impression that based on that opener area, that it's still... Excuse me. It's still very... It's a linear game. You're going in a linear path. But there's moments where doors lead to doors, lead to corners, and those corners lead to pits that lead back up to the path you were on. And you can kind of like run in circles around these areas a little bit. And yeah, it opens up a little bit more so far in this second part. Gameplay-wise, of course, because we've been talking about the setting and Diana and stuff, but the core loop of just like... It's third-person shooting over the shoulder. Feels good. You jump and...

Speaker 1:
[44:56] Shooting feels good? The hacking also feels good.

Speaker 2:
[45:00] Jumping feels amazing.

Speaker 1:
[45:04] So, this is one of those fun things where they had the ad copy. Make sure to say it's by people who made Devil May Cry and Resident Evil, specifically the team. In the opening credits, you see Jun Takouchi is a producer. Jun Takouchi is a monster producer. He's produced all the Resident Evil games, damn near everything that's come out of Capcom. But then I'm like, well, where's the Devil May Cry stuff? And then I'm like, oh, enemy attacked me and I hit jump and Hugh jumped 15 feet straight up in the air with an invincibility frame on his startup. And I'm like, that's the Devil May Cry one jump.

Speaker 2:
[45:39] I described it to Reggie as basically from the people who brought you Dante and Blanca's jump arc, right? That's so specific. Dante and Blanca have the same jump. It's really high, really fast. It doesn't go very far forward. And then they drop like a brick. And it gets you the fuck out of the situation and then drops you back down. And it's really tricky to deal with if you're defending against it. But I really enjoy that into a hover. And then you boost with him forward. And it's nice. He's got a nice little movement thing going. And then you jump and then you aim down the sights. And that sumbitch starts floating in the air.

Speaker 1:
[46:24] And you're like, ah, but also I was like, okay, I got a dodge or two dodges. And then I go to the upgrade thing. And it's like, you may upgrade from one dodge to two dodges. And I'm like, okay, I guess that's the limit of how crazy the game will go. No, because then I got one level further. And every single thing in the entire hub said, no, we unlock more levels of every single ability in the game. And there's way too many of them for you to buy. Which is something I haven't seen in the game in a long time.

Speaker 2:
[46:55] So I didn't spend my money on that, interestingly. I went a different way where I was like, I see you get a special currency. And there's a whole big build up for when you get that fucking super currency.

Speaker 1:
[47:06] I didn't get that new currency.

Speaker 2:
[47:08] You pick up that, you open up the chest, and it's like, you're like, yeah. And you get it. And it's like, you now have access to dad dodge, dad time, you know, which is last second dodge into boom, right? Or do the boss take down QTE on regular enemies.

Speaker 1:
[47:33] On anybody. Yeah, it's, it's so there's too much that you don't have enough to buy all the upgrades, like not even close. Like I finished two levels and I had enough to get like one of the two of the cheaper upgrades. I would have had to save up for any of the others. Right. That's awesome. That's awesome that I have to like really be like, okay, do I want dad time or critical hits on regular enemies? Because those are both really, really, really fucking good.

Speaker 2:
[48:04] Do you want to spend your currency on just restocking your shotguns? You know, or do you want to put them towards like, yeah, like any of the other stacks of upgrades or so?

Speaker 1:
[48:17] So like one of the things that I did, I'm like, oh, more mod slots. I will have as many mod, I will buy mod slots until I run out of like slots that I can equip because these upgrades are really powerful. They're really powerful and they're on all the time.

Speaker 2:
[48:31] Did you notice that when you got mod slots and mod upgrades, that every time you saw a percentage that some bitch had two digits on it, every time you get a modification, it's minimum 10%.

Speaker 1:
[48:47] I talked about it. And I was like, but you know what else I noticed? You know what else? I was like, hey, I unlocked the shotgun. Now the shotgun is available every time I want to leave the hub. I can start with the shotgun. Somebody described it as Dark Souls 1 spells.

Speaker 2:
[49:04] Oh, preparing.

Speaker 1:
[49:06] You're leaving the bonfire with all you're going to have and then you can find more out there, but that's what you're leaving with, right?

Speaker 2:
[49:11] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[49:13] But more than that, I unlocked that and a little cut scene happened of like a locker opening up and like the little thing of the, you know, the locker. I'm like, where is that? Right? I'm like looking around like, where was that in the room? I'm like, oh, it's the set of like a hundred lockers next to the tunnel exit.

Speaker 2:
[49:34] Oh, okay. It's coming out of those and printing.

Speaker 1:
[49:39] And so like every single one of those fucking things is a hack or an upgrade or a weapon or something significant, right? And it's a huge line on both sides.

Speaker 2:
[49:51] Okay, okay. Every, yeah, that's, that's your...

Speaker 1:
[49:54] So you're like, oh, there's gonna be some fucking guns in this game.

Speaker 2:
[49:59] And the thing is, is we're on a almost vanquish like system of like you get four slots and you can carry one of each category in each slot. So you're not gonna quick switch into everything, every way you want all the time, all at once.

Speaker 1:
[50:13] No, you have your damage slot, you have your utility slot and I didn't get the bottom.

Speaker 2:
[50:16] Yeah, whatever that's gonna be, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[50:18] And then obviously there's your default gun which will never leave.

Speaker 2:
[50:22] So basically after you go through some of that New York section, so you get introduced, you get your shotgun, you get your net for locking things down. Your next upgrade after that, you get basically a grenade that replaces your net on the ground. So like just spreads the enemy out and knocks them down. And then your shotgun replacement becomes sniper, right? Just laser pierces through enemies, multiple in a row, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Takes a long time to charge it up, but it has its utility. Not long after that, you start seeing. So I mean, here's the thing is like the game, as it's a Capcom game, has its moments where you're doing this running around and you're shooting and stuff. And then it goes, for this part, you're playing Resident Evil. You're in a hallway and the enemies are coming at you and they're going in your face and you don't have the room to dodge actually. And when you run out of bullets, you can reload, but you're reloading one bullet at a time. And that takes forever. It takes forever. Yeah. Right. So I'm like, oh, you have a big guy and two small guys and some floaters around zapping at me in a tiny little hallway.

Speaker 1:
[51:37] That's a problem.

Speaker 2:
[51:39] This is an RE moment in a not RE game, you know? So it can switch into that when it wants to, which I thought was really interesting. Not to mention, you need a little bit of room to like hack while things are coming at you from left and right and stuff. And then you start being like, okay, fuck this, just go straight to the target. I can't be going through the extra relays, you know?

Speaker 1:
[52:00] Yeah. One of the things that I really liked was I unlocked the, I forget what it's called, the multi-target.

Speaker 2:
[52:08] Multi-hack, multi-hack.

Speaker 1:
[52:10] And it's like, I get three of these.

Speaker 2:
[52:11] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[52:12] And I'm like, this might as well be an incredibly good grenade in any other game.

Speaker 2:
[52:18] How?

Speaker 1:
[52:19] Hacking it, I'm like, ah, I got this big fucking mess, I need it to stop.

Speaker 2:
[52:23] But don't accidentally use it by just panicking and automatically running through the yellow object on your way to the green.

Speaker 1:
[52:30] So like, giving yourself powerful hacks makes the hacking minigame harder against normal enemies because you have now put obstacles in your brain to avoid. It's really smart. It's really, really smart.

Speaker 2:
[52:45] And it feels, again, I can't say enough, after we talked about it before, it feels good to do the game inside the game. It doesn't feel bad. I hate when it-

Speaker 1:
[52:53] Putting it on the d-pad, very smart.

Speaker 2:
[52:55] Feels good to do that. Now, there's a moment that occurs where the second category of flyers drops in and starts shooting missiles at you. Okay? And so you fucking- You gotta take some time, shoot those missiles out of the air while the rest of the thing is coming, right? The missiles, however, if you aim Diana at them, can be hacked.

Speaker 1:
[53:18] Oh, get the out of here.

Speaker 2:
[53:20] And-

Speaker 1:
[53:21] That's cool.

Speaker 2:
[53:22] You then have Diana hack the missile and you return to sender that shit back to where it came from, right? Awesome. But the moment that you hack it, this is- and this is like, to lay this out, there's something that happened in my brain. And like, you know, I'm like, I can't- I'm not gonna go too elaborate into it because it's sponsored stream, so I'm not gonna bring up the other whatever properties and games, etc. You're playing the whole game and you're aiming at things and there's a grid, and then you're looking at nodes that are blue, that you're trying to move through to get to a green one to activate the crit. When the missile comes at you, you're looking at four rotational nodes. It's like, you know, the elevator switches that rotate?

Speaker 1:
[54:10] Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[54:11] You're looking at that and like three of them are already blue and one of them is orange and you have to switch to turning that one into the correct location. And your brain goes from seeking out blue to needing to ignore all blue for that missile hack moment. And I go, Icaruga, right? The moment you switch polarity in Icaruga and you say your black dots are now hostile and white dots are friendly. And then you switch it back and then white dots are hostile and black dots are friendly. And you're like, that exact moment happened when hacking. And I was like, I've, I know this little tingle in my brain of needing to turn the colors that I was seeking out into colors to avoid, right? So that felt really cool as well in the middle of the fight. You get these larger enemies that's come out and they're like tightening. They're basically like, hey, remember the creepy Titan effect? Like, that's going to be a part of this here and they're a problem. And they represent things that should be dealt with until things that should be dealt with even more than those things start to show up. And now you have a list of priorities to go through. And basically where I took it to was after that first boss where you get a really awesome fight against the demo boss where it's like a Metal Gear and you're dashing out of the way and hacking.

Speaker 1:
[55:29] And Diana gets her fucking child fire.

Speaker 2:
[55:32] Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, rage of the dad. Diana Trigger, Diana Trigger is what I was calling it. Her DT, right?

Speaker 1:
[55:40] Yeah. Oh, okay, DT, perfect.

Speaker 2:
[55:43] Yeah, so she pops her Diana Trigger and then you deal with the thing. So what comes up next is you get an exam room, you know? It is a series of waves and there's a bunch of them and there's things in there and they come at you and you need to prioritize immediately. And it's the first like, okay, now this is not the re little hallway section that we're doing. We're in a room and we're controlling a way, a horde, a wave coming at you and choosing what to ignore on the ground, what to pick up, when to switch to what. It's like I started to feel all of that as I was going through it. And like I died I think twice and then came back through it the third time and just like I put down the sniper, picked up the shotgun, dealt with these things up front, take out the fly, et cetera. And then as you're just prioritizing and then I saved up enough to deal with the big guy at the end and you're like this game when it's flowing and you're aiming and you're returning to sender and then oh my god it feels so good it feels fantastic man.

Speaker 1:
[56:48] Also I want to give the developers of the game a little golf clap for two things about the naming conventions in Pragmata. First of all, having this game come out on the moon like a week after a new moon mission, good one, good timing.

Speaker 2:
[57:11] Not intentional but what an increase in timing.

Speaker 1:
[57:14] Yeah, unrelated but good one. But also calling Diana, Diana, that's a plus.

Speaker 2:
[57:23] What's the bit?

Speaker 1:
[57:25] Diana is the goddess of the moon and childbirth.

Speaker 2:
[57:28] Okay, sure, yeah, all right, that works. That's great.

Speaker 1:
[57:34] She's literally the moon baby god.

Speaker 2:
[57:36] Moon child.

Speaker 1:
[57:37] Here's your moon baby.

Speaker 2:
[57:42] Yeah, I mean, and...

Speaker 1:
[57:43] She's also the hunter. Which, I mean, Diana can hunt.

Speaker 2:
[57:49] Oh, so it's Artemis, yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, gotcha. I mean, they easily could have been...

Speaker 1:
[57:54] But also Artemis.

Speaker 2:
[57:55] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[57:57] Which just happened.

Speaker 2:
[57:59] Yeah. It could have easily been like a kid named Luna or something, but that...

Speaker 1:
[58:04] That's why you're going up to... That's why the company is called Delphi. Cool. Cool.

Speaker 2:
[58:12] Cool. Okay. Okay. Wasn't piecing that together. What I was about to say just before that fuck was... Oh, yes. Something that I found that was initially tricky was like the fact that I'm like, oh, fuck, I'm out of bullets, and now I'm waiting to reload, and all this is taking time. And then I kind of realized in that last phase, that challenge, where I was like, the time where you run out of bullets is actually the time it takes to manage everything else happening on the screen. So as those shots are coming back, you can look around, decide what to switch up to, hack anything that you need to hack right away, and position for the next re-engage moment after your bullets have reloaded.

Speaker 1:
[59:02] Now Woolie, I don't think you played Call of Duty Modern Warfare.

Speaker 2:
[59:08] No, I played Advanced Warfare.

Speaker 1:
[59:11] But if you had played Call of Duty Modern Warfare, and maybe Advanced Warfare, I didn't play that, I don't know if it's there. But Pragmata agrees, switching to your sidearm is faster than reloading.

Speaker 2:
[59:24] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[59:25] Your default pistol reloads whether you have it in your hand or not. Which took me some getting used to.

Speaker 2:
[59:34] I hope you've got a sidearm and that you're not empty.

Speaker 1:
[59:37] Right, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[59:39] Because you've got to choose one to spend those shotgun bullets, which is another Resident Evil moment.

Speaker 1:
[59:45] How many do you start with? Four? That's enough for like one and a half problems.

Speaker 2:
[59:50] Encounters, yeah. Straight up. Did you waste your shotgun on all the grunts? Well, too bad.

Speaker 1:
[59:56] No, no. I had the shotgun. I fired it four times at the wall. So that it hit zero instead of reloading. Then killed myself on the next encounter to get the checkpoint reloaded and went only for big boys.

Speaker 2:
[60:15] Furthermore, you start shooting at not the weak point on things and realizing you're an idiot because there's glowing things you should be shooting at to make this encounter easier and if you can line them up even better. Yeah, no. I did appreciate just like each subsequent enemy that got introduced became the new problem priority that you need to shift up the list and it's like, you see that? Deal with that. Which is a little vanquish like?

Speaker 1:
[60:50] I mean, the most vanquish like thing about this is the suit of armor. Is the suit.

Speaker 2:
[60:54] Yeah, for sure. But there's a little bit of that too of just like, it's almost like in vanquish when you're hearing you know, and you're like, stop where? What? Deal, you know? Not to mention running up to the thing and QTE-ing it and stuff too as well.

Speaker 1:
[61:12] Yeah, I say one of the things that I found very charming. I thought I was psychic at a moment in this game because I was, you know, in one of the first areas, you walk back to the tram to pick up a collectible and like two robots start coming out of the printers. And I'm shooting at one robot. And then I just dodged to the side. And the second robot that I forgot was there, swung at air. And I'm like, oh my god, how do I know how to do that? That's crazy. And Chat had to tell me, Diana told you. What, she did? I hadn't even noticed. But Diana like literally yells, watch out.

Speaker 2:
[61:54] Oh, okay.

Speaker 1:
[61:55] I just reacted without thinking. And I'm like, awesome. Awesome.

Speaker 2:
[61:59] Okay, because I didn't notice that either. But something I was worried about often was, is there one behind me? Because sometimes you're dealing with the thing in front of you doing the hack.

Speaker 1:
[62:09] Yeah, she'll give you a heads up if something's readying up a swing.

Speaker 2:
[62:12] Okay. Okay. Because yeah, like there's times where they are behind you and you're not always getting an audio cue, especially if you're locked into the hack moment.

Speaker 1:
[62:21] You know, the stompies, the big guys with the tummies, they stomp. I failed one of those and the next time they got ready, Diana was like, jump, Hugh.

Speaker 2:
[62:30] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[62:31] And I'm like, oh, thanks. Oh, that's cute.

Speaker 2:
[62:33] 100%. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[62:34] That's cute that you did that. Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[62:36] It was great. It's great.

Speaker 1:
[62:37] I wish Ashley in RE4 had told me that somebody was sneaking up behind me. That would have been more useful than you hiding in a trash can, Ash.

Speaker 2:
[62:46] So something else that happened too was an enemy. I was in the middle of hacking. I was shooting and I hacked it and it died. And then I aimed at the next enemy. And then the hack line went to that enemy instead. So you don't lose the hack for killing the thing you're looking at. It applies to the next thing that you aim at. And it just kind of like transfers over. I have to go back and look, but I basically feel like what I thought I saw happen was I was shooting and then it goes down. And then the line that I completed the hack on, I turned to the next thing, and it went into that. And then that thing created instead. I think that's what I saw happen, in which case it's like, that's interesting, because you have a transfer moment that's possible. No, I fucking...

Speaker 1:
[63:47] The game's just super solid.

Speaker 2:
[63:48] Yes. So solid, in fact, that I'm going to continue playing it.

Speaker 1:
[63:54] People have been at... You know what's a really positive sign for your sponsored stream? When you're like, thanks, Capcom. All right, that's going to be enough Pragmata for today. And then every single day since, you get a couple of comps... When are you going to keep playing Pragmata? When are you going to keep when? And the answer for me is next week, because I have a very busy week this week that you should check out.

Speaker 2:
[64:17] Yeah. And to be fair, anytime a thing is brand new, you can expect that that's going to be the case.

Speaker 1:
[64:22] Yeah, this is going to keep... Have you heard about Lunatic Mode?

Speaker 2:
[64:25] No. Nice name.

Speaker 1:
[64:27] Lunatic Mode is the God Hard equivalent.

Speaker 2:
[64:30] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[64:32] It's harder. And they unlock more of the system for you at the very beginning of the game.

Speaker 2:
[64:40] Nice. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[64:41] Like, they just open up the store, like, much, much earlier, to be like...

Speaker 2:
[64:46] Deal with the problems. You know what you're doing?

Speaker 1:
[64:47] You had to unlock this by beating the game. So what do you fucking want to use to go through hard mode?

Speaker 2:
[64:53] Great, great, great. Yeah. I'm envisioning really great hacks, really great items and mods, but, like, resources becoming the problem. You know? Because that little pew pew gun at the end of the day, you're gonna need to rely a lot on that thing when you're out of your good shit. You know? I did find, like, you always kind of... You're running by them, and you're like, okay, I remember this room had a couple things, but I ran empty in a few encounters and went, stop, go back and pick those up, and then move forward. You know? Which, again, RE, right?

Speaker 1:
[65:31] Yeah, no, it's like, listen, no, you can only hold four shotgun shells at a time, but I passed a shotgun power-up in that room!

Speaker 2:
[65:39] I picked up...

Speaker 1:
[65:39] I should go and get it.

Speaker 2:
[65:40] I picked up a multi-hack, but I left a disarm on the ground.

Speaker 1:
[65:44] Oh, you gotta keep that in.

Speaker 2:
[65:45] Let me go get it.

Speaker 1:
[65:46] I will say, going into that first boss fight, that somebody in my chat described it as a boss pond rather than a boss fountain, it is ridiculous. It is a giant circular room with, like, a dozen visible Unreal Tournament-style weapon pickups just floating on the ground. Go get them. I fucking wonder what's going to happen.

Speaker 2:
[66:11] Yeah, but also get used to picking up things on the fly while the action continues, you know?

Speaker 1:
[66:18] Like, this is what I have now.

Speaker 2:
[66:19] Yeah. And also, the boss is shooting a fucking circus of missiles at you. You can't really do much right now. Might as well take the chance to evade and go reload, you know? Go pick up new shit. Plan. So there's going to be these breaks in the action where you got to, like, reassess and start up your next hacking plan. You can put the hack node right before the final point and then choose to use it later, you know? If you change your attention to look back at something and then look back at the thing you were in the middle of hacking, it'll be where it was.

Speaker 1:
[66:52] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[66:52] You know? So, like, that's... I can only imagine how this hacking is going to get insane towards the end of the game, you know?

Speaker 1:
[67:00] You know what I really like? I had this happen a couple of times in which I had to cancel the hack. I had to start it over. And if you're pointing your gun at someone and you're hacking them, you have to start the hack over. Like, not fail it, like I locked myself into a corner. You have to hold the touch pad, you have to hold it to cancel the hack, and it's really awkward. And that's definitely on purpose.

Speaker 2:
[67:30] Not failing, but stopping and starting it.

Speaker 1:
[67:33] Because you can't, you can't, like, you can't, you have to pick a thumb to fucking let off the fucking movement or aim. And it's like, no, you fucked it, get ready to crab claw this shit.

Speaker 2:
[67:46] Okay. I mean, I found myself getting cornered in a couple of moments where I was like, I have nowhere to go, and there's a big boy and a dude about to slash me, and I jumped, float, doshed out kind of thing. And, you know, I haven't found myself having to do that yet. But that's an interesting, that's an interesting decision. Yeah, really fucking cool game so far, man. That is, and I also heard it's not very long. So, you know, we'll see.

Speaker 1:
[68:11] That's 20 to 25.

Speaker 2:
[68:12] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[68:13] And then another, you know, 15, I guess, if you want to hit lunatic mode, which is the length of all Capcom games. I don't know if you've noticed that. But like, if you're shooting a gun in a Capcom game, it will take you 20 to 25. Unless it's, you know, a classic Resident Evil game. Then you'll blow through it in a single sit down.

Speaker 2:
[68:33] Is that also the main campaign for Monster Hunter?

Speaker 1:
[68:37] Uh, no.

Speaker 2:
[68:38] Before the real mode starts?

Speaker 1:
[68:40] Yeah, I would say so. And RE9 was that as well. But RE9 and I assume Pragmata are built to like, no, I'm going to do it again. I'm going to beat it. I'm going to do it again right away.

Speaker 2:
[68:53] The only thing I'm kind of looking at that it's happening is you're spending those cabin tickets, cabin coins on, I guess, like model viewers and you're filling up the room with gifts, you're giving Dianna and stuff, and I'm like, this is clearly a game where cosmetics can go far.

Speaker 1:
[69:12] Absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[69:14] They gave you a taste of that in the DLC, and I was kind of hoping, not in the demo, and I was hoping we'd get some right off the bat, because I can see there's that like, put her in a bunny outfit like costume, or you can get Hugh to have his suit be a little more halo looking, I think, or have little cat ears on it or so. But I'm hoping we get some cool cosmetics, because I mean, we already know the Mega Man one, like they literally showed that in the Evil Fools bit.

Speaker 1:
[69:39] This is Mega Man.

Speaker 2:
[69:42] Cat armor, excuse me. Yeah, that game is fucking great. And no, and yeah, Reggie walked away going like, I'd love to see more of that. That was super fun to watch.

Speaker 1:
[69:53] It's great.

Speaker 2:
[69:53] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[69:54] It's super good.

Speaker 2:
[69:55] So, I guess I'll take it from there.

Speaker 1:
[69:58] Take it away, Woolie!

Speaker 2:
[69:59] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[70:00] Guy who works over at Woolie Versus.

Speaker 2:
[70:02] Correct. You know, okay, I wanted to bring this up too. So, just a little tag on from the conversation we had two weeks ago about River City Girls and the endings.

Speaker 1:
[70:15] Yeah. We're the only people who liked that ending.

Speaker 2:
[70:18] So, here's the thought, right? Because it turns out that for a lot of folks that hated it, it was based on they felt it came out of nowhere and it invalidated everything they did.

Speaker 1:
[70:28] It didn't come out of nowhere, though.

Speaker 2:
[70:29] And it felt like there was kind of a bait and switch, right? It turns out there's some obscure... There's an obscure Cuneo game where these characters existed.

Speaker 1:
[70:41] Yeah, there's a version of the game in which those girls are listed as their girlfriends.

Speaker 2:
[70:44] And then they got retconned out of existence. But it's not canon. Yeah. And they got retconned out of existence, right? Therefore making them and then the rivals have an actual reason to exist in this and hate each other in this setting, which is a cool little detail. But I think for that type of ending to work where you're going, everything you thought was one thing is actually a not and it's kind of nuts, you're kind of nuts. As long as it's hinted at in interesting ways on the way there, I think that would be much better received than the idea of feeling like you just got the rug pulled because I love the idea of everything I'm hearing about that. But I think to give people to not receive it the way they did based on the conversation we had, you got to give something that you can look back and go, remember when this happened, didn't you think that was a little bit weird and then you just look past it? That might be something that plants a breadcrumb for you.

Speaker 1:
[71:44] Hold on a minute. So you didn't play River City Girls, right?

Speaker 2:
[71:46] I did.

Speaker 1:
[71:47] You did? Okay.

Speaker 2:
[71:48] But I didn't do the secret ending. I just did a main run, a single run.

Speaker 1:
[71:53] The first thing that's your hint that the River City Girls are not their girlfriends is that they literally aren't. They're the wrong girls.

Speaker 2:
[72:02] From previous games.

Speaker 1:
[72:04] Those are not, that's not a Cuneo and Ricky's fucking girlfriends. And the second one is every single villain in the game is like, who the fuck are you? Where is girl, where are their girlfriends? No, you're not. Who are you? Like the whole game builds up to it.

Speaker 2:
[72:19] Oh, okay. Well, then never mind. Fuck that. Okay. No. Yeah. Okay. Then they go, yeah, we are.

Speaker 1:
[72:27] And like you got all the villains are jerks. Oh, no. That. All right.

Speaker 2:
[72:31] Then that's exactly what I meant. If they're the I don't remember. But if that's what's been happening the whole time, then that's exactly it.

Speaker 1:
[72:37] So I'm like absolutely baffled by people not liking the ending because it was it was built up to that.

Speaker 2:
[72:44] OK. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[72:45] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[72:45] Yeah. No, because that that's how you make that that that shit work. You know, I feel like the because because basically reading the most charitable interpretation of that, you go, oh, I remember how I felt at the end of fucking Bayonetta 3. Where the fuck did that come from? Hey, Woolie, by the way, oh, yeah, no, I know, I know, I know. And we're going to, you know.

Speaker 1:
[73:09] Yeah, turns out you were dumb and wrong.

Speaker 2:
[73:12] It turns out that that there is alternate realities being teased the whole time. And like, I mean, the kind of work is there's Sarazae and everything.

Speaker 1:
[73:18] And we'll get there.

Speaker 2:
[73:20] There's not much to say. It's just they did an interview and Kamiya said that they hinted at the alternate realities in previous games. So there was signs like the moon being destroyed in Bayonetta 1. But then it's back in two. So there's reasons to believe that like you were no longer looking at the same.

Speaker 1:
[73:34] It was the ending of Bayonetta 2, Balder going back in time to do Bayonetta 1. Are you saying that Balder went back in time in Bayonetta 2 to do Bayonetta 1 in Bayonetta 2? Why do you do that? You lie!

Speaker 2:
[73:44] You lie! I'm not even there. I take no issue with him saying that like this is what you can go back to the old games and see hints of. That like there is an idea that alternate-

Speaker 1:
[73:58] Okay, sure, fine.

Speaker 2:
[73:59] It doesn't make it good. It's like-

Speaker 1:
[74:02] No, you just didn't understand it. Well, you're explaining a bunch of shit that I had no complaints over at all. I actually think like Viola's like absolutely garbo fit at the end of the game is a bigger problem for your story than any of this multiverse shit.

Speaker 2:
[74:18] I mean, yeah, I just, you showed us-

Speaker 1:
[74:21] I'm the future of the witches and my fit is trash. you.

Speaker 2:
[74:26] You leaned into the multiverse set up here and it wasn't that great. So it doesn't, even though there were hints at it in the past, it doesn't make it better received, unfortunately. It just, it felt like shit.

Speaker 1:
[74:40] So the main heroine of the series going forward's gameplay isn't finished, so let's patch it fixed later, because it sucks.

Speaker 2:
[74:53] Um, yeah, no, it is, it is like addressing, like, it's addressing a gravy complaint as opposed to like the meat and potatoes of what everyone disliked, which is weird.

Speaker 1:
[75:11] Well, you see, this is how I made the gravy, bro. I'm complaining because your shit is overcooked.

Speaker 2:
[75:17] Yeah, well, because underneath that meat and potatoes is Shinzo Abe.

Speaker 1:
[75:23] Oh, no, not again.

Speaker 2:
[75:26] How'd you get into my dinner?

Speaker 1:
[75:28] His ghost is so strong.

Speaker 2:
[75:32] The fact that that comes up, it's like... Oh, fuck. Anyways, the whole thing with the whole thing with River City Girls, like, yeah, if that was telegraphed, then that's exactly it.

Speaker 1:
[75:49] I have no...

Speaker 2:
[75:49] Then no issues. That shit's hilarious. Beyond that, yeah, no, the only other thing was, all right, wrapped up Soul Reaver 1. Hit the credits.

Speaker 1:
[76:01] Woolie?

Speaker 2:
[76:02] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[76:04] I wanna describe the event that occurred. I was playing, I think, was it Progmodan that was doing it at the time? And someone came and chatted, like, Woolie just beat Soul Reaver 1, and the very next comment underneath it was somebody went, already? And I went, yes, that's the Soul Reaver 1 experience. You think you're building up to like the 80 or 70% mark, and then the game just goes over with a cut scene and a cliffhanger, and you're like, I can't believe this.

Speaker 2:
[76:37] It really does, between that and, excuse me, if we're talking about cut content, it really does feel like they ran out of time and money.

Speaker 1:
[76:45] They, guess what, I can tell you with absolute certainty, they ran out of time and money.

Speaker 2:
[76:50] Yep. Right. Cut human era, area, like it's not cut, but it was meant to be more cut boss fight that is apparently in the remaster?

Speaker 1:
[77:01] Hey, did you know, you remember when you got that fire, Soul Reaver? Did you think it was weird there was only the one element?

Speaker 2:
[77:09] Oh, yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[77:12] But that's supposed to be like eight of those, man.

Speaker 2:
[77:15] To be fair though, I hit the credits with half of my spells not being there. Sure. The glyphs were like all...

Speaker 1:
[77:23] You could have gone a little further.

Speaker 2:
[77:26] To be honest, most of them felt worthless. The fire one was great.

Speaker 1:
[77:31] Oh, totally.

Speaker 2:
[77:32] The others didn't do anything really and that was that.

Speaker 1:
[77:36] That is a Halo 2 ass scenario.

Speaker 2:
[77:41] So, I knew like... One, I knew the game was short, but I also knew like cliffhanger shit coming the fuck up because of previous conversations.

Speaker 1:
[77:49] Yeah, I remember that conversation vividly. I'm like, you're going to do the second one? You're like, I don't know. I don't like to promise. And I'm like, this one ends with the fucking expectation that you're going to keep trucking because it just cuts the fucking page in half.

Speaker 2:
[78:05] And so, while I was more or less prepared for that, yeah, Reggie's just there like pogging out, what the fuck do you mean the credits are rolling? You're like, welcome to the 1999 experience.

Speaker 1:
[78:16] If you flip a coin enough times, will it land on its edge credits? What?

Speaker 2:
[78:23] Here's what I will say is finding out that the, I said how long did you have to wait in 1999? And the answer was two years. Right? So I'm like, okay, fine. That's fine.

Speaker 1:
[78:37] Different console though.

Speaker 2:
[78:37] Yes. And also, two years after 1998 time? That's like 13 years now. The speed at which amazing shit was coming out back then, that's an eternity, you know? But no, I'm like, all right. They did get to the second one within a reasonable timeframe here.

Speaker 1:
[79:01] But guess what? Soul Reaver 2, also.

Speaker 2:
[79:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can see. So here's the thing is, I was looking at the, as you're walking down that final stretch of the game, you're looking into the future. You know, you're looking to the past, and then you're seeing these scenes replaying, and then you start looking into the future, and I'm going, are you showing me, are you showing me the sequels right now? Are you setting up moments that you're going to have to come back to? Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[79:39] Now, Woolie, if you were playing Legacy of Kane in 1999, and you're like, oh my God, this cliffhanger is crazy. I can't believe it. But like six months later, they announced Soul Reaver 2 and it's out a year later in 2001. You're like, oh, okay, but then you finish Soul Reaver 2, and the same fucking thing happens. You're like, oh, I can't believe it. Oh, when's the next one? I can't wait when you think Defiance comes out.

Speaker 2:
[80:12] Oh, that, I guess that was a bit more of a stretch.

Speaker 1:
[80:16] Well, when do you think?

Speaker 2:
[80:19] 2005? Okay. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[80:25] So, like, each time it happened, you're like, oh, I can't believe it.

Speaker 2:
[80:29] Oh, there it is. Right, right, right.

Speaker 1:
[80:31] Okay. The whole trilogy of games, sorry, a whole tetralogy of games, like an eight-year period, because Blood Omen was 96.

Speaker 2:
[80:45] 95? Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[80:49] So, in a seven-year span, they released the tetralogy of games. And then Defiance does wrap it up, but then they open it up for the future. And you're like, I wonder when the next one's going to be? In about 18 months, right? And that's where I've lived for my entire adult life.

Speaker 2:
[81:12] And there we are. Yeah. What I will say is knowing that looking at this with the lens of late 90s, early aughts, as how you're supposed to play it, it is really, there's a lot there that is incredible for the time. The thing that I remember the most though is this is the ammunition that was used in the war of this versus Ocarina of Time.

Speaker 1:
[81:43] Ridiculous comparison.

Speaker 2:
[81:44] Now, and now, that's insane. That you cannot.

Speaker 1:
[81:49] The structure, I can see it. Structurally, it shares like, I'm going to go to a dungeon, I'm going to do a puzzle, I'm going to get a puzzle.

Speaker 2:
[81:57] Puzzle, third party, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[81:58] And it was mature and violent and had voice acting, which, but like, it's a small game with a small scope and it does a couple things that are impressive, but it's not like this mechanical master class that Ocarina was.

Speaker 2:
[82:16] Like, Ocarina is like, you finish the Deku Tree, and then, no, Jabu Jabu's belly wraps up and then we end the gate roll credits there. You don't even get to adult, you know, in direct comparison here, I'd say. So, yeah, that feels silly. Not to mention that, like, there's no real other, like, you're not really going about and, like, talking to, there's no other, like, towns, villages, people, et cetera, whatever, going on. You're doing the puzzle rooms, you're killing the enemies, you're meeting your brothers.

Speaker 1:
[82:51] No, Simon Templeman and Michael Bell are just gonna monologue it.

Speaker 2:
[82:54] They're doing it. It is funny, though, seeing this with the lens of the past in the chat next to us at the same time, because I'm appreciating it and what it's doing and keeping in mind that, yeah, I get voice acting at a premium back then. But at the same time, there aren't... Your childhood memories of this game are way longer and more in depth and have more plot going on than the reality of what we experienced, right?

Speaker 1:
[83:23] Like, for example, this is a really good example. I'm streaming and somebody goes, Woolie just beat the Silent Cathedral. And I'm like, I thought that was going to take him, like, multiple seconds. When I was 50, it took me, like, eight hours.

Speaker 2:
[83:42] Yeah, yeah. And I felt that...

Speaker 1:
[83:43] Oh, I was stupid.

Speaker 2:
[83:45] I felt that the whole time, watching as we were going, encapsulated in these big moments where, for example, walking into the final room with Kane, right? Folks are like, best monologue incoming.

Speaker 1:
[84:00] That's pretty good.

Speaker 2:
[84:02] It was all right. I mean, it's fine.

Speaker 1:
[84:03] It was... Well, so the reason why it was the best monologue incoming is that your choices of monologues were...

Speaker 2:
[84:10] Yeah...

Speaker 1:
[84:11] .your solid one and nothing.

Speaker 2:
[84:14] And when you got this monologue, you were also on summer break in your friend's house with a sleepover, and you just had pizza, and you had some 7-Up, and you're getting super hyped up for this sick final battle that's about to happen because you rented the game for the weekend. Right? So you're having all of that. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not there right now. That's not where we are. But I can't fight that memory. You know, it's it is it is kind of like, yeah, this is this is basically introducing these characters. And Kane really has like two moments, one where you fight him and then he kind of was like, ah, I'm doing something with the Soul Reaver and disappears on you. And then the second time where he sets that up and talks about viewing the future and Mobius gets introduced and then he rage quits to the time stream, which is the funniest shit ever. Like, fuck alt F4. I am jumping into the live stream and you will come find me. You know, it's hilarious shit.

Speaker 1:
[85:19] And then they are suddenly telling you that I hope you are excited for the timeline of the games to get super fucking confusing. Super confusing, man.

Speaker 2:
[85:33] Looking forward to it, you know. But this being said, keeping a lot of that in mind, I see the potential here for this game to then tighten up some of these mechanics, expand the whole like how to kill the enemies bit, and you know, maybe making this shadow realm a little more interesting with stuff. And then fucking, pausing, pausing and thinking and turning and pushing and spinning and blocks. Because, oh boy, this is a puzzle game with 3D fighting graphics happening around the puzzles.

Speaker 1:
[86:13] Absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[86:15] As is a video game, an Eidos video game at the time. Anytime I thought like there might be one moment, there's the moment where you fight Dumas and he gets up, you pull the stakes out and you're like, oh, here we go. It's a fight fight. And it's like, it is not. It is a lead him to the furnace moment. But his AI kept breaking, so I had to like run back and kite him and it was actually a port showing.

Speaker 1:
[86:42] So Dumas rules. Like Dumas is like a really good example of all the problems we're talking about in Soul Reaver. The setup for Dumas as the biggest and healthiest of the vampire lieutenants, whose children you've been fighting the whole game, was so tough that he's the only one that the humans of the time were like, that one, and staked his shit to the wall, but couldn't kill him. So you have like, I have to allow my enemy to like heal up so I can actually kill them. Cool idea. Very awesome setup.

Speaker 2:
[87:24] I think...

Speaker 1:
[87:24] I'm gonna trick him to fall into the furnace.

Speaker 2:
[87:27] I mean, like, he does do the ha ha ha laugh when you swing at him, right? But ultimately, I think what's a little strange too is that like, the only fights that are not puzzles in the game are the cane fights, but those aren't really fights either as much as they're like run up to him and get a swing at him.

Speaker 1:
[87:46] He's gonna do a thing in the corner. Go get him.

Speaker 2:
[87:48] Just do it fast. And it's like, it's not about solving how he's gonna zap you or what. It's just like, no, just get there faster, you know?

Speaker 1:
[87:54] You can feel how every single part of this game was built out of the old versions of Tomb Raider.

Speaker 2:
[88:03] Definitely brings that back.

Speaker 1:
[88:04] And since Raziel doesn't have a gun, how like he doesn't, it's not a good bunch of ways to fight a bunch of these enemies.

Speaker 2:
[88:12] But around that, one of those last pauses where you're pulling the one block from the, to open the one door and the two block to open the two door, and you're switching the sides with them and getting the, you know, like yeah, yeah, yeah, we're tomb raiding for sure. I still do think though that like, again, the idea of how you'd kill enemies and have to take their souls and that whole thing is very unique for the time. And yeah, that's very unlike any other thing. And that's the most unique bit it has going for it. Some of the platforming is dodgy, but like, it's fine. You have, I really only learned that-

Speaker 1:
[88:51] We're talking to somebody and they're like, Legacy and Kane, Soul Reaver is so much better than Zelda because you actually have a jump in that game.

Speaker 2:
[88:58] Fuck off with that shit, dude. That Zelda not having a jump actively made platforming work way better. Because I'm doing the thing that I only learned at the end, which is hold a slow walk to approach an edge and you won't fall off of it, right? And you, and then I'm like, the problem I've been having was like walking to these edges and trying to get the high jump and floating down to get fucked over on just being unable to grab the ledge and moving up or whatever.

Speaker 1:
[89:33] The game's from 99, Woody.

Speaker 2:
[89:36] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, a jump button feels good in combat and the ability to do that running around the map is something that feels good in video games regardless, but getting used to it and getting used to the weirdness of like run to the edge and you'll jump off of it in Zelda was strange, but I ultimately got what they were going for and why, you know?

Speaker 1:
[89:56] I tell you what though, Legacy of Cain Defiance did genuinely change a lot. You have a high time in that game. And air combos. Wow. Okay. They straight up were like, we played a bunch of DMC1.

Speaker 2:
[90:14] So, I mean, combat in this first one, as basic as it is, the little stinger input and sidestepping was interesting. I'm like, oh, you can backstep, you can dash in and slash or you can swing around them if you dodge when they're attacking you and get to the side. That's more engaging than I thought, while you're locked on. They had like soft lock controls and strafing. That kind of worked out. Yeah, it was just all that and the puzzles and everything in the end were just like a... Ultimately, I get what you're going for. I want to see the step up from this. And yeah, maybe we can start to walk away from block pushing a little bit and get more towards the other interesting things with these games. And if you're going to keep block pushing, you can make the blocks go faster. You don't have to make them go cube by cube, square by square, one push at a time.

Speaker 1:
[91:08] So I'm looking at defiance footage and I can still see the fucking... The rooms are still made out of the grid.

Speaker 2:
[91:16] Mm-hmm. Okay, great. The other thing too is...

Speaker 1:
[91:20] But Raziel has million stab with the Soul Reaver.

Speaker 2:
[91:24] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[91:25] So fuck it.

Speaker 2:
[91:26] You also do feel like you're running through a giant cave for most of the game, and rooms just connect to rooms in a way that like... It feels like you're in one big complex as opposed to like...

Speaker 1:
[91:36] Well, don't you understand? It's been so long that the earth has shifted to... Cities are gone and the landscape is barren.

Speaker 2:
[91:46] So yeah, Nosgoth feels like you're in an ant colony. And that's a weird feeling, right? There's a couple of moments where it opens up, but for the most part, the whole thing feels like you're running through an underground ant colony. Which, you know, like Metroid games have those moments, but there's ways to kind of like, break it up a little bit in presentation, I suppose, to feel more like, you know, you're traveling zone to zone. So I'm looking forward to see how they do that. It does help to shoot the blocks and push them faster that you get later on, but it's still pretty slow, you know? Anyways, the plan, and I said it at the end there, was actually going to be hit credits, jump right over to two in that collection, and hit the start button. However, and that got people excited, but I gotta say, Pragmata has struck my interest.

Speaker 1:
[92:42] Pragmata's here.

Speaker 2:
[92:43] So I wanna play some of that because I really, really enjoyed it. So we're gonna play some Pragmata before we continue doing anything else. And in the meantime, Ace Attorney continues as the other LP we're playing right now. Yeah, that's over on Woolie Versus. This week, I'm gonna do some more of that. And then on Saturday, I'm going to see if it's possible. I think we're gonna do a Strive 2.0 stream and try to get a guest in. But I'm gonna wait for confirmation. How about you?

Speaker 1:
[93:11] All right, so before I get into anything, I'm turning 40 years old tomorrow. So I'm having what Paige came up with this idea, to call it the Half Dead Marathon. Because I am turning half dead. And by the end of the day, I will also be half dead.

Speaker 2:
[93:34] Okay, so that means that by 80, like zombie-

Speaker 1:
[93:38] I must die.

Speaker 2:
[93:39] Well, no, I think you just entered like, unlife, zombie mode.

Speaker 1:
[93:42] Oh, like lichdom.

Speaker 2:
[93:44] Lichdom begins, yes.

Speaker 1:
[93:46] Lichdom's all right. Oh, people, people, people knock on it, but-

Speaker 2:
[93:51] Well, the whole time with this Kane thing, I was like, oh, so that's, that's daddy. And then y'all are looking up to it. And it's like, no, no, no, that was Necro Daddy, actually. And then now he's like, now he's Necro Puzz Daddy.

Speaker 1:
[94:09] It's a shame, like very little in the Legacy of Kane series can live up to like, all right, Kane, you can solve the world. And he's, nah, don't want it.

Speaker 2:
[94:20] Well, but now the, well, but now the implication is because I seen shit though. And I'm like, what'd you see, Kane, staring in this fucking room of portals. You've been looking at stuff, what you see that made you choose to go, fuck it.

Speaker 1:
[94:32] I'll tell you right now, the most interesting discussions between Raziel and Kane is you don't know what I've seen. And Raziel going, you're fucking full of shit. You didn't see shit. You just didn't want to sacrifice yourself.

Speaker 2:
[94:51] And then Raziel goes, rather Kane goes, nah, you just didn't look long enough.

Speaker 1:
[94:57] Yeah, and fuck you. It's a great clash of ideals, because you don't know which of them is right until the dead last moment.

Speaker 2:
[95:07] I don't know what you saw.

Speaker 1:
[95:10] But yes, tomorrow, April 22nd, 2026, at 10 a.m. Pacific, that's 1 p.m. Eastern, I'll be starting a long stream until 10 a.m. the next day. I'll be catching up on FF14 7.4, then I'm going to do a full run of Symphony of the Night, including The Inverted Castle. And then with the time we have left, I'm going to play a game I got on my birthday 25 years ago called Shining Force 2, which is the best and I'm going to play that until I am tired.

Speaker 2:
[95:42] You got to speed run this roll down the hill.

Speaker 1:
[95:46] Speed run this roll down the hill?

Speaker 2:
[95:48] Because you are now on the other side of the hill.

Speaker 1:
[95:51] Oh.

Speaker 2:
[95:51] It commences. And by trying to murder yourself.

Speaker 1:
[95:57] Oh, come on.

Speaker 2:
[95:58] Live on stream. So the stream ends today for good reason. I concur with...

Speaker 1:
[96:04] Yeah, no. I have a hard out to date because I haven't had nap times ordered by wife.

Speaker 2:
[96:10] That's good nap. That's good mandatory nap.

Speaker 1:
[96:12] I can't wait until it's literally like 3, 34 o'clock in the morning Pacific and I'm playing Shining Force II and someone comes in and goes, is this an old Fire Emblem? And I just like, I've been streaming for 18 hours. I just lose it. Like I've never fucking lost it before. No, it's not like Fire Emblem. Shut up.

Speaker 2:
[96:30] At the stroke of midnight, like you're going to get like reboot, like Enzo, like the light's going to shine down and just pass over you. And yeah, actually nothing will change.

Speaker 1:
[96:39] It'll just, yeah, nothing. Slightly. Aside from that, I also played Pragmata. All caps.

Speaker 2:
[96:47] All caps. All caps. Do not.

Speaker 1:
[96:50] Don't you dare.

Speaker 2:
[96:51] Capital P only. How dare you? Nope.

Speaker 1:
[96:55] Also make sure to have the hashtag Pragmata in the title.

Speaker 2:
[97:01] All caps.

Speaker 1:
[97:01] Again. All caps.

Speaker 2:
[97:03] From the creators.

Speaker 1:
[97:04] I have a weird ask, honestly. But hey, fuck it.

Speaker 2:
[97:07] Hey. You need to stop fucking around and do what it says and don't even do it as a bit.

Speaker 1:
[97:13] Okay. Can we?

Speaker 2:
[97:14] No, we can't. Shut up. Shut up. Stop. No.

Speaker 1:
[97:21] Didn't respond to that text message. I think the answer is yes.

Speaker 2:
[97:25] Well.

Speaker 1:
[97:25] I think it is a yes a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[97:26] Well, that, I mean, that was literally in the middle of said regression and freak outs that were happening in Madness. However, not even as a bit.

Speaker 1:
[97:40] That one.

Speaker 2:
[97:40] Oh, sorry. In the parlance.

Speaker 1:
[97:45] Pragmata is cool. I also continued to play some Kingdom Hearts 2. Of note, so I blew through Kingdom Hearts 1 in eight days. Right. That's the fastest completion I ever did for anything, considering it's our count. Right. I am on track to taking five times longer with Kingdom Hearts 2.

Speaker 2:
[98:09] There's a fraction joke somewhere in there that I don't feel like making it.

Speaker 1:
[98:13] Yeah. Kingdom Hearts 39 over 8. I don't know. Anyway.

Speaker 2:
[98:29] Welcome to the old age. Welcome to the old age.

Speaker 1:
[98:35] That's right. Somebody in the YouTube chat was tracking it, could somebody in the chat right now hit me with the death number? I think it's like 370 something. It's up there. I have never been more glad to waste the chat's time banging my head on bosses that I'm pretty sure I can't beat right now.

Speaker 2:
[99:06] Oh, you're trying to clear Sephiroth on camera?

Speaker 1:
[99:10] Oh, I did clear Sephiroth on camera.

Speaker 2:
[99:11] Oh, okay.

Speaker 1:
[99:13] For one. In fact, there's a funny moment that you can only get in a VOD, right, when you're watching like the YouTube upload, because there's a moment where I go, I got a text from my wife, I'm allowed to do one or two more tries of Sephiroth, but there's like three hours left of the stream.

Speaker 2:
[99:32] Okay, this is important.

Speaker 1:
[99:33] She went to bed, assuming I would stop streaming.

Speaker 2:
[99:36] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was seen and regarded as the ultimate go fuck yourself level difficult thing at the time. And I remember everyone talking about it. I remember about the life bars.

Speaker 1:
[99:48] Oh, that's a clip going around of me just instantly dying in one second.

Speaker 2:
[99:51] However, with 2026 brain and time and with you having...

Speaker 1:
[99:57] Oh, he's hard as fuck.

Speaker 2:
[99:58] So, but does he compare to Dodging Waterfall Dance and, you know...

Speaker 1:
[100:04] Oh, yeah, absolutely. He's hard as fuck.

Speaker 2:
[100:06] Okay, okay.

Speaker 1:
[100:07] Sephiroth 1 in Kingdom Hearts 1 is hard as fuck.

Speaker 2:
[100:12] Post Souls game world, it's still...

Speaker 1:
[100:14] Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[100:15] Okay, cool.

Speaker 1:
[100:18] He is like... What's a good comparison? Like playing through the entirety of Devil May Cry 1 and then the final boss is Virgil 3 from DMC3.

Speaker 2:
[100:31] As a jump, okay, okay.

Speaker 1:
[100:33] Like a full different games level of fuck you get good on it.

Speaker 2:
[100:40] But I guess I'm just wondering if your reaction has been honed over time so that what once was...

Speaker 1:
[100:46] Oh, my reactions are probably a little slower, but I'm a lot better at figuring out how to do it. But yeah, no, he's brutal as shit. And I mentioned Absinthe Silhouettes last time in Kingdom Hearts 2, where they just let you fight some of the organization members whenever the fuck you want. D, I think I'm near 400 deaths. I would put like 95%, no, 99% of all deaths in my Kingdom Hearts 2 LP to me going, yeah, I bet I can get this boss now. I don't have to come back later.

Speaker 2:
[101:25] But you can just level up, get stronger, and come back and do it easier, right?

Speaker 1:
[101:29] Yeah, but what if I could do it now?

Speaker 2:
[101:31] Okay, okay. It is a game where...

Speaker 1:
[101:32] Yeah, of course I could come back stronger.

Speaker 2:
[101:34] Yeah, okay. It is a game where that is a thing.

Speaker 1:
[101:38] And in one particular Sundare case, I had to come back like a while. I fought Larxene 200 times and lost. Left, came back stronger, lost 50 more times, had to leave and came back stronger and then finally put it away.

Speaker 2:
[102:07] How long were those attempts on stream?

Speaker 1:
[102:10] Each attempt was, and I shit you not, the first 100, maybe 8 or 9 seconds long. When I say this shit whooped my ass, I'm talking about from game over screen to back in the fight is 10 seconds and the fight is lasting one second. Like dying to the first move.

Speaker 2:
[102:47] So this was not my titling of this entire stream is dedicated to Consort Radon.

Speaker 1:
[102:54] No, this was like I died maybe a dozen times walking forward, which kills you. And then going, okay, don't do that. And then I got to see a move and it killed me. But then the next ten attempts, I learned how to block that move. And now I'm getting six seconds into the fight.

Speaker 2:
[103:16] But this is only happening because you're doing it underleveled.

Speaker 1:
[103:19] Because I'm doing it way underleveled because single strikes are killing me outright.

Speaker 2:
[103:23] Right. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[103:24] And then that three hour session of just banging my head on it, I got to the second phase. And then I'm looking at this, I'm looking at the second phase and I felt something that I have not felt in a long time, which was the phrase, what do you even want from me here? You know when there's so much on the screen and there's so much damage that you can't even like, what do you fucking want me to even do? Like do you want me to do? What the fuck? That's when I left.

Speaker 2:
[104:02] The expedition is cleared from the canvas.

Speaker 1:
[104:05] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[104:06] That sentence.

Speaker 1:
[104:07] Well see, no, no, no. I don't mean that. Because that is what do you want me to do? You want me to be better? No, I'm talking about, I can't even see where you want me to stand.

Speaker 2:
[104:20] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[104:21] Like there's so much here. I've been playing on Critical, which is the hardest, and man, that game is incredible. That game is just incredible. Kingdom Hearts 2 is absolutely incredible. It's a fucking incredible action game and it's a great RPG, and constant charming slash funny moments with Sora, Donald and Goofy. In particular, one which is like a foible of translation, where they're reading out like a blackboard, and there's something written on it in English, and they are like sounding out the letters, because none of them can read. And in Japanese, it's still written in English, which explains why they're sounding out the letters in English.

Speaker 2:
[105:10] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[105:11] But when it got translated, it's like, Donald, can you not fucking read?

Speaker 2:
[105:17] Isn't he a mage with a spell book? So the bit is meant to be they're in Japanese reading English.

Speaker 1:
[105:25] It's supposed to be a bit. It's supposed to be they're reading an English piece of text.

Speaker 2:
[105:29] And doing the thing where they're like, I speak Japanese, I don't understand this.

Speaker 1:
[105:32] But in English, it's like a single word, and they're going D-O, and you're like, oh my God, man.

Speaker 2:
[105:43] Amazing.

Speaker 1:
[105:47] It's really funny. They should have changed the texture on the wall to be a made-up language or Japanese and not just readable by the player.

Speaker 2:
[105:58] Going back to those boss difficulties, what is the... everything you're describing are all optional challenges. What is the level of the hardest mandatory thing by comparison?

Speaker 1:
[106:12] I'm pretty good at action games. The mandatory stuff hasn't really slowed me down at all.

Speaker 2:
[106:18] Okay, the gap between the easiest of the optionals and the final...

Speaker 1:
[106:23] So the mandatory stuff in Kingdom Hearts 1 didn't really slow me down at all either. I'd say it's a nice five or six, like good action game, you know? Like it's not free, but like yeah, you and I play this shit. But then when you get to the stuff that is like, hey, do you want to fucking fight something?

Speaker 2:
[106:46] Because I'm like, the moment you're describing, I'm just thinking of like, you know, you get to parts of Silksong where you're like, I can't move that fast. And the game is like, yeah, you can. Yeah, you can.

Speaker 1:
[107:00] No, there is a chasm in between stuff that's optional and stuff that's not.

Speaker 2:
[107:06] Right. Right.

Speaker 1:
[107:06] Right. And the stuff that's optional in 2 goes on and on and on and on and on. I think it has... It's got like 25 optional super bosses. Which is enormous.

Speaker 2:
[107:24] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[107:25] That is like really legitimately ridiculous. And they're all fucked up like that. So, like, I was talking to Chat and, like, the way that the playlist is gonna go is like parts 1 through 30 are gonna be, like, playing through Kingdom Hearts 2. And parts 31 through 60 is beating optional bosses.

Speaker 2:
[107:55] Cool.

Speaker 1:
[107:56] Yeah, what an incredible game. What a fantastic, stellar game. Me and Paige were going to watch more One Piece, but we fell asleep four or five nights in a row putting the baby to sleep.

Speaker 2:
[108:13] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[108:15] Just like, okay, okay, we're gonna get them down and then we're gonna go downstairs and we're gonna watch one.

Speaker 2:
[108:22] Yep. Yep. I mean, I, you know, like one, I'm, I can say that like you're struggling to figure that end of it out right now and Punch Mom has indicated an interest in potentially coming back to do some Deltarune, you know, but gotta figure this shit out.

Speaker 1:
[108:46] Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, it's really funny. Because there was one night when I'm like, all right, I think, I think he's out. I think he's, he's out. And I look over and he is looking back at me. And I'm like, God damn it, man. He goes, hi. Yeah. And then from the other side of the bed, I hear, all right, she's done. She's, she's, she's cooked. She's out. And then I'm like, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to wait for him to fall asleep. And I'm going to go downstairs. I'm going to play. It's tomorrow. What happened?

Speaker 2:
[109:27] Do you ever have you gotten the like it's it's dark, but like whatever the whatever source of light exists in any way, shape or form, like she's craning to fucking stare at it. And we have this thing where I'm like, I have to turn you away from the light and you are like looking through my body at anything you can focus on because like you just refuse to just let in the sleep. You know, anyway. All right.

Speaker 1:
[109:55] So let's see. I did I did some Kingdom Hearts. I did some I did some pragmata. I went and played some Rondo blood and I was like, I could bang out Rondo blood in one stream.

Speaker 2:
[110:10] Fuck.

Speaker 1:
[110:10] No, I can't.

Speaker 2:
[110:11] Excuse me. That's Chino Rondo.

Speaker 1:
[110:14] Shut up. I don't want to fucking do this. I can't fucking tolerate this. Not doing it. Not fucking doing it.

Speaker 2:
[110:27] That's the fastest the pit has ever ended.

Speaker 1:
[110:31] I was ready. I was ready. As soon as you did this with your hand, I knew you... Because you do that move every time. I'm so sick of it. Oh, my god, dude. That is the fastest.

Speaker 2:
[110:45] I didn't even get to the end. All right. All right. Next time, I'll just raise an eyebrow.

Speaker 1:
[110:56] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[110:57] Fuck that guy. I'll just do this.

Speaker 1:
[110:58] Oh, my god. Fuck that dude. Anyway, so I was like, yeah, I can beat Rondo Blood in 4 or 5. Fuck, no, I can't. Oh, my god. That's so... That game is so hard, dude. That game is... It's so good. It's everything good about old Castlevania games, and it is so hard. It's crazy. I don't...

Speaker 2:
[111:19] So I... Hey, guess what? I don't know a ton about Castlevania, but from what I have played, does anything or does anyone feel as insanely powered as you feel as Alucard at the end of Symphony?

Speaker 1:
[111:35] Oh, no. Rictor, if you play Rictor mode in Symphony of the Night, feels fucking busted. Julius in Julius mode feels fucking busted. But in their own core game, I mean, some of the, I mean, Soma and some of them, like the Metroid ones, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[111:58] Okay, he's not a standout feeling of like, you are unstoppable.

Speaker 1:
[112:05] Yeah, so the strongest Castlevania character in the action games by an order of magnitude is in Rondo of Blood and her name is Maria Renard, and she can shoot a bird at you. And the bird has similar timing to the whip, but it hits on the way out and the way back, which makes it one million times better than the whip.

Speaker 2:
[112:30] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[112:31] She also has a double jump and a slide in that game that Richter doesn't have. So Maria is like baby mode. By comparison, she is super, super, super, super tough compared to Richter. Also, going through Rondo of Blood is really fun because Maria has her own subweapons, like the cat from Vampire Survivors, and the turtle from Vampire Survivors, and the dragon from Vampire Survivors. And then Richter has the Santa water from Vampire Survivors, and the cross from Vampire Survivors. And it's really... I had forgotten just how like one pixel off a lot of that Vampire Survivors shit was.

Speaker 2:
[113:20] As long as the gameplay is different, it doesn't fucking matter.

Speaker 1:
[113:26] But yeah, Rondo's great. Rondo's super. Hey, buddy. Hey, bubba. Hey, give me a happy one. And last but not least, I was approached for another sponsorship. It was a big sponsored week. I was approached by Wolfgang and Mirren out of Sweden and Romania to check out their game Dynastyr, which you can check out on Steam right now. It's on sale for the Steam medieval sale, which is their independently made, self-described Eurojank action adventure game. Self-described. Self-described. Every email I have about this game has the word Eurojank in it.

Speaker 2:
[114:11] Nice. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[114:12] All right. They basically said, hey, we're big fans of the show. The only one we want to sponsor to play the game is you. You're the whole market. Let's go. You're all the marketing.

Speaker 2:
[114:28] The word Eurojank says a lot.

Speaker 1:
[114:31] I'm like, that's a lot of pressure. That's a lot. It's a very indie game. It's made by these two guys. I have a video up on it, Vaught up on the channel. It is a, how do I put this? It's very much like a kind of mix between a Dark Souls and a King's Field and a Gothic, where everything is unexplained and also everything kills you.

Speaker 2:
[115:03] Where's the camera?

Speaker 1:
[115:05] It's behind your back like a Dark Souls.

Speaker 2:
[115:07] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[115:08] And I played it for a little while and had the wonderful experience, again, no pressure, of both of the developers being in chat, chit chatting the whole time, including when I fell through the goddamn earth and died. And they're like adding it to the list. And then I'm like, at one point, an NPC offered me like a mystery gift for my broken sword, which was my only weapon. So I traded it away and then couldn't attack. And then one of the devs in the chat was like, haha, you fell for it. Now you have to find the currency to buy a new weapon without being able to fight anything.

Speaker 2:
[115:53] Oh, we got on some fear and hunger shit. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[115:55] Yeah, like laughing at me.

Speaker 2:
[115:56] Okay. Jesus Christ. All right.

Speaker 1:
[116:01] And then I finally found one out in the world and bought a sword, went to go fight a boss and that boss kicked my fucking ass. Super interesting game. Very indie, very Euro jank. You can check it out now on Steam. Made by fans of the show.

Speaker 2:
[116:18] Thanks for the spawn.

Speaker 1:
[116:20] You know, you know how you know they're real fans of the show? Because the email that came in was like, oh man, I really want you to take a look at this. I've been watching you since, you know what? That's for our own old man Sanity, call it the apartment days.

Speaker 2:
[116:33] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[116:33] And I'm like, okay.

Speaker 2:
[116:34] Got it.

Speaker 1:
[116:35] Oh, all right.

Speaker 2:
[116:39] Just talking about the sponsorship stuff, but like one of the things I just saw, I remember reading it was like, do not say thanks for the spawns. Thanks for the spawn. And I'm like, is this a real case that happened? Do people, have you ever heard anyone say shout outs to whoever for the spawns? Anyway, whatever.

Speaker 1:
[117:03] Oh, that's cute. Patch Notes version 8.9.9.1, the Pat Patch.

Speaker 2:
[117:12] Hey.

Speaker 1:
[117:15] Added auto exposure settings to make dark areas more readable. That's one of those things that comes up that I guess you only see it once it's on stream and it's through video compression. Game was really super dark when I played it.

Speaker 2:
[117:30] Yeah. It is nice to have those again, Hekita style like whatever is happening live on Twitch. Okay. That's what's being addressed next. Cool.

Speaker 1:
[117:42] Reminds me of when I was playing Hat in Time and I got some kind of fucked up sequence breaking nonsense that they had to fix because I broke it in a highly public setting.

Speaker 2:
[117:57] AGDQ, where they're watching, I think it was Double Dragon, and there's like, oh God, oh no, oh Jesus. Dynasthear?

Speaker 1:
[118:07] Dynasthear, yeah. So they were super chatty and answered tons of questions, which was a dream compared to most sponsored screens where there's nobody there to answer. But we were talking about like, they basically said Dynasthear is a little hard to say and it's a little tough to market, but it's the only fucking game named that.

Speaker 2:
[118:28] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[118:28] And does not fall into the Dawn Gate Storm.

Speaker 2:
[118:33] It's not a slot machine.

Speaker 1:
[118:35] shit.

Speaker 2:
[118:35] It's not a slot machine title.

Speaker 1:
[118:37] Everything else does.

Speaker 2:
[118:38] No. I was just praising Bridgeborn last week and it's a great game, but it does fall on the slot machine. Bridge is not common, but still.

Speaker 1:
[118:47] Bridge is not that bad.

Speaker 2:
[118:49] But born means you're going to... That font in your brain is already kind of fading away. Cool.

Speaker 1:
[118:57] I am being admonished by my tiny crippled dog that he's hungry, so I will have to be right back if you'll excuse me.

Speaker 2:
[119:04] BRB. Quick word from our sponsors.

Speaker 1:
[119:09] Whom we love in all caps.

Speaker 2:
[119:13] All caps. Quick word from our spawns. This-

Speaker 1:
[119:19] Oh, I get why that doesn't... Okay.

Speaker 2:
[119:24] Yeah. Must have been a thing.

Speaker 1:
[119:27] The only quick word from my spawns is doodawg.

Speaker 2:
[119:30] That is a word from the spawns. This is true. This week, Castle Super Beast is brought to you by Rocket Money. That is your modern solution to the problem of forgetting about what you've subscribed to and where you're paying what every month and keeping track of your spending and all of that stuff that gets out of control.

Speaker 1:
[119:57] You can find yourself like I have, looking at the weekly and monthly, sometimes it's not even monthly charges. There's weekly charges for certain services, certain apps, certain things that are piling up. Don't recognize what it is. I'm squinting at it going, I don't know what that is when I signed up for it or why I'm paying for it every month or week. Sometimes there are things where to use an app that I need for one second, it's like, well, you got to sign up for the subscription that auto renews and I often do turn it off right away. But every once in a while, it slips through the cracks. It does. It really does. Rocket Money is here to help you with tracking subscriptions, and it can help you cancel unwanted subscriptions with just a few taps on the app. Users have saved over $880 million in canceled subscriptions. So that's a pretty good way to tighten up the belt, so to speak, by just not a couple of sandwiches with that money. Without just wasting on it, especially if they have a whole confusing unsubscription process that you're getting put through. Never mind that, never mind having to chase an email that's time-limited back to another link onto a website with a button somewhere that doesn't work when you click on it. Just you can get Rocket Money to help you with the unsubscription process as well. And yeah, if you are just trying to keep track of your savings and set goals and take a look at how you can get your budget together, yeah, Rocket Money helps with all of those things as well. It adds up when you are just kind of letting little charges slip through the cracks over time. And I have found it has been very easy and convenient to identify and get rid of that stuff. Because again, they will sometimes change price and change names on you. And you won't even notice. You won't even know. But Rocket Money can give you a heads up for things like that as well. So yeah, really, really useful in this modern growing age of confusing subscription process we find ourselves in. Rocket Money is a personal finance app. It can help you find and cancel online subscriptions, monitor your spending, help you lower your bill so you can grow your savings. You can let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at rocketmoney.com/superbeast. That's rocketmoney.com/superbeast. rocketmoney.com/superbeast. Are you okay?

Speaker 2:
[122:28] The dog just snooted into my entire face.

Speaker 1:
[122:34] Okay. Well, that's the end you want it coming out of, I suppose. I can't believe this has never happened in my life, but I got a dread farted on and I was like, what the fuck?

Speaker 2:
[122:52] That's a new experience.

Speaker 1:
[122:52] That's a new experience. And only she can get away with it. I'm like, oh, that's hmm. I don't know what to do with this. Anyways, this podcast is also sponsored by Factor. And you can 100 percent get yourself into a tizzy trying to solve your meal problems with, you know, preparing them, eating them, figuring out what to do. And even once you can get down to that step, you also need to want to make sure that you're eating healthy. And guess what? Often I don't and it sucks.

Speaker 2:
[123:37] Yeah, so I have the problem where like, you know, it's 9 a.m. not hungry, 10 a.m. not hungry, 11 a.m. not hungry, and so on and so forth. Now it's 3 p.m.?

Speaker 1:
[123:49] Oh, that's a problem.

Speaker 2:
[123:50] I'm starving.

Speaker 1:
[123:51] That's a problem.

Speaker 2:
[123:54] I'm too hungry to, I'm just gonna start eating ingredients out of my pantry. Yeah, don't do that.

Speaker 1:
[123:59] Don't do that.

Speaker 2:
[124:01] But I'm hungry now and I don't wanna wait.

Speaker 1:
[124:04] Well, Factor has tons of meals to choose from, built around your goals, whether it's overall nutrition, more protein, weight loss, GLP-1 support, strength or workout recovery. They got lots of options for you and you're getting functional ingredients with each one. So lean proteins, colorful veggies, whole foods, healthy fats. They're, yeah, in Factor, bands 175 plus ingredients, so no artificial colors or sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup, nothing like that. No refined seed oils, just nutrition-dense food, fresh, never frozen. And for variety, you got 100 rotating weekly meals that are available for you. They got global flavors, Mediterranean, Asian, something new to look forward to all the time. So it's nice to be able to spend two minutes getting a meal ready that is healthy.

Speaker 2:
[124:55] I can wait two minutes.

Speaker 1:
[124:56] Two minutes is a very reasonable amount of time to get a delicious, healthy meal as needed, as opposed to the rush and chaos of the unhealthy that takes much longer and is more expensive. So, yeah, be sure to check them out. Go to factormeals.com/castle50 off and use code Castle 50 off to get 50% off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until, that is, September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. Yeah, love the ability to finish this podcast. Go downstairs, heat one up and just have a nice healthy meal ready to go real quick. So one more time. That is factormeals.com/castle50 off. And if you use the code Castle 50 off, you'll get 50% off and free daily greens per box. Next Factor.

Speaker 2:
[125:59] Thank you, Factor.

Speaker 1:
[126:01] This podcast is brought to you by Shopify. The best checkout on the Internet. If you're trying to cha-ching, it's supposed to actually play a way file there that goes cha-ching, but I rather my mouth cha-ching. I'm flashing back to, I remember the last time my dad had a register, that was like an old school cash register that made that noise and everything.

Speaker 2:
[126:30] Cool, man.

Speaker 1:
[126:32] Then there, anyway, whatever. If I ever want to play a way file here, probably jump scare everybody with the volume being incorrect. The point is, if you're trying to get your business started off the ground, or if you're already established and you're trying to figure out how to grow it, Shopify is a commerce platform that's behind millions of businesses around the world and it can help you get your business taken to the next level. If you want to get your website set up, you've got a design studio that can help you use tons of ready templates to make it just the way you want it to get your brand set up for your online store to match your brand style. If you are trying to handle things like marketing, for example, you can get an email and social media campaign set up, so you can figure out where people are scrolling or browsing and checking out your stuff. And you got a world class award-winning 24-7 customer support always around. And yeah, if you want to help with things like international shipping, tracking returns, shipping, all that stuff, Shopify is there to simplify that process, so no need to get complicated with it. They've also got a thing that regular leasing shop pay button that you're seeing on millions of stores around when you browse these days, and that is one of the reasons why it's one of the best converting checkouts on the planet. So super handy, was very useful for setting up the podcast to t-shirt business pipeline. That being said, yeah, turn those what-ifs into cha-ching with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/superbeast. That's shopify.com/superbeast. shopify.com/superbeast. Thank you, Shopify.

Speaker 2:
[128:27] Thanks, Shopify.

Speaker 1:
[128:28] This one's for all the shippers. Lastly, and timely, you got Mother's Day coming up, and moms, they do a lot. They do a lot.

Speaker 2:
[128:48] They do a lot.

Speaker 1:
[128:49] And considering-

Speaker 2:
[128:50] They gave birth to you!

Speaker 1:
[128:53] And considering the insane amount they do, the least you can do is make them happy, and one really, really free and easy way to make them happy is with something-

Speaker 2:
[129:07] To be quiet.

Speaker 1:
[129:08] Yep. Yep. Just shutting the hell up. Shutting the hell up is a really good gift to get your mom for Mother's Day. Next-

Speaker 2:
[129:20] But also-

Speaker 1:
[129:21] Next to that, hey, look, here she is right now, actually. There we go. Okay. So yeah, perfect. Perfect timing. What I can say is my mom loved an Aura frame. It's a slam dunk. It is a frame that is a digital picture frame. You put it on your wall, you put it on a table, anywhere on a mantle, and it cycles through all the photos that you decide to upload to it. Sometimes, you can get little movies going. You can have a scrolling image, the, I forgot what it's called, but pictures that have a little movement with them. It does those too.

Speaker 2:
[130:11] Parallax?

Speaker 1:
[130:11] No, not parallax. It's like when you take a photo, it takes a couple seconds of photo these days.

Speaker 2:
[130:16] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[130:17] So the different eyes closed, you can correct it and things like that. Yeah, it has those little moving photos too. They're great. They look really cool. And it's not a GIF. It's a motion photo, live image. There we go. Yes. The live images are a nice little like captures a moment, a little sound, a little video of the time and place. And you can get those popping up on the aura frame as well. And they look super cool when you walk by. And one of the things my mom loves obviously is I'm just uploading tons of baby photos, like an absolute avalanche of baby photos, just dropping her way on the Carver Mat frame she's got. They, it's really convenient and easy to use the app and drop the pictures in. You can even send them to an email address to do it. It's super cool. I also appreciate the fact that when the lights go out and when it's dark at night, it dims to reflect the brightness of the room and the daytime of day. It's not going to just kind of be like a really bright screen or like a tablet that is there being a beacon in the middle of the night. It dims and then when no one's around and it's dark, it turns off. So I really, really, yeah, it is a freebie as far as getting a good gift goes.

Speaker 2:
[131:33] I really got to get one of those because I send my dad photos of the kid like three, four times a week and he always goes, cool, it looks handsome, whatever. And I know they're just sitting in his phone. My mom might not even see them.

Speaker 1:
[131:47] Yeah, it's cycling back through them that you really get to see like, wow, holy crap, look how different she is now. The passage of time and how that hair is coming in and stuff. So yeah, looking at the one we have downstairs even as well, I'm just kind of like, oh man, look at her, there she is. It's fun, it feels really good to just have that around every day. So be sure to get one, check them out. It's a super dope gift and simple to use, so guaranteed your mom will not be confused in calling you up to try to figure it out and whatnot. I mean, in fact-

Speaker 2:
[132:22] God, that would be the worst, man.

Speaker 1:
[132:24] Yeah, you can put a welcome message on it too. You can plug it in and set it up and have it ready to go too. So that is the number one gift by Wirecutter. You can save on gifts moms love by visiting auraframes.com. For a limited time, listeners can get $25 off their best seller Carver- best selling Carver Mat Frame with the code SUPERBEAST. So auraframes.com and the promo code is SUPERBEAST. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout as well. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you, AuraFrames.

Speaker 2:
[132:57] Thanks, AuraFrames.

Speaker 1:
[133:02] What is going on this week?

Speaker 2:
[133:06] I have two remaining things to say. One is, I still got that birthday stream tomorrow at twitch.tv/patstairs at youtube.com/patstairs. That starts at 10 a.m. Pacific. It's going to go for a while. Go to it. The second thing I have to say is, Woolie, get your Hourglass. Oh, that one's too big. All right, I'll use my child's Hourglass.

Speaker 1:
[133:34] What topic are we entering here?

Speaker 2:
[133:38] So the other thing, oh, I can't see it. The other thing that I did this week is I'm back into 14.

Speaker 1:
[133:44] Yeah, all right, here we go.

Speaker 2:
[133:49] Long and short of it.

Speaker 1:
[133:50] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[133:51] Is that I have not played that game seriously for about 18 months, something like that.

Speaker 1:
[134:01] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[134:01] I've been out and I went back to the recent patch and I'm doing the newer patch tomorrow. But what's more interesting, and they were good. But what's more interesting to me than that is why I left this part to technically be news is that the keynote is on Friday and the keynote is when they're going to announce the next expansion and all that. But of note is that the keynote is more than twice as long as it usually is. And we are now in interview season where there's implications and have statements about what's going to be incoming.

Speaker 1:
[134:44] Is this the live leak or live letter? What is it called?

Speaker 2:
[134:48] No, no, it's the keynote. It's for FanFest. He comes out on the stage and gives a gigantic presentation.

Speaker 1:
[134:54] It's not the FF14 live leak.

Speaker 2:
[134:57] Yeah, that's different. That's highly different. Usually, those are an hour long. They start with the trailer and they go, we're going to go here and whatever, right? This one is two hours plus. The reason of why it is a special note and what has gotten me back in is because interviews in which YOSGP talking, and YOSGP is one of those producers that deliberately undersells things. Nothing is ever bombastic. Everything's always, please have reasonable expectations.

Speaker 1:
[135:36] Sorry. Hold on. Doorbell got to go.

Speaker 2:
[135:40] Can't stop this.

Speaker 1:
[135:41] All right. We are back.

Speaker 2:
[135:43] Woolie, did you fake a doorbell to get out of this conversation?

Speaker 1:
[135:48] I did not. And I turned this sideways as a sign of good faith.

Speaker 2:
[135:53] Yeah, here we go. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[135:53] All right. We are resuming.

Speaker 2:
[135:55] All right. Anyway, the point being is that YOSGP has stated in... I'm using a tiny one.

Speaker 1:
[136:07] No, I know, but I'm just making sure that I switched it back to the right side and not the...

Speaker 2:
[136:11] Ah, whatever. Okay. YOSGP has said that the upcoming changes are the largest that have had to the game since A Realm Reborn. The only difference is that this time they are not rebuilding the client from scratch. But that is the level of systemic change to expect for the game going forward.

Speaker 1:
[136:33] And not just the plot resetting, but system changes.

Speaker 2:
[136:40] So, an example he brought up was, there's a thing where if you do what's called an extreme trial, which is a boss fight against a famous summoner, and you do it with your bros, and it'll drop weapons and it also rarely drops mounts. But if you don't get lucky, it also gives you a token every time you beat it. And then you can cash in the token 10 for a weapon, 99 for a mount, and that's how it is. So that gets people running these things over and over and over, because if they're just really, really, really unlucky, you get up your tokens and you cash it in. And in response to that, he says, oh yeah, no, that system is going to be gone. That's going to be replaced with a completely different thing. And goes on to say, we have taken a very long look at every single system that currently exists in the game, and whether or not it should be there, and if it should, should we change it? As well as in one of the interviews describing how the data center situation will be solved, which probably means that it's going to be like a matchmaking across every player simultaneously instead of being siphoned off into different data centers. This is like specifically, you know what this reminds me of? The only other time I have ever seen this type of developer call their shot like this is when Itsuno came out and said, Devil May Cry 5 will exceed all expectations from a guy who's very quiet and doesn't brag.

Speaker 1:
[138:21] Do you got that second Hourglass around?

Speaker 2:
[138:26] The big one?

Speaker 1:
[138:26] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[138:27] Yeah, I do.

Speaker 1:
[138:28] All right, flip it over for a second. All right. No, no, keep the other one going.

Speaker 2:
[138:32] Keep the other one.

Speaker 1:
[138:33] All right. Oh no, you can pause that one actually if you need to. Okay. All right. So what? Yeah, we can pause that. It's just funny because this reminds me of when I was on stream with Bricky and we were playing 2x KO. And.

Speaker 2:
[138:46] How come you get the big Hourglass?

Speaker 1:
[138:49] Say again?

Speaker 2:
[138:51] How come you get the big Hourglass?

Speaker 1:
[138:54] I'm giving you the big one here, too. I'm giving you the big one. I'm giving you.

Speaker 2:
[138:59] You gave me the big one. Okay, because we're going to just go off of your mortal combat.

Speaker 1:
[139:05] So I was playing 2x KO and when we were doing, we were doing the the the Twitch Rivals. And like we were talking about some of the new stuff that was coming to the game. And he went and I was like, oh, yeah. And here's a big something. That's a big deal is they announced Duo Finder is coming to the game. So new fuses, new character, et cetera, all that stuff is great. But Duo Finder is going to be a thing where you just queue up and it's going to find you somebody to team up with.

Speaker 2:
[139:31] And that's a great that right. Honestly, that's fun.

Speaker 1:
[139:33] Huge, huge, right?

Speaker 2:
[139:35] Play with some pros or some trash. She's got to make do.

Speaker 1:
[139:38] Local duos and the ability to write. So that's, that's, that's great. And Bricky just went, that's not a feature.

Speaker 2:
[139:51] That's not a feature.

Speaker 1:
[139:51] And I was like, fuck me. The expectation. Yeah. This, this revolutionary, awesome new announcement is like, well, no shit. How is that not already a thing?

Speaker 2:
[140:04] And you're like, this is totally going through that.

Speaker 1:
[140:06] And this is where we are. This is how far back we are.

Speaker 2:
[140:09] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[140:09] It's fucking Stone Age.

Speaker 2:
[140:10] It's, it's a PS3 game built on Spaghetti Code. Yeah. So the, so I haven't been paying attention. The Dawn Trail, the Dawn Trail, what do you call it? Patch cycle has been about cleaning up technical debt. It's like, hey, this, this system over here sucks shit. We're going to, we're going to clean it up.

Speaker 1:
[140:34] Old things that are, there are holdovers that have not been addressed for years.

Speaker 2:
[140:38] Like one of the things that's going to happen in the patch that comes out in two weeks is you're going to make it so that if you make a full set of like a full outfit glamour, it's going to count as one item in your, in your storage, right? Which means that people will be able to store like ten times as many outfits.

Speaker 1:
[140:57] It didn't count as one before.

Speaker 2:
[140:59] No, it didn't. So one of the, one of the things people want out of a glamour system is the way Wow does it, which is anything you have ever put on your fucking character ever stays in a big list that you can get to pick. FF14 system is super complicated and relies on you keeping the item and putting it into the fucking whatever. That's fucking, it's a mess. Right? So hearing that they are, so that what was known like a year ago is that 8.0 will be the big combat overhaul where they're gonna like look at and fuck with every job from scratch. But now they're talking about, no, apparently it's the overhaul overhaul where they're looking at everything and seeing what needs to stay, the video game, what needs to be changed into a different game.

Speaker 1:
[141:48] Okay. And you said a Realm Reborn levels of change.

Speaker 2:
[141:53] Yes. He said, the only reason we wouldn't call it as big of a change is we are not rebuilding the client from scratch.

Speaker 1:
[142:03] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[142:03] But like, this is really, really big, big talk from a guy who is always careful to manage reasonable expectations and go, maybe we'll get to it later. Maybe when we can, you know, that kind of discussion for a live game.

Speaker 1:
[142:21] Well, okay. And if, and if this, if the extra muted like reasonable take is actually underselling the level of change there, you kind of have to wonder then like, why not rebrand at a certain level? Right?

Speaker 2:
[142:36] Well, I have a sneaking suspicion that they're going to call the next expansion, A Realm Rejoined, which would be a play on A Realm Reborn, but also a thing. But, yeah, no, I expect, so for people who play FF14, this means that they have essentially said that the two-minute meta is going to be destroyed, which is great, because every job in FF14 relies on a two-minute timer, and every single job is build your meter, then spend your meter. And like, the identity between those has kind of fallen away.

Speaker 1:
[143:19] Did that smiling old guy that got cooked in the Realm Reborn reveal ever come back?

Speaker 2:
[143:26] Uh...

Speaker 1:
[143:27] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[143:28] Well, I'm going to go with... Yeah?

Speaker 1:
[143:34] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[143:38] I'm going to go with kind of. Kind of? Okay. Alright.

Speaker 1:
[143:44] Should I have not asked? I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[143:46] No, that's... You are asking a ten-year-old question.

Speaker 1:
[143:50] Okay. I just remember because when we were working at the fucking company and people were testing it and they left their shit on idle, I just had a million screens of that old guy getting murked.

Speaker 2:
[144:00] Yeah, and then the list swat makes a minor mistake.

Speaker 1:
[144:01] And then it goes, mm, and fucking gets dragon balled out of existence.

Speaker 2:
[144:08] So I'm catching up because I want to be current for when they announce the thing, right? And the other statement that I actually really liked, which was they said that normally the keynote is two hours. Sorry, normally the keynote is one hour, but they have five hours of shit they want to talk about. So they're actually going to split it into two, the North American one, two at the European one, and two at the Japanese one, which is way, way, way more than they ever talk about an expansion. They usually just give you the trailer, and then go, you're going to go to this location. And then they talk for half an hour about the new class.

Speaker 1:
[144:46] So you were out up until this point, right?

Speaker 2:
[144:48] A large scale systemic changes.

Speaker 1:
[144:50] You were out prior to this.

Speaker 2:
[144:52] I was out. And one of the reasons I was out, and some of this is going to fly over your head, but for people who know, I have been playing FF14 very strongly since April of 2015. We are now coming up on April of 2026 with a year long break. So I played it solid for 10 years. There is only so many weeks in a row I can get 450 tomes before lockout. There is only so many EX trials I can do to get 99 fucking totems to get the fucking bird, dog, dragon, whatever. There is only so many times I can learn a two minute rotation within the first week of playing the game in the expansion and run that rotation for a 23 month period without any changes whatsoever. There is lots of little mechanical things that have been exactly the same since 2013. That's too long.

Speaker 1:
[146:05] Meanwhile, skill issue says Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 players as they pop off at the final DLC announcement for a game that's been running for probably just as long. I think 2016 was the launch of Xenoverse 2.

Speaker 2:
[146:25] So yeah, the long and short of it is I'm going to check out the live letter on Friday morning and I am expecting big changes. I have been told there are big changes coming and I believe the person who said it. So if there are not big changes coming, get ready for me to be pissed the fuck off the following Tuesday, where I will rant and rave about how I got fucking hoodwinked.

Speaker 1:
[146:54] But ultimately, the changes are not what you needed. You just needed new interesting things to do.

Speaker 2:
[147:01] I do need certain changes.

Speaker 1:
[147:02] Okay, okay.

Speaker 2:
[147:03] Like I, I will very shortly, the weekly grind, like the nature of what you get and how you get it and how fast you get it has been the same since 2013. It's literally been identical for fucking 13 years. That's ridiculous. The what's called the two minute meta and what's called homogenization. Which is, so do you, okay, Hourglass is out. Do you want me to tell you what the two minute meta is?

Speaker 1:
[147:33] Go for it.

Speaker 2:
[147:35] Okay. The long and short of it is that long time ago, a long, long time ago, Woolie, classes got buffs that would apply to the rest of the party. So Dragoon had one that would up the critical rate of other people in the party and by 10 percent. A damage buff for everybody and it would have a 90-second cooldown. Simple. Bard would have one that was 60 seconds. Dancer would have one that's two minutes, whatever.

Speaker 1:
[148:03] So everyone's rotation should last about that long.

Speaker 2:
[148:05] So what happened was is you had like 14 classes and it turns out some classes have moves that line up more readily with each other. So hey, turns out, I forget what the numbers were, but there was like a 90-second meta at one point where it's like, hey, Bard and Machinist and Astrologian and this, they all line up so they're the ones you want to take. So they went, okay, and over 10 years, they've said, well, we don't want Dark Knight or Warrior or Bard or Summoner to be left out. So let's nudge their numbers over here, here. Now everyone's buffs are on a two-minute timer. Which means every rotation is now built with the assumption that everyone's going to burst at one minute and 45 seconds to two minutes and 15 seconds. And all those buffs have to line up at the two-minute mark so that everyone's doing the most amount of damage when everybody's buffs are active. And there's two problems with this. One, it makes every single fucking class feel exactly the same, because every class is on a rotation that lasts exactly 120 seconds. But two, it means that if anybody makes a mistake and is three seconds behind, the whole fucking system starts to come apart during the fight, and now no one's shit is lined up, and it sucks.

Speaker 1:
[149:38] Oh, and there's no accounting for like slight lag or slight delay?

Speaker 2:
[149:40] Because you can't make the cooldown go faster.

Speaker 1:
[149:42] Gotcha. Okay. So everyone, so two minutes becomes the skill points to pull out everything from.

Speaker 2:
[149:49] They've designed fights around. The fight's pretty normal and the mechanics aren't too strict, but at one minute and 50 seconds into the fight, there's a really complicated math component that you have to run your burst while managing and stuff like that. It has been, the two-minute meta has been the two-minute meta for like six years.

Speaker 1:
[150:09] I see.

Speaker 2:
[150:10] And it has led to every tank feeling like variations on tank. It feels like every healer is variation on healer. You know, like, every tank needs to be different, and now every tank is Coke. Do you want Diet Coke or Coke Zero or Crystal, you know?

Speaker 1:
[150:28] Right.

Speaker 2:
[150:30] So I am fully expecting the destruction of what's called the two-minute meta. I don't know how they're going to do it.

Speaker 1:
[150:35] Here's your new Overwatch hero. It's a fusion of all previous abilities from a bunch of different characters together or whatever.

Speaker 2:
[150:43] Hey, congrats. You want to play tank? Every tank is either Ryu, Ken, Akuma or Sean.

Speaker 1:
[150:49] Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[150:50] And hope that your tank isn't the Sean this cycle.

Speaker 1:
[150:56] So do you break that and not have the whole system be destroyed? Because the reasons why it exists do make sense.

Speaker 2:
[151:03] They do. So there's a couple of ways you could break it. You could just not have party-wide buffs anymore outside of Bard and Dancer. Just like the only people who can buff the party are the guys whose class fantasy is to buff the party. Entire job is dedicated to that. Right? That would just kill that shit right off the bat.

Speaker 1:
[151:23] Class fantasy. I've heard this terminology before. So, like, the hero fantasy...

Speaker 2:
[151:29] Class fantasy is not specific to MMOs.

Speaker 1:
[151:31] No, no, no. I've heard this in shooters. I've heard this in other things as a game design term for, like, the hero fantasy, the thing fantasy.

Speaker 2:
[151:38] It works for fighters, too.

Speaker 1:
[151:39] Yeah, it's like what the idea of playing this character is supposed to feel like, right? The goal, ultimately, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[151:46] So, like, a really good example in 14 that I can explain because I play Tank is that tanks want to feel fucking invincible. You want to be standing at the front and just fucking, oh, you can't get, right? But now every tank has been built off what's called the, like, warrior template. So every tank has, like, a burst phase and they have, like, a one move that protects the party. But all four tanks have one move that protects the party on a 90 second cooldown. So now all four tanks feel the same, including Paladin, the one with the fucking shield. No, the one with the shield should be tougher, but too less damage, because they have a fucking shield. The Paladin's fantasy is to be invincible.

Speaker 1:
[152:30] Can't have, right? Can't have Geef's SPD doing the same damage as other command grabs from other characters.

Speaker 2:
[152:36] No, it's Geef's SPD, it's big.

Speaker 1:
[152:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2:
[152:41] Anyway, so that's what I'm getting back in. So you are either, I'm sorry, Woolie. Next week, I will be using the big Hourglass.

Speaker 1:
[152:52] I'm giving you the big one.

Speaker 2:
[152:54] Like you're- Yeah, I know. But I'm on the honor system here. All right. I'm using it on myself so that you don't have to.

Speaker 1:
[153:02] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[153:03] So I'll either be thrilled or pissed as fuck. Hey. There's no in-between.

Speaker 1:
[153:09] If I were truly going hollow and dead-faced and whatever else people say, I wouldn't have asked you about what the two-minute meta was.

Speaker 2:
[153:17] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[153:17] So it's fine.

Speaker 2:
[153:18] But even somebody who doesn't play, you can see how the two-minute meta sucks. Of course.

Speaker 1:
[153:23] Yeah. It's a sliding-scale balancing problem where things... I mean, this applies to all genres, where the standardized thing, based on the meta that develops, becomes what everyone has to adhere to, and now you've brought in a feeling of saminess that kills the fun of multiple characters. So just everything gets bland as a result, even though it didn't start that way.

Speaker 2:
[153:46] They chased short-term solutions, because three expansions ago, they were like, damn it, samurai doesn't fit in the two-minute meta, and samurais aren't... Oh, so we'll make... We'll improve samurai. And now samurai fits in the two-minute meta.

Speaker 1:
[154:03] And anyone who gets released that doesn't fit into that gets ignored immediately, I assume. Just no one who's taking the game seriously is going to even look twice at that, right?

Speaker 2:
[154:12] Yeah. It's... So... And the other thing, and this is more specific, there are people that have been playing FF14 in its current state for 13 or 14 years. And everybody has the version of their class that was like the most fun to play. And none of them were the one that exists now.

Speaker 1:
[154:41] So...

Speaker 2:
[154:41] Like, my favorite version of Dark Knight was the first one in 2015. That was 11 years ago.

Speaker 1:
[154:52] So there's a possibility that you can win back some people that have been fucking out for a long time, if what they do now is good. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[155:02] And my last thing I'll say is, I miss Bane on Scholar. That was more fun than anything they have now. I don't give a fuck. Bane on Scholar was so fucking awesome.

Speaker 1:
[155:21] I feel like it's weird that these big changes didn't line up with the story reset, and it probably would have been a good time to do those two at the exact same time.

Speaker 2:
[155:29] Do you know what? Yeah. So let me tell you something. Let me tell you something. Dawn Trail was pitched as the start of the new A plot, and it fucking wasn't. It was an intermission. I finished Patch 7.3, but I didn't see the final cut scene. The start of the new A plot is in the next cut scene. Like, it's literally...

Speaker 1:
[156:05] So it actually was a waste of time. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2:
[156:08] But that is over a year into the expansion. It's a beach episode. It's filler.

Speaker 1:
[156:21] Sixteen years.

Speaker 2:
[156:21] But you would have expected this level of big change to be with Dawn Trail, because that's when the graphics changed. But no, this was the intermission. And the next one, which will have all the mechanical changes, is the start of the new A plot.

Speaker 1:
[156:39] Four years of filler. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2:
[156:44] Well, so you probably don't get that. So what happened was, is Endwalker was the everything is wrapped up in a neat little bow, perfect main campaign. And then Endwalker 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 was a side story that had nothing to do with Dawn Trail. And like, if you enjoyed it, you enjoyed it, but it didn't really, it wasn't the start of, it was not an off-ramp to something new, right? Honestly, somebody in the chat says, not so he says it's the Avengers Endgame problem. It actually is actually very similar to that, where they built up to this perfect ending, and then they're like, well, what do we do now? And then they just kind of flail around with the Falcon and the Winter Soldier for fucking four years.

Speaker 1:
[157:37] But it also sounds like what people used to talk about with like, I guess, Burning Crusade and some of that like stuff that WOW went through.

Speaker 2:
[157:45] Well, yeah, no, WOW also had that problem. You beat the Lich King and you're like, hey, guess what? That was the fucking goal from day one.

Speaker 1:
[157:51] So I thought like, you know, you would learn from the lesson of the previous all-in-one MMO platform, you know, that was, that you took all the attention from. Like, that was the lesson to learn specifically, was whatever WOW did wrong, fix that.

Speaker 2:
[158:03] Yeah, so what WOW did was, every single time you killed a big bad, they said, actually, there was another big bad behind them.

Speaker 1:
[158:11] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[158:11] And that obviously can only go so many times before it's absurd.

Speaker 1:
[158:16] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[158:18] FF14, so I'm calling my shot because I don't know. I am going to assume that the new A plot is basically going to be, you didn't get everybody that could have been a problem.

Speaker 1:
[158:35] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[158:36] There are, that you didn't kill everybody, therefore, we will continue to have problems.

Speaker 1:
[158:43] Now, this timer is still going. However, there's another timer, and that's the page timer, which says we've got half an hour left.

Speaker 2:
[158:52] I'm afraid of my wife. Let's go, let's go, let's go.

Speaker 1:
[158:55] All right. So, you know, I can hear you winding down there, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[159:01] By the way, gentlemen, specifically, and gay ladies, Mother's Day also applies to the mother in your house. That counts. It's not Mother's Day, is it just for your mom? It's for moms.

Speaker 1:
[159:22] Yeah, who do people not? Is this what? Why is this? Obviously.

Speaker 2:
[159:30] I've seen, I've seen mistakes be made.

Speaker 1:
[159:32] Okay. That's a, that's a, that's a fucking no duh.

Speaker 2:
[159:36] You know, when we were at the hospital and all that pregnancy stuff was happening, I had this moment, I was like, oh, this looks hard. This looks pretty tough.

Speaker 1:
[159:48] Are you making an announcement to yourself, Pat? Was that an announcement for you? Was that a, you know, you're on an airplane in the sky, the person complaining in the Louis C. K. Bit, I was the one complaining, it was me. Oh no. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[160:05] All right. All right.

Speaker 1:
[160:09] Well, look, we already talked about Bayonetta 3's ending. We talked to-

Speaker 2:
[160:14] Just stop Kamiya from- Can we just block Kamiya from talking?

Speaker 1:
[160:19] I mean, I feel like the- I assume he's more relaxed now that he's out and about doing his thing and he's got like Okami to work on.

Speaker 2:
[160:31] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[160:32] But which I'm looking forward to.

Speaker 2:
[160:35] Yeah, that'd be cool. Do you think it'll be Okami's four, five, six, or just Okami?

Speaker 1:
[160:40] I imagine it'll be Okami four, five, and six. Actually, Okami four was Okami Den, so this will be Okami five, six, and seven.

Speaker 2:
[160:47] Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 1:
[160:49] Devil May Cry Season 2 trailer.

Speaker 2:
[160:53] So I am going to be strong, Woolie. I'm not going to hate watch this because I was looking at the picture on the subreddit and they are fucking up jackpot in the preview picture, in the thumbnail. It is wrong. It is incorrect.

Speaker 1:
[161:16] Here's what I just watched it and I realized I'm like, you know, I'm a huge fan of Johnny Young Bosch, and I love hearing him work in whatever. So I'm going to look forward to hearing his performance, and that's it, and we'll see what happens.

Speaker 2:
[161:34] I'm just a man, though, so don't take my word for it too strongly that I'm not going to hate-watch it. I'm only a man. I'm not made of stone.

Speaker 1:
[161:42] I touched on it earlier, but Dragon Ball is fucking crazy, man. Like, I just can't believe how resilient these game platforms have been, because Xenoverse 3 has been announced, which is the Age 1000 thing that they teased some time ago, which just looks like a whole, like, you want to talk about a fantasy, like, here's a whole, like, insert your Dragon Ball character into a future timeline thing and go play as them in this world and do the thing. But Xenoverse 2, which has been around since 2016, is like, I didn't hear no fucking bell. And of course, there's one piece of final DLC coming for that, because that's been just consistently updating. And Dragon Ball Fighters is also getting one more character, because they're like, don't forget us, because Dragon Ball Fighters from 2018 is also still fucking getting updates.

Speaker 2:
[162:30] There are literally millions of people out there that will overhear any question and just scream out, G-Goku?

Speaker 1:
[162:37] Yes. And there is a-

Speaker 2:
[162:38] Dude, I'm talking about where you want to go for lunch. Calm down.

Speaker 1:
[162:41] There is a video of an auditorium full of people losing their minds at Daima SSJ4 Goku being announced. And yeah, he's also-

Speaker 2:
[162:50] Dude, Rufalmonger already got a fucking Tifa video out. Bro, you are crazy.

Speaker 1:
[162:58] It's the funny thing. But you can see the cracks are beginning to show though, because if you look at some of the effects on Daima SSJ4 Goku, you can see stuff being reused from other characters. Some of the moves, some of the animations, some of the flips and effects of explosions are assets that were previously in the game. So, you know, you can see that it is still like, yeah, they're doing their thing, and they're using what they already had. But, this is also in a world where fans are adding Dio and fucking Yugi.

Speaker 2:
[163:35] Yeah, you never know. You don't know anything anymore.

Speaker 1:
[163:39] So that's what's going on. There was also the... Oh, just, I guess, an update, but we talked about the Mass Effect rewrite occurring, and the showrunner or the co-showrunner, Daniel Casey, basically came out to dispel this news and say that the whole thing about Mass Effect being rewritten as a show for non-gamers is not true, or he doesn't know where it came from, and at no point has that been said to him, is the quote. Okay, that's great.

Speaker 2:
[164:18] Why is it taking so long? I don't know. Okay. So here's my opinion, and this isn't fair, but when somebody goes, that's definitely not the reason, and people go, oh, so what's the reason then? I'm not going to tell you. Well, shut up.

Speaker 1:
[164:36] I don't care what you have to say. Was the genesis of this rewrite rumor was because of how long it's taking?

Speaker 2:
[164:47] I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[164:48] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[164:50] If it's completely fake, then the genesis was someone's ass.

Speaker 1:
[164:53] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[164:55] Right? But...

Speaker 1:
[164:58] Yeah. It's all those Street Fighter rumors. They might not be real, so we'll address that maybe when something a little more concrete drops or something else comes out to say.

Speaker 2:
[165:10] Nah, fuck it. Tifa's coming to Street Fighter 6. It's going to happen. Or I'm a dumbass. Whichever. Pick your poison.

Speaker 1:
[165:18] I mean, Tekken would fucking die another death if so, but...

Speaker 2:
[165:22] I don't think that that list is real because Haggar's on there and that's just a shitty pick.

Speaker 1:
[165:27] It's also the bit that they run that they can never be in the same game with GEEF, so yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like a fake list. I wasn't even going to be... Whatever. What else do we all have lists of? We have the Elden Ring movie cast, which I don't really recognize anyone on it, so don't have much to say about it.

Speaker 2:
[165:44] I recognize two people. I recognize Nick Offerman as the moustache guy from all that stuff, Parks and Rec and Last of Us.

Speaker 1:
[165:51] Did I not notice his name on that list? Let me look at that again.

Speaker 2:
[165:54] Oh shit.

Speaker 1:
[165:54] Okay. Interesting. Oh yeah, there he is.

Speaker 2:
[165:57] And I recognize Peter Serafinowicz. Peter Serafinowicz voiced mild-mannered Pate in Dark Souls 2.

Speaker 1:
[166:11] Ah. Interesting.

Speaker 2:
[166:12] Which means Peter Serafinowicz will be playing Patches.

Speaker 1:
[166:16] Cool.

Speaker 2:
[166:16] Just flat.

Speaker 1:
[166:17] Okay, that's dope. I don't know what this should be or how this happens.

Speaker 2:
[166:25] It should be anything but about the Tarnished.

Speaker 1:
[166:30] That's basically what I was going to...

Speaker 2:
[166:32] It should be anything but the story of Elden Ring.

Speaker 1:
[166:37] The only way I could see this, not the only way, but one of the most clear ways to make this kind of thing work as an Elden Ring film project with how complex a Souls game is in general, is to just pick a small specific plot, subplot somewhere with someone and just zoom in on that, while the game you know and the world you know happens in the background. Do not do this massive cinematic retelling of the intro all the way up until the final moments in the Erd Tree.

Speaker 2:
[167:10] Okay, well, I'm looking at a picture of the lady playing Marika, and she's not strung up long across, she's walking around with fruit behind her, so it's not going to be the fucking game.

Speaker 1:
[167:21] Unless they do that because that's-

Speaker 2:
[167:22] Probably going to be about the shattering. Do that.

Speaker 1:
[167:25] But there is like, you know, a like exact ass way of looking at things going, no, it's got to be big and bombastic and it's got to deliver all the crazy bells and whistles that everyone expects from what this game is. And we got to make it even bigger. Big, big, big, big, big. Fit the whole thing in big and then get Shadow of the Earth Tree in big. And you're just kind of like, it's a fucking single movie script, man. You know?

Speaker 2:
[167:47] It's like 4,000 locations in that game.

Speaker 1:
[167:51] Basically, what I can't think of, here's the thing I realized, when I can't think of, like when I look at a franchise or an IP of some kind and I go, I don't know why this movie should exist. The only solution I can come up with for like how to probably do that well is to do a dread, right? To just pick a location, thing, go. Yep. Just zoom in super far and make a dread situation happen and let the thing you know how you like and recognize happen in the background. That can work in almost anything.

Speaker 2:
[168:23] Just do Vyke's story, man. Three fingers.

Speaker 1:
[168:31] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. May chaos take the world. Sure.

Speaker 2:
[168:35] Yeah, sure. And then he gives up.

Speaker 1:
[168:36] Okay. More casting news. That's not the only one. The Netflix live action Gundam cast has been announced. Have you seen this?

Speaker 2:
[168:46] I saw it.

Speaker 1:
[168:47] Starring Sydney Sweeney.

Speaker 2:
[168:50] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[168:51] To which I read and I read again.

Speaker 2:
[168:54] As a member of the, what is it, the Xion royal family? She can play, what's her name? Not Garma. Garma's the bitch. Killia?

Speaker 1:
[169:07] Lady, Lady, Lady Xillia. Yeah, you can.

Speaker 2:
[169:09] Xillia, that's it.

Speaker 1:
[169:10] Yeah, yeah, you know, she can be Hamon Karn. She can be a lot of people. But one thing is for sure, is I just look at her and I'm just like, yeah, I don't know if you've ever seen the bit, but like, what the fuck is a polar bear doing in Arlington, Texas, if you've ever seen that meme? And it's just like a, it's just a picture of a polar bear in Texas and everyone's like, the fuck? Like, why are you here? And then I'm just like, I don't, like, all right, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[169:41] Sure. So I'm going to say the same thing that I say every time, but this time it has a nice little meme to go along with it. Much like when we heard that Akira was going to be made into a Hollywood movie.

Speaker 1:
[169:53] My body, soul and brain all went, Yeah, it's just we need a star and Scar Joe is unavailable.

Speaker 2:
[170:02] So to this, Who else we got? I say, I genuinely don't believe Americans can make a Gundam movie that isn't just, wow, cool robot. I don't believe they can do it. It's going to be fucking wow, cool robot, the movie.

Speaker 1:
[170:25] Yeah, because I have not heard that Tomino will be there in the room with a gun, right? So if they're willing to wheel him in there and load a pistol and have him point at everybody.

Speaker 2:
[170:42] If Tomino was in the room with the American staff of Gundam with a gun, he would hold it and put it down on the table and go, I should not use this gun. And somebody from the staff would pick it up and go, wow, cool gun.

Speaker 1:
[171:07] Oh, man, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[171:12] All right.

Speaker 1:
[171:13] Well, whatever. G-Savior 2, here we go. Here we go. I look forward to Sydney Sweeney in a spacesuit outfit.

Speaker 2:
[171:31] It's going to be Selah, dude.

Speaker 1:
[171:32] Being... Are they even going to try an Amarrow thing? You think they're even?

Speaker 2:
[171:37] Yeah, they're gonna... Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[171:39] They might not.

Speaker 2:
[171:40] It's going to be Aaron Rodgers.

Speaker 1:
[171:42] Like, if she... Because if she's a titular star character, star name, star power, et cetera, that makes me think instead of going, like, Selah is the main character of the story or anything, like, they would have cast a big name for Amarrow and a big name for Shar. I think this is probably just a brand new random fucking...

Speaker 2:
[172:00] I fucking hope so.

Speaker 1:
[172:01] You know.

Speaker 2:
[172:05] They won't even be brave enough to give the Gundam pilot severe autism and gender issues. You know what? If they say Camille Badon coming in as the main character of the fucking Gundam movie, gonna fight a bunch of cops for saying his name's a girl's name and then freak out on a date because he's got autism, fuck yeah, I'm in.

Speaker 1:
[172:32] You're not gonna get that. You're not gonna get that.

Speaker 2:
[172:35] No, no, no, bro.

Speaker 1:
[172:36] They'd never, they'd never, not for Netflix.

Speaker 2:
[172:38] You should have seen my fucking face when he's on the date and he's like, sorry, I'm awkward with girls because of the tism.

Speaker 1:
[172:46] Netflix.

Speaker 2:
[172:47] That was from the 70s.

Speaker 1:
[172:48] Netflix would fucking never. Yeah, and then also on this list, the dude playing Ken in the Street Fighter movie is in it too as well. So too soon to say what that means.

Speaker 2:
[173:06] But that was the 80s, whatever. The gun's old. It's old enough for me to have been dead.

Speaker 1:
[173:13] Once again, polar bears in Arlington, Texas.

Speaker 2:
[173:17] Was I dead before I was born?

Speaker 1:
[173:37] I'm going, okay, it's a question of language, because whatever the things that make up your, even the sperm that begins to be you.

Speaker 2:
[173:45] No, no, I was alive. I was just an egg.

Speaker 1:
[173:49] The things that eventually, but those things have to come together, the materials that come together to make you.

Speaker 2:
[173:54] Yeah, but like, you know, I was an egg.

Speaker 1:
[173:57] Well, but no, because that egg didn't always exist, right? At some point, the proteins. It existed for a while. It did, but at some point, it had the proteins and enzymes and everything to come together to make it.

Speaker 2:
[174:08] Yeah, I know, but life is contiguous. It's a whole different thing.

Speaker 1:
[174:10] Well, so the thing is, you come together to temporarily be a ship of Theseus, but then you eventually break apart and stop being that. But like, the first thing that is Pat at some point and the last thing that will ever be Pat, like that already existed from the beginning and continues to the end.

Speaker 2:
[174:25] Oh, but I only came online as the Pat that I am now, like, ten minutes ago.

Speaker 1:
[174:30] Yeah, so then you've spent most of your existence being dead, but parts of you existed in...

Speaker 2:
[174:37] Oh, no, that's con- oh, I don't want to talk about that.

Speaker 1:
[174:39] The wood of Theseus continued to exist elsewhere, and it is currently a ship for this brief moment in time, but then it'll...

Speaker 2:
[174:46] Did you watch the second season of Fallout?

Speaker 1:
[174:49] No.

Speaker 2:
[174:50] Because there's a ghoul of Theseus thing going on in there.

Speaker 1:
[174:52] Interesting. Cool. Okay. Pieces and parts of others coming through.

Speaker 2:
[174:56] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[174:57] Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[174:58] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[175:01] You asked a question.

Speaker 2:
[175:03] Yeah. I shouldn't have asked that question. That's too hard.

Speaker 1:
[175:09] Yeah. If non-existence is death, then yeah, you start dead, you come alive, and then you could go back to being dead.

Speaker 2:
[175:16] No, not me.

Speaker 1:
[175:20] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[175:22] Simon and Somme are so fucking stupid. I've been thinking about that all week.

Speaker 1:
[175:27] Yeah, but the whole wanting to be a mortal thing is aging poorly, because now you're joining the likes of fucking Peter Thiel.

Speaker 2:
[175:34] Yeah, right.

Speaker 1:
[175:34] And that dude who injects his kid's blood into his body.

Speaker 2:
[175:39] Or these shitheads that are like, can you believe I'm actually 30? I look exactly 17. And I'm like, you look like you are fucking a hard 30, and you're just wearing too much makeup and face-drying.

Speaker 1:
[175:52] Yeah, so it was cute, you know, 10 years ago, making the joke, ha ha. And now it's like, nah, there's people that are like, vampireing their children to live forever.

Speaker 2:
[176:01] Don't do that.

Speaker 1:
[176:01] So all of a sudden, hey, how's that immortality bit looking?

Speaker 2:
[176:05] Your legacy is supposed to continue on through your children, because your children are better than you.

Speaker 1:
[176:10] So you know, it ain't all that it was cracked up to be. Anyway, the only other thing I was going to get into there is, wherever you go, there you are. Time is a flat circle. Hey, let's talk about an IGN review.

Speaker 2:
[176:33] Oh, who gives a?

Speaker 1:
[176:35] Okay. I saw that bit with the people talking about Mouse PI For Hire. And it was pretty weird. And just a strange way to go. Talking about this game being too full of cheese references and having you kill too many people and that not being real noir enough for noir. And it's just a strange way to go about it.

Speaker 2:
[177:10] I'm turning 40 tomorrow. I am checking out of review discussions. Out of, with one exception, that God Hand review is pretty fucking funny.

Speaker 1:
[177:22] Now, to be fair, once again, not only are foundational bits of this career built on review review and the silliness of the old IGN reviews, but also we have not talked about anything like this in at least five years.

Speaker 2:
[177:43] It's so tiring. It's always just the most neck, beard, mouth, breathing fucking weirdos going, but I like that game. Who gives a fuck? And there's like a culture element to it. What fucking? Oh my god. Who gives a shit? It's your toys. It's your toys. We're all just playing with this a toy podcast. Yeah, I like my toys a lot.

Speaker 1:
[178:13] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[178:14] But like, holy fuck.

Speaker 1:
[178:15] Well, this is okay. You're currently feeling the exhaustion I feel around watching award shows and trailer shows. And the delay news and whatever something.

Speaker 2:
[178:29] But what if there's a new toy?

Speaker 1:
[178:31] What if a toy gets delayed?

Speaker 2:
[178:34] I don't like it when toy gets delayed. I want the toy now.

Speaker 1:
[178:36] Who cares? Just wait. It's fine.

Speaker 2:
[178:39] No, I could be dead tomorrow.

Speaker 1:
[178:41] Well, then you won't get to play it.

Speaker 2:
[178:43] No.

Speaker 1:
[178:45] Like I just.

Speaker 2:
[178:46] My toys.

Speaker 1:
[178:47] You know.

Speaker 2:
[178:50] No, there was a point. I forget what it was. But I was like, I don't care about any review anymore because I don't trust anyone's opinion but mine. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1:
[179:00] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[179:01] And not like you tell me about a game and you say it's good. And I'm like, fuck you.

Speaker 1:
[179:06] No, no, no. But it's just like I haven't give a fuck about reviews of any kind of with that stuff for a very long time. But the reality of like. But I'm like, but it is true that this week when Pragmata was getting a lot of good reviews and people started talking about that, I was like, oh, that's cool. Good to know. I like, you know, so you kind of. So you. So finding emotion. So suddenly there's like you do put some weight on this thing that you weren't thinking about before or otherwise. And it's like, okay, I guess there's a thing here that is a, you know, also a consensus is on anything other than a five point scale is wrong.

Speaker 2:
[179:39] Five point scale is the best scale.

Speaker 1:
[179:40] Well, but now we get into the fucking should this be a. We're not doing it, but just the should this be a critique of media, or should this be a buyer's guide, you know?

Speaker 2:
[179:54] So considering everyone's broke now, yeah, I think it should be a buyer's guide more than ever.

Speaker 1:
[179:58] I think it can be either, but you should set out, it should be clear what you're going for from the outset. You know, because people come in looking for different things. So you don't, I imagine, watch fucking Tim Rogers to find out whether or not you should buy the game he's reviewing.

Speaker 2:
[180:16] No, I don't watch Tim Rogers because he hasn't put out a video in like 10 years.

Speaker 1:
[180:20] Sure, but the point even back then when he made articles before videos even existed.

Speaker 2:
[180:24] No, I watch or read Tim Rogers because I want to see a crazy person be crazy at me.

Speaker 1:
[180:28] Nothing about what he was doing had anything to do with whether or not you should purchase the product. You know.

Speaker 2:
[180:34] Well, you think I give a fuck about Tokameki Memorial? Absolutely not. Let's sit down and get some popcorn. Tim's just gonna go nuts at me.

Speaker 1:
[180:42] Insert coin, Katamari Damacy review, a billion years ago. Do I want to buy this game? I don't know. But if you ever go to Japan, I don't care.

Speaker 2:
[180:52] Just tell me about it.

Speaker 1:
[180:53] You're invited to go spend the night on his couch.

Speaker 2:
[180:59] I was better than other people who decided to actually watch only two pieces of the cyberpunk review. Do you remember that? When the cyberpunk review was six parts?

Speaker 1:
[181:11] Oh, and then you could choose to go around it.

Speaker 2:
[181:13] And he's like, only watch two. And then after you watch all six, he's like, I fucking lied. You were supposed to watch all six.

Speaker 1:
[181:20] Well, like, no.

Speaker 2:
[181:23] I knew it.

Speaker 1:
[181:24] Okay, but no, because like, I can out hipster what you just said by saying, I'm like, I read his stuff back in the day. I didn't really get into watching the videos that much later, you know? I mainly know...

Speaker 2:
[181:36] You think you're better than me because you can read?

Speaker 1:
[181:39] Like, to me, that's... I remember reading the Insert Coin Articles and then the Six Red Coins and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:
[181:45] Oh, by the way, before we forget, you know, you got to go through your TikToks and manually disable AI Remix on every single one manually.

Speaker 1:
[181:55] I don't... What?

Speaker 2:
[181:58] So TikTok is implementing a new feature called AI Remix where people can go to any video that has the feature turned on and use AI to remix it and make people do whatever it wants.

Speaker 1:
[182:09] TikTok is not on my phone. I'll be okay.

Speaker 2:
[182:11] It's not on your phone? You don't have it?

Speaker 1:
[182:13] I do not.

Speaker 2:
[182:14] You have no TikTok anywhere?

Speaker 1:
[182:15] I do not have TikTok installed on my phone. I'm not on... We're fine.

Speaker 2:
[182:21] Doesn't CSB have a TikTok account?

Speaker 1:
[182:22] Yeah. Other folks are doing that and uploading to it.

Speaker 2:
[182:26] Okay. Tell them to turn off the AI remix.

Speaker 1:
[182:29] Okay. All right. What does that do?

Speaker 2:
[182:35] It will allow people to use AI to remix any video that doesn't have that feature turned off.

Speaker 1:
[182:41] And you're opt-in automatically because...

Speaker 2:
[182:43] And you have to turn off every single video manually. There's no batch thing. So I had to spend like two hours the other night just going through every single fucking video, going off, off, off, off, off.

Speaker 1:
[182:54] You know, I had a good conversation with my mom the other day and it felt like she did seem to understand because something I had been telling her about in advance finally started coming true, which was describing the fact that like, you're going to see this thing, this AI thing you've been hearing about is going to go from something you don't understand that is over here to something that it's going to be harder to avoid than it is...

Speaker 2:
[183:14] And you're going to know what it's doing or not doing and you're going to get pissed off.

Speaker 1:
[183:18] And now you're currently confused how to opt in and then you're going to be confused about how to opt out and it's happening before our eyes and she kind of gets it, you know? Let's take some letters.

Speaker 2:
[183:30] All right, we got time for one letter. Go down to castlesuperbeastmailgmail.com. That's castlesuperbeastmailgmail.com.

Speaker 1:
[183:40] All right, Cog says, recently I saw a trailer for a game called Kiln by Doublethwine and it starts seemingly showing off a pottery building art tool as its main gimmick, then it shows pottery functions as armor for a PVP 3D platformer or arena brawler, functionally if Psychonauts was PVP. It got me thinking back on Doublethwine's catalog and wondering how they're still in business as a world where Hi-Fi Rush still cancels your studio. Besides Brutal Legend, I'm not sure if any other game sold well and if they've put out a game that has played as well or better than any others that other genres have attempted. My question is, are there any media companies that continue to survive purely off of pedigree, inflated or undeserved despite the actual output being awful?

Speaker 2:
[184:24] I legitimately don't understand how Doublethwine continues to exist. Every single game they've ever put out was like a critical failure. And Brutal Legend is the, sorry, not a critical failure, a commercial failure. And Brutal Legend could have been, we could be up to Brutal Legend 5 by now, if it had been anything other than the world's shittiest RTS.

Speaker 1:
[184:46] Wasn't everything after Brutal Legend crowdfunded?

Speaker 2:
[184:50] Not all of it. So it was like kind of indie thing.

Speaker 1:
[184:53] Because I thought Broken Age, Psychonauts and so on, I thought all of that was crowdfunded.

Speaker 2:
[184:58] You're thinking, you're forgetting the mech game they did. And there was another one, Big Chalice.

Speaker 1:
[185:04] Okay. Because if they were crowdfunded, then that's the answer. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[185:08] Also Psychonauts 2 was not crowdfunded. You might think it's crowdfunded because they held a crowdfunding thing for it and took money on Fig. Fig.

Speaker 1:
[185:16] Fig.

Speaker 2:
[185:17] But then they got bought out by Microsoft and then completely ran out of money. And then Microsoft had to bail them out to finish Psychonauts 2. Because much like Brutal Legend, not Brutal Legend, Broken Age, they just can't plan for shit.

Speaker 1:
[185:37] When you're an industry name, you can definitely get like, you can go around and talk to people and get favors done and pull strings for sure. But I would say that a trail of lots of crowdfunding projects does indicate like, this is the only way this place will stay open. And if any of those, you know, in a lot of cases, my real, my bigger thing question here, my answer to this question is Quantic Dream, right? Quantic Dream is one where like, they have these huge, like, I'm sure like Detroit was probably massively, exactly. But in terms of just like, I guess the critical acclaim aspect of that, you know?

Speaker 2:
[186:20] I think the only one I can think of that is living on its pedigree alone is the Vanillaware. Every Vanillaware game that has come out, has been like, we have completely run out of money. So if this game doesn't do well, we are all going home with our shit in a box.

Speaker 1:
[186:40] So I can't prove it.

Speaker 2:
[186:41] And every time they say we barely made enough to keep the doors open.

Speaker 1:
[186:43] I can't prove it, but I, I in my heart believe that Vanillaware is not real. It is just George when he wants to release a game, opens it back up and says Vanillaware exists. And then when the game is out, he shuts it down again and it goes back to not existing.

Speaker 2:
[187:01] It's crazy. Every Vanillaware game is like, we have completely run out of money and hopefully it does well or else the company is going under. And then it does just well enough to fund one more.

Speaker 1:
[187:14] I bet you it's just him and it completes and ceases operations as soon as...

Speaker 2:
[187:19] Yeah, it's George and 10 Monkeys with typewriters.

Speaker 1:
[187:21] Every time, you know, and you just see the logo and go, oh wow, game company. And it's like, nah, nah. Like they've been gone and they came back. Alrighty. Happy pre-birthday. Don't die.

Speaker 2:
[187:35] I won't die, I promise.

Speaker 1:
[187:36] No, you can't.

Speaker 2:
[187:38] I promise. People who die, oh no, no, no. Nope. No, that'll age badly when I'm dead.