Castle Super Beast - CSB 172: FF7 ReGackted

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Miles Thor-ales Dragon's Dogma: Best 7/10 ever made Berserk Continues Kiting With The Limiters Off Final Fantasy Intergatcha Fossil Dated Gaming Trends You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Get 25% off and zero delivery fees on their first order of $15 or more, when you download the DoorDash app and enter code CASTLE. FFVII25th: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second game in the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy, launches next Winter on PlayStation 5 FFVII25th:Crisis Core ─Final Fantasy VII─ Reunion, featuring updated 3D models, full voiceovers and new music arrangements, launches this Winter on PS5, PS4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and Steam FFVII25th:Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade launches on Steam DD10th: Dragon's Dogma 2 is in production Twitch streamer @quinrex  just spent $10,000 on Diablo Immortal and got…nothing Aspyr Says It's Aware Of Star Wars: KOTOR II Switch Crash Preventing Players From Completing The Game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 remasters were in the works but they were scrapped after Vicarious Visions was merged into Blizzard Treasure Co., Ltd. celebrated its 30th anniversary! This year, the 30th anniversary, we are working hard to announce the highly requested "that" title. TRIGUN STAMPEDE, a new anime from Studio Orange is scheduled for 2023 Slave Zero X - Official Announcement Trailer

Earg cantata Earg cantata Earg cantata Earg cantata Earg cantata Earg cantata Hi Odin's Fade, I do believe that's the start of a podcast. It's a great time for comic books.

We got a new hero in Thor Miles Morales and the hot new Spider-Man movie, Spider-Man Lotus is coming out. That's a fan film, everybody excited. I didn't hear about that second one. Oh, you didn't? That's the one where the lead actor and the director after making what is apparently a pretty good Spider-Man movie with Indiegogo Dollars,

got outed as being massive white power racists. Whoa. Okay. Okay, no, I didn't. All sorts of DMs leaking out of them, dropping the end bomb and calling people dog heater and all sorts of shit. Wow, I did not see that. That's crazy.

But the new Miles Morales run is good, right? Yeah, well, the run is one thing. The what if is certainly another. But yeah, I don't know, man. To be perfectly honest, I've been clicking on to the Internet and looking a little bit, peeking here and there just enough to keep a docket going,

but I have not been around. I have not been around, so. It's a slow week, don't worry about it. Okay, well, by the way, for those of you who only caught certain bits of last week's breaking news, I would like to confirm that the bungee Juneteenth kerfuffle was indeed caused by a hilariously unfortunate

technical error. Yes, I thought we got to that by the end of the story. Yeah, I know, but you know how clips circulate and whatnot? Yeah, well, yeah. That being said, somebody still hit publish on that shit. It's a journey, but by the end of the journey, I think we get to the point where we see that it's just hilariously unfortunate indeed.

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing, like it's one of the, these bits, there's always the one where you're like, there's almost nothing to say about it by the time you get to it, because everything that you need to say has already been done, but really, if you're listening and you don't know what's going on,

I guess you can just go look on Twitter and see some of the choice clips of the what if Miles Morales was Thor comic, in which, you know, the short version of it is essentially that like if, like what if Miles Morales picked up Thor's hammer and then as soon as he did, all of Asgard around him just turned into the hood,

like a line, almost like a reboot scan of just the environment. And the hammer just is getting scanned down and now there's all graffiti on it. This group tags on it and like, it just, yeah, it just updates and then all of a sudden, Asgard becomes the hood. And then everything in the narration boxes

is told through rhyme. It's good times. It really is. It's, it's- Oh, I love it. It's absolutely, it's the most in touch it's ever been. You know, it's right up there with- It doesn't-

That, go ahead. It's like the timing on it's so perfect because last week you were like, I don't want that covert shit. I want that overt shit, but this doesn't even seem malicious. It just seems like fucking cringe. Yeah, that's exactly it.

There's nothing really fancy to say or it's just, it's massively, ooh, ooh, you thought you nailed it and the spirit was there, but you, and you thought you were gonna get one of those clips where the person who wrote it, like they thought that like everyone was gonna react like one of those like gifts that everyone going, oh shit, you know, and you just-

Yeah, have people invite them to the barbecue. The cookout. The cookout. Yeah, I really, yeah, sorry, the cookout. But like, oh, you did a gr- Oh, you know, oh man. Yeah. And, and you know, yeah, like I said,

it's right up there with that old white lady teaching you how to hip hop dance from everything is terrible. You ever see that lady where you just, you put a little step into it and now that's real hip hop right there. Oh, yeah, actually I'm not, cause everything is terrible is a really wide, Oh yeah.

Wide brush. You know, I got like, you know, my friends tell me like, what are you gonna do when this whole hip hop thing fades? And, you know, I just say to them, well, hip hop is a mentality. It's a state of mind. So you don't have to worry about that.

Now put your back into it. Here we go. One, two, a little bit. It's all about the attitude. It's all about the walk. You know, she gets really into it. And- That sounds fun.

It's a good time. It's a good time. And then she reveals the abs, the abs to see where you see the, you know, the thug life tattoo right across. And then you're like, oh shit. Oh, that's good. She's about that life though.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. So I fucked your bitch, you fat motherfucker. Hey, take money. Watch out now. Come on out. See, when you, when you, when you say, God, when you say everything is terrible, the one that pops into my head

every time is just yoga farm. Okay. The absolute nightmare that is yoga farm and like do the crow move and that guy's just bent over with his arms back just screaming at the top of his fucking legs. I don't. And that's the one with the rasta crow.

I don't think I remember that one. There's, there's so many though. Oh dude. Yeah. It was a movement. People aren't gonna know about everything is terrible. Yeah. In just a few years.

Oh, I mean, it, it was an era for me specifically. It was the time when YouTube was blocked at work. So you would go to everything is terrible for the direct video uploads of just wild shit. It was a good, good browsing. I don't know how, you know, when, when, when, when, when we're older and we're explaining to the kids, I don't know how to, I genuinely don't know how to explain

that I spent maybe a hundred thousand hours of my life looking for vapid garbage. Yep. And like I wanted it as vapid and as trashy as I could get it. Oh yeah. As direct as possible for sure. There's, there's a lot that's gonna be hard to explain.

I this week, for the second time now, I realize there's a, there's a real problem. And punch mom is fucking taking me to task over it. But if I am seated and I cough, my hand reaches out to press a mute button. Oh. Like if I'm in the couch seat where I'm usually sitting and nothing's happening and there's no mic in front of me,

I call, I start, I feel a cough and then I reach out and I press a mute button that's nearby or in some cases just like there's a bit of a, what, oh fuck. And it's just, it's instinctual at this point. So it's not, so I have been freed of my version of that but I will gain it shortly. So back at the old place on the couch

where the camera was set up, the camera was set up about to my right and a little bit up on top of a secondary monitor, right? So I would be talking to Paige, whether it be in the kitchen or on the couch next to me and I'd be telling a story or something and I would periodically turn to make eye contact with where the camera would be

if it had been set up in normal thing. But that happened in other rooms. Okay. So I would be talking to some, so people watching the video, I'd be like, oh yeah, so then I went to the store, right? So I went to the store but there'd be nothing. There's nothing there.

There'd be nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's no good. She'd be going like, Pat, who the fuck are you looking at? You're just no one here. I'm like, I don't know. It's bad. I don't know, man.

It's bad. And I mean, like the first time it happened, I didn't even realize anything was off. Like I just, I reached over and clicked the button and then kept watching the movie. And then she was like, did you just mute yourself for nothing? You know?

Yeah. Maybe I did. Yeah. Maybe I did. All right. That's the fucking PTSD that I'm gonna get, right? From this- That's not that bad.

Yeah. It's gonna, like when the internet is gone and we're all scavenging for food in the post apocalypse and you're still doing it and people don't understand what a TV is, then it's gonna be troubling. The phantom mute button. Right. Mm-hmm.

Well, there used to be a device you could hit and people wouldn't be able to hear you. And they're like, isn't that called closing your mouth? And you're like, yeah, I guess. Anyway. Pure, pure unfiltered internet. Yeah. Hey, shout outs, shout outs to-

I need more. I mean, to the, what if Miles Morales and the timing of all that. So let me write that down now. You said Spider-Man Lotus? Spider-Man Lotus. Okay, I'm just gonna make a little note on that. Apparently the movie's pretty good.

Okay. Okay, good to know. What's up with you? Ah! I mean, part of this is news, but what's up with me is I played a couple games this week, nothing of note other than that, exploring the enjoying nature.

BC's very pretty nice people here, wonderful. I'll probably be talking about how wonderful people in the BC are for the rest of my life, because they're nice. I finished Isomnium Files. What a great game. So did you play 999? Yep.

Okay, so you remember at 999, I'm gonna talk real around this, but people who know will be able to know. I feel very comfortable with this one. 999 has a turn. There's a definitive turn where the nature of the mystery changes significantly. And the writer of all these things loves that shit,

loves to just have that third act turn be just some wild ass shit. And Isomnium Files has the best version of it I've ever seen, because in one of the roots, a character looks at you and says, dude, it's a secret society. It's about parallel worlds. There's morphogenic fields that like we're doing

all this stuff and just hit, like you have six, you have two people to talk to and they each have three options that you can pick twice. And they're all perfectly in line with 999 and VLR and your mind is racing and they're completely full of shit. And the author knows that you will buy into at least one of them and they're all bullshit. Interesting.

And the actual left field twist is significantly pared down from that. I hear that, yeah, it's Uchikoshi. I hear that Uchikoshi, he's done the same in anime as well and just has become a, if you followed his work, you can feel, in a Kojima-esque way, you can feel the flavors. Oh, he is out of all the games I've played,

particularly Mysteries, he is the most, like, Arraki-esque of, or Kojima-esque of anybody in which characters will just stop the plot to tell you about this resort town that I went to once or did you know that this bug is really cool or just whatever? Like, but he's a pun freak, he's obsessed with it. And the eye puns go like all the way

to like the dead ass final moments of the game. It's out of control. And more than that, it ends super strong. Okay. Like in the kind of mystery game that this is, like the nightmare is that it kind of ends on a fart, which apparently people say Zero Time Dilemma does. Ends really, really, really strong.

Excellent, absolutely excellent game, super good. Kind of mocks VLR a little bit. Okay. Like, in how wild that game got. Yeah, just a great game, it's a great game. Sequels out this Friday. I did not know the sequel was coming out at all. Oh, shit.

When I started playing it a couple of weeks ago. Well, that's fortunate. And yeah, sequels out this Friday, direct continuation, same character, well, at least some of the same characters. I was told that it doesn't follow the true ending of Somnium Files, it follows one of the branch paths. Okay.

Because there's a screenshot on, there's a screenshot on the store page of a character who gets their head blown off. Jesus, okay. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure we're following a different thing. That's a very Yoko Taro move to just the hard sequel of a random ass ending.

Interesting. Yeah, maybe. Well, yeah, but yeah, it's great. It's great. I love it. It's a good game, very excited for the sequel. Everybody, if you love mystery things and anime presentation and interesting writing,

go check out I Somnium Files. I think you have to specify extreme anime presentation. Oh yeah, no, I mean, it looks like a good old anime. Yeah, there's layers I think at this point where you have stuff that's like, oh yeah, well, you have perfect blue, which is like, this was supposed to be live action and it just happens to be anime.

And then you have a gradient that you slide all the way over. Yeah, no, then you have fucking Date being told by his AI waifu robot in his eyeball that there's a porno mag underneath those goons so he gains superpowers to shoot them with his anime gun. Yeah, no, 100%. Does this mean I'm off to Steins Gate or U-U-U-M-I-N-Y-E-K-O?

U-U-U-M-I-N-Y-Steins Gate, yeah, U-U-U-M-I-N-Y-E-K-O. I don't know how to say that thing. Or what was that other one? Dog-on grandpa? No, thanks. What the fuck was it? Punchline? I don't fucking know.

Punchline? I don't, I don't fucking know. Okay, well, anyway. I also played an absolute shit ton of Dragon's Dog with this week. Which was, in fact, based on announcements. The news. Yes, so that was not a coincidence.

Man, Dragon's Dogma is such a great, not good game. It's a great game. It's not a good game. Does that make sense to anyone but me? Perhaps, because a lot of people have played it and you have talked a lot about how great Dark Arisen was by comparison to the original thing that launched.

And I guess the thing that's mainly, I have a lot of awareness of the pawn system and the fact that plot stuff comes together, creative character is really good. What I guess I don't know that well is what the combat is, what the combat feels like and why that's good and unique. Okay, so I'm gonna,

we're gonna pretend that Dragon's Dogma, Dark Arisen just came out, but also I've been playing it for years. Dragon's Dogma is the best seven out of 10 game that has ever come out. Okay, what I mean by that, it is, when it is strong, in the parts in which it is excellent,

it is one of the best games I have ever played in any genre. However, where it is weak, it is not just weak, it is in some cases actually missing because the game is laughably unfinished. The, all the, like all the, Dark Arisen had expansion content

and there's the post game and all that stuff. It is like 40% of its original design dock is actually in there. Kind of like Kotor 2. Kind of like Kotor 2. It is, it is a open world RPG, action RPG, like a Skyrim, let's say, that only has one town, really,

and a one side town and has huge swaths of land that nothing ever sends you to, ever. And there's no reason to go there, but it is there to explore and there's enemies there. And it has a really like slap dash main quest that like you can just feel the huge story beats were ripped out. But despite its relatively boring landscape

and terrible story, it has mechanical depth that is across between Monster Hunter and Devil May Cry. And has the most interesting AI buddy system ever in a game with the Pawn system. So the Pawns are like, it's not just that you have a summon that follows you around and helps you fight.

No, so the Pawn system is actually extraordinarily complex, but that doesn't actually surface to most people because when you bet, Dragon's Dawn was a game where you bounce off for the first 10 minutes and you'll never understand anything about it. And then you bounce that off after five hours and you go, okay, I kind of, you know, whatever. But it has a straight line up in terms of quality,

in terms of getting better as you play it. The Pawn system is every AI created character is going to act within their own AI paradigm, which is called an inclination of which there are nine. Skater, Challenger, Mitigator, Utilitarian, Pioneer, Medicint, Guardian, Nexus, and Equisitor. And these each have AI designations on their actions that combine with every possible skill in the game.

In addition, you have a primary inclination, a secondary inclination and a tertiary hidden inclination that will depend on their order of priority. On top of that, the character's personal knowledge of every enemy in the game will factor into those AI behaviors. So if they've fought, say, undead and know that undead are weak to holy and fire,

then the next time they fight undead, they will use holy or fire if they have it. And if they have an AI fucking plan, such as mendicant or utilitarian, which will let them prepare for that. And most, if not all, quest markers on your map are going to depend on whether or not a person who is not you took your pawn out to do that quest

and then your pawn will learn the steps that they took on that quest alone out and will tell you where those markers are. And you're hiring other people's pawns that they've made and they're all combining into this fucking thing. And all of that works? It absolutely works. The AI totally works.

So you go and you hire, hey, I need a ranger and a mage and I want them to have quest knowledge of the quests that I have active and I pick them up and then I look over and I go talk to them with the quest selected and they will tell me, hey, I remember that this letter is dropped by this location, but there are wolves there and when we get there, they will auto-equip fire

on their shit and they will act according to their AI and fight the enemies appropriately. You can make a really good pawn. You can make really terrible pawn depending on your own personal actions and the inclinations that you give them. It's a whole fucking thing. It is easily the most complex AI simulation in a game ever.

But you have to look at the wiki and dive super deep on it and most people don't, it's a thing and you level them a certain, it's super fucked, but it's cool and it's really, really, really unique. And then for your own actual combat, it plays like a action RPG that is a slightly pared down version of Devil May Cry. Like between Devil May Cry one and three

in that your right arm and left arm each get three skills and you can equip them as you would. So say if I'm a fighter, my left hand is gonna have three shield skills and my right hand is gonna have three sword skills and those sword skills include literally Stinger. Like the first ability in the game is Stinger. It's called blink strike, but it's not, it's Stinger.

Or the ability to swipe in the air or the ability to skewer somebody and twist the knife or bang on your shield to bring enemies towards you or put your shield up and have your pawns leak frog off your shield to get to higher up enemies. Did I also see a thing where you kind of mounted a griffin as if it were like a monster hunter thing? Yes, it also has a grappling system

because they wanted you to not just slash it a monster's feet constantly. And the way that it works is you jump and you hit right trigger and you just grab on to anything and climb around on it as if it were a shadow of the Colossus. And that includes climbing to weak spots and slashing them or some of the more interesting ones is climbing onto a Cyclops's face that has a mask on it

so that he tries to pull you off and then you jump off and he pulls his mask off by accident, which allows it. It is this ink, like the moment to moment actually playing the game once you have a couple skills is absolutely incredible. It's just put into this really bare bones setting that doesn't use a lot of it. And it has a, depending on if you liked it already,

it has the best or worst progression of any game ever in which when you beat the game by defeating the dragon, the final boss, the entire overworld flies into what people refer to as the post game in which every single enemy and dungeon in the world are completely mixed around. The look of the game completely changes. All the items change and it opens up a super dungeon

as well as the bitter black isle DLC thing is a completely new expansion that is a pseudo randomized rogue-like mega dungeon that has more new enemies in it than the entire game. So is it a secondary goal to try to create a pawn that essentially will just crush bosses like mimic tear style? Absolutely, you wanna make the best pawn ever

because when you make the best pawn ever and people hire your pawn for long periods, they will pay you the pawn currency which allows you to hire higher, higher, higher level pawns. So if I, if Big Peach, who is the current pawn that I'm using, which is a seven and a half foot tall page, is very popular, I'll get hundreds of thousands of rift crystals, which I can then use to buy pawns

that are like 20 levels higher than I am. Okay. Which are assuredly going to have all the information on every enemy that I wanna fight. So you're not just gonna hit a point where you've like made a perfect pawn 20 hours in and now you can just sit back and watch it crush the game or anything like that.

Well, no, because your pawn is gonna be following you around and it's gonna be leveled according to you. Okay. However, what can happen is that when your pawn goes out on trips with other players when they are hired, anything that they learn or see in other players' play through will be synced with your pawn when you rest at an inn. So you'll, you'll fucking sit down and rest at the inn

and you'll get a message going, your pawn has learned of these four unfamiliar quests or learned the third tier of goblin knowledge or learned how to fight drakes or whatever. So are you enjoying, are you enjoying the pawn system more than the light combat or? No, it's, it's, it's the, the combat is...

It's solid enough, yeah. The combat and the pawn system are tied intimately. Okay. Because the combat isn't quite as in-depth as Devil May Cry, but what makes it is you're actually making a four-person party and you're trying to synergize that party so that you have a situation where you're, say, fighting in the thick of it as your support mage

is buffing your shit with fire and the sorcerer is throwing down a firewall and then the archer is shooting down harpies that are going around you. You're trying to build your perfect D&D party. Yeah, okay. And when it, when it works, fuck, it, it's like ideal. It is the only game I've ever played that's like it.

And when it doesn't, it kind of sucks. And you're connecting to one other person and their pawn, right? You have your main pawn that you create and control everything about them and then you can hire two others. Right, okay. So for a total party of four.

Now, what does this mean when the pawns are constantly trying to tell you things? It means that if I walk near a lake, occasionally I'll have three pawns with the same voice actor telling me, fuck and be careful, don't get into the water. All staggered on top of each other and clipping into each other's voices. I'll hear wolves hunting packs arisen

roughly one million times per game. I'm gonna hear the phrase, the road splits up ahead. We must make doubly sure of our destination. Every single fucking time I get to a certain split in the road. The messaging soap zone system is inside of the pawn. Yeah, and they constantly talk to you to the point where unless you turn it off,

their subtitles track along the left side of the screen like Twitch chat. Interesting, interesting. Pog! Yeah, okay. Yeah, 100%. Okay. It is one of the coolest fucking games

and the biggest problem it has is all the coolest stuff is after you beat the title final boss. And it goes from like the best seven to like really like an eight or nine. Like the bitter black aisle thing, they tweaked the way experience worked. So if you start from level one and you try really hard, you can actually level completely through it

and ignore the entire main game. Whoa, weird. Because it has exponential XP. So if you manage to kill a couple things, you'll immediately leap frog up to like level 15, that kind of thing. Okay. And the gear out there is actually randomized

instead of placed. It's a great game and people have wanted a sequel for it forever because it's so flawed, but it's so like, oh, the good is so good. And it's the only game that does this. And then Dragon's Dog Online happened and it has some of the coolest classes I've ever seen, one of which would appeal to you very strongly, Woolie.

I don't know if you've ever seen the Dragon's Dog, my online alchemist. Ah, not at all. It's a full metal alchemist. Oh shit, okay. It is throwing down like their high jump is I'm gonna use earth to jump up. I'm gonna punch and have earth spikes

shoot out of the ground. Nice, okay, earth bending. Basically, it's like, ah. But the game is also kind of ugly. Like, it's the most generic. I remember you didn't wanna give Dark Souls a shot because originally because you thought it was very generic fantasy.

Everquest shit, yeah. Dragon's Dogma is that game. Okay, okay. It is going for artist, okay. The art style of Dragon's Dogma is the pencil art on the opposite side of the equipment, the starting equipment table in the Dungeons and Dragons one manual, right?

Just the most basic. Just the primeval archetype of generic fantasy. It's, to me, I've said it a couple times as the analogy, but it's the fantasy game that they reboot into in that episode where they do a D&D game. Oh, totally, 100%. Like, nothing else to it. Yeah, okay.

But it's all the trimmings and extra bits besides the main, the main. Yeah, and also, like. Story. Itsuno's idea of making an RPG is very different from everybody else and you find out wiki diving. You would never, you would not find it in your natural case because the game has a single line about it,

but you find out that height and weight affect your walk speed and your hitbox and your ability. Like, heavier characters will have a harder time getting knocked off on grapples and there are goblin holes you can only go into if you're less than 145 centimeters tall. Oh, wow, character creation bits, okay. So your lamp, your lantern is a hip lantern

and the lantern has a hitbox that interacts with water, so short characters will have their lantern go out in knee-deep water. Geez, okay. But tall characters will have it go out in waist-deep water. It's like, there's a million fucking little tiny systems that when you're playing it for a couple hours don't show up at all because you only have one skill

and your pawns are dumb and you're just doing this first quest and it's just like, oh, that game's so great. I mean, so the thing is, is when the systems are fun, but like you have to progress to get them and combat is good when you eventually get a larger move list. Like, in that beginning, I mean, even if the story is bad,

like is there, like what's compelling you forward? Are the boss fights delivering enough interest to like push you on? The game has a start, like an open tutorial where you're playing as a more built-up character, like your abilities kind of thing in which you fight a chimera and the chimera fights are really cool

because you climb on it and you can cut the tail off to have it stop. You can cut the tail off to have it stop spitting snake poison at you and then the goat on its back will cast spells and you can kill the goat to stop it from casting spells. But if you're able to kill the lion part of the chimera first, the boss's rigging will change to a goat movement style

because the goat takes over the legs. It takes over, interesting, okay. So like, and that, it has a really cool big boss fight before that with a built-up character that has like six skills. Because if the whole thing about the setting is that it's like pretty bland and not that compelling, then you're like, okay,

but you can still get away with that if you have really fun boss fights, you know, that you're trying to go seek out. Yeah, the only issue is that in the early game, you just aren't equipped for the average, like Cyclops or whatever, because you don't have any fucking skills. But yeah, it's one of those things that's like,

it is trapped within the no man, just play for five, six hours that it gets good genre, which you can't possibly ask that of people, but I'm very glad that I did. And therefore, I mean, to just pull from the docket when they walked up and said, hey, they're announcing two. It's not just a, hey guys, remember 10 years ago, but there are twos in production now.

Nothing else to say, besides the fact that we do it. Yeah, so Capcom has decided that the best way to announce things is to unbutton your shirt. Sure. That's the best way to do it. Yeah, so I guess like taking all those bones and like putting them into something that,

I don't know, team up with, not George R.R. Martin, but I don't know who like, what's your, who's... Who's like Kintaro Mura? I was going to say like Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. Well, so the reason why I say that is if you remember... DLC. Original version of Dragon's Dogma had DLC promotions for literal guts and griffith armor.

Yeah. And there's a Duke in the game that has an incredibly similar art style and story to the King of Midlands. And the more you play it, you're like, it looks like Berserk without ornamentation. Okay. Like without style, like generic Berserk.

Flat Berserk, yeah. I mean, look, team up with a talented writer that can help you sculpt that world into something better and then work on the gameplay bits, you know, by all means. I want like, and then like, so I went and dug into like the, what was Dragon's Dogma supposed to be before they didn't finish it. And then when you were supposed to go to the moon,

you were supposed to have a giant snake, fast travel, they're gonna have more vocations and all that. And it's just like, man, it's just, I wanna, there must be a word for this where when you want a sequel, but all you want is the first one to be finished. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Right, where you're like, oh no, just a little more time. I don't know. Like the game has, the game has a, what's called an affinity system, which was supposed to be, I guess, part of a larger romance system that is so hilariously obtuse and broken that it ends up turning characters that you gay

or in some rare cases into child molesters by accident. What the fuck? So here's how it works, okay? Affinity goes up every time you talk to a character, a little bit. If you do quests for that character, it goes up a lot. Near the end of the game, right before you fight the dragon, the game will lock in whatever the highest affinity character

is on the roster and say, this is your beloved. However, in the original version of Dragon's Dogma, they had no issue giving you affinity points at maximum for merchants or random characters. So tons of people ended the game with like the best merchant being the fucking guy. And he's like this fat old dude with a mustache. That's just a poor design system.

Or his kid. That's just a really dumb idea. Or the innkeeper. Okay. And like the cutscenes or like, you know, so like the cutscenes just play out, like you're madly in love with the innkeeper, who's just some dude that you don't even remember his name.

And in the, and here's the best part. If the character that you are in love with has a mechanical function in the game, they're gonna take that function with them to your house from wherever the fuck they were in the game prior. And now you can get in a situation where the only innkeeper in this entire half of the game now lives at your house 10 feet from the other innkeeper.

Or the only guy who sells weapons is now in your house. It feels like an easy fix to that. Would to this just put a confirmation prompt that this is in fact the person you want to be your beloved. No, it's gotta be hidden. It's gotta be hidden, man. It's gotta be natural. Like just a single thing to be like,

actually, you know what? I don't want that dude. And then that's that. So the solution they came to it is threefold. One, merchants obtain affinity at dramatically lower rates than all other characters. Two, an item was added to bitter black aisle that you can use to give to people

that will set their affinity to zero. And three, an item was added to the game that you can buy that when you give to a character, it will max out their affinity. So you can go up to a character that you like and fucking max out their affinity by giving them a ring. And then hopefully that'll carry over. The old solution, which still works by the way,

is you know what people in this game really don't like? You unsheathing your weapon in front of them over and over or picking them up and throwing them into walls. So I did a quest for a guy named Valmiro. And I talked to Valmiro and a little chime played and his cheeks were rosy and I went fuck because I finished Valmiro's quest, Valmiro loves me. So you know what I did?

I fucking took my sword out in front of his face and tried to throw him off the cliff and he didn't like that. So now I don't have to worry about fucking him by accident. There you go, relationship down. Dude, it's like the weirdest game Capcom has ever made. Every single part of that game is fucking bizarre. Like who would make a game like this?

What if the sequel finds a way to salvage bits and pieces of deep down and integrate them like the spear play? You know? Deep down is gone, dude. There was a quote like a year or two ago where where Sean Layden was like, hey man, they asked him what happened and he's like, I don't know what happened to it.

But I think some of the teammates that Ohno left behind might still be working on something. No, deep down was supposed to be an engine demonstration of Panta Ray, which is a deprecated engine that's not going anywhere. Like deep down is gone, it is gone. In actuality though, if Dragon's Dogma represents, I guess supposedly the introduction of these mechanics

that are interesting, but just not put together in the smoothest way, then. Oh boy, are they not. The rule of a lot of big sequels that come along and make it all make sense. You'd hope that this is gonna do that, right? Like, you know when you're playing a game, you're like, man, this could have used another six months

or this could have used another year. Dragon's Dogma could have used two more years. But it's just, oh, fucking weird. And also in the, are we gonna talk about the Dragon's Dogma 2 announcement separately? No, we can go right into it, that's fine. I mean, yeah. So they're doing the anniversary thing

and they're fucking jerking us around up until the last like five seconds of it. But one of the most interesting things is that fucking Monster Hunter is born out of Dragon's Dogma first. So the timeline is, it soono works on Shadows Over Mistara and goes, I want to make an action RPG as a party like this, like this, where you all team up and fight a monster. And then that idea got taken out to go make Monster Hunter.

Oh shit, Monster Hunter came from D&D arcade? Oh fuck, okay. Monster Hunter was born from the original idea for Dogma that then sat around for eight, nine years. Huh, damn, okay. I mean, shit, like fucking Mistara is amazing. So I can see that adapting itself, you know, to like someone like, I can see Capcom being like,

yeah, we can do this ourselves without necessarily the D&D license or whatever. And a bunch of them. Yeah, no, just have a team of four and they'll have different weapons. Yeah, and some of the boss fights, I mean, some of the, it plays like a beat them up with like more advanced sub menus and skills

and items and such, but like a big distinguishing part about the Mistara is that like the fights that are not against another human sized enemy or giant orc, but like a set piece wall monster, you know? Yeah, a super, super massive dragon, yeah. Interesting. And then like, I'm playing Dragon's Dogman. I'm thinking about Shadows of Mistara.

I'm like, Dragon's Dogman. One of the things that the, one of the only things about its graphics that are like legitimately incredible is the sorcerer, their high level spells are some of the largest spells you can cast in a game where you cast like high maelstrom and you are actually throwing down

like a one kilometer high tornado that is blowing everyone up. And when you cast high bolide, you are having a cataclysmic meteor shower coming down. And I'm like, oh, those are the fucking spells from Shadows of Mistara. Mm-hmm. That's the exact fucking thing.

Cool, okay. Yeah, well, big sell. Big sell on Dogma right here. Dogma is also like mad on, like it jumped up for, you know, on Steam numbers. Part of that's because then the announcement and people like me are going like, wow, I love it. The other part is that it's like six bucks right now.

Oh shit. Which you can't beat six dollars for Dragon's Dogma. Yeah, I think I have it, but let me just make sure, cause that's pretty good. It was really nice when I loaded it up the other day and I just saw a bunch of people on my friends list buy Dragon's Dogma for six doll hairs. 84% off.

Oh, you know what, you know what else actually? There's one thing I forgot to mention that Steam has that's just, all versions have, but on Steam it's a little easier. Ponds that your friends make on your friends list are free no matter what level they are. So. Okay.

If you want to really tear that shit up, you can go and grab somebody's level infinity pawn. And just break it. Which is the level cap. And just bust it. Okay. Yeah, there we go. For some reason the DLC is more expensive.

It's $30 for the. Oh, the DLC is the soundtrack I think. Yeah, the extra shit, okay. Which doesn't include the pop song that they originally had with it because the license ran out. Wait, was it a pop song? I remember the demo had like a singing lady. No, not the demo of Dark Risen,

but Dragon's Dogma original had like Into Free, which was a Japanese pop song singing about the Dangan and the wind is pushing me. Yeah, okay. Okay. Literally I am the Dan Gan. Yeah. Remember Indestructible?

Yeah, that fucking period. Yeah. And now we got ain't on the sidelines, I believe. But yeah, what I want is the other one. Cool. Okay. All right, Capcom. Yeah, no, I'm I'm I'm interested in seeing like a lot

of that recycled into a more interesting setting because or not setting, but just a better overall thing because. So like Dragon's Dogma online already did that. And it's just like, you know what the game just needed? It needed more. There's only so many different recolors of harpies you can fight before you get tired enemy variety. OK, yeah.

Yeah, cool. If you want to see more Dragon's Dogma this week and maybe some Boshok and the new I Somnium game, you go down to twitch.tv slash past stairs at there you go. OK, I can segue off of multiple things. I'll go with this one. Speaking of Berserk. Yeah.

So I went down to good old Captain Quebec. If you remember that shop. And I kind of just cleared them out. Of the entire the entire Berserk deluxe. Because I've been meaning to, you know, sit back down and and do it. And I was like, yeah, you know what? Let's just let's just get it as well this time.

Because the first time through I was basically reading Scandalations fucking 20 years ago, you know. I have never read Berserk off a page. Yeah, so that's what it was. It was it was waiting for the translation. Scandalation drops back in the fucking early aughts. And Gatsu. But yeah, I'm like, you know what?

I'm just going to if I'm going to restart this, let me just go actually fucking get the damn thing since it's pretty much almost all there. And they've already announced, I think, the volumes eleven, twelve and thirteen, which are going to be the entire thing. It's crazy to think of how many volumes there are when you see them in like individual like Tacobons, you know, like the individual manga books.

And then like when you put three and one like this, it's just it's like, oh, yeah, there's like thirteen, fourteen and you're good. I I read the entirety of Berserk up until the fight with the Kraken in one weekend. Doesn't that just melt events into like a goop? I did that for Jojo and let me let me know. I'll let me know when the next time we talk about it and see how confused I am. OK, because I know I felt that like for the Jojo parts

that I like really condensed, I fucking gooped them a bunch together. And in my perspective, watching, for example, watching Golden Wind, like my sense of pace for that whole thing is super fucked up because like I feel as if I remembered fights being like three or four of the of the the bad guys together in like the same chapter almost, you know, like there were certain moments where I felt like because what I mean, what actually happens is they get away from one fight, get in a car,

drive that way, and then another fight immediately starts in the car. Yeah, but like in the just in the just pressing forward and going through it, it all just kind of, you know, you don't bookend it until like a major bookend moment occurs. So in your head, it's all kind of one big long action sequence. Yeah, in my head, there's like. Events are kind of broad. So like conviction, right? I remember the horse.

I remember Farnes being a massive fucking bitch. I remember Mogas. I remember the dickhead squad. I remember the baby. And I remember the fucking evil goat orgy where everybody's getting sick. And that's kind of it. Oh, and Serpico, Serpico is cool. Yeah, I'm going to I'm I'm going to I'm going to like fucking

I'm going to take my time and enjoy turning the pages, you know, that's a that's something I'm happy that I read Vagabond like holding it turning the pages as well in a way like. You can kind of, you know, go sit outside and and fucking enjoy a nice, enjoy a nice day while you do it. And I mean, while like all my Jojo reading was done, like a fucking gremlin in the dark with like a I was using my switch, not my switch, my my Wii U tablet at one point with the browser and just like turning it sideways

and just, you know, that's that's troubling. Yeah, so that that should be nice. I should I should probably reread and catch up because we're entering into it's either next week or the week after the new chapter, which is. I I feel secondhand anxious terror for the people working on that new chapter. In advance, there will nothing will ever be judged so harshly as the next chapter of Berserk. Oh, yeah, I mean, I've already seen the some people are like, you know, all supportive, all love.

But I still I'm just going to look at this as a fan tribute, you know, more than an actual thing. And it's like, I mean, yeah, all I can do, I guess, is from where I'm looking. I'm like, I I feel happy that even though it's like when I make when I think about vagabond, I go like, well, at least he was able to do that last epilogue, you know, that thing I was talking about. Yeah, no, like if it had to have ended at that moment conclusively,

like you could go, OK, OK, I can. Yeah, I can deal. Yeah, it's not the weirdness that is going to have to come with the feeling of his team, you know, kind of like trying to capture it. And I mean, you know, it sounds like really, if anyone's it sounds like the best people based on the description and the fact that they've had conversations about how it would go, you know, but then I've also heard about how there was conversations where even though he recalls what Mira told him,

you know, when they when they talked about it years ago, like in more recent times, Mira said he himself didn't know, you know, for sure, like whether that was still what Berserk was to him, you know, so it gets heavy. But yeah, we'll have to just see what what comes of it, I suppose. But that's it. I just I feel like the the incomplete, but still somewhat like incomplete, but still alleviating like sense of closure I got from reading that final epilogue

in Vagabond and then seeing the the the live not the live, the the gallery of like, here's a glimpse of the future. You're just like, oh, man, this could have this could have been way more abrupt and shitty, but like we get that out of it. And Berserk is it's in a situation where there's not there's there's nothing you can really do. It's either leave it alone or this, you know, and then and then Griffith's going to hold up the one piece

and he's going to be like, it was this all along, you dumb shit. Damn. I feel like Manga has this weird, so like the thing that I I will talk about, like, oh, I love Manga over like a lot of Western comics is because they'll run the same fucking continuous story for 20 years. But with that comes what I mean, I guess we're going to call the Game of Thrones problem, which is like, what if we get to the end and they don't fucking nothing? Well, so here's a thought, right?

What if there was a third route that was like a bunch of notebook scraps that Mira drew and a couple of bullet point ideas just kind of scanned in towards the end? Supposedly that is in this new guy's head. OK, this is what we're to understand. Yeah, OK, OK, all right. Yeah, which is is is like, like, do we have proof of that? Not really.

But he's been friends with Mura for 30 years. I don't think he fuck on him like that. Of course. Yeah. OK. Well, um, but I mean, that's how you get shit like the Somerillian. How did how bad like did that? I didn't I didn't know about it was written by. I think I think the Somerillian was written by like the sun tabulating the notes. Oh, OK, OK, that rings a bell.

It's such a goddamn fucking mess. And then I think we're talking about the whole second age thing the other day. Yeah, OK, um, well, um, so yeah, that's going to get a crack that open and see how it goes in the in the meantime. Um, and then, I guess, speaking of wind, I suppose, I was is pushing you. It was pushing me and it pushed my kite. Yeah, so I got a delta kite, which is it's basically a kite that is triangular in shape.

And then if right from the front and if you're looking at it from the side, it looks like an M, you know, in its bend. And oh, I know those. Yeah, they're cool. Yeah, they're they're pretty they're pretty sick. So there's a great and I and I and I've been meaning I've been wanting to get to try this one, this one out. So I took it out to the Windy Park.

It's got some good clearance and tried it out and was immediately setting it up and having some trouble with it because I have some light kites that are like single string. And I do a little test, right? I do a test with like the pizza one and then I whipped and I was like, OK, I got some good wind on that. And then I busted out the whale and the whale was fucking pulling and we got some good wind on that.

So it's like, OK, right? It's it's it's solid. We can get to the heavies. And so I switched over to the delta kite and the fun thing about those is that with the other types of kites, you generally you kind of need either like a running start or someone to kind of hold it and get you to give you some lift off. But with this one, you can self launch. You know, you just kind of set it up and then give it a nice yank

and then it'll it'll it'll fucking go. But the the control of having two handles instead of one is the craziest difference in the world. It is. Oh, it has two handles. It has two separate control handles instead of just one line. Are they are they two completely separate lines going all the way to the top? All the way up to the kite. And then one is grabbing the left of the kite and the others grabbing the right.

So see, if I had that, I would have it tangled up in like a second. Yeah, that's the problem, right? It's a skill you have to develop. You have to learn it. And you're pulling on that shit like Shinji with the left and a right. And and there's a whole skill set that comes with the two handing that you don't have to worry about with one hand, because with one hand, you just have to kind of let the wind carry it and then you can lift and drop

and do a couple of basic things, but you're not really in control. Whereas with two hands, you're in complete control. Just don't run away. So so you do the lift off and then like I was already having some trouble because I was kind of unfurling it and trying to keep the rope shorter because I didn't want to hit anybody nearby because it's kind of getting a little crowded, people are having their picnics and playing playing games and stuff. So you're trying to keep this image of people having a picnic

and you're like running by and going, oh, no, with the guy. Well, people are playing outdoor. They're outdoor things and having a good time. And some people are just lounging, but you're trying to be like not a jackass and keep a nice big open space around yourself so that if it goes down or anything or if the line drops, you're not well, you don't want to hit anybody, you know. And so I do this one. And then, you know, I've had the kites drop before and something

that often happens to is like some kid will see a kite and be like, it will run up to it and it'll be like, right, right, right, for sure. But then it's just be like, OK, now don't get too close right now. Don't back up back up, kid, you know, you don't want to like a hit. And with this one, immediately I launch and then it goes straight up and then fucking nose dives and spikes the ground hard. Like I'm like, oh, shit, that's an injury. If anyone is underneath this thing, that's a problem.

Yeah, you gotta be careful, man. Got to be real careful. So I'm figuring that part of it out. And I'm like, and I'm trying to do it with the, you know, kind of like restricted amount of line because this tighter, the shorter the line, the harder the pull. But the more I can like keep it from hitting people and stuff, you know, whatever. And then a lady comes over and basically just points over

and goes like, hey, so you actually do you need some tips? And I was like, oh, my God, we had our kite angel before way back when I first got some of these. And now is this happening again? And they're everywhere, man. And so she's like, yeah, no. And she points over and like the guy she's with this dude, like probably, you know, late fifties or so is just like, yeah, you got to.

He's like, OK, hold on, hold on, I'll come over and he gets up and he comes over and is just like, yep. So what you got to do is you got to unfurl all the way. And then you got to set it up like this and he gets the whole thing going and then you and then he takes off and starts going. And I was like, oh, shit, here we go. You know, and he's like, yeah, you got to be careful. You give me some tips about like how you be careful with like the line.

You know, you can you can if it unfurls up, there's some tricks for unfurling it. And I was like, dude, like I was like, thank you. That's very nice. He's like, yeah, no, you know, I've been I've been at this for a while. And I was like, oh, yeah, how long has it been? And he's like, I've been collecting for eight years. You know, I was like, eight years. All right. Yeah. And then he's like, yeah, check it out.

And he pulls out the phone and he starts browsing through his photos. And he's got like, he's like, I got I got like 45, maybe 50 kites. And he starts showing off the collection. So you're so you're you're looking at your future. And I'm like, oh, shit, we found a fucking grandmaster. I didn't realize I thought I thought my casual enthusiasm was meeting another person who was also like, you know, like, oh, yeah, I've done this a little bit before.

And this dude is like, no, he's got it set. And he's like, he's showing off ones where there's lights that make it look like it's like a bird shape. And then it makes it look like the bird is flapping its wings when the lights go off in a pattern on the kite. Oh, that's fancy. Crazy wild shit, you know. And like, and I was telling punch mom, I'm like, look, I'm not looking to get into the the giant collection.

I kind of just want like one or two cool ones that I really dig. There's recently an octopus that's been going around that looks fucking sick. I get an octopus in a heartbeat. But yeah, this dude's got the whole he's got the whole thing. And he said he's showing off the the the customs and and all that. And, you know, like I bought a repair kit. So I'm like ready for any any any on the on the fly fixes that need to happen. What does the repair kit actually come with a kite like for a kite thing?

You're going to need some like replacement like line. You're going to need some replacement, like some tape for like basically like sealing up a rip, but like not OK, you know, allowing it to just stay airtight and keeping it aerodynamic. Yeah, a replacement handle, just a little bits and pieces, you know, things like things that might break, quote unquote, on the fly. Right. There you go. It's a kite humor, I get it.

And yeah, no, so it but it was just it was it was really wild and educational. And so his thing was like he's like he fully unfurls it. It's like solid 40 feet out at that point, both lines. And then starts doing it. And then he hands it over to me and like I do like a loopy loop. And then immediately just go straight down again. And I'm like, OK, I can't be doing this with people around. And he's like, oh, yeah, I get it.

Like you're probably you might want to go somewhere empty to practice because, you know, the fucking danger. And I'm like, I'm just I'm always hypersensitive of anyone walking around. And people don't have like they'll just walk underneath it and not give a shit. And it's like. So what you're saying is that people don't have very good kite awareness. They don't have good kite awareness.

And I kind of try to I try to give a heads up like, hey, oh, could you walk around, you know, and people just like whatever. They don't give a fuck. And I'm like, ah, shit, this is just not going to work. I can't be expecting multiple people to be kind of where. So it's a good place for wind, but I got to find a nice empty field, you know, to properly train my my my haddo. Yeah, so so I'm going to I'm going to see if I can find him.

And he gave me some some possible like tips on some locations, you know, a little further away that might require a little driver to. But I got to go practice in an empty field because, yeah, people, people are too risky and I can't I can't cut loose. I have to hold back when everyone's around me and I want to I want to go full kite, but I can't because the risk is too dangerous to the civilians around me, you know, civilians. Can't hurt them, man.

You know, I feel like we're like three weeks away from you describing that people keep walking under the kite and you describe that only people with kites can see other kites and that like kite kite fans are naturally drawn together in certain places. I got I get a mysterious invite to an island. Yeah. Um, so no, I'm right now I'm I'm like I the the few seconds of control that I felt were exhilarating.

They're very, very, very fun. And I could definitely see that like the step one is enjoying the loose feeling of just like flying it in the wind, letting the wind take it where it does and you just kind of bend and ebb and flow with it. But step two, when you get that second handle on it is like, OK, I am I am mastering this, I am controlling this, I am piloting this this this thing through the air and you can pull on the left, push on the right and have it turn left, you can have it invert, you can have it do controlled loops, low passes.

I mean, you can do advanced shit as long as you understand how to position both of your arms and give the right tension and the right amount of slack. So I'm feeling it. I felt a little bit of it and it felt really good. So time to take it somewhere safe and I got to go to NAMAC. I got to find NAMAC so that I can I can I can fully I can unleash, you know, that's that's the only hope that you don't run into a situation in which your kite ends up in some jackasses yard.

Yeah. And then you travel back to 20 years ago and some dickheads like what the fuck is this in my yard? It's my now bullshit. I I don't imagine that'll be a problem because there are strings that I can yank it back to me with. Yeah. But we'll see.

Anyway. Um, oh man, I just had you ever mentioned and then something unrelated, just flash points in your fucking memory and you just get the incredibly vivid recollection. Did you ever have it at your high school that the like there would be a day once a year when like the maintenance guy would go up onto the fucking roof and kick everything off the roof that had gotten up there. Oh yeah.

No, not for us. Oh man. That was the coolest day in the world. You man, a lot of tennis balls like wow, like wow, a lot of tennis balls. Yeah, no, I feel I feel like our building was too high and even the surfaces where you could reach, they'd have to go pick them up. That's just dangerous. That sounds like problems kicking shit off.

But yeah, I mean, there was that time that I was filming that Metal Gear movie and we were on the roof and had our plastic guns out and lit part of the roof on fire and I never heard that part of the story. Yeah, like the finale of the movie is a rooftop battle because a hindie flies in and has to get shot down, of course. So there's a there's a rooftop battle where some fire of the from exploding bullets hits the wall. And so we were filming the bit and we had our and one of our and our our at the

time MRE, Moral Religious Education Teacher, was walking to his car in the parking lot and looked up and saw what appeared to be a gunfight on the roof and was immediately concerned and was going to call and was going to call the police, but decided to call the principal or then the office first. And then, thankfully, they came up and went, what the God name? What the fuck are you doing up here? And we're just like, nothing, nothing, it's fine. You know, you know, it's funny.

We'd finished shooting by that point. Yeah. We had like, you know, a good teacher really goes a long way. We had that kid. I think his name was Greg, right? And Greg was smart and Greg wanted to build bombs. Like he thought that shit was cool. And so like he he he came to class and showed my physics professor.

Our teacher, rather not professor, like fucking homemade napalm that he had been cooking for like two weeks and like and it worked. And like that physics teacher, instead of like reporting him or anything like that, went fucking cool and then like took some extra time to like talk to him and like do some experiments and like focus that. Yes, to a positive direction. OK, I see, I see. OK, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah, for sure. Good, good, right. And it and it was it was literally as simple as Greg got the anarchist cookbook and that shit has a lot of cool ass shit that you can make it blow up in your backyard. Now, and it's like, you know, got to focus that. Yeah, to focus that positively, positive energy. Well, I guess I'll specify that when I say like lit parts of the roof on fire, we did not use homemade napalm.

No, I had a little trick, which was basically taking rubber cement because you can light the rubber cement and it's flammable for a bit. And if you have a little bit on your hand, it'll like let you do like a like a kyo pose and then it'll burn away like a second for like a second. So, you know, after dicking around with that for a minute, we kind of put a little bit on some surfaces and then lit that up. And then it burns for a second enough for the shot and then it's gone. So it's not that big of a deal.

That being said, you're still playing with real fire on the school roof. So when we eventually when when when the movie was then played during lunchtime in the auditorium for like as a screening and stuff. And the the principal is like, oh, wow, cool, special effects with the with the fire. I was like, yep, you can do a lot with computers. It's crazy. It's amazing what you can do with computers. You know, I feel like every generation talking to the generation one or two before them is going to have that moment of like, even the kids are like,

that was stupid. I remember my grandfather telling me a story of how him and his buddies would spend like the occasional Saturday afternoon, they would rig up shotgun shells to like sticks that they had sharpened into pins and then into like a hammer and then they would go into the forest and like use them as shotgun hammers to blast trees apart by swinging them hard enough that the shell would pop. And I'm like, I remember being told that at like 10 years old. I'm like, yeah, that sounds that sounds pretty fucking dangerous.

That I was just reading about that sounds fucking stupid. There's a name for that. There's a name for that. When you have like a pipe and you just put it in and you just hit it and it like it's a gun that just fires with a hammer and a pipe. It's insane. Because I'm like, what what is like, aren't you weren't you afraid those would like blow up in your face?

And he went, nah, and that that's it. That's the whole story. Jesus. Slam, fire, zip gun. Yeah, OK, that that that seems that sounds correct. Yeah, and then then then we're going to tell stories like, oh, yeah, me and the boys is outside playing with guns and the cops showed up. We're like, haha, no, it's not real guns.

So they were they were mad, though. That put the big orange thing around the front. Right. Yeah, that'll. Yeah. The the the fucking the gazelle, the peacemaker toy, which just talk about a tri-gun in a minute, one of the one of the lines of toys was like a transforming like all his equipment became a six shooter. And it had the big orange thing on the front to be like, yo, it's big old fake gun. And then it just had this non-descript random piece of metal

plastic looking thing that was not in the instructions anywhere, but conveniently fits over the front of the gun. Oh, just happened to fit right over the top of the orange parts. I don't know. Must have been a weird misprint. I just remembered what my physics teacher channeled Greg and his pals towards. He got them competing with each other into building increasingly effective

trebuchets. OK. That that he wasn't a chemist, right? He he fucking basically like convinced them that trebuchets were the sickest because they are. And then they would build increasingly large trebuchets and go to the field that was behind the school that used to exist there and just like launch like microwaves and shit. Hey, you know, what's funner than explosives?

Just the artillery. Look what I set up any time you want to. Yeah, Greg's probably like an engineer now, right? Hopefully, that seems like a hopefully that that's you know what? That sounds like a good teacher. Yeah, that's the same teacher that this is my favorite teaching story where he's like, OK, kids, we're going to learn about inertia, the tendency of things when they're not moving to not move and things

when they are moving to keep moving. And the way that he taught this is he brought the 30 kid class out into the parking lot and we he put his car to neutral and we pushed his car out of the snow bank that he had parked it in. And he was like, see how much easier it is once it's already moving. Well played. Good shit. Like if he gives you marks for it, then that's fucking.

Well, it worked. I fucking definitely understood what inertia was. Yeah, no, fair enough. What a beast. I don't remember that guy's name. That's the weirdest part. I can remember exactly what it looks like. Can't remember his name at all, Mr.

Or something, obviously. Yeah, because you can't you can't miss frizzle shit. You can't actually, you know, jump in your magic school bus. You can't you can't shrink the class down and go into fucking Robbie's liver to find out that he's got stage two, whatever. Exactly. So in the meantime, get my car out of the fucking hole I parked it in. Not bad.

Anyways, yeah, no, that's that's pretty much me. Going to be back to recording the Elden Ring and Mass Effect are going to continue this week. So check them out over on Wally versus on Twitch and on YouTube. And yeah, I seems like I there's an event. I cannot necessarily announce yet, but something cool is going to happen next Thursday. So stay tuned for next Thursday.

And Twitter is it going to be really cool? It's going to be cool, special event, special event. Once I'm allowed to say, then I will. But yeah, there you go. Cool that everyone's shut up. There's a new patch for vampire survivors. Here we go. It's been a minute since we've had an everyone shut up.

That's it. What's in it? I have nothing, I don't know, some guy. Isn't it always like way more than than than you think it is? You guys are telling me like the patch pattern has been insane every time. What the who the fuck is this character? Oh, boy, her eclipse event and the yellow sign. What the fuck is on lock the mad groove, Arkana.

Is this even real? OK, well, on on on the last event is is is patch zero point seven two from June ninth, so whatever you're talking about is not on steam yet. Oh, not yet. Oh, boy, they might have just announced that I got to go. I got to catch up vampire survivors. I only have one hundred and twelve of one hundred and fourteen achievements. Of course.

Oh, it's the pet point seven three will be dropping on the twenty third. It's the posh patch. Posh is the posh patch. OK, well, that concludes everyone's shut up. All right, let's take a bathroom break and then we'll be back with the news. All right. Quick word from our sponsors. This week.

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OK, so what happened this week? Well, you can't start anywhere besides Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I really want to say that having the Dragon's Dogma and FF7 events simultaneously and both of them giving everyone exactly what they wanted was great. So, yeah, and I would say this, too. I what I cared about. OK, seeing like the announcement for the FF7 R2 is great. But what I wanted equally as bad was confirmation that it was going to be

three or, you know, however that was going to work out. The road map for that. But now that now we know for sure. Yes. So the confirmation that it's going to be remake, rebirth and then fucking re-revengeance. So I really have to say that I was absolutely 100 percent convinced that the third game in that set was going to be called Reunion. Yep, but right up until I'm watching the trailer for Crisis Core Reunion.

Too obvious, exactly. So regacted is what it's going to have to be. Redemption. Yeah, FF7 R redemption. Yeah, done and done and done. Oh, boy. Anyway, so yes, FF7 R2 rebirth launching next year. Far into next year.

And that's fine. It's it's it's there you go. It's happening. Couple shots. You get to see a bit of the calm flashback, a bunch of the calm flashback, actually. Yeah, I when I finished 7R, I was of the strong opinion that the flashback was going to basically be what you get as soon as you hit start.

OK, like we're just going to go right into an entire nibble hind flashback as the first chapter or two of the game. And then they're going to pull out to the group sitting around in the end. Yeah, and then OK, so what are we going to do? Where are we going to go? And then, yeah, much to much to everyone's surprise crisis core FF7 reunion. So now we can get a definitive like redo. Me, Gangaga, HD clip for everyone.

I I I know that it's not going to be. But it would be hilarious if it stayed as janky and clunky in the parts where it originally was. That that game needs some cleanup. It's a PSP game made for PSPing. And then and then basically tucking it away. Don't look at it too hard. Don't squint at it.

Certainly don't play it on the full screen and and and see what's going on. There's like there's a feeling I got from going back to QA for a minute. Whenever PSP games came in, the there was a always a very clear thing where like you would have a bunch of bullshots to be like, oh, yeah, it's just like, oh, yeah. And it'd be like any other PlayStation game, except it's portable. But in design, everything was basically a everything was crash bandicooted.

Do you know what I mean? Everything is based around you making it from the Osaka terminal to the the fucking five terminals over time period. It is hallway design levels and that are that are pitched as like big open ones. And it is and this applied to like just about every genre. There's FPSs that were came out on the PSP that were just like, again, a hallway and then you get to something that looks like an open room

and then you make a left and you're going down another hallway. Dude, I beat every mission in Crisis Corps. And let me tell you. So. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So running around that that that base looking for the the secret fucking soldiers that are that are like hidden behind the the list. Like whatever it is.

I don't remember. I don't. Yeah. Like you want to talk it. You want to talk about shit and events melding into a fucking blur. Oh, my God. There's like a thousand missions that don't need to be there. So terrible. So, hey, we get to we get to see a proper updated through line for the for the Angel.

Path, it's almost like Zach's going to be really important. Almost almost and then they were. Crisis Corps is a really fucking weird game, but I do have to say the characterization of Zach walking up to Angel and going, what's your goal? And then Geo goes world domination and he just goes, that's not even funny, man. Like, like that's that's stupid. Mm hmm. Is great.

Oh, what's your goal to be first to be a hero? Oh, unattainable goals are good. Yeah. What? What? What about you, G? I'm going to jerk off on this copy of Loveless. OK. And so just and so, yeah, the idea of of there being a whole lot of Zach in that

FF seven or two trailer lets you then. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Here comes ever crisis. You can see all the classic FF seven and camera angles you want. Just just do it through ever crisis, you know. So whatever you're looking for, be it new shit, old shit in between shit,

Gatshit. They got you covered. Dude, I. I'm I hope ever crisis is. Exactly what I want it to be. I know this sounds silly, but like that fucking Gatshit, buddy. I just want it to be a one to one thing. Not in a not on your life, not on your goddamn life.

Have you clicked on the screenshots of the battle system? Yeah. There's stuff happening at the bottom of the screen that is absolutely not classic FF seven. Hell no. Is that going down? But but it'll be it'll be the only way to to see those cut scenes. From the camera angles that you're thinking of, you know.

So. And you bet your ass that. Rush is going to show up. Anyway, rush rush rush rush. I hope he becomes like a. A fucking mainstay of the new games. I really like him, actually. He's stupid.

They're making a toy. Okay. He's getting a toy. So that that says, yeah, he's he's something. So that there's that. And then also FF seven integrate. Drop it on steam. Finally coming to the personal computer.

They and it's like. Yeah, you know, you got your you got your your your delay. In place so that people can early adopt on the console and then. They're not going to do that. They're not going to do a sink drop for for a fucking PC. I wish they fucking did like. If you want to play this game in its relevancy, which you probably do, the PC version is not going to come.

You're always going to be a second second class citizen. So, you know, just stay used to that. But it dropped the day of that announcement as well. So, yep. Big FF seven twenty fifth anniversary stuff. Congratulations, FF seven, you're 25. Yep. Then we got Dragon's Dogma two.

There you go, which there was, you know, there's one part about that announcement that makes me feel like, oh, no, which is the T-shirt reveal is like. And a logo like, oh, that's far, isn't it? Oh, that's that's like, is that like the super far away, isn't it? Okay, so on the scale level. Okay, so on the scale of this game doesn't exist. Like is T-shirt reveal further back than floating concept art of the last

games and two logos? Fire Emblem Cross. Like that's the worst one ever. That's as far back as I think you could get. Like we don't even have or like we have floating art of the last thing to show off the new thing. And it's like, well, Street Fighter Six is coming out this year and Monster Hunter Rise coming out in a couple days and Resident Evil

four comes out next year. So it's like, well, it's not going to be this year. It's going to be spring of next year. It's hurts. Sorry, spring of year after next. Like March of 2024. Like something about the T-shirt reveal is makes me think like, okay, there's at least one other person in an office somewhere like typing

and that's the team. There's this guy with the T-shirt and then there's one guy typing and then that's it. No, they've been working on this since 2019. Okay. But the old, I was going to say the old concept art trailer feels like, no, they just asked someone in the fucking video department to just whip that up and there is no team.

There is a bullet point. Anyway. Well, the Resident Evil 2 remake thing was slightly different because that We Do It thing was put out like a couple weeks after they got the information that they were allowed to start it. So like that was before they had even literally even started working on the game at all. They got the green light and that's what they're announcing is the green light. Yeah.

Yeah. Whereas Dogma 2 is like, no, we're good to it. And everybody knows that we've been working on it for a while, but we still have nothing to show. Which fuck, I hope they didn't reboot development or anything like that I would cry. I would cry. I would cry.

Well, you didn't see anything, but anyway. Yeah. So then there's those announcements. Or you could always go the route of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 plus 4. To which Tony Hawk himself confirms on stream that if, yeah, you thought we want to talk about scrapped games on a video, he basically was confirming that Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 plus 4 was totally on the slate to follow up 1 plus 2 with the remasters

and Valkyrie's Visions was then merged into Blizzard, which effectively scrapped the project. Sucks because those remasters were great. And alongside that, he also mentioned that it feels as if in that clip, he's kind of just like, what are you going to do? Fire me. He's got big. He's got like Mark Hamill energy of like, I'm just going to say shit

that may or may not be okay to say, but who gives a fuck? And he basically says like, yeah, they also opened up the floor to pitches for different companies for like what they would do with Tony Hawk and they didn't like any of the pitches they got. So that's that. So yeah, that acquisition has already had casualties. You know, it's going to be really interesting when I think Call of Duty sales are down in general.

And I don't know what Activision is going to do for its long term growth prospects because like it has cannibalized every single thing it had into like two things, being Call of Duty and Blizzard. And like, I just don't understand why like that would be the move because that was a well done like Tony Hawk thing after a string of failures. And it sold well, but what if Call of Duty maps sold better? And if they already had it on the table as a, you know, like why do a white, why wipe the board with an acquisition instead of like being like, hey,

this is what we acquired you for to do the good thing that you were about to do, you know, like, I don't get that part. But we heard it from the man's mouth himself, you know, so like people are throwing numbers around for Diablo immortal, which I'm not sure how accurate these are going to be. I got numbers. Yeah. $10,000. Yeah.

Hey, if you're if you're blowing 10, 15, 20 grand on camera to do a spectacle, you're acting like a fucking piece of shit because you are glorifying addictive behavior that is going to get people to do stupid shit. In the end might as well be on camera shooting up heroin and drinking yourself into a fucking stupor going, I'm the coolest. In the end that revealed that there was no reward. So it still makes Diablo immortal look like a piece of shit of a waste of time because that's what you get when you're being as predatory as possible.

The idea that you can spend that much money on a fucking game on its on its lute systems and get nothing is laughable. But I would and you would hope that it would also like encourage people to that that are thinking about spending money on it to see that and go, Holy shit, get the fuck away from it. But I don't think that's the way it works, unfortunately. Anyway, you're saying about it, though. It's made either like May 24 million dollars already. And it's like didn't Diablo three make like hundreds of millions of dollars on its launch.

I believe I remember that. Yeah, I remember that vividly. It also makes me wonder if this is what Tony Hawk is telling us direct live and from his chair of, you know, like being untouchable. What else was just being scrapped with this acquisition that, you know, would have been interesting to see like the idea that they're like, OK, with this merger comes a blank slate for all teams. That sounds crazy.

That sounds insane. I hope that's not what what actually happened, you know. Diablo mortal on on its on its. I don't even know. I don't like like. Everything Activision's got Activision. Everything they gobble up is just going to die and turn to shit and become a farm for some other crap.

And then they're going to funnel it towards shit like Diablo mortal that underperforms even in its own mass grossness. I can't wait for Overwatch to to become free to play. Which it did. It did. Oh, woolly. Did you catch the new spotlight of their of their Overwatch to character reveal and roadmap plans that happened to come out

within hours of the news that Activision investigated themselves and found no wrong doing by the senior staff. Single player PvE coming at the end of the road map. Oh, wait, wasn't Overwatch to justify the road map as it was going to be PvE. PVE begins. I thought that was the road map feature. I thought that was the big feature. PVE begins.

PVE begins. Later. End of the road map. Like in like nine months. It's coming. Um, yeah. This is such a stupid fucking joke. Look at this Australian lady.

She's got boobies. She's from Australia. Um. Anyway, so speaking of things falling apart and this is really less of a falling apart and more of a not seeing it fixed in the way you'd expect. Kotor two is having a rough time. Aspire just ported it to the switch and it's been released pretty much as is. People were kind of hoping that they would take the time in development to do more than port it since it was an incomplete game.

Clean it up a little bit. What with the 14 months and all that. And they did confirm that the restored content mod would come in the form of DLC later. So that will come. But in the meantime, the launch version used there's still a lot that hopefully could be fixed. There's been threat after threat on Twitter confirming that the game crashes constantly that there are aren't in fact fixes where you would expect them to have been. And the most severe is one that occurs when you get the basilisk ship. And you did right after the crash there the game crashes making it completely incompletable as as we would say a class a class bug on that because they really didn't actually clean up any of the problems.

So I ran into that bug on my PC file. And it took like an entire day of me figuring out how to manually load the level the next level through the console. Yes. To get past it. So that's it. So basically you're like, yeah, you you it's that right before you land on under on there's that moment where you get to the ship. And the work around is if you can load up a warp system where you have to warp to the next environment. And then then then all the triggers play correctly once you've forced your characters outside the ship.

Now it sounds like knowing the game. I mean, like the fact that the game has such a constant set of crashes in tons of areas. The warp system is like the only saving grace to making sure that you can get through the fucking thing. It's on a switch. So good luck. Yeah. But I I it's it's it's one thing to like, you know, be like, OK, we're bringing it back. It's it's you're happy.

It's here. It's preserved, whatever. And yeah, we're doing restored content. But besides restored content, there's other mods, tons of months that existed that we're just to make the thing fucking to hold together that they should have been working on in the port. I don't get it. What the hell were they doing spending 14 months on this and it's still busted mess. And then the restored content isn't even included at launch. It's weird.

It's just making it run on the fucking switch is a goddamn like PlayStation 2 game. And in looking at Xbox one game and looking at the original game. God. And looking at it. I hate it. I still hate it too bad. Too bad. No, there is the weird.

The weirdest part was seeing some of the clips of it. And I was seeing footage from this this bug and stuff. Excuse me. And they have they show off one of the fights with fucking Krusty, Darth Krusty. Yeah. And yeah, Darth Krusty. Yes. And you're and you're looking at the sky at the space in the background.

And it's just that awful, insanely over dense star background. Because like the one that everyone replaces. Horrible. I was like, oh my God, it looks so bad. It's so dense and it's insane. You know, it's like, oh man, like why not just at that point just basic like, OK, you'd have to you'd have to have some sort of discussion about like, hey, can we grab the best mods and talk to the people who made them and find a way to make this game the best it can be.

Because like the state that that thing obviously launched in was just a terrible one. But the fact that the thing that everyone loves and remembers is the fixed patched fan adjusted version of it. Try to figure out if there's a way to do that. Devil May Cry DMC Devil May Cry style, you know, where you just get the best experience you can for people, even though the DLC for the restored content mod is a separate thing, which that's already kind of confusing that it wasn't there to begin with. But anyway, yeah, sucks, man.

You can't fucking beat the game. You can't beat the game you bought. Once upon a time, compliance would say, you can't release this. But I think if you have a warp system and possibly argue to them that this is a port and it's the way that the game originally released, Nintendo might give you an exception waiver for that. So that's probably what happened here. That's still complete bullshit.

In the meantime, fucking word to the wise, if you're if you're jumping in on that, the best way to play Kotor 2 at the moment is still to just PC and mod it. Yeah. Better news. What's cool? We talked about FF7's 25th anniversary. We talked about Dragon's Dogma's 10th anniversary. But it's also Treasure's 30th anniversary.

Hey, congratulations, Treasure, a company I would not have expected to continue existing. Yeah, they exist. And not only do they exist, but they said that they're working hard to announce the highly requested VAT title. Now, what the fuck is that title? Is it Icaruga? Icaruga, excuse me. Is it Sin and Punishment?

Radiant Silvergun? Could it be Icatuga? Icatuga. Mischief Makers? Thank you. Alien Soldier? Gunstar Heroes? Guardian Heroes?

What are we doing? Bang I.O.? There's a lot of good shit. You know what I really love when they're like, Astral Boy? We're going to bring a fucking wildly anticipated sequel to you. Silhouette Mirage? It's some fucking piece of shit you didn't know about.

Axley? Wario World. Wario World 2. Yeah, that's crazy. That's one that you forget they made that one, too. I forget they made almost all of these. I'm not super familiar with Treasure. They, they're fucking, they're great.

Hey, here's the game they're going to release. Okay, get ready. The character is going to be small and they're going to shoot lots of guns. Lots of bullets. It may or may not be a man or an animal or a plane. Or a little, like, girl or a little robot. Or a robot. Just for a big robot.

Is a robot not a plane? And then missiles come out of you in every direction and, yeah. Dude, I can fucking, like, when they say the highly anticipated that title, it's like motherfuckers, that could be anything you've ever made. It could be anything. What the shit, man. Yeah. That, that's like maximum engagement bait.

Like everyone's like, oh, it's, it's my, it's the one I've always wanted. And the reaction immediately, if you look in the comments especially, is just like everyone's showing a photo of their collection of physical treasure media. You know? Yeah. Because they know. Some other fucker was holding on to that go-go troublemakers fucking strategy guide for this moment to show treasure.

Look. Which is what mischief makers was playing. I love it. Yeah, man. Personally? Who fucking? Personally, I think I would like, as much as Ikatuga would be a fun idea. Incident punishment did get its equal.

And there could be, we could do more there. I think the raddest thing would be more alien soldier personally. I would fucking love more alien soldier. That's, that's just me. Well, yeah, you love alien soldier. Yeah. You're going to say? I was like, did they make no one to stop Mr. Domino?

And I looked it up and like, no, that's made by Artdink. But now I'm just thinking about, they should make no one can stop Mr. Domino too. But I don't know what it would be called. Like, you still can't stop Mr. Domino? They almost stopped Mr. Domino. I just really like no one can stop Mr. Domino. Alternatively, you could go Gunstar Guardian Heroes where like you just fucking mash it all up and make a wild ass crazy. Oh, fuck you.

That's insanity. Anyway, let me, let me look at something treasure. I'm looking up. There's one game I would like them to make. But they're, I don't, did they make Shining Force? Were they responsible for Shining Force? I don't believe so. No, I don't think that's,

Then why the fuck were people in the chat screaming Shining Force? I blame all of you. You're all garbage. Well, I sure could go with Shining Force. Now I'm set. That's a different thing. Anyway, I sure do love. It really shows off how much I love treasure by constantly getting what games they've made wrong.

It's fine. Look, just, I mean, you know what they could do is they could release a game that's just called Seven Force and it's like, it's, it's, it's, it's that. But anyway, besides, besides loving me some, some, some classic treasure, I'm also a huge fan of Vash the Stampede. In fact, true. I've, I've been told that you liked reading Trigun once, once.

I just the week before this one was on stream saying, damn, I sure miss Trigun. And, and, and Gungrave is getting its new drop. And I really hope that one day Trigun Maximum gets some love or an adaptation. I wish Trigun came back. And then not, but two days later, a Twitter account was like Trigun's coming back and I'm like, get the fuck out of here. Twitter account. Who are you talking to? I don't believe you.

Stop telling me things are coming back and then having no information. And then I get excited and then I'm sad because it was wrong. And then Johnny Young Bosch retweets that random tweet and goes, hey man, I'm ready. Love and peace. And I'm like, because Trigun is one of those few we've talked about where like the dub is fucking excellent. And I can easily recommend going that way or going with the original and you're getting quality one way or the other. Johnny kills it.

And then, yes, they hard confirmed. Trigun is coming back as Trigun stampede. There's one key piece of concept art. It's Vash looking out at an open desert on the planet Gunsmoke. And who knows what the fuck else is coming. It's coming in 2023. Sure. Is this going to be a redo or a continuation of like what?

I have to assume this is Trigun brotherhood. Right. It makes because if that's the main thing is like it's very much an FMA situation where the original came out. And did its thing and it was diverged. But it was all right. It was all right. And in Trigun's case, I like it. I do like it.

You know, I'd say more than FMA original even. But like and then the manga was always its own thing. And that was like way crazier and different. But it's fucking sick. And it deserves love too. And yeah, if this is just doing that, y'all are going to be Trigun fans in a minute. Give it a second because it's fucking hot, man. So yeah, more more more at six on that.

But I do hope I do hope that they don't ignore Johnny, you know, especially if he's like ready and willing. Are they going to have Wolfwood and Vash do the kissing that they were supposed to be doing? They they that's not. That was not. I don't know, man. I remember when I was watching Trigun and I was talking to girls about Trigun. They kept showing me all these dry. These these draw guns of Wolfwood and the no.

That was your bookmarks. That was your trapper keeper and mine, too. That was not my trapper. And they were like, look, this is what happened. And then they were like, no, I'm alive. No, it's it's it's all about the gung-ho guns. And then and then somehow that discussion was like, have you seen Wolf's Reign? And I'm like, no, I haven't seen Wolf's Reign.

I have. It's really watch Wolf's Reign. I like Wolf's Reign until the fucking baseball season ruined it. Because the last four episodes were right in the middle of like a playoff season. So they had to fucking essentially cancel the new episodes and make four filler episodes that were just recaps. Damn, Wolf's Reign got done dirty. And then the final real ending was released on a final DVD later on.

Yeah. Trigun's coming back and that's cool. You guys, if you don't know what Trigun is, it's an old ass anime from the years of anime DVDs and VHS tapes and laser discs when they were putting anime on laser discs. And it was before when Pioneer was not called Genian. And it was it was fun. It was from that cowboy bebop age, you know, people used to often put cowboy bebop, Trigun and Outlaw Star on like this shelf of like, hey man, 90s cowboy vibe anime.

Trigun coming back is just is just another stepping stone to paving the way for the get backers revival. Get backers is get backers going to get back. Get get backers has got back. It's coming back. Okay, so I'm going to assume he's going to eat that leaf that flies in his face. Now, hold on a minute. The last time we talked about get backers, which was probably 15 years ago, the whole bit was that there was no knowledge of what get backers actually was.

I don't know what get backers. I don't know what it is. I have no idea what it is. All I know is the guy with the spiky hair. A leaf flies in his face. Then he eats the leaf and they're going to get things back. I have no idea. Damn, dude.

Yeah. No, it's it's an it's an anime named from someone in grade seven. We would call something to get back just because they get back your stuff. Oh, fuck. The leaf thing is from Macross. I've been lied to. Okay. Well, whatever.

In any case, will he try guns not that old? Stop it. Listen, listen, it's older than some of you. Fuck off. First of all, because if an anime is old enough to have been released on VHS laser disk and then DVD. Yes, there's tons of shit in that era that I that I mentioned that people like glaze over when they hear it and have no idea what I'm talking about.

Try gun is very old by comparison. That was what I was cutting my fucking teeth on. So yeah, no, don't even play that game with me. Listen, okay. I had I had my breaking point moment that will never happen again in which somebody was I was playing fall fancy tactics and somebody was like, wow, this game's really old. I'm like, it's not that old. It's only 21 years old.

Right. And that that means that everything prior to fuck were in 2002. Sorry, we're in 2022. Everything prior to the year 2000 is fucking old shit. Anything that could have come out on a VHS tape, something kids nowadays don't even know what a fucking VHS tape looks like. It's fucking old shit. You know what?

You know what sucks, Willie? I just realized the episode of cowboy bebop where they go to get the fucking beta max tape. You know how fucking inscrutable that episode is now. It makes no sense. The format makes no sense. It's done. You just have to consider it used to be.

It used to be like, aha, they got to be a check. But now it's like they're right there with a spike in and check in which they're like, what the fuck is this thing? Now they're now they're getting the format that's also from this weird world they're in. It's just another alien format. Yes. Absolutely.

Hard fucking nineties on that shit. Hard old anime. Kids don't know about the fucking piracy of fucking videotaping fucking TV yourself. And then the fucking tape that you do it with is so fucking old because your mom also uses it to tape ER because ER comes too late for her. And so every now and then you're watching anime and like that fucking Romanian hot doctor Luca comes in and he's like, oh, they're going to die. It's like, no, back to anime because the tapes a piece of shit.

I watched I watched Armitage 3 this weekend. That is hard nineties anime. That is vibes. There's there's a smell to that era, you know, some of you, some of y'all. Anyway, whatever y'all weren't even born. But you know, you know what kids nowadays aren't going to know about? Yeah, it was creation, my bad. I'm going off like fucking 25 year old memories of a show I didn't watch.

Give me a break. You know what kids nowadays aren't going to understand? Wally, you ever played baseball? Mm-hmm. It's a fun game, right? It's fun. It's a good time. Better played than watched, sure.

Yeah, exactly. But kids now are going to understand the vicious, vicious hatred of baseball, ruining your whole fucking week because the baseball went into extra innings. Oh, yeah. Which meant that the auto record on the VHS that was going to grab the bullshit Sunday night fucking caught 60 minutes of a fucking baseball game instead of what you really wanted. Absolutely. And now listen, we could always just set it to SLP and record extra late afterwards

just in case something happens. But fuck you if you think I'm going to record my reboot episodes in SLP and have them play back in shitty quality. No, uh-uh. We're going for that short, high quality play. So if something gets delayed, fuck you. You're going to get 80 minutes of baseball and the first 10 seconds of your reboot episode. Ah.

Um. What's even happening? They wonder and they wonder why people pirate TV shows now. Try guns coming back. That's awesome. Yeah. That's super cool news. I'm really excited for that.

And man, I just I just had this image of like you're trying to fucking record episodes of like slam dunk, but like the basketball game went long for some reason. And you're like, God damn it. I don't want fucking real basketball. I want my fucking fake. Motherfuckers. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Turn this bullshit off. Who cares about game six? Um, that's good. And then also, again, in speaking of rising or rising from the grave, another old thing is coming back, but barely really it's a brand new thing.

Slave zero X was announced. And I don't know what that is. Uh, here, check it out. Um, basically slave zero was a 1999 PC game. And like I look at it and it's like scratching the back of my brain because I'm like, oh, I, I think I remember this thing slave zero, but slave zero X is just. We're taking the name and we're doing a whole new crazy thing with it. Um, action beat them up, uh, stylish and big vibes of Strider two.

If you remember Strider two looks so much like an interpolated 97 like Genesis PC game mixture of 3D backgrounds and 2D sprites on the backgrounds. Absolutely going for that Dreamcast era vibe, Dreamcast era vibes and Strider two in the feeling, um, with, yeah, what looks to be just some solid ass combat, um, looks fun. Um, and yeah, I just, I can't believe it's actually an existing dead IP like what and why is it not just its own thing. This looks so old. Yeah.

But check it out. Slave zero X, um, big, uh, big cool stylish things happening there. And I think it said, uh, yeah, some folks that worked on a Devil engine working on this and I think what was the other thing the, the, uh, right writers, uh, from Ruby as well. So yeah, take a look. Um, I'm down for some combos and shit. It might be cool. Um, hey, apparently the music and sonic origins is like a complete fucking

travesty. Oh no, what happened? Uh, you know how there's those music tracks and sonic three that are like legally dubious because of the Michael Jackson stuff. Well, they've been replaced with new tracks again. Right, bro. So, um, don't buy that on anything but PC where you can just someone will tell you how to get the good music in there.

Okay. Um, yeah, ice cap carnival night and launch base got changed. Wow. Fuck that. Ice cap space and carnival night is all the best music in that game. I like this. So this sounds to me like going back to play like Mega Man two and fucking with the music that's crazy.

That's that sucks. That fucking sucks. That's horrible. Um, that's such an important part of the memory on the plus side in one of the little animated cut scenes. Uh, there is, uh, animated footage of tails getting fucking trolled super hard by other animal friends and they're pulling on his tail and he is crying. Okay.

Congrats. Tails gets trolled. You did it. It's real now. Um, here's, here's, here's what I recommend as a feature. Uh, you go to options, you go to extras and then you go to, uh, uh, alternate soundtrack and then next to each track, there's room for a URL to be inserted to a YouTube video. Come on.

And then you just play a YouTube video that loads itself in as soon as the stage loads up and everything's good. Uh, hold on a second. Someone's at the door. Be right back. Okay. Anyways, all I'm saying is, um, if, if you're Christian Whitehead or whoever is working on bringing Sonic three back to the people and you try the lawful good approach, but

diplomacy fails, then sometimes the only path left is chaotic good, which is a simple list that says Angel Island zone URL hydro city zone URL, marble garden, et cetera. And you insert your fucking YouTube video of choice and no one can say shit. I want to tell you something that I feel from the bottom of my heart. I really appreciate that you are such a smart guy, that you are such a genuinely intelligent smart good person that when you're talking about Sonic three just now, you correctly latched on to the actual pronunciation of the stage being hydro city and not hydro city as performed and spoken by freaks.

What are we? Are we beasts? Are we, are we nothing but mere fucking creatures that crawl upon the dirt hydro city? It is hydro city zone. It is obviously hydro city zone. It is a city with hydro. What are we doing here? Lots of water.

Hydro means water, by the way. I don't know if you people know that actually. What type of D gen shit? Are you not familiar with the poll? No, I saw, I saw the poll. I did. I did. Yeah.

Animals. Swine. I bet people who say hydro city are the same kinds of idiots who got to the barrels in the carnival stage went, I don't know, it's impossible. How could you? Oh my God. I'm going to get stuck on this for 30 years. Just don't know how to get past it.

Totally impossible. Wait, what was the result of that fucking poll? It was 50.2 to like 49.8. That sucks. Yeah, it's completely inconclusive. The battle rages on. That's no good. That's no good.

All right. Well, you can yell at us by sending an email to castlesuperbeastmail.com. That's castlesuperbeastmail.com. If you are a human shaped freak beast that says hydro city, I would be impressed if you managed to use your keyboard to send an email. We await the accomplishment. We got one coming in from RC who says, hello, Pat and Willie. When you guys were discussing DMC five back when it originally came out, Pat mentioned

how the multiplayer in that game was a test for what would be dragon dogmas to pond system. Dragon dogma twos pond system. Now that it's been announced, we believe that. What's some gameplay DNA that you want to see from other Capcom games? While it's not my kind of game, Exo Primal does some interesting things with co-op that I wouldn't mind seeing in DD two. I got contacted by Capcom to be part of like the Exo Primal fucking close test. I didn't even write them back.

I don't even. I don't care. It's going to have Monster Hunter stuff. It's, I mean, the DNA is already there. I was playing the game on stream last night and the inventory system in Dragon's dogma is very cumbersome. So people were like, God, this needs the Monster Hunter World radial system for items so bad. I mean, yeah.

Okay. Monster Hunter is like endless menus, but there is the top level that radial system really made a big difference. Well, it makes it, it makes it go from unparsable to parsable is what it would seem to be. I couldn't imagine having to deal with. Oh, no way. I did respond. Scrolling.

I literally forgot that I filled out that form. Emma. Okay. All right. We got one coming in from X who says, Hey, Willie and Pat. Recently, I was watching a YouTube retrospective on the AFF 13 trilogy, a YouTuber called Brando SP mentioned how a lot of design elements from the trilogy follow game design trends at the time.

For example, 13 two has QTEs after every boss battle to finish them off. Okay. Also, the actual little late for that era, like Tomb Raider and Mass Effect instantly tell you when the games released. So my question is what other examples of game design choices or content can instantly allow someone to fossil date the game? Stop and pop. I'm going to say up and pop gameplay is like viciously 2007 to 2015.

I'll go one further and say you can also refine that exact same date range with the walk and talk. Oh, man. The walk and talk eventually led to the squeeze through those loading squeeze. Absolutely. Yeah. The walk and talk of the of the mid aughts to the early 2015 or so is a defining thing that yeah, eventually becomes move that bookshelf over and squeeze through or crawl through

this little hole and squand squeeze through so that we get from one loading set piece to another. Gears of War 2K six, seven, whatever it was, like that's that's the initial hide the loading screen in this type of game. Loading screen hiding existed or like fucking way way before that. I mean, Metroid Prime with the elevators and literally even Mega Man, the boss hallways in Mega Man are loading screen. Yeah, totally.

Yeah. Right. But like the feel the walk and talk was one that like got copied a lot. I'm going to go with I had it I had it right on the tip of my fucking tongue and it's leaving me. It's leaving me right now, fuck. The carbon dating. Fuck.

It's it's gone. Yeah, it's gone. I want to say a fucking crafting system, but we're still in that fucking era of every single fucking game who needs a goddamn item crafting system. Hmm. There's a lot of defining things that are still around really. I'm like, oh, something that ended or has a is not as copied anymore as the best answer. It just came into my mind.

Assassin's Creed one came out in 2005. Is that it? Is that is that correct? I regardless. Assassin's Creed one up until like three years ago, every single open 2007 every single fucking open world game having 10 to 30 tailing missions, tailing, yeah, just the absolute fucking worst mission type in every game that has it. You have lost sight with the target fucking Dragon's Dogman as a fucking tailing mission

in it. Judgement. The first mission in judgment is a tailing. Oh Christ. Oh, there's so many judgment. I did all of them. The first thing you do terrible. Oh, I hate it.

Did you ever play Assassin's Creed Black Flag? Yes, you did because you love the boats. Do you remember the boat tailing mission? I mean, you're you're you're tailing a boat through a swamp and it's like, yes, mission. Yes, that's ever been in an Assassin's Creed game. It's so bad. It doesn't work. It's because they don't work.

The concept of range and zone can't stop a boat in that game. So it makes no sense. The concept of just danger, arrange, zone, falling behind all of it. It never fucking works. Yeah, it always it always like going back as far as Grand Theft Auto three. The tailing mission has the one problem because of the way they're all implemented is they're implemented with a pure distance calculation, which means that when somebody hits a corner, yeah, and you continue walking in the same direction, they take a 90 degree angle left

to right. If you keep walking at the same speed because of the way the Pythagorean theorem works, you stay extra distance is going to stay is is going to get super close like right away on the on the tip of that turn. Um, yeah, I'm going to say tailing missions are like second highest fucking crime behind escort missions and underwater escort missions for that matter. That's that's a real fucking bullshit thing that we have now. Um, yeah.

OK, that's solid. That's solid overpowered detective vision is also another one. Oh, Eagle vision. Like God, like what a cool idea that was immediately like ruining. Yeah. Well, that's the thing is you have to pull it back to the point where like I remember when I was playing when I was playing Arkham and I was like, is there a reason to turn it off?

And it's like, well, no, like your your role playing reasons. If you don't want to always have that vision on, yeah, if you don't want the game to look like a goddamn visual suit, that's that's a that's a bad incentive. That's a bad incentive. Audio logs. The one of the things that really jumped out of me about audio logs actually was going through Bioshock one and two is that the Bioshock one and two audio logs, they really, really popularized it.

But there's something about them that's actually very strange for the audio log phenomenon, which is the audio logs in Bioshock one and two are tops 60 seconds long, like they're actually really, really short. And initially, I thought that was a really good idea because it means that they don't get cut off as often, except you'll collect literally eight to 12 of the audio logs from the same guy in like a zone. And it actually becomes super tedious. Yeah.

I mean, the strong example of the successful evolution of that becomes Spider-Man with the fucking Jonah podcasts. Right. Like that is amazing. But you just need to not have it interrupt every time you spot a crime in progress. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. There you go. Those are, those are, those are pretty defining answers, I'd say.

All right, we got one over here. Joe and Pencil, Mega Joe and Pennsylvania says their patron and Woolsworth isn't really a question, more of a talking point, because you talk about how, because your talks about how weird the morality can be in the persona games often reminds me of how that kind of weirdness bleeds into other Atlas properties. The ones that most familiar with our trauma center, in that the trauma team, in trauma team, there's a scene where there's a man dying of a disease and he decides to go on a shooting spree in a mall and he ends up collapsing due to some kind of injury and

the surgeon character who finds him has a big impassioned speech about needing to save his life to the various people who are incredibly mad at the man who tried to murder them. Obviously. However, the one that takes the cake was in the very first game, you find out that a doctor, best friend of your healing touch doctor is actually practicing unauthorized euthanasia on patients who have seemingly no terminal conditions. He intends to do the same to his dying sister, but after the main guy gives him a speech about how he's going to save her and how the sister even tells him that she wants to

keep fighting, he realizes he was being selfish and closed minded and to the wants of his patients instead of being arrested for first degree murder of several dying people at the hospital or at least losing his license in medicine, he's still a supporting cast member for the rest of the game. I found that to be a baffling decision because the game story considers that man is essentially a serial killer performing mercy killings on dying patients without their consent. Yeah, everyone's deserving of forgiveness if they say they feel real bad, I guess, look, man, that shit's wild, but hard cut to a Rocha Maru farting around the village while Konoha

Maru just stares at him, just just looking just stares at him as in a grown ass adult. And that's the way it goes. Yeah, I mean, we can go on to another spiel of like Japanese stories think forgiveness is easy and free, but like, I don't want to do it again. Though that being said, the mass shooter one doctors duty is to save their patient regardless of mitigating circumstance, do no harm and all that. So that one does make sense. Just the idea of them yelling at the people who were just hiding undercover is kind of

insane. I haven't played Trauma Team, I couldn't say, but that sounds drama fucking wild. Trauma Team is like one of the weirdest games I've ever played because like they're all like anime characters as specific doctors and the the the fucking the character that does like a colonoscopy looks like Yukiko and she's all like traditional. She's a fucking traditional kimono and she's doing colonoscopies in the traditional way. And like they're doing a lot to like make like distance it from the fact that you're just shoving a fucking camera hose of people's asses.

There's a Yukiko and the Chiye look alike. Oh, yeah, no, it's a whole I saw the Chiye girl, but there's a Yukiko as well. Yeah, hold on. She's on the fucking. Huh, she's on the fucking boxer. Oh, she doesn't look that much like Yukiko. I guess it's just her outfit. It's like a red kimono.

Here you go. OK, right? Well, then, yeah, you see it, you kind of see it and she's like, oh, I got to do the traditional tube up the ass as my forefathers did and it's like, what the fuck is this? Same artists. Well, that would explain that game. That game is fucking weird. Again, again, it's a Ruchimaru end of story.

Cool. All right. That that'll do it. That'll do it. It's a normal length podcast. I'm sure we'll get distracted next week by some bullshit. I'm sure we'll get distracted next week by some bullshit. I'm sure we'll get distracted next week by some bullshit.

Take care, everybody. Have a good week.