Castle Super Beast - CSB 178: Smug Carth Black Carth Fantasy Carth Carthn't

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

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[♪ Leonited by Max Savard plays in the background, completely useless guitar effects, looped through the guitar, not Arduino or any博force�. Voice after Voice is raised. And here you again have him. All of theseد gave way to feel it." So I just got thecott job. What, what's that? Hello. Congratulations, Woolly. You did it. You're the Elden Lord.

I have introduced Lutherians to the world. Yeah, that happened. No, you don't need to do that. That happened. Um, whole lot, whole lot, um, quicker than I guess was the initial, well, called out from again, that, that, that August date. Yeah, I know.

So I didn't know you were in for a Missoula when I was saying that. So as soon as I tuned in your stream, like the next day, I'm like, what are you doing? Oh, no, no, oh, I'm super wrong. Oh, shit. Uh, I enjoyed the part where upon completion, it's like, cool. All the questions are answered.

There is nothing left to, to no stones left unturned. We walked into the boss room and Marika sat down and had a conversation with us for 10 minutes, explaining all of it. And now we're caught up and it's like, oh, I mean, I never expected that. Why would you after all this time? That'd be ridiculous, even if Grimm's involved. But it, uh, I, I, knowing that I was hoping that what little

breadcrumbs were left would still give just enough to answer the biggest glaring questions, you know? Yeah. So, I mean, it's a from soft game. It's quite unlikely that the boss is even going to speak to you, which it doesn't, uh, doesn't talk to you at all. That being said, I feel like this time around, I wasn't left with any like vicious unknowns by the, the time credits

wrapped, um, at the end of Bloodborne, I beat the Bloodborne and got to the end of Bloodborne and watched the final ending of Bloodborne and had a moment of like, what the fuck just happened? What, what was the whole game? Uh, you get to the end of Dark Souls one and most people burst into flame and go, what, why? Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Why, what? Like, but, and the thing is too, is like, if you are barely, if you are like Elden Ring, in this case, I'm scraping through the game for every bit of context and you still have massive gaping holes. Imagine just running through the mainline bosses. Oh my God. And then you, you know, so obviously we're going to discuss

the end of Elden Ring at this point because I beat it. Um, yeah, beat it. But just how, what little you might understand from the moment some lady gives you a horse and then you walk forward a bit, fight some people and then she's on fire. Okay. So let's, let's break it down. What's the, what's the speediest way?

Crit path to get, to crit path it. It's all runesouls. No, it's, you'll need to, so it's straight to Godric, straight through, right? Don't do anything other than go to Storm Vale and do Godric straight to the Academy, do Rinala, right? Immediately take the, the shortcut path into Altus, run to the front of the goddamn Capitol, do the Capitol, Morgot, then

north through the Giants, straight to the kill, the Giants, the Giants, yes, the kill, then Azula, then Malaketh, then the final seven. Yeah. And like, like you get who are these guys nonsense. Absolute nonsense. No, even if, and the thing is just, even if you did it in a more like normal way, which is not explorative, but just following

the grace lines, you know, you'd still have so little to go on. So, you know, afterwards we sat and watched a couple of Vati videos to get up to speed. And that helped contextualize a couple of a couple of things, of course, but not the big ones. It's not the big ones. I feel like, I feel like, I feel kind of bad for Vati because in the past, his YouTube channel was, I'm going to say bordering on

mandatory to like, I still remember back in the day when Dark Souls one came out, and you either went to Marcus's channel, Epic Namebro, or you went to Vati's channel, because they were like, what was the story of the game I just played? I don't, right? And Sekiro obviously didn't need that. Sekiro has a fucking A to B to D story. And lots of, lots of discussion of it, yeah.

And Elden Ring is like, like, yeah, there's some big questions. What's up with the four or five outer gods that you don't deal with at all? But like the, the general, like this is the grim part of it is like, there is an understandable sequence of events that led to how most of the people got where they were. Um, yes, there is a, there's a, there is an understandable sequence of events.

There is a timeline with bullet points on it. And like, there's a one sentence for each bullet point describing the events of what each character was doing. But like, when you have to try and line up major motivations in some cases, you're left high and fucking dry. And I mean, I guess that's the way we, they, they, they want it for now, at least until the DLC comes out. Um, so, um, the big one for me is like the exact nature of the

Radigan Marica duality is so important and so unaddressed. So it's, it's funny because you mentioned big questions. Personally, I did not find that to be a big quote. So my big questions are all, uh, setting and, uh, event related. They're not thematic or character. Um, the Radigan, like there's lines of dialogue that implies that they were like separate entities. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

But they're also lines of dialogue that reference them as being alternates of the same person. Yes, that, no, no, no, I'm referring to exactly that. The parts where their motivations are not the same, where they don't know the same things, where she says, you are yet to become me, but also you are going to get married to yourself and you're also going to off, create offspring with yourself. Like super incest baby, you know, more incestuous than your average incest baby.

And were those, were those incest demigods the product of outer god tampering, or was that just what happens when you fuck with yourself? No, the, the, the answer to that question is absolutely both of their kids are super cursed by external forces, of course, but I, what I mean to say is, is it also when you make fuck with yourself, this is what happens as well, even if you are a God, you know, which we are also aware of. It's like, eh, you're not a born deity. You are a no, you were made a day that was chosen by the greater will.

And perhaps even before that, there was a connecting force of the one great. So, you know, it's not at all this, like in the beginning, there was, um, all the gods, and then like she was one of them. It's like in the beginning, there was the one great. And then at some point there was other ones. And then at some point they picked who they wanted to make like rulers, you know, yeah. So in the, in the character, there's actually, uh, in the character creator,

if you go to the Newman race, you, it's like people from outside the lands between, which has a very like Dark Souls one, like Lordran thing going on of like, yeah, this part of the world is all magic out to hell and it has a different set of physics and life and death function differently, yada, yada. But I feel like the implication is, is that in the wider world, like almost none of these metaphysical God shit are up, applying in the same way. So, because the golden order seems to be like, it's contained. It is contained, but I will say there's a, so there's a difference in how each

of these games treats and or gives you a feeling about the outside world. In souls, you, in Dark Souls, you feel as if the outside world is normal and this place is cursed and fucked and only crazy people go there because that's where zombies are, you know, um, I feel like in, um, in Elden Ring, you're hearing about like, okay, we like whatever, occasionally we talk about outside the, the, the, the lands between, but then it gives you like one blurb about the land of Reeds and it's like, oh, the land of Reeds is fucked. Japan and Elden Ring is super not okay either.

So you're like, huh, okay, I'm not going to assume that we are in one cursed place and everywhere else is doing fine. You know, yeah, um, it's demons as well. You have all these different realms and they're all having their problems too. So yeah, it, it, you get, you get a picture of like, it's not just here. Yeah. Cause, uh, to elaborate slightly on what you said about Dark Souls, Dark Souls one and Demon Souls as well is very much like most of the world is doing fine.

Right. There's this area. There are undead, but it's manageable enough that we can just send them to a building, right? And then this particular area is fucked in Dark Souls two. It feels like it's turning like there's undead all over and society may have started to collapse. And then at Dark Souls three, they literally state outright that when you

look out from Lordran, not Lordran, Lothric Castle, what you're looking at is what is left of the entire planet. It's not like scraped, scraped into one spot and then you get to the end of the DLC and it's like, well, the world is dirt now. And Elden Ring, it's like, yeah, no, there's weird shit. Like we're going to a different location in the DLC and we'll talk about that later. And I feel like that own location will have its own weird shit going on that isn't necessarily associated with the tree, for example.

Maybe. And in Elden Ring, you even have the pre-society, which was the crucible. Yes, the great tree and such, which again, there's that and that was a whole thing again, that I'm looking, that's a, the Vati theory there that is like, OK, yes, I can, based on the, the crucible knights, based on the things that came before and based on the fact that there's a whole lot of bullshitting secrecy of like, don't look at this magic marriage greatsword. I'm going to turn it into a golden lineage greatsword.

Don't worry about what it was before. We don't talk about the old shit. Stop it. That whole vibe seems to lend credence to that theory. Also, a shout out and thanks to him as well for giving the OK for me to upload us watching his videos for the last bit, just in case that's a thing. You know, it's one of those things you probably didn't need to do that, but it's still nice that you reach out to him, so anyway, and he said no problem. So, yes.

Yeah, now we're in the era of, hey, Zuley and illusory wall. You are the people we desperately need because there's a lot more you can get out of God when by removing the visual effect on his fucking model, then you can from his item description. Yo, that motherfucker had a limiter on his back, not to fuse with for power, but to get rid of it to return to his grappler form. Yeah, it's it's a really is. Yeah, Godric.

Oh, I was referring to I was meant. I meant God, whatever. All these fucking God, whatever. But yeah, Godfrey with the lion. Yes, in all in all the fancy art, the lion is like perched and like I'm a fucking cool stand lion. And then when you meet him, the lion is like actively biting him and holding his arm holding it.

Yes. And it's like a dress up, be a salaryman, act like a king, stop it. And he's like, oh, but Hulkamani is going wild inside. Lou, we've got a great detail from somebody in the chat that the earth tree is kind of fake in that there's a diagonal cut between the glowing, like ethereal part of the tree and what is clearly a real tree. It's called a scion cut in the form of grafting. Interesting.

So grafting even has a way of working its way because there's because like the pre-society also had the primordial tree. Yeah, they're great. The great tree. Then they show up and they're like, OK, fine, tree, we'll just take it. How do you feel about getting to the end of Elden Ring and being hit with just straight up no joke, no question, no ifs, answer, buts. That's an alien.

So well, OK, before that, I need to continue shouting out gearless Joe. Yeah, who's like, fuck this stupid axe, fuck this tie. You know what I mean? Fuck your goddamn taking the glasses off. This job sucks. I hate it. I don't want to be king no more. And I'm and I'm I'm a kill everybody and I'm a get you and I'm a kill

my buddy because your fight is worth it. That was fantastic. And yeah, take the grab was one of the best pieces of advice I've gotten. Yeah, all LP. Did you catch and it's it's a minor detail in the in the cut scene that I didn't catch on the grace run because I wasn't paying that. Yes, the graces point at each other. You're the last one left.

And you're and he's the last one. Like like the greater will is acknowledging. No, it's down to you guys, dude. Like that motherfucker was seconds away from just putting his hand out to his ear. Yeah. Waiting for the crowd to pop off, you know what I mean? Like it was yeah, it was awesome. And the and calling in Nefeli there as well is really cool.

Even if she doesn't get any extra dialogue, I'm happy. She got one last piece because I like her a lot and I was kind of just like, oh, I guess her quest just ends at Stormvale and there's nothing else to do. Well, it used to just end at nothing. Right. Very unsatisfying even before that. Yeah. So here it's not a whole lot more satisfying, but it is nice that she can come in and, you know, face her lineage in that in that moment. So that's great.

Um, and then, uh, yeah, after Huaramania, you go inside, you get a really fucking clean cut scene. You get that the theme, the theme. Right. Yeah. So we talked about this a while ago. I'm not really sure if you remember, but you were you were we were doing an email is like, what about when the main theme kicks in? And I'm like, oh, I got one, but I'm not going to say it.

Yeah. And it's like, man, that that the the arm over the head when it hits the Max Crescendo at the highest point of the song. And I don't know if the timing was just lucky, but each time I went to phase two, the fight was right at the point where it was doing the buildup. And then like on the kill to the next cut scene, it starts with, duh, you know, so I'm just kind of like, is there a thing that's musically triggered? I mean, maybe to play right before it dies. That's the buildup point because it brings phase two right into the quiet part.

And then a fucking alien dragon with a finger for a head where I'm looking at it like, yeah, that's the thing they've been talking about. To be fair, that is what has been described and it is as unfathomable in its like weird shape and context as as they've been hinting at. It looks like a bunch of weird goop would come out of that and become other stuff. It's fascinating to me and that this is the Elden Ring is the most fantasy game they've ever made. Like I would say it has the most fantasy in it. The most dragons, the most knights on arm, you know, that kind of thing.

And it also has the most definitively varied set of straight up elder god aliens in it as well. Like you look at the Elden Beast and you look at Estelle and you're like, those are completely different fucking life forms. There is absolutely no cross in between those at all. Now, there was a joke that was made at some point during the exhaustion when Reggie said something to the effect of can't wait for the final boss, ulcerated Elden Tree Spirit.

Um, I don't like I don't you dare. And then they do, in fact, share their skeleton, I believe. It's not that far off. Did you walk backwards to the the final area where you when the when the when the whole capital is desertified? And yeah, did you walk back to the final ulcerated spirit? I did not. Oh, OK.

Or did I? I don't remember. So it's the only one that is wandering the field like an outside creature as you walk back to the staircase and you see it. And that entire area that connects the the backdoor of Lendell to the area to where the mountaintop goes, you have to walk backwards from it. When you go down the stairs, you fight that urge tree ulcerated or the urge you fight the ulcerated spirit. And you run over to a talisman and then the ground shakes

and a fucking second one pops out and you fight a second one back to back. And then I do that. And then as you wander out of the area, the ground shakes and a third one pops out and I go, fuck you from soft. You know exactly what you're doing. This joke of a fucking enemy that's been like ridiculously overplayed. They now drop three in the same area as a punch line on you. There's no way it wasn't intentional to get the it's basically the the the fat plus two.

OK, that's that's all right. Yeah. It makes it makes it makes sense that the ulcerated tree spirit is now like popping off everywhere. They're weird parasites and they're diseased and you're burning their house. Sure, right. You're you're burning their fucking house down. Sure. I wonder if it's like if you're a lower explanation on that is like, is this a part of the the the crucible beforehand?

Or is it like and it's, you know, that's like reacting in a just a beast show way or is it heard related tough? Everything's everything's tough. But that that final that final fight is it is it's a very like spectacle driven one. But it's like yes, not as challenging. Certainly, the the Radegon fight is much more like testing your reaction and your ability to recognize the the attack.

Yeah, no, Rad's a fucking fucking fight. Like it is a throw down against your typical antagonist. The the beast requires like platforming at one point with his fucking ring bullshit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sprint out. I will say that like, OK, dragons overstayed their welcome as we addressed in the past before. The fucking Dragon God, Dragon Lord Placidus Sacks in Pharah, Missoula is the best dragon fight from soft has ever done.

Oh, yeah. That thing's unbelievable. And yeah, just straight up taking your your Ghidorah cues, you know. Oh, yeah. Shin Godzilla cues and the attack that I missed, the nuke that fucking goes off. I stopped it right as it was it was it was I beat him right as he was apparently like getting primed to do it. But I saw a video later of what we missed and it's unbelievable. And I'm like, that is so refreshing for an enemy type that I was kind of tired of,

you know, so I'm really happy to have that in there. It's this kind of fascinating thing where I've been talking to friends and one of the bigger complaints about the game in general is enemy reuse, right? We talked about this a little bit when you were going through Hadleytree. Sorry, when you say platformer, you have to jump the rings of the. You're supposed to jump the rings as they come in at you. I sprinted out of the aggro zone every time and that and rolled and dashed

through the the the the issue with that is that sometimes you react too slow. And then you have to play your jumping game. But yeah, no, there's a hell of a lot of monster reuse. Like you go to Hadleytree and you're mainly dealing with the same types of enemies. And, you know, all serrated tree spirits, erd tree avatars, bears. Revenants, like there's a there's a couple. That are reused too much, in particular, which I was talking about up. And the demigods are like basically the only non-reused enemies in the entire game.

And even then Godric gets a reuse, he gets a reuse. But simultaneously, this also goes into the game's balance. Like there's a lot there. There's that's a big goddamn fucking game code for it. And and it feels like areas were designed on the assumption that you were not going to 100 percent scrape every area as you went. Perhaps that's the thought. Perhaps perhaps you would encounter a couple of the burial watch dogs.

Perhaps, you know what I mean? You would see a crucible or two, which admittedly, admittedly, when I got to the end and I was like, hold on, I only have one aspect of the crucible. And I fought at least two or three of these guys and I had to go back and I found. Oh, yeah, I went back and then, like, you know, with the tips, I was able to go back and get the rest of the ones I was missing, which were not immediately obvious, one of which is a lot of them are quite hit fucking off that ledge in Stormvale way in the the fuck.

Nowhere with a death drop. That's not a death drop. And then, obviously, Tanneth's night, you know, yeah. Um, but anyway, uh, yeah, that that final sequence of like, uh, Gideon into Hoara, into Eradagon, into, you know, Elton Beast is a really tight one. I really those are some fun fights, man. It's not just cool, like in terms of the the you're escalating like a full game's worth of antagonists in like an hour.

Right. It's not just cool for that, but also considering the ending is purely ideological based, like every person you're running into has a completely different ideology. One is not keep it going forever. The other is I'm going to go back to being king. The other is we're just going to keep shit like this and we're going to make it perfect and oops, I might have fucked it up. Oops.

And then the last one is I'm a fucking space monster. Do what I say. You fucking freaks. Yeah. Also, it grabs the corpse and turns it into the sword, you know, um, and you like, you would think that's the closest direct connection to the greater will, I suppose. Um, you know, I got a, I felt, I felt kind of silly when I got to Rad. And I realized that I had not noticed that his rune is all over the game.

And even on the title screen is that his rune is the crisscross. Oh, yeah, I had not interpreted that as part of the rune at all. Oh, no. So I remember the exact point where we caught that was in the church of Marica that is, uh, just, uh, in Northern Learnea, and you walk in and you see the Radigan statue with the crosses. And I remember we were like, oh shit, like down to that behind him, we saw one in Rinala's room, we saw one in the church as well.

And then, yes, that's part of the rune that you see when it all comes together. Um, yeah, it's, it's all, it's all related and, and, um, Marica is with the, with the tea, you know, but. Did you, did you see it's hard to you? It's hard. It's easy to miss in Malachith's arena. There is a unique depiction of the Elden Ring that doesn't exist anywhere else in the game.

No. So it's the Elden Ring that you know, except there are just branches or tentacles that are covering the entire thing. It is like massively enlarged. Interesting. Compared to the normal one. That is, so because you know now that like philosophically, you can take all the runes and put them back together along with your own interpretation of

events to get your different endings and mend it that way. Um, seeing different types of, um, versions of the Elden Ring sigil, like is, it makes sense with what the, the story sets up. Um, uh, fucking kudos and well done, well played. What I was talking about my Garank theory, and I was like one inch to the left of bullseye on that. Yeah. Um, that was still, I was in the dark until we walked in the room.

Hey, Wally, I found a screenshot of it and, uh, I'm sending it to you now. Okay. So it's the existing Elden Ring with the rune. Yeah, it is just drowning in extra tentacles. Okay. Interesting. And I remember seeing that like, what a fuck is that? The fuck does that mean?

Yeah, I, um, that Malakith fight is the most animation ever. Oh, it's great. It's super, super good. It's a fantastic payoff. Um, and he recognizes if you've done his whole quest. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Which what a cool detail. Um, the bit about, I will, I will say one thing about the Malakith fight that I absolutely despise, which is the instant that I beat it and you go back to the Capitol and the Capitol is gone. I'm like, Oh, great. Now I get to re beat the whole game and stop before Malakith in case there's a goddamn DLC entrance in this ash pile that I can't get to anymore.

Um, yeah, I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to start my new save, but I think I'm going to keep my cloud one at the decision point, just in case. You know, um, because that's what I did is I, to go back and see the different endings, um, yeah, uh, fucking awesome that the scars of the third finger stay on you, uh, after the fact that shit's great. I like that your decision is made. And that ending is the most interesting one. Oh yeah.

It's easily the one that's like, cause like all the others are kind of thrown of want. Let's be real. Right. All the others are listen. I have the control and I would like to make things this way or that way or this way or that way, or I'll let the, the space switch handle it. Sure.

Yeah. And she wants to fucking peace out and have you be like, where is God? And she's like, Oh, I'm not talking. Oh, you went and got the fucking retranslation of that ending. I mean, no, uh, but the conversation we had with her in her tower where she says what she wants to do, like, uh, I didn't like, like I caught after the fact that there was translation issues or whatever, but in the way she was wording it, like we were able to intuit that she just wants, uh, a distant

world that is like ours where if God exists, God's not going to tell you who exists. She wants to remove all these troubles from the land and just fuck off. Because ultimately the fact that, and this is what again, it's, it's not confirmed and I was hoping it would be, but it's, it's close enough to see that like every one of these, um, gods and demigods has been given a job to do. And they kind of want their freedom and they don't want to do what they've been prescribed, but they're stuck because that's the nature of being high

born, right? Almost like being born to like a king or a Lord in an old times where you don't get to actually marry for love. You don't get to, you know, be anything but a political convenience piece. So you got to make a bunch of super babies because the space monster tells you. So the idea of like rebelling against the greater will rebelling against the greater order of the earth tree and the golden order of the earth tree and everything that, you know, the, the fingers or, or, uh, ascribing to you is

like, you see that with Ranny and then it's just echoed in the parents as well. And it's, and, you know, and it sucks because like in all the cases of the like, uh, vassal beasts, right? They're all pretty badass, like loyal, uh, uh, cool guys, cool beast, wolfers, men, but, but you feel so bad because it's like, okay, so Blive comes to his ending, which is like he fought back against it. And to the end, he, he died like basically saying, I'm never going to let the, anything happen to her, right?

Um, yeah. Sarash, I mean, took a step forward towards you. And Hoara Mania did what it did. Uh, and that was that, you know, but, um, even when we saw, Malakith gets it bad. Malakith, you feel so bad for, because Malakith, like, did nothing wrong, essentially was used as a puppet, given the root of death, because, you know, that's what Marika was up to at the time.

And then knowing that the, that the, that he was the vassal spirit given to her that like would have to essentially, I guess, become, uh, uh, uh, you know, a mindless tool of the greater wills. If the rebellion were to go through, she has to completely give up on him and betray him and fuck him over by stealing it from him afterwards. And it looks, and like the fact that he seals away the rest of the rune is part of the guilt plan that she wanted, you know, it wasn't like she took it or did something that caused the ceiling to happen.

It was his response to losing a piece of it that made him so sad that he said, it's never going to happen again. And that's exactly what she needed for the rest of that to start, you know, to be fair to, uh, I'm down with the Ronnie plan of, you know, moving all this shit away. However, part of that plan unintentionally created like the worst form of undeath I've ever seen in anything. Oh, um, uh, God, uh, Godwin, Prince of Death tree thing.

Every waking morning is like an undying fucking corpse that is spreading more versions of itself like a goddamn parasite. Like Fia is a nice lady, except for when she's a crazy murderer, but she's a nice lady, but, uh, the fact that she's kind of ignoring the state of the fucking Prince she's sitting in front of, as well as the other undeads that were like, I said over at Agheil that are like, please cook us dragon. Please kill us. We can't fucking, we don't want to be like this, you know?

And then every other version, and this is, this is one of my favorite parts of the story, actually, is when I came across the, um, you know, the area where you're up in, um, the snow field and the big skull lasers, skeletons are shooting at you and you got to go find the tibia mariner. Right. So when you go there and you fight him and you get the weapon that is like, uh, the, um, the signpost, right, for leading the dead off. And then there's a death right bird over there as well.

And you're like, there's all these other methods of death that existed that have no job anymore. Right. Yeah. Because the urge tree sucks up your soul like a fucking siphon. So the boatman is, Karen is lost just like swimming on land. Like, I don't know what to do, you know, and the death right birds that use ghost flame to cook the corpses, they have nothing to cook anymore because

everyone's shoving them, the bodies in the trees now. So they're just, they're out of a job. It's this very interesting situation where in dark souls and in Sekiro and in Bloodborne, what you have is people who committed some kind of horrific act that inverts the natural order, either the sin of the first flame or a sin during right is causing undead or everything to do with the old ones of Bloodborne or, you know, worshiping the centipede shit in Sekiro. But in, in Elden Ring, you have something that's like much worse where the

Elden Beast destroyed the existing natural order and replaced itself with its own, which then also broke. Yes. So you have like two natural orders stacked on top of each other, which are both ruined. And all this because the, the, the code of the universe and the rules, which are not unlike the backyard. The Elden Ring has the rules of the universe and it's right there.

And if you want to grab it and take one out and fuck with reality, you can. That's the biggest problem really is that, you know, the fucking, the, the, literally the, the, the JavaScript twigs that the world is running on can absolutely be sourced and fucked with if you just go grab it. It's like tearing the gravity page out of your physics textbook and everybody starts to flow. Exactly. Exactly.

Like, yeah. And so this is why though, um, as much as so Ranny's choice is an awesome one and represents a fucking solid ass future, right? But gold mask is the shit, dude. Cause gold mask says nothing. All he does is spend his time staring at the equation, tracing the finger, right? Doing the gestures as the two fingers would communicate, trying to piece it together and he's like, hold on a minute, this shit's fucked up.

They're flawed. The gauze are flawed. They're just as dumb as us. They're lying. The idea of this golden order is one that is an, it's idyllic, but they're not following that it's not adding up, right? Carry the two, put it all together. Turns out we should be allowed to read the Bible for ourselves.

That's how we'll figure out what's going on. You can't just trust some random priest to tell you what's in there. Learn to read it yourself. I'm a do it. And then I'm a fix that thing and we'll do one better than the shitty gods that failed at what they were trying to do. And Corrin shits his pants at that and goes, meh. And I have to assume that Corrin choked him out mid calculation out of just

absolute like, uh, crestfallen, you know, like, like weakness and, uh, tried to hide his body on the cliffside over and the corpse would not stop T posing. So he's like trying to shove the arms down, but, but like it won't happen. Gold Mask dies in the tipos. You know, now I think that Corrin got a fucked up intro to begin with too, because they tried to burn him and all that shit. And he had his faith was, was pure and, you know, all that yadda yadda. But at the end of the day, like when the truth comes out and you are just like,

nope, faith to the end, no matter what in this narrative, when the gods are flawed, fuck off, buddy, that sucks. It's I think Corrin might be like the worst of the, of the haircut gang yet. Like he's so wretchedly pathetic. Hmm. I don't think so. I cannot stand him because original haircut was like just a fraud where he was. Yeah. Being he was he was he was he was doing the thing that you hate, which is like

you are the hypocrite beyond hypocrites trying to pretend you're holier than thou. Corrin was legit, but he was so legit that when he was confronted with the breaking of the enclosure of his understanding, he shattered and couldn't handle it, right? And he survived again. He survived the persecution up until that point because he was so steadfast. Some some lore, some stories would be like that devout warrior is to be rewarded for their unshakable faith. But in this case, sorry, the gods are frauds.

This is not the world where that's going to pay off. I think I can understand. I think I know what the tipping point between our views on Corrin is. And it's very simple. I played a faith character and as a faith character, turning in to get new spells and have him basically shit himself, that anything outside divine order fundamentalism even works. Yeah.

It's like, oh, it's not stop order, the divine order. But I guess I'll teach you. And that's why I took all my spellbooks to Turtle Pope. His turtle. Hell, yeah, you did. Let's learn together. Turtle Pope, so fucking cool. I love them. I'm so glad nothing happens to him.

Yeah, he's chill. Like when you come back and you see EG burning with the black flame, and you're like, God damn, that's a way to die, you know. And there you see the corpses of the assassins around him as well. And it's like, OK, but he got a couple, though. He got a couple without standing up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a little step over from where he was. Now, the thing is, is though, I guess, is like you look at what,

like, you know, destined death is and you look at what the black flame and the ghost, all these things. And it's like, well, he's dying a true death and not getting like an urged tree death. So I guess there's that, you know. But yeah, yeah, like it feels like such a long time ago in the LP, but like those are those are some nice people you roll with. And it ends up bad for for just about all of them.

Turtle Pope is it makes it out on the spot. Yeah. The Elden Ring quest line is really taking the the from software quest narrative design to its upper limit, which is everyone would probably be better off having never met you. Well, yeah, I mean, it's kind of Fox die vibes a little bit. Yeah, it is. And of course, the idea, too, is like, well, depending on your choices, you know, the things can things are always going to go bad for some of them.

But like, even if you lean into like, let's say like Vare and Moog and all that shit, it's like or the three fingers. It's like the moment you go, let's say you take Shabriri's advice and you go meet the three fingers and then it grips you and you're like, all right, let's he should be happy. Let's see chaos take the world and you go back to him and he's out. He's just gone and like you get the rags of Jura, you know, because like it seems like the power of frenzy is what kept his body,

kept his spirit alive in the world to begin with. And now that's gone with you, you know. So even following through on on on what what these people want sometimes is like leading to a tragic ends, which, of course, goes back to the soul bit about, you know, people satisfying their wants and thus hollowing out, right? Um, Jar Alexander, you didn't have to swing, right? But you knew he wanted to. He's been telling you the whole time that like he wants the greatest

warriors inside of him. So it went the way it went, but he could have easily have been just a G all the way through to the credits, you know, um, hopefully the Jar Baron gets a little more love. The DLC people are pointing out that Shabriri will help you fight Godfrey if you're madnessing it up. What? That's wild. Okay. Damn, you can summon him back anyway.

Interesting. That's great. Because that's the moment where he's like, no, we got to do this. We got to do this madness thing. We got to burn it down. Where did you end with patches? Uh, the where I ended with patches is, uh, me with a, a save file in which they kept patching in more patches. When I was playing the game, he never even went to the shaded castle.

You, you, you finished the volcano manner quests and talked to him and then he just disappeared from the world. That's where I ended up with patches. So yeah, you go back. He's in shaded castle, gives you the item, right? Doesn't do anything. Doesn't convince Tannith to turn or to turn away from eating a rye card and then he, and then patches dies, right?

And then I'm looking at it and I didn't see it and Reg is looking at it. He didn't see it and motherfuckers are like, he's still breathing. He goes, uh, and slumps over and he's still breathing. And then you reload your save and he's gone. You walk back to the fucking first cave you ever meet him in and you open up the treasure chest and he attacks you again and the whole sequence starts. But then he goes, wait, hold on a minute. Is that you?

You know, and then he stops and then he's like, ah, yeah. I guess in the end, all that adventuring was, you know, it got a bit high falutin for me. So I'm just coming back to my roots kind of thing. And he just sets up his shop back in the cave and like patches has a perfect loop. Okay, it's great. It's great. Um, absolute perfect, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, for, for someone like that.

Anyways, uh, yeah, very cool. I will say as well that's something else that I'm kind of kicking myself a little bit for not at all thinking of the connection. But this was again pointed out in, um, a recent Vati was the, I, the, the, the very Cromulant theory that, um, the falling star beast, right? Falls and then grows into the full grown falling star beast. Oh, that's, that's been like, I'm not going to say confirmed, but like, they literally have named life cycles in game.

We completely missed that in, in the, in the, in, you know, trying to draw connections and then yeah, evolution of falling star full grown is the, the, the, the, the rock spitter, you know, where the skull comes out and it's got the same mandibles and it's like, oh yeah, totally. And then there's the immobile one. That's what I mean. Right. Yeah.

The, the rock spinner, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then like that's, that's just kind of in its, in its, uh, cocoon form, it's metapod form, you know, and then you go, you go down to fucking Astell and hey, look, it's a butterfree. You know, well, not quite. It's a butterfree.

What's interesting is that one of the things that Zuley pointed out is that the, um, the insects that come out of the rot that appear to be like literally born from the rot and the rot predating the events of literally everything in the entire game, um, look like termites. Um, oh, the pests would. Yeah. The ones that shoot that fucking like Macross thing. They look like termites.

And personally, so do kind of Estelle. Yeah, they're also kind of look like big, evil termites. They're insect-like. Absolutely. They definitely are. Um, the, uh, um, uh, fuck, what was it? Oh, the, uh, and speaking of the rot as well, um, the, the bit about the butterflies is pretty solid.

It's like you got, uh, you got, you got a, a butterfly. That's a rot butterfly. It's the Aeonian. That's obviously millennia. You've got the McKella butterfly, which is, um, nascent and like always childlike, always, you know, uh, uh, in that same curse. And then the smoldering butterfly, which is just on fire, hanging out by the flames whenever you find them.

And it's like, okay, who catches on fire? The other one with the M name, who says that her mother is stuck in the earth tree. Okay. Yeah. So Melana, uh, Melana, it's not just a matter of playing word games again with Melania and Melana Melana. It's also, she is likely a third child, but, um, just wants to follow through and

be your stand in maiden as her, as she doesn't even refer to herself as a finger maiden. No, she says, I'm not, have you? Yeah, it's like, she's a different thing. And the other thing is that her, uh, her eye tattoo has three fingers on it, whatever the fuck that means. Oh, hmm. She hates it when you follow that route.

Oh, she really doesn't like it at all. You kicked the horse and now you're going to fucking get it. Um, yeah. Anyways, uh, fantastic, awesome. And definitely gonna, as I said in, in, in, you know, in the video, gonna need a breather before we jump back into souls, uh, LP, you know, not jumping into DS two right away. Gonna have to come back to it.

I finally started my second run of Elden Ring for realsies, like last night. And that was after like four months, five months away from the game. Like it needs some serious fucking breathing room. Yeah. I mean, you know, it was an extremely enjoyable experience, but I just, I need a very fresh, very fresh take. And I feel as if, especially going backwards at this point, uh, is going to feel extra rough.

So, uh, taking that breathing room, but it's, I'll tell you one thing about it though, is that depending on what kind of second run you want to make. Boy, you can fly through that fucking game, man. You go, Hey, I want this weapon and I want this weapon art and you fucking grab whatever normal ass thing you want to use and you just ride your ass over to the bloodhound step and get it and then just drive that horse up through whatever boss you need to go and get whatever item you need. I think whatever I do do it, I think I'll do like something probably

arcane, just to see how weird that gets. And, um, probably a lot more multiplayer focused, you know. So I'm in a weird state in that I went through with a, a strength faith build, uh, the first time, um, and I'm actually going to go through with a faith build again, but probably more towards like quality or decks. And the reason why I'm doing that again, instead of going for something different, did more different is that literally every patch that came out after I beat the game took every spell that I wanted to like, but

was trash and fixed them. So there's a lot of, uh, a lot of spells and faith in which you like, you get into an animation lock and do a huge, a huge fucking spell. Uh, and any arrow would just plink you out of that. No problem. And they all got armor. Okay. Like they all became faster.

They all got more damage. Hmm. Interesting. Um, balances will surely get addressed again when DLC drops. So we'll see. I think anything that's in the main game right now is going to get changed from now on. I think it's mainly going to be adding new stuff that mixes it up like a, you

know, some talisman that ad inverts your type damage type or, you know, whatever the fuck. Yeah. Um, anyway, uh, fucking cool shit, happy to, happy to finally get there. And, um, not, not dissatisfied with, uh, uh, what we got when we finally did get there, I'm also like, I'd be really curious to see not that it would, I feel like we're ever going to see it, but like just what Grimm's notes were, you know, I would love to see his like manuscript almost for just like the,

the, the world building process. I wouldn't want our novelization. I would just be curious about like, you know, his overall bird's eye view of the setting and like how they went about like being like, you know, okay, like we need a cool guy here. He's going to fight you. Um, he's going to have two phases. Uh, what, what, what, what are we doing?

You know, and then it's like, Oh yeah. You know, or like the idea of, um, like, uh, cause I know that there's some stuff cause we're going to talk about, uh, one of the, one of the things that came up today was like, when you grab the 1.0 version of the game, for example, uh, you can see different moves, different tech millennia used to have extra moves and used to be way more aggressive in, on the disc version of the game of, yeah. And so someone was able to, uh, basically go in and like, uh, you know, get her behavior to, to be what it used to be.

So the big thing about that, I'll just, yeah, this is, this is one of the stories, but waterfowl dance was originally called millennia's blade and water and there was a second attack called waterfowl dance, which was a grounded four hit version, not for hit four sphere judgment cut version of the aerial one, but it was grounded and just moved aggressively towards you. So she had two of them and they had no life, uh, threshold. So she would just do them whenever she wanted frequently. That's, that's too much.

Insane, absolute madness. And the damage was the same. Like you get caught in it, you're dead type thing. Um, she also had, uh, she had her behavior. She did the, the run up and kick a lot less and she could block. With what? Her sword. Okay.

She would put the sword out like Sekiro style and block your attacks after she was vulnerable sometimes, and that was it. Um, it was ridiculous. It was the most batchage. Like they wanted her to be stupid and what we got, stupid as it was, was toned down. Um, that's, that's just silly. I'm now going to be looking at this. There it is.

Yeah, there's, there's waterfall dance. Holy shit. Yeah. She could block and she could, and it was like, when you fight a boss with a big shield, it tells you, Hey, sometimes they're going to block your attacks, whatever. But someone like that, you're expecting like, no, you swing on her counter hit. You get her to stagger or you do what you can. No, uh, sometimes too bad.

And after the, you know, like it just, it was a, it was a part of her behavior. Occasionally there's those little clash moments, but this is, yeah, she was, she was, she was wild. She was beyond wild. Um, so, you know, uh, uh, you can go back and see that you'll block a hit and then dash away. Yep. Fuck you.

No, no hit. Anyways, um, Elgin ring, that doesn't even like the thematic consistency of her being the toughest shit in the world, but she tanks hits like a fucking like level one hollow in that every normal hit just goes, puts her into the right. Like that was appropriate because she's the best swordswoman in the world, but she's just riddled with super space cancer. Um, yeah. Yeah.

That's that shows you where their heads were at with the fucking balance. And it's like, if it's optional, then like too bad, fuck you. Uh, well, we put all these tools in the game and you don't have to do it. Therefore, throw another thousand hours on my play through. Uh, good times. All right, that game was a great goddamn experience. I'm so happy that it ended up being as good as it was after stuff like cyber punk and shit like that.

Like that would have been just a fucking knife to the gut. It would have deflated the hype of what has been a banger ass, um, not franchise. Um, series of games, I'll call it, you know, let's say anthology. Sure, sure, because they're all good. They're all good so far. Like even Dark Souls two, which is the least of them because of, uh, it's it doesn't live up to their standard is still a very cool, fun video game. I still remember the year it came out.

We got to the end of the year and I'm like, I've never been more disappointed in the game. Uh, everything about it is worse than Dark Souls one. Uh, I'm just so miserable about how it's not nearly as good. Uh, I can't stop playing it. I've beat it multiple times. It's the game of the year. Um, and I don't strictly include Sekiro in that list to me.

You should. It's it's right there. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's hybrid, but it is structurally, I guess the corpse running aspect and the boss fight. Yeah, it's structurally there. It's pretty, but like, but like the character choice selection restriction though is so aggressive, you know, by comparison. So I went and watched a video by Noah Gervais who does like long form

video essays and he did one on the from soft, uh, catalog, including one that he did one on Dark Souls and he did one on the other ones, which is Bloodborne, Sekiro and Elden Ring. And he kind of correctly figured out that like Sekiro is taking that time, that kind of formula and boiling it fucking super down. You have a named character. You have one weapon and it is indeed going to focus narratively on, no, you're going to fight your fucking ass off and there is no difficulty

selection in terms of maybe if I go somewhere else and get stronger, maybe if I go somewhere else and try a different, different technique, it's no, you're going to fucking do it or you're going to fucking cry and die. And Elden Ring is the opposite of that. Elden Ring is the 100% polar on your own way. So like Dark Souls would be the center of this and Sekiro and Ring would be on the opposite ends of the spectrum. Yeah, Elden Ring is kind of like hilariously easy in hindsight, because

anytime I ran into anything that was really genuinely too tough, I just turned my character 70 degrees and just went into another random direction until I found something that I could deal with. Yeah. I mean, it, I'm going to, I'm going to take note of the, the character rigidity more than like I, perhaps others might because of how much I love custom characters and how much I love the ability to like pick my own build and such.

So, you know, not to say that like, yeah, of course, like every game that is like this needs to be that, but it is, it is part of what I kind of felt, I suppose hamstring to buy. But if this wasn't based on my expectations of other things they had made prior, I wouldn't have those expectations. So, you know, anyway. Well, it made a lot more sense back when it was literally called Tenshu. Tenshu, yeah, yeah.

But even then, Tenshu was a fucking stealth game. It was, it was not a fight your goddamn ass off against somebody like fucking Sekiro might as well be from soft makes Ninja Gaiden. Sure. Sure. And Neo is the actual samurai souls experience when it comes to like, you have a named character that is doing plotline things, but boy can your, your and boy, can you pick up a lot of useless garbage off the floor?

And you're, boy, sure. But your character can be very, very different, accordingly. In Neo one, that is to say, Neo two is a whole other bag. Hmm. All right. Moving on though. Um, uh, I'll just take it because, uh, yeah, a lot of things happen in this week, so I hit the credits on, on Elden Ring.

Good shit. Um, then, um, as a result of that, uh, well, maybe just the amount that I've been using it, but one way or another, I don't know about you, but I am now on my fourth dual sense controller. The three that I bought all have had issues. And as of like a couple, like a day or two ago on, uh, yeah, when we played multiverses essentially, um, took note of another problem. So these dual sense controllers, just a warning that, um, if you use them a

good bit, and we did have this issue, I remember when like PlayStation two controllers were like, we're using your PS two constantly, right? Like it was, it was just a regular thing. Um, the first controller I got, uh, the first dual sense, uh, I ran into a problem where the dead zone on the stick just started going off. So basically, um, yeah, the, the, the, if you tapped up on the left thumb stick, it would continue doing an up input, um, sucks, just caught that. I was like, okay.

Um, so then the second controller I got, uh, was fine, but, um, I noticed that after a some amount of time, the USB C slot up top, if it's wired and plugged in, um, sometimes the wire, if it just nudges a little bit, it would then cause a disconnection to occur. Right. I've had that. So that the port is loose up top. It can get loose really easily from just regularly plugging in your controller.

If you're using it wirelessly most of the time and only charging it while plugging in, you probably won't run into this problem. But if you use it plugged in regularly, it's going to happen. Um, and then the third controller I got where I was trying to be avoidant of that port issue also went back to having a dead zone issue as well. So, um, basically this is gen one, but really they've had years to perfect working on controllers. It sucks, but I'm on my fourth fucking dual sense now.

And they're not cheap. I think I'm on my fourth as well. Um, I haven't had, I have not had any of those issues. What I have had is I had one of the triggers, just whatever mechanism is on the inside snap blew up. Yes, I forgot the first controller also had the R button blow up on it. Completely forgot that happened to it too. I've had it, I've had it snap and I've had, uh, I had one where one of the

buttons just like it didn't get stuck all the way in, like I couldn't get it out. But like my square button, I would press it and then it would like stay stuck in for multiple seconds and constantly trigger the sensor the whole time. And it's like, yeah, no, these, these, these are my favorite controllers to use. They're great. They're the most comfortable and I love them. Uh, they are super weak and built to die. Um, I salvaged the dead zone ones by, if you use them on PC and you get DS for

windows, then you can turn the dead zone aggressively off and like make it, uh, you know, work as a kind of normal controller again. Or like, if I'm playing like, um, you know, uh, DNF or something where I'm on the pad anyway, um, the stick doesn't matter. So I could just turn that turned it the stick off entirely and that'll, that'll fix the problem, quote unquote. But, um, you know, the options for getting it working on PC to begin with are still kind of like, eh, they got, they just put out their drivers.

They now allow you to download a PlayStation updater on your PC, but you don't have all the options. Again, DS for windows has to do all the heavy lifting for you. And if you want to wirelessly connect it, which you can do because you can use it as a regular Bluetooth device, it'll connect. But, um, once that, but then if it gets connected without proper drivers, it's not going to be detected as an actual like, uh, controller by windows. It'll just be a Bluetooth device.

So, you know, it's, it's just like, I hate that these controllers, like they've, like you said, they're comfortable. They feel good. I want to use it, but it's just, we're back to that, you know, mid-auts era of like time to stock up, I guess, because we're going to burn through these things until they fix the build and make it more sturdy. It's, I'm in this weird place where I'm, I want to get a, if they have one, a clear plastic PS five controller specifically because in my experience,

clear plastic controllers, uh, the clear plastic is made out of a different plastic that, uh, actually retains it's, it's like, like, you know, how do I put this on a PS five controller? There's a certain grit to the exterior that wears down over time. Uh, PS four controllers were the same. The plastic ones don't have that. It actually is made of a different material and they tend to be a little bit more durable as a result.

I'm not sure if this is my brain going nuts on it, but I've had a much better run with clear plastic ones because they use a different mat. I feel a texture difference, certainly. But, uh, yeah, I never noticed that though. Um, what I will say is though, in comparison, I've been through a lot of Xbox controllers over the years admittedly as well, but like my first elite controller finally like, uh, broke the other day when like the, and it wasn't even that it broke.

It was just the grip at the back, which is like, you know, the rubbery part. Um, that part like came off of the controller and yeah, it like, it just like that piece just like disconnected. Uh, in the normal, in most cases, it's all one piece anyway, so that wouldn't happen. So this is just like part of the elite's fancy build is, is having this extra thing that can come off, um, but it lasted quite a bit there, you know, um, minus the thumbstick, uh, uh, magnetic aspect when, uh, uh, you know, like that, that would fall off pretty easy at some points when the magnets got a little bit weaker.

That was a little questionable. But anyway, um, so just, yeah, a little, a little warning about the PS5 controllers. If you're, if you are using them, um, and it was a bummer. I bought, so I bought one of the, the color, uh, ones. There's the red and then there's like the purple and stuff, you know, like all these, the newer ones. I'm hoping that getting a newer color version of the controller is an improvement over getting a launch white one.

Well, yeah, let me tell you. Yeah. There you go. As somebody who has the red and purple ones in their hand right now, um, the red one I've, I've kept the longest and has done the best by far. It's still like day one goodness. The purple one for whatever reason, the top right of the big middle touchpad. If I leave it long enough, when you go click on it, it has to click in a little

bit more, but it doesn't fail any button presses. It's just a little weird boy. Stop telling me it's blue. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Now everyone, I bought this controller yesterday on the box. It comes in. It says purple. It says galaxy purple.

It says it on the box. I bought it yesterday and read that there's a blue one that's lighter. And this, this, the GameCube discussion, I'll fucking, we'll do that all day with the indigo shit, but, um, I, I absolutely, I, that's what it, that's what it is. You know? Uh, oh boy. Anyway, uh, yeah, no, the red one has done me fine, but I mean, these are anecdotal, right?

It's the issues are per, per unit. But it's, I'm just, I'm hoping for that thing almost like, you know, N64 era where it's like, yeah, give me the fucking banana yellow N64 controller. Hopefully it's built a little bit better because it's a later generation one than a long time, you know. It absolutely has been my experience that, uh, whenever you buy a Sony controller in particular, you absolutely want the, the newest color they have come out with, because you're unlikely to get a version one version of the controller

that's been sitting in the back for a time. Um, anyway, so just a little heads up about that. Okay. Other things going on, uh, I, as a result of finishing off Elden Ring have started the next game, Dead Space. Man. So I said something last week to you that was, was secretly a gauge of how much you knew about Dead Space.

And the answer was you didn't know shit about Dead Space, which is kind of exciting because I said to you, get ready to play as the character with the heaviest boots in the world. Uh-huh. And then I look at clips, people are sending me and you have discovered that Isaac, it does in fact have the heaviest fucking boots in the world. Yeah. I just, I'm like, listen, this game, I remember it came out, you know, in an

era when getting headshots was the goal of every video game. So here they're telling you like eight times aggressively, hit the fucking lens, hit the fucking limbs. It's like, it becomes a joke. You find a goddamn gun on top of a bloody corpse, blood on the wall, cut off their limbs and then you hear two different radio transmissions that tell you to cut the limbs off. No, that's play testing at work right there.

Yeah. Absolutely. That is people shooting things in the head and not knowing why they're, they're not dying. That's instinctually expected, but, um, anyway, but like with that, there's also me going, well, I don't know what else is different here. So until it's, until I know the rules, I'm going to just stomp everything in the nuts super hard and that stomp is incredibly strong and satisfying.

So, uh, that goes well with my game plan. It's, it's not like it's, it's strong. It's as strong as a gunshot. If you can get it, it will, it has this gigantic hitbox. The hitbox is like your whole character's width and it's super loud. And the crunch, there's a crunch noise, yes, specific to the boot. Yes. It's super loud, but the wildest and funniest, most dated thing is the fact

that when you then see a regular human die and like she passes away in front of you and now it's just like a ragdolled body and you use it and then they just come apart like a fucking, uh, Mr. Potato Head, you know what I mean? Like they just like the, they, everything just shoots off of them. And I haven't seen that level of cartoonish dismemberment since 300 on the PSP. You know, listen, Willie, those necromorphs, they used to be people too. Right, right.

Um, that game wastes no time just getting right into it. It, you know, yeah, does a little horror intro, starts you out, gives you the fucking the saw, go cut, and then you're immediately in just what might take 20 to 30 minutes of buildup and any other games, perhaps, you know, they're just like, nah, you're in space horror go, like we're going right to it. Everything is, uh, unbalanced in the audio. There's Kodak calls that come in way louder than anything else happening in the game, even when you turn the volume down.

Fucking ridiculous. Like, um, the bloom in the intro is blinding you as you pull up to the station. We're, we're both doing this thing right now that was inspired by you going through a halo and Arkham. And then I hopped on the idea as well. Like, hey, 2005 to 2010, yo, man, games were weird back then that that era, man. Um, but I got to say, uh, it's, it's, I'm playing the, I'm playing it as a 360 classic on my X bone one, uh, XX.

Yeah. And it's, uh, it holds up, man. It looks good. It does. Oh, it, it looks, it was like absolute bleeding edge at the time. It's fantastic. Um, the, uh, yeah, the, the areas where you, um, do the, the space walking and such stuff like that, that's pretty cool.

I didn't, yeah, I didn't, I didn't really know that was a gameplay element, but that's pretty cool with the zero G, um, to it. And then you're limited inventory game. You're playing reload discipline, all that shit, you know, like you're getting, you're getting it, uh, uh, hard mid-auts right away. I shoot that baby, shoot and stop that baby. Yeah, exactly. Again, my, my, my main experience was, uh, Dead Space Extraction a million years ago.

Yeah. Um, what is also fun. It feels like Glenn Schofield's in your fucking ear going, did you fucking see event horizon? I mean, I did. I think I literally said the words, um, there's a, there's something like, oh, they cut off, he cut off his tongue or his ears or whatever. And I think I said the words like, oh, we don't need ears where we're going.

Like it's so absolutely event horizon. Um, the, uh, the bit with the upgrading is of weapons is quite interesting too. Because I expected those, um, cores, nodes to be a limited resource that was like, holy fuck, I found a node. And it's like, no, if you've got 10,000 bucks, you can cash one out at the store constantly, but I hope what you're cashing out is something you're willing to sell. It makes it very interesting because you get in these situations where you're like, you know, if I sold every single health item in my inventory, I could

totally get another node. Mm hmm. And I have to say that Osmosis has also, while it's my first time playing this game, it's affected like me, because right away, uh, when I got my shit, I'm like, okay, you have now unlocked flamethrower. And I'm like, I'm not spending $11,000 on the fucking flamethrower. And I'm like, I don't even know what it looks like, but the things I, the two things I know about this game is the cutter is good all the way through.

It's the X Buster. It just does the job. And the flamethrower is ass. Um, so, uh, you're right, uh, the flamethrower in Dead Space One is complete garbage. It is actively useless. Um, and the plasma cutter, the plasma cutter in Dead Space One occupies a really incredibly specific point in space and time, a point in space and time

and intent that it shares with its sister game, Mirror's Edge, both games made by EA in the same time period and both made as the passion project part of Rick Otello's idea for EA. And that is you think that maybe they actually wanted to make the game a certain way, but they had pushed back on the team. So instead they put it in as an achievement. So Mirror's Edge, no guns. Dead Space One, there's an achievement for, Hey man, you want to beat the whole

game with just the plasma cutter? Ooh, you should do it. And let me tell you, yeah, as somebody who has done that run through, it's not even harder than a regular run. Mm hmm. I guess the gun is fucking incredible. Using achievements to state your intentions. Interesting.

I can absolutely see that because the moment I learned how ammo worked, it was like, Oh, absolutely. When you have four guns on you, you're picking up four types of ammo that are randomly generated as you draw, as things drop or as you pick up items. If you've got two, it's two types. Therefore one type, one ammo, one gun. You know, if you just carry around one thing, you will always find what you need. So and if you consistently upgrade the plasma cutter's damage and all of

that stuff, you get in a situation where you're going through the whole game and one shot equals a cut. Yeah, every time I can imagine. Um, because I'm thinking about like Resident Evil games and, you know, those are cases where the ammo types you find are specifically chosen, right? It's all placed set that you find, but not in RE four. Stuff that is dropped in RE four follows the same logic. Uh, what's on your case is it's what's what, what do you got plus, uh, what

are you missing? Um, okay. So is it and then it feeds it into a randomizer. Okay. It's weighted by like, if you have a ton of health items, you're not likely to get health items on drops. If you have a ton of a certain type of ammo, you're unlikely to get that type of ammo on drops.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. I mean, in this case, I, I, that system is like, it encourages you to stick with like two things you like, which that seems cool. So far I've been introduced to about four types of weapons. Um, the, uh, the, uh, saw blade I fell in love with immediately, that thing is so cool.

That is so fun to use the ripper, AKA the item hoarders, favorite weapon. Oh man. I, I want to cut the legs off of six guys with one shot. Excuse me. Yeah. And now the big bootfuckers are coming out with their extra thick overalls. Like, like, oh yeah, really? That one space zombie just wore, uh, snow pants and, and like Tim's like, and

you're going to have a hard time cutting through that, huh? Are we fucker? All right. Fine. I guess we'll aim for the higher up limbs, but I do, I do really love the in universe explanation, which is these are not guns. These are power tools for industrial mining. Now that being said, the plasma cutter being shaped like a pistol and firing off

a very small beam. Yeah, right. That's a goddamn industrial tool, dude. Fucking force push and pull and freeze are just tools of your rig suit that people are casually supposed to use for, yeah, construction purposes and not ruling the galaxy. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, we got a, you know, a lift and heavy stuff all day. So I got the telekinesis thing in my, in my rig. Like that is the room. That's the most ridiculous, like buy in to the universe so far is like God tears stand like powers for the most mundane activities and no one's going to be abusing them then outside of this context. Okay. Let me, let me tell you, man.

Let me tell you, as you go through dense space one, you are going to absolutely appreciate your character's mechanical dexterity with his power tools because they throw a lot at you. It is, it is absolutely resident evil five in air quotes in, in, in terms of release timing. It came out, I think before RE five and was absolutely like a better game as a resident evil game than RE five. It is a straight sequel from a different team to

that's why people called it RE five. Okay. Yeah. Cause it can't, yeah. And also like it came out a little bit before, but also I like it a lot better than RE five because it doesn't have all the weird forced co-op stuff in it and that's a, and death space too is a hell of a lot better than RE six. I, uh, I haven't had to think about the angle of my cut aim since Revengeance.

So, yeah, that's also a moment of like, Oh shit, right. Like, uh, uh, try to, which one do I want? Okay. You know what? This area, I'm running into a lot of jumping spine ones. I'm going to keep it vertical for now. Let me ask you a quick question. Uh, what are the enemies that you have fought thus far?

All right. Regular necromorphs, necromorphs, your slashers, yeah, you, you, yeah, regular necromorphs, um, the spine jumpers. Uh, so the, the, so your, your slashers and your crawlers, the, yeah, the crawlers with no legs, um, then again, level two. And I suppose level three slashers with the bigger pants on. And I got big pants. Stop cutting our legs.

Uh, hurts out. Um, and then, uh, the bugs, which was a shock because I was like, Oh shit, I guess I do need a gun. Um, because the bugs jumped me and I'm like, the cuttering is not going to do anything here. Oh, uh, you mean the infectors, the ones that, that run around and they fucking turn corpses? Well, no, no, no, like literally a swarm that jumps on you and you mash

it and throw them off of you. And then they, they die. Oh, those little freaks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little swarm. Um, I fought the baby, a technical baby, and then the flyer winged thing. Yeah, the jumps on the corpse, there's, there's a, there's, um, the, the roster of enemies in that game is really good.

Um, there's two or three that are just like, like fucking thumbs up great enemies of all time standouts, but I don't think you've encountered any of them yet. I also fought a tentacle that grabbed my feet. Yeah, that tentacle cannot be defeated with the Ripper, which is what, uh, people were telling me happened, found that out real quick. The distance point is not going to cut it unless you just shoot it out with

the alt fire, I suppose. Yeah, I got tentacles just kind of around the alt fire is a cool thing, of course, uh, for each of these power tools with alt fire, uh, including a screen clear, give me the code, the lower reason for a screen clear on a, on a, on a line gun, sure. Um, sometimes you got to bust us some rocks apart. Yeah, no fair. Yeah, you got to just, you got to bust the rocks and run out fair enough.

Um, the, I was hoping that they would also have angling rotation, but it's so far only the, the main plasma cutter does, you know, that's why, that's why it's good. It, that, that's how they get away with having a default pistol that is just a good pistol, but it needs a gimmick. And the gimmick is, is that it's the one gun that you get to decide to go vertical or horizontal. Huh.

So they could have made that more of a repeating gameplay mechanic, but instead it's like, no, this is the weapon that does it. Yeah. The line guns really good at firing wide. Right. Right. And I, and if I want to get it to cut a room full of, you know, morphs, neck or more flags off, like I'm going to have to spend a bunch of notes to get there.

So, uh, I don't think I'm going to keep that around, but you can get that thing to go real wide. It goes like eight feet at its final upgrade. It's great. Now, I assume if you did use the gun and shoot at the limbs long enough, eventually one would fall off, right? Or not at all. You're referring to rail gun or what was, oh, you mean the, the, the, the

fucking machine, like the rifle. It's a rifle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, the rifle's fine. Okay. The rifles, the rifles big, uh, uh, is, is for weak points, like not cutting limbs,

but like weak points and it's got excellent range because it's not shooting a projectile like some of the other ones. The alt fire is the dumbest, most insane thing I've ever seen. Once again, it is in a practical situation. When would a gun have an alt fire that is spin and shoot indiscriminately in 360 degrees? Well, that's when, uh, you're fighting a bunch of space aliens and you want to kill them and, uh, they're going to crush you.

And your allies are not right behind you. So when you just hold it up and just start shooting and spraying, it's literal spray and pray, but it fires back behind the, the, the death range. Like what the, what the shit is that? It's insane. It's the least practical thing in the world. Um, uh, the, the pulse rifle, death blossom mode. I would have actually really liked the pulse rifle to be in the game and have

it just complete trash because like everybody else with a gun gets fucking owned in like a second. Yeah. Just this, just as a, as a, as a wooden shield and bloodborne, right? Yeah. Don't do it because they get just annihilated. Um, that game's so goddamn great. And Isaac doesn't talk, not a single time.

Yeah. And I didn't know that you saw his face right away either. Like you see him, he's just a guy, he's just silent. You know, it's like, okay. While they're arguing and bickering, he's just like, whatever. I don't know. I'm, he's, he's got music playing in his head. Um, I'm just a working man.

Um, I mean, I don't know if like people have freemanized him over the years. I assume they must have, okay. Um, one of the weirder things about dead space and you're not getting this because you're, you're, this isn't when it came out. Dead space was like the focus of an absolutely intense effort by EA to cross media platform the game into every possible fucking format conceivable. There's an animated film. There is a series of motion comics.

And those motion comics were actually fairly decent. There's books. Um, yeah. No, the whole, the whole church of unitology bit going on is like, that's, you know, you got, you got lots to do when you introduce a space cult, right? Uh, uh, proper space, Scientology barely veiled, uh, uh, is, is rife with asshole scientists that are like, but hold on though. Don't save them yet.

Let's get some data. I can see that going pretty far. I fucking love unitology, um, as a, as the space cult in that game. It's like, it's all these great moments of life. We're all going to get, oh, it's going to be great. We're going to be a rapture. Uh, and then they look over at their friends being like vored into a thing monster and they're like, uh, yeah, maybe, I mean, like, well, much

like doom, it's like, it's not enough that, like, if it was just like humanities in space and then the monsters came, it'd be like, oh shit, that sucks. Okay, let's fight him. But then it's like humanities in space and then the monsters came and then a bunch of fucking freaks were like, yes, cleanse us. Let us cut a deal with you. We want to be the leaders of this new hell.

We're like, that is when you go, oh God damn it. I hate everybody now because like it, it, it brings out the worst in people while the actual monsters are in the middle of murdering people. You hate the person who sold you out more. Uh, the, the one thing that, uh, going through the Moshe comics does a really good job of is that it's a six comic series that deals with the point where they find the marker up until the point where I was up. Um, and it just delves really deep into how just having the marker around starts

to make people go super nuts and like kill themselves or have violent freak outs. Um, yeah, they did introduce, I mean, I'd have to go back to remember the full details, but I do remember that like, uh, extraction and the comic inside of it introduced a lot of that, um, backstory right off the bat. Uh, that being said, gameplay is also like, again, it, it wastes no time. And then it's also just like, yeah, here's your map, fucking, here's your Metroidvania, like room, go to this dot, click the button.

There's a line that tells you which direction it's in. You know, there's a, there's a lot of cool stuff for a fucking LP dumb, dumb, dumb. Uh, in, in particular, there's like a couple of rooms in the game that are just violently oppressive, but don't have any danger. They're just like, just audio visually, like attacking you in terms of like, like high grade, scary, like stress, stinger noise. And there's, you know, they have the, the, the zero G, which is actually like still probably the best zero G mechanics.

Uh, no, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, oh, I'm thinking of two. I'm sorry. I'm thinking of two. Okay. Well, I was good. I'll see what you're saying. And I'm going to raise you, um, fucking call of duty advanced warfare. Um, the space one.

Hey, guess what? What? Who do you think worked on that? Oh, is that where it went? Okay. Yep. Okay. That's that space, like, like zero G gunfighting in the, in that cod game is fucking amazing.

I, I like, it was one of the coolest goddamn things ever. That's the dead space guys going over to Activision and being folded into sledgehammer games to help with call of duty. Infinite warfare, infinite warfare. Yeah. Um, yeah. Holy shit. Space sniping and zipping up to, to, uh, uh, rocks for cover and then

boosting and it's really fun. Yeah. The game is definitely a lot more interesting than its pedigree suggests. I'm thinking back as a survival horror game. There's a couple of interesting tricks that they pull in that game that I think are unique to that game, like completely unique to it, which is fascinating. In two or in one, in one, in one. Okay.

There's, there's at least one scare attempt that I believe it's the only game I have ever played that has tried to scare you in this manner. I do remember, so this I do recall because of, again, the other things that have been talked about over the years, I remember the, the discussion and yes, I am fully aware that, uh, I am not going to un-pucker at every save room. I remember I was told about this. Reggie doesn't know how I was told. I must have told you about that like a million years ago.

Yep. And I remember, yeah, no, there's, because I'm like, that was such a betrayal of trust enemy, the instant you touch the table, an enemy spawns behind you and attacks you as you're coming out of the animation. The betrayal of trust on that, when you told me that was so egregious. I, I, I remember to this day that somewhere that happens. But again, Reggie doesn't know. So we'll, we'll, that'll be fun.

Yeah, it's mean, right? That's not, that's, that's against the, the implied rules of the way a game works. Like how dare you, yeah. Try it at the fucking Hague for that shit. Um, not that game's great. I love that game. Uh, yeah. So have a good time with that.

We got, um, we got the, the first session recorded, gonna, gonna do another one this week. Um, and then upon completing a Mass Effect, we have started Mass Effect two. Uh, doesn't Mass Effect two feel like a real video game by comparison to Mass Effect? I'll say this and, and I'm looking at legendary editions. So I don't know how much the visual stuff is, is, you know, uh, improved in such, but like, it's not Mass Effect two barely got touched. Mass Effect one got a significant glow up is strong.

The glow up is very, very strong right off the bat. And, um, the big set piece it opens on is like waving, it's waving, waving the money in your face showing you like, Hey, we're, we're, we're spending the money. But also like here is like three or four celebrity voice actors in like the first half an hour, you know, uh, you got your Steve bloom immediately into, um, uh, what's his name? Um, um, old man, um, I'm Martin Sheen and then Martin Sheen right into Trinity. Yeah.

So, uh, I'm like, okay. Martin Sheen is like Martin Sheening all over that game. Like he, he, I don't think you hear him. Like he does not pronounce the H in humanity. He says humanity because he's just old man voicing it. Um, yeah. Good old Timmy. Uh, and so, uh, that is, that is, uh, that is a very interesting start as well.

So, um, with that, uh, and I'm curious, uh, as to what, what, uh, yeah, I'm curious as to your input on this. Uh, I want to know what you think hit me. So, um, I announced, you know, long ago that, uh, we're going to be, I wanted to start Mass Effect two because I never played it. Uh, originally it was going to play that with little V, but, uh, since we're not doing that, I kind of went, Oh, okay, here's an opportunity. Um, Reggie's going to jump on for part one and then I'll jump on for part two.

And that way I can like, uh, play it and he'll get it. Reggie will get up to speed and, uh, not be lost. And so you played Mass Effect one near-ish it's release, right? Exactly. Yeah. Way back when. So, um, as a result of that, re, uh, uh, Reggie's insanity in playing has created a very wild run of this game.

Um, which understandably folks are like, Oh, we really want to see it go through to two, but I'm like, I really want to play this game. I've wanted to for a long time and I don't want my first time experiencing it to be sidesaddle. I think that's an understandable thing. Like we only played it so that I can do this, right? So I'm taking over and I'm continuing and we've, uh, and I also wanted a really great opportunity to get a different.

Shep in there so that we can see like what the Jen Hale readings are like and what that totally different. Exactly. You could probably already tell. You could probably already feel it. I played Femme Shep in my run originally back in the day. It's crazy, right? It's like a completely different character.

I've never seen the, the, the male Shep one. So that contrast I thought was really cool. Um, so, uh, Blue Shepard has been introduced to the world. Of course. All right, of course. All right. Um, of course. So that, that being said, right?

I already kind of knew that going into this, um, there was like, it sucks. Cause if I had just played it, went right to two and whatever it wouldn't be in the situation, but there's like a bit of a damper in the air as a result of like not continuing the same save file over from, from some folks. Okay. So I need, I need details on exactly what is happening here. You played Mass Effect one yourself off-camera in the near recent past. Not near recent.

You're carrying. Oh, this is your ancient file? No. Well, okay. I played. What are you carrying forward here? I'm carrying forward. So, okay.

Basically I was going to just create a new character in Mass Effect two and then do the quick selection, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, um, I have learned a lot about Mass Effect's like back, you know, save stuff going on that I didn't know of. I was, I was kind of just going to do anything you goddamn want with that shit. So I was just going to go forward normally.

But, uh, what I found out was that if you just create a quick character with the past of, uh, the quick selections in Mass Effect two. Yeah, it doesn't actually flag any of the good shit. Every side quest that you've completed in one will not exist. And those people won't be in the game and you'll miss out on that. That's right. That sucks. So, uh, basically because of that, right?

Um, uh, Azna, who's been again, really helpful, uh, has, uh, and helped out with the Kotor two experience as well, um, basically said, I can make you a like hacked save file for all those choices so that you don't miss out on those characters. And did you, did you, uh, tell them what the choices that you wanted were for each thing? Because, um, okay. So, uh, I fully support that a hundred percent. Um, there is, I don't put this, oh my God.

So there's more to this work, but go on because there's other stuff. Do you remember the matriarch's writing quest? Dylan Aga's writings found in a public sack was one of the intros, one of the titles of an episode. Okay. So that carries through and there's a quest you can only complete in Mass Effect three, if you completed that in one and carried it forward. Very interesting.

Like it's, you are, you are discovering what might be the best player retention technology I've ever seen in my life, which is Mass Effect went to come out. And there's the suicide mission and all that. And everyone suddenly discovers that if they want to do Renegade or Paragon or any variation, what they need to do is go back and like 100 percent each game multiple times in order to ready save files up for what they want to do in three. And then when three came out, it's like, is it the end of the world that you didn't get all of the matriarch's writings?

No. Do you feel super, super great that somebody goes, oh, I'd actually need this stupid old Asari writing. I'd never get it. And you get to go actually. OK, well, I picked up a couple of some years ago. So, I mean, the thing is, is I would assume, though, that like when you're building a series forward, you're going to go back and try to make little, you know,

I remember this hook, that hook, you know, little bits and pieces. So that is stuff that, yeah. So I basically went, OK, mirror the choices that were done in the LP for the most part. And here's a couple of things I want different, right? OK, so, yeah, Mass Effect 3 is a fascinating game. I think we might have briefly mentioned it called Shepard with No Friends or something like that, an LP series in which somebody goes through Mass Effect and just tries to make as few friends as possible and kill everyone they can kill

and all that. Mass Effect 3, under those circumstances, completely falls apart. Like, the game's plot doesn't even really make sense anymore. OK. Well, and as a result, it's this weird thing. It's like Paragon or Renegade are absolutely, totally viable options, no matter which you can, except for the fact that Paragon, Shepard has so many more people to hang out with in all these tribute moments and action sequences and parties and that has all this extra custom

dialogue for when you're hanging out, you know. Well, even finding out about how, like, the since dialogue is not since your dialogue options are no longer hooked up to your charisma attributes, like your intimidate and your charm, it's now just going raw off your Paragon and Renegade, that means that mixing and matching or not sticking to one is going to punish you, right? Oh, yeah, it's crazy how people were like, I don't know about this dialogue system in Kotor 1. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And every game they ever made after it was like, no, pick one. Right. Pick one. That sucks, because in Mass Effect 1, that like insane fucking seesaw, Shepard was like, it was interesting to see how it plays out when you can just jump from one to the other. In this case, I've heard that Legendary Edition actually allows you to be a little more flexible. So it is, it is a little cleaner. It's a little calmer.

I think what happens is there, you know, there's there's there's a level up skill that you can get, which juices your Renegade and Paragon points by some percentage. Oh, yeah. I feel like I yeah, it's it's whatever your class skill is. I feel like it's that got buffed to be a little stronger. And they toned down a lot of the thresholds, probably. Probably and you only get to this when you get to three. But by far the biggest change they made to

three was mechanically. And what happened was that you have to have your war readiness above a certain number. You're basically building up the the Dragon Age, like get everybody together kind of thing in the background. But there weren't enough points to get the really good ending inside Mass Effect 3 at all until the DLC came out. So it was like, well, go play multiplayer to earn war readiness points if you really want the good ending.

OK, Yikes. So for a legendary what they did, because the multiplayer isn't in the fucking game, they have made it so that they added a bunch of situations where all your carry over stuff. So whether or not you hung out with somebody in Mass Effect 2 and you they you trust them and they'll help you out. All of those now feed into that system. And so if you were to start Mass Effect 3 raw,

yeah, you're going to have a hard time getting a decent ending. Gotcha. But if you actually went through those series and even attempted some form of completeness, you had to kind of drowning in points by the end of it. Now, hearing a lot of people saying the multiplayer is good, though, is like, yeah, that's not the point. That's the bummer. Yeah, that's not the point. The point is that you shouldn't have to jump out of your single player campaign.

The bummer, though, is that like people when they saw Legendary Edition were actually excited to go back to playing that multiplayer. But since the multiplayer wasn't going to be monetized the same, they didn't include it. But like Mass Effect 3's multiplayer was actually great because you got to play as a Solarian. You got to play as a Krogan. You got to play as almost every alien race that you you could think of.

OK, almost like in Metal Gear, when you can like play as the different types of soldiers and stuff as well. Yeah. Interesting. OK. Like there were volos that you could fucking play as in that multiplayer. Wow, OK. Well, so anyway, so that's what we did. So we imported a save and that's going right. So that was one of the one of the suggestions for like,

you know, what would be like a good run. So there's a bunch of other suggestions as well, including just like bug fixes, you know, hair issues overall. There's literally a way to crouch. I didn't know crouching was gone from the game, but there's a way to get back into the game. There's Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2 is this interesting. It's this form of game development that I don't particularly agree with,

which is people going, man, I don't know about cool down system for the guns in Mass Effect 1. Could you make that better? And the response is we can make it better by removing it. I don't know about the inventory system in Mass Effect 1. Could you guys like make that easier to navigate? Gone. Yeah. No more inventory. I couldn't believe it.

Yeah, that goes onward again. OK. Into three. And my like Mass Effect 1 is an RPG. Mass Effect 3 is a fucking shooter. It's actually fairly close in field to dead space. Huh. You're just moving forward and your build is is not as much of a up in the air to your to your yeah. Interesting. Well, so yeah, that was the thing.

The gun class restrictions were open as well. So ability to to use any type of gun. Was one of the mods that was turned on and that was recommended. And and then the one that is the the the topic here, certainly, is I was so I was basically I basically got a description of like how combat had changed and that now there were like unique shepherd skills that were not shared by the rest of the teams. So the idea was essentially like, oh, well, you could do something

that would be a class that gave you the unique shepherd skills instead of the ones that your team could do. And then you'd be playing like a kind of unique unique job, a shepherd. Yeah, a specter, right, specter shepherd. So I was like, oh, OK, sure. And I didn't really think twice about it. I'm like, that sounds cool, I guess. Yeah. And I had also heard about how certainly people are like very,

you know, attached to their classes and their abilities and the the the ways that you play, because it's a very identifying thing about shepherd in these games, especially to going forward. So for the most part, that seems to that seems to be something that it says, you know, seems like a cool idea. But I guess I was just I was a bit surprised because there's a lot of when we streamed it at the very least, a higher than usual amount of people were pretty negative on the idea.

And they thought essentially that like that was too much and that it would kind of bust the experience with the game. I then went like, OK, I wasn't I thought it would be fine, more or less. And then I got an explanation that it is still not that big of a deal. But either way, this is just the preemptive feeling about it. And I've seen it kind of lead to, in fact, some I saw a couple of people going between that and the whole like save, carry over thing. I'm just not even going to watch this.

And I'm like, oh, I don't want that response. That's not a real game. So so I've kind of come to this. I've had two minds about it and I've come to a pseudo conclusion. But I'm curious what you think. So I don't know the skills, the if you actually have the mod list, I can look it over while talking about this or not the modelist, but like the class mod that you're describing.

I would I would not have any personal issue or in in two, because the combat in two is fairly simple in three. They they actually went like pretty far out of their way to emphasize the difference between the classes and the way cool downs work. And like I played a vanguard in that game and vanguards in Mass Effect 3 don't shoot their guns. They they played like Dragon Ball characters. You charge that charge.

It is you know, but no, I like vanguard in three, specifically you charge. But then you start doing like shock waves and energy blasts and like shooting your gun is is so right. I got it. I got someone to it. Yeah, whatever. I saw I saw a repeating thing was in three. The combat is really good and it's unique.

Don't like like leave. Absolutely. Yeah. And I would say I would agree with that. And I think it was something about how when you use enough like biotic abilities back to back, there is a pop that like pays off that you can combo. Yeah, you can you can basically you can basically tag enemies with biotic and then you can pop the biotic with a different biotic.

But a character like Vanguard can do that by themselves. It's supposed to be a team synergy thing, but Shepard can just do it by himself. OK, but in this case with two, it's like, yeah, just going in with the unique shepherd abilities and that means that the team would have the the tech and the biotic and the, you know, the the the regular stuff that I would like, you know, have to coordinate with them. And then Shepard is just like a unique shepherd or so. So now this is all anticipatory

because as we discuss this right now, the first episode has not gone live on YouTube yet. It's about to tonight. Right. Once it does, I'm expecting to see the proportional amount of feedback that's going to hit. So I'm going to tell you right now the Mass Effect two and three LPs that I did have been were like the most backseaty infuriating ones I've done in like three years. Wow.

I would I would put it on the I would put it right. Now, I would put it as the live streaming equivalent of how you and I felt going through Dark Souls to I'm really not sure why. But people started to kind of go nuts, particularly in three, the way I was playing in a back seating way that I I was like repeatedly like gas lit that people were going nuts about the difficulty setting, OK, and that like hard is the new normal. That's come up a bit.

I got DMs like that. Yeah, that's not true. Yeah. And I spent like maybe the first 20, 30 percent of that game on hard and was like, yeah, no, I'm super pissed off and frustrated this whole time. And my response by the end of it was to put it to tell me a story, shepherd difficulty and just absolutely steam shitting my way through like all of it. Well, I saw I read that and I got I got the message from someone describing that. And I went, you know what, I'm just going to play it on normal

and I'll see how I'm doing and then I'll make a decision later because fortunately, you don't have to get locked in. So here's here's what I believe happened. These games got played a lot that like the the choice stuff as represented a thing where there were people that had gone through Mass Effect one and two, maybe five or six times to get their save files ready. And then they get back three and then they went through Mass Effect three, four or five times because the class game play was actually

really interesting as a result of that. I'm going to say the average person who played those games figured out a way to absolutely bust that shit open by the end of it. Like if you know how to build Garrus in three, Garrus can beat the fucking game for you. But people are coming into like it was actually the first time I played three and this will be the first time you play two and three. You don't know any of that shit.

You you don't have eleven years of of replaying the game every one or two years. I didn't even to bust it all open. I didn't know that like ability remixing would would be even a big deal. I just I was just kind of like, oh, that's a probably a unique way to play it. OK, sure. And so many of these games that like also like get modded a lot and regular. Sometimes there's stuff where it's just like, oh, yeah, aggressive, aggressive modding is like how this is expected.

Or, you know, I don't know. I'm just again, I'm just coming in, going, let's see what what's what, you know, so I'm taking I'm I I have a perfect way to explain this in a in a context that you're more familiar with, because I was going to use like infinity engine games like Baldur's Gate one and two or pillars where you go, hey, guys, I'm starting out. What's a good build? And somebody throws like the most min max shit in the world at you

that includes endings. You get items you can only get in the back 30 percent of the game as part of the bill. You're like, what the fuck is this? No, let's talk about fucking force lightning. Right. And the way people I've I've gone through Kotor one like three or four times. Hey, guess what? All of the force abilities are super broken.

Not just for slighting the stuns that stun everyone in the room the whole time. Yeah, those are incredible. But when you start, people that have beaten Kotor one six times are well aware that if you build a character a certain way and then go for slighting, that's the most optimal way to go it. And so they go crazy demanding that you do it the most meta way. And Mass Effect is kind of like that as well, where, well, what? You're you're going to put a machine gun on Garrus, right?

And then you're going to give him this ability for the armor piercing, right? Obviously, I'm like, I don't know. I haven't opened up his skill menu yet. OK, there's a million ways to break it, but these are the most broken ways that are perfect. Yeah. And also, I can't see you getting to a point with Mass Effect two or three that you can't clear it at all. No matter how you build your character. OK. Like, OK.

Yeah. So, I mean, we're going to see I'm just noting. I'm just noting the vibe I got initially was just like, oh, really? Yeah. Enjoy. Enjoy the pre-vibe. And it's and it's the one, two of the the import save plus that that kind of, you know, is, I guess, just, you know, any reliciting some of that feeling. But the thought I was kind of coming to, because I did see I did see, again, more discussion about like, oh, maybe, you know, like difficulty could like balance that out or so.

And then the kind of conclusion I went to was like, well, fortunately, I was also told that, like, this is something that can be updated or pulled in or pulled out without fucking up the save in any way. So, yeah, if I ever did want to change it in some way, it wouldn't at all like kill progress, you know. I'll tell you what, the save editors that the people built back in the day to fuck with the Mass Effect saves are incredible. You can fuck with those mid fucking.

Crazy. Seems really impressive. I literally just I had my save updated because the imported character had weird lipstick lipstick and makeup on that I didn't want. And I just had the save updated to remove that. So, like, it's pretty impressive. And like the Emmy tools, like installer for mods, it's a whole verified sub, like third party thing. It's crazy.

I was very impressed with how organized that entire thing was. So, yeah, but my thought. Was like, OK, let's just let me just see how this goes, I guess, and get a feel for it. Because again, I'm just like as someone who's oh, OK, so that ass in a sent me the the the the skill thing that you got going on. Oh, I understand what you're doing there. OK, you're you basically have the the fun ability off of like four or five

of the classes. So it's the unique shepherd stuff that that. Yeah, because nobody else gets to do charge right. Tactical clothe without the drone, I think no drone, but like the engineering would be that might actually break things if you put the drone on it. OK, no, that there's no there's no problem with that. Because in Mass Effect 2, you're defining you're playing a character and the unique thing is the unique class skill that you have given the thing.

Yeah, that actually looks great because it means you get to fuck around with Vanguard's charge, which is the only reason to play Vanguard, because that's a blast. But you also get the the the the invisibility and stuff like that. So essentially, one of the one of the things was that one of the major points that sounded interesting was the idea that like instead of having to run multiple intros and characters in each class to get a feel for what that ability would be like, you get to just experience

all the all the unique shepherd stuff in one run. And that way you get a like content driven. Yeah, the reason why that doesn't really work for three is because most of the classes have a bunch of unique shepherd stuff. It doesn't translate along a single skill. So so I like the idea of like, you know, seeing again, like what these unique abilities are and seeing which ones are my favorite. And yeah, I'll I'll we'll, you know, the first episode is going to come out.

We'll see how it goes and how that's that's received. But I am down to just like continue going if this feels cool and things are more or less like adequate. I'm also I can also look at this as a way to see which abilities I like more than others and like, you know, use that as a like a nice test drive and then like make modifications later on. But ultimately, I will say, hmm, ultimately, I'm sorry. I'm taking your your conclusion on this, that it's like it matters

way more in three than it does here. Yeah. Yeah. OK. 100%. So I will I would like to put something in that the fact that Mass Effect 3 plays so much better kind of causes a weird situation. Mass Effect 3 does play a lot better and they wanted it to appeal to more casual fans or shooter fans and it absolutely did. And there is an issue here. And the issue is, is that when you're talking about Mass Effect 1 and 2

and we're talking, we spent the majority of the time talking about Mass Effect 1 and 2 today, talking about gameplay and the way classes work. I don't care about that shit when I play Mass Effect 1 and 2. The reason why I played Mass Effect 1 and 2 and 3 is because I wanted to learn weird shit about a bunch of fucking stupid aliens. The conversation. And that's that's what Reggie was saying, too. That's what the game is like actually about.

Mm hmm. Like you go to a planet and there's a bunch of drunk aliens arguing about some drunk alien shit and you're like, oh, wow, I never thought about space strippers or whatever. And you're like, cool. Yeah, Reggie's Reggie's takeaway was basically like, yo, who cares? It's all about the conversation and the characters. This this is this doesn't matter.

You know, like just the reason my any strange. Yeah, the reason why it gets strange about three is because and this is the biggest. This is my biggest problem with Mass Effect 3 is that you go to you go to you go to the Asari homeworld in Mass Effect 3. Right. You go to the Krogan homeworld in Mass Effect 3, right? You're going all these spots that you wanted to go to, right?

And you know what you're doing there? You're fighting a big battle and leaving. Yeah, you know what? I didn't want to see Thessia as a battleground. I wanted to go hang out with a bunch of sorry people and go to their Capitol building and talk to them about their space government. About their go, yeah, their life. Yeah, right.

And so as a result, Mass Effect 3 is a big war. And it's like, but I don't care about the big war. I care about going and hanging out in a bar with a hand are and talking about does can a hand are even drink booze? I don't know how does it work? Right. Yeah. So I mean, the one thing that I'll say, well, not the one thing, but like what I do understand is like a part of what I do and what I've been doing for

the last, you know, era of the most recent era of woolly versus is that I'm going back to beloved classics to see kind of like, yeah, what's so beloved about them, you know, that's that's part of what's going on. And I can understand the perspective of like, you're like, well, if it's a beloved classic and this is the way it was experienced and you're not getting that experience, you're getting something that's going to be overpowered and it's going to like ruin what we had back in the day. I can understand that that point of view about it.

But I also, I mean, to be perfectly honest, like it was like, there's a lot that I don't know about that I'm not aware of. But like I've there's a pretty lengthy description as well about why you're still super vulnerable and you can still totally die and why you're not going to be able to just steamroll everything, even having all of this stuff. And if and as I suspect, if I if I fucking charge into a room full of enemies and then I kill one, I'm still standing and getting lit up by the rest of them. Well, welcome to the Vanguard lifestyle.

Yeah. So the idea, the idea essentially being that it's like the overpowered concern is not actually going to be that much of a concern. No, it's definitely not. Then I guess it, you know, it doesn't seem perhaps that bad. And I know for sure that like, even if it was, I'm somebody who's my aiming is not going to make the best of that ability, you know, my my my fucking. Yeah, I'm swinging that shit around using time stop as a lifesaver on my aiming

because they're God. This is why I just I just play in these games. I just remembered the one thing I forgot to say. Hey, the Mako controls like shit. Can you improve it? Gone. OK, so this is and this is one of those moments where because, again, on the outside, some people some like just some feelings

of like, oh, yeah, so there's some planning, probing mini game, mod that shit out. Don't even do it, right? And everyone's on board with that. There is no controversy. 10 out of 10 people vote, get that shit out of there. And it's like I installed a mod in my game so that I would just ping the planet and would instantly give me every resource. So it might go that way.

The I'm going to I'm going to do the thing to see it. Yeah, you need to feel the the frustration. I've done it a little bit, but I already really don't like the flying the ship around gas system either. Yeah, that's a that's a knockdown from just scanning the map and selecting things because I just want to look at the planet control for data. Mako control like fucking shit, right?

And but like the complete removal of rolling around on planets legitimately sucks. It just if it was less frequent and a little less dry, like when you're using the Mako on bring down the sky, it's an engaging, scripted, but like driven thing. You're having fun with it, you know, in the main missions, it's fine as well. It's just the just the empty planets that you're scraping nothing for like half an hour. I think what's really funny is in the DLC, they said, hey, you know, you guys miss Mako mission. So we gave you the Hammerhead mission.

It's like a tank, so it controls the Mako. And while it does technically control better than the Mako, the missions associated with the Hammerhead are unironically the worst shit in all three games. Damn, they are fucking terrible. Dang. OK. Well, yeah, I in some cases the the streamlining stuff like seems like an improvement in other cases. It seems like, yeah, removal is just like that.

You didn't have to throw the whole thing out with the bathwater. I mean, ammo types, I'm I'm going to wait and see. But it's an ability now that's that the characters have. And I'm like, huh, so like flame ammo is just a thing that I use on one of the Jacob or whatever, right? Like, yeah, one of the best abilities, any character that has that ammo has because, hey, do you want to just shred ammo? You want to shit? Oh, man, you know what?

You've met Jacob. Fine. We can talk about this shit. Stop putting humans on the ship at all. Like God default. Damn it. I take choices for you. I'm stuck. Fuck. Like the only one that's decent at all is fucking Vega in three. But like every single here's the team mates.

Oh, cool. Who fucking gives a shit? I am having the weirdest experience with with this intro because Jacob appears to be like the like the Caden type, you know? Yes, that's that's introduced. He aggressively looks like my brother. Oh, yeah, aggressively. OK, so I guess we're not going that way. That's weird.

Yeah, it's it's I was like, I've there's a whole, to be honest, the loading screen for that game has like fucking 15 characters. And I was like, what is that? It's so many people. What is happening? And then like when you go to land on a planet and you see all those spots, I was like, oh, my God, this is so this is twice the size of the team in fucking one wild.

Anyway, yeah. Mm, I'm having like hold it back if you have to hold it back. OK, so I just have I just have one thing. It's one thing to ask you. Are you confirming to me right now that you absolutely, positively will not be smooching it up with Jacob? I mean, unless something really wild happens in this LP, I don't I don't think that's what I've I've not set my eyes on him, nor have I known about it.

I don't know about the new characters too much, with the exception of Jack, who people have told me that's a woolly character like Jack for years. So I know what Jack looks like. But every other new character, I don't really know. So the but that's not what I've been thinking about. There's this bummer that there's a fun mod that you can put in, which literally just turns off the gender flags. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard about that.

And I wanted to use it. But I was I was concerned that it would just break Mass Effect three. OK, OK, there's people are freaking out, whatever it is. Hold it back. I'm yeah, I know people. I'm going to ask you to hold back. You're going to see people start to get super, super nuts around this time about characters.

OK, OK, Mass Effect two was the first game I ever encountered that was made by a Western developer in which I saw multiple people taking screenshots of sorry, photos of having dinner at their computer with fan art of Garris or Tally having dinner with them. Right. Like, like it is like it's where people started to just really, really go crazy. Interesting. We got to that level, did we?

Huh. I mean, and the and the takeaway from seeing those is that Jacob was never on the other side of that screen. I see. Is there a is there a percentage like chart out there for like most popular and least popular partners and choices? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, telltale style. OK. Yeah, somewhere. Eight percent of players across all three games went renegade,

which led them to the situation where they're like, we seems like we actually wasted a lot of time and money making renegade at all. Interesting. Which I would agree with. OK, so the thing is, though, admittedly, as we say in the cotor choices, it's not about being a sif that kills everyone immediately as soon as the conversation starts.

It's about agreeing to the quest and then betraying them later. Yeah, right. So yeah, that's what's so disappointing about renegade mass effect. When the renegade choice, yeah, well, the renegade choice in the first fucking 10 minutes is just like blow this crazy person away. Just shoot him in the back of the head. We ain't got time for this shit. I'm like, Jesus, can we find a middle ground between not paragon

and not shooting him in the head? You know, I'm like, can I lean in and then, yes, and it into something renegade? It's very it's very strange because the renegades are I've told you this before, but the renegades are different in each game in that renegade in one is a dirty cop and does does does anything for the mission. Renegade in two is like a like a almost violent action hero. Right. And renegade in three is like a war criminal, a monster.

OK, so based on the introduction of two, you can hypothetically say that your newfound lease on life also is a newfound lease on morality. Oh, absolutely. It's a perfect setup for that. It's an excuse to be able to go that far. Yeah. Hmm. Also, you you you I'd be in a bad mood if what happened to me in Mass Effect 2 happened. Yeah. Well, I rough and I also like I do

like how if you are doing what ninety one percent of players do and you are playing a paragon and you are doing it, let's say, like you're trying to be lawful good if your life is owed entirely Robocop style to like a corrupt organization. But in this case, now it's black market shit. You're yeah, you owe your big lawful good life to black market. What now? You know, are you going to do the lawful thing and delete yourself again?

You know what I mean? Like you weren't brought back under legal and, you know, upstanding council terms. So it's it's a nice like, I guess, like, oh, shit, I guess the world is not I will tell you one thing. And I'm sure a dead astronaut actually seems to be a great resource for this. But I will tell you myself is that in Mass Effect 2, they start the prompt system, which is outside of the usual dialogue system.

Our two you you're going to want to really think long and hard about maybe doing every prompt you see ever. Because like I played good rewards 100 percent goody two shoes. But when that red prompt comes up to just blow a dude away in the middle of his conversation, oh, I mean, look, here's what I will say is and people are very on the edge of their seats and they don't we who knows what's going to happen, but I'll say this.

Blue is not red. These are different people, but at the same time, like Reggie and I have had arguments mid conversation as if it's literally inside the character's head or just like, oh, what would red do here? Oh, is that what you want to do? OK, well, blue doesn't like that, you know? So that little that little interplay is already pretty fun. And we'll see what fucking happens, man.

You know, I'm I'm I'm just I want to know I want to know. You know, I won't spoil. Yeah, I'm just I'm in this weird space, particularly mass spec, especially since I refresh it for myself. That are you familiar with that control? Not controllably X KCD comic in which they describe playing every video game seven to ten years after release. So they are all fixed and they all run great and everything's great,

except there's just one problem. And then a character bursts on the scene and goes, oh, my God, guys, the cake is a lie and starts singing the fucking portal song. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like you are you are straight up 15 years removed from some dank memes that you are about to engage in. And I got to say, I'm excited. This is the point of my channel.

It's become the entire purpose is just digging through the attic, pulling out these fucking Xbox 360 cases with, you know, and like breaking the GameStop seal on them. Should should we have played these games back on their release? Yeah, you want that might have been a good idea. But barring that here we are almost 20 years later. Yeah, yeah. So we'll see.

We'll see how it goes to later today. But so I will. I will say, like talking about Mass Effect 3 and the combat and all this stuff, I'm just like, man, you know what I want Mass Effect 4 to be? I want Mass Effect 4 to take place on the Citadel. And you are a fucking Turian CSEC officer who's investigating a series of like anti human murders.

And there is no combat and you have 28 fucking stats that tell you what to do. Like there is absolutely no reason that this universe needs to have shooting in it at all. Yeah, the fact that what I know about Andromeda is that it's a million light years away in a completely new place is like I go, but why not just do more interesting things in the setting? And you can jump around and the combat's really exciting.

And it's like, yeah, I don't care. A big part of, you know, what Reggie and I were talking about and appreciating in one was how quickly this new sci-fi world like gets to thinking about the politics and the cultural implications and interplay between all these species and all these fun questions that you would love to explore with a series of spin-offs and books and wild shit. Dude, OK, so two things.

One, I just saw somebody in the chat say, Pat, just want Star Trek. You know who else just wanted Star Trek? The developers of Mass Effect One, which is why it has a grain filter and it has a soundtrack that is specifically reminiscent of the next generation. Not only am I saying that because you can tell, but they also said that in multiple interviews, that is the exact goal. Second of which Andromeda and going to a completely new galaxy is wildly disappointing on a level you probably can't understand

because set up one, every alien that comes with you is set. OK, what what what ones did we bring with us? Because you didn't bring all of them. You only brought like most of the Citadel races. OK, are they making new societies? No, it's just kind of little baby colonies of the old one. Second, do you have any new aliens you actually find in Mass Effect Andromeda? Two.

That's it. Are you ready to engage in a completely new galaxy? Filled with a new civilization? Guess what? There isn't one. Yeah, yeah. Then who gives a shit? Why did you go to a different gallon? What the fuck?

Um, like I I I just. I think, yeah, I'm seeing it as the the the the wording is fucking disco effect. Right. That's oh, yeah. Easy. You could have just you could just walk around, talk to people, learn more about this already really interesting society. And, you know, that I mean, that's also part of like what was immediately appealing with Kotor as well was just like, let's, you know, spend time on these planets learning the the mundane things, right?

The. Oh, yeah. So, by the way, somebody confirmed in Andromeda, there are no Corians, no Drell, no Hanart, no Elcor and no Volas. Council races, lesser races denied. Literally only the major council races, council races only. Yeah. It's like, oh, cool. And you still got to play as a fucking human. I am. I did not think that's what it was.

I thought Andromeda was you as a as a main character zipped to another galaxy and there's a whole bunch of new races. And it's just like doing Mass Effect one. No. I thought I was just like we're doing Mass Effect and me one. Yeah. Okay. Damn. All right. Like crazy missed opportunity, like embarrassing. Because I feel like even that would like if they had no council races,

no new, I all knew like that would have been unexpected, but still could be fresh if it was done well. Yeah. So, you know, this whole conversation makes me think of something like, do you know why you have two party members that are human in every game? It's so that the people who don't want to play with space aliens can just have an all human party. Human party. Yeah. And to me, that represents a massive failure of vision

because people who want to play as all humans in a fucking sci-fi game. Don't give a shit about the fucking sci-fi game. But if they want to get on the bandwagon of the latest gun shooter thing that's trending and everyone's on it and they just, God damn it. Why is Dante dancing? Why won't anyone tell me what's going on? Well, you know what? Well, you know what they say at the at the money is green, too. At the end of the day, we're all just animals. That is like, that is one of the most unbelievable red

caught, like I can't believe the red card. It's insane. Hold on. It's not a retcon. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, trust me, trust me. I that is it's that can be interpreted as either by a rare retconning it or the war in game cover story being delivered that way by on the news to make her seem like they're they are lionizing the Marley in background. And it's like, totally aware of that.

That could be a way to. But that is incredible. What a line. And so here's the thing, right? That moment is the thing that I care about Mass Effect for, which is like this fucking interplay between all these interesting new care like the races they created for Mass Effect are fucking incredible. Like the Krogan are my favorite analog to the fucking Klingons ever.

They're great. Tired warriors are a fucking vibe. I'm so happy that I met another one right away. You know, like, yeah, there's there's the ones you shoot, but the ones that are tired are really fun to talk to. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to seeing where the fuck it goes, man. The the, you know, but like it's clear the money's in play now. They got the, you know, they got the shiny budget.

They got the big names. They got a lot more going on in the even when the cut scene camera lighting like kicks on, it's like, you know, some of the hair is not floating off the character's heads as badly as it used to. And I mean, beyond that, I'm also looking at the size of that party. And I'm like, you barely had time to like really get all the like hanging out with and talking to your party members in one. How the fuck are you going to spend enough time with everybody in this?

So I'm going to answer this in a in a vague way, but the biggest complaint about Mass Effect 2 is that it feels a little fillery. And the reason why that is is also the reason why people love it so much. Finding the gang and hanging out with the gang is literally the entire game. OK. Yeah, like search for friends like the the roster. In two is fucking gigantic. It's it's stupid how big the roster is.

But ninety nine percent of the game is putting the team together. OK, I mean, the way it introduces all of those, like, you know, points of interest right off the bat, it does feel like you're like this is like you're so in Mass Effect, you get your three main missions, you know, before you start before you hit Vermeer. And like in this case, it feels like, yeah, you're going to it's a big list. Yeah, no, it's it's characters. One main mission, the other set of characters, the end of the game.

And so it actually ends up giving a lot of really great replay value because you go, well, I actually would have rather hung out with Thane on 80 or 90 percent of the missions in the game. So next time I'm just going to go grab him immediately. Yeah. And just do everything that I possibly can. So I landed on the on the asteroid on Omega and I met Cable. And I went, we're going back to the ship so I can hang out with Cable. And I just put him on immediately because I'm like, yeah.

And then you're like, oh, no, Cable is one of the DLC characters that did not get the same amount of resources that the other ones did. And that when you go talk to him, he doesn't go into a scene. He's just like an NPC. I see. OK. But he does have a loyalty mission and it is good. OK. I like the cut of his job, you know, nothing wrong with that. Hey, let me ask you, you went to Omega, right?

Yep. Did you meet a vortia? No. OK. Not yet. If you think that Batarians wait, are they the bats? They are the freak demon assholes. The morbing, the morbing aliens. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like they feel like they were invented to be fodder evil to be shot. Like I was super I. Yeah, OK. That race, I said it immediately.

I'm like, this is such a disappointment. Like it sucks when you meet like exactly you meet putties, you know, and you're like, oh, I'm talking to putties right now, like they're. And I'm like, it could like it would be great if you walked away from that first guy and met one who was like, oh, that guy is weird. We're we're we're not all like no, no, they're they're they live for two years and they're fucking evil and you can kill them. Yeah. No guilt. Yeah. No guilt. I feel like I'm like, damn it.

Like it's a it's a fodder. I can feel the fodder of that evil monster race. And it's like, don't do that. Don't do so. Hey, be a real race. That'll I'm going to. You remember when you fought those robots when you in the intro and that was like a cool new robot enemy. Oh, in the in the lab. Yeah.

Yeah. OK, so you're going to go through Mass Effect 2 and I want you to pay attention to how many enemies do you fight are either robots or mercenaries? Specifically, it's something like 99 percent of the enemy roster is those robots or mercenaries of some kind. I mean, in one, you're shooting cultists, you're shooting scientists, a lot of gas, a whole lot of like three types of zombies, really. Yeah, you've got you've got like, yeah,

like three like different kinds of space zombification. And then a handful of thresher was in Yadda Yadda. But anyway, yeah, the fucking goblins that that are introducing themselves as a new race. And I'm like, oh, my God, man. This is what it's like outside of council space, man, Batarians and fucking Vorka. And you want to live out here at bare minimum?

I think all races not all like like at bare minimum, all races, you should be able to see like what the extremes of like a like, I guess the, you know, the Paragon or Renegade like idea of what they could be. Like I don't think there's even a Vorka with like a name ever. That's it. I'm like, if the race dictates that you can only be like, for example, so far, Batarians are scumbag assholes, but they're like

merchant assholes that are like trying to slay sell slaves. And they're kind of just like business oriented while being pieces of shit. So like you'll get a range of, hey, man, let's just talk and talk about our greed. And I want to deal you want to deal maybe we can barter while I'm a piece of shit all the way to let's crack that planet open. I'm an evil piece of shit. And at least there's a range there, you know, I need to meet more of them. But like the way they're just like, it's absurd.

All right, all right. Anyway, let's let's see where it goes. Yeah, so OK, cheers. I appreciate that. That's a people are informing me that there is one Vorka with a name. Wonderful. And then, yeah, so multi versus is now officially out. So I was able to plug a monitor into the PS5

and then put that in front of Reggie and then we played some co-op. Queuing against the world together, and that was pretty fun. Oh, is that how you did it? Because the page ran in a situation where it doesn't have local co-op versus online. And what a stupid fucking oversight that is. Sucks. It should let you sign in to a friend's account. Let's as long as you have, you know, I understand you need a WB account to play, whatever. Fine, let's let a friend sign in secondary and then local because you can local versus

each other and you can local versus bots. But, yeah, no local online. Yeah, so that game's fucking incredible. I fucking love it. I fucking finished the battle pass on it yesterday. OK, yeah, lots of fun, man. The the ability as well. So like I did that.

I got also like did some some queuing with a soul Carl and like it was one of those things where, yeah, like he was like, hey, I'm having a hard time figuring this game out. Like there's some stuff that's not really clicking. And I was like, oh, cool. OK, we can just you can you can like it's a fighting game where you can go on with somebody and like if you know what like they're lacking or if you want to like, you know, go over stuff or figure out some tech or whatever, you can do that.

And the two v two mode is like, yeah, it's a great like way to get someone that might experience just losing a bunch and turned off from the genre. Like if you have someone with you that knows it better and can help you team up together and work together, that feels pretty good. It feels good when you can work together and do shit like that. It's it's so far. It's fucking doing it. My it.

I was going to say I have a couple of now that I've spent some time with it, a couple of nitpicks, but overall that that package is strong. So yeah, I have some nitpicks. I still miss throwing like only a couple of characters have throws and I miss it. Throwing and blocking our things. There's a couple of there's a couple of like bugs that show up more often than I would like Batman killing himself with his grappling hook is one of them. They said they fixed it.

No, they didn't. When one of the four players is on a bad connection, roll back. Oh, yeah, fucking horrible. Yeah, I'm playing now. I heard that like if you don't play cross play, it apparently improves that. Yeah, but like I've I've had a couple of matches. Like it's starting to go more frequently because like, yeah, there's matches where I'm like, I'm on PC, but my partner's on Xbox.

And then I'm playing against two PlayStation users. And like one person will just start like fucking up the rest of the match kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. There's a there's some balanced stuff where like Taz and Finn need to Finn needs something. Finn's ridiculous. His sword, he's a sword character, but his sword hitboxes are they out. I mean, priority seems to be like always in his. Oh, man, I saw a great I saw a great video describing a smash

player breaking down why fins hitboxes are so good. And they're describing well, you know, what you would expect is that the stronger of an attack is in terms of power. It should go through another person's hitbox until it hits them. But in multiverses, the only thing that matters is hitboxes. And I'm like, you mean like every fighting game fucking ever other than smash? It's it treats hitboxes like any other regular fighting game. It's not factoring in literal like the model of strength.

However, as a has no priority system, Finn's got this massive fucking disjointed hitbox that is pretending it's in a smash game, but it's not. I mean, it just feels like every exchange in neutral always is in his favor. And then like your best bet is like if you get a nice whiff punish on something, that'll be good. But if you're both going to trade, there's no real clashes that happen. He's just going to beat out what you're doing with the sword. Yeah, be in particular as well with the last hit of that just rocks your world.

There's a couple other things as well where priority and hitboxes are just wild. I'm the issue I'm having is OK, so there's a there's a couple of characters where they have like a gimmick that'll be like a just a thing that they can rely on, right? So right, Superman's flying grab, Shaggy's Falcon kick. And Iron Giants, but Stomp, for example, right, are things that like they they they beat out most of what challenges them, unless it's like a projectile or so. If you're coming to Jake's House Drop, it's similar.

And with I mean, Iron Giants, but Stomp is actually just not working properly because it glitches through the bottom of the stage and hits you extra times and stays active. Don't worry about it, even if you spot dodge it, which is like wild or whatever, right? But with those others, those things are like the fact that the movie is that good is I can. I think that's fine. What is kind of weird to me is that I didn't realize because Garnet is a character with a bunch of moves that have cooldowns. I thought everyone had a bunch of cooldowns.

No, it is character specifics and move specific, where some people have almost no cooldowns and some moves certainly don't. So I was like, oh, wait, what? So it's just up to what you determine is should not be spammable, I guess. Yeah. And like with Superman's fly, with the Falcon kick and with the down B, with Iron Giant, I'm like, people are using this move, this move. Like it's a good move. People are using it to replace footsies.

They're using it to replace neutral entirely because there's no cooldown. If you made a cool down on the move, they'd have to use it and then fight without it and then get it back and that would be fine. Yeah. So that is interesting. I follow the co-founder of the studio and the director and probably the best example of what the fuck is going on with this is Wonder Woman. So it has a cool down of like 20 seconds and the move sucks. So like people are like, what is what is going on with that?

When Taz, even his nerfed spin is 100 times better than Wonder Woman's Lasso. And open beta means there's going to be just a lot of changes coming. I hope so. Experimental is all over the game. So LeBron came out and he don't list it as experimental. So something that happens is like, you know, Garnet is not a character you're seeing online too much right now. But I mean, I fucking love her.

But like what will happen is like you do her up B, which is like the point finger with the electricity, which is all right. But for the most part, like getting people to stay in a certain area, it's like you're not really going to stick around like people will avoid it. So it's like it's not fantastic as an up B. But then it gets has a big cool down on it. Then you do her rocket punch, which is great. And it has a big boy is it?

Holy shit. Fantastic. And it has a big cool down on it, understandably, right? And then you do like her her like good normal. So she's got the aura or a punches. And then she's got her air neutral attack as well, which is really solid. And because the decaying effect where you use a move too many times, it can affect two moves at once. So you'll be decaying on two things

that you're alternating between while you're in like in neutral. But if I'm if I'm trying to hit a fin who's like sort is I'm not going to use my bad moves. I'm going to use the ones that have the best chance of armoring through, right? So I'll have like two cool downs going, two moves on decay. And I'll be like, well, that's I currently am not able to really fight right now. Yeah. So and if other characters went through that, then it would be like, OK, they would be in that situation, too.

And then you'd have to plan a bit around it. But seeing as, you know, again, they just like some things just can keep going. And there's no downside to it. It's like, well, you should probably allow moves to be great, but just make them seldomly like like spam. Let me ask you a question. How much of your time is one V one versus two V two? I've played less than 10 one V one matches.

Yeah, I played a couple of days as one V one. And then I was like, wow, they were not kidding that this game is not meant for one V one. It's it's a less fun game. It is a dodge shitfest with high priority normals that takes forever. It like it is absolutely dependent on you kind of not being able to pay attention to two fighters simultaneously. I am eating like I've I've never eaten my words like like the moment I started the first beta and I went, OK, what I want is one V one, no perks.

I can't believe how much I don't know I don't I don't want to play that ever. Yeah, and I didn't know because I'm like, give me give me this weird WB smash thing. Right. Yeah. And it turns out that like it was not built for that aggressively. And that is a less version of the game to play. Like you look at Rain Dog, right? Where I'm playing Rain Dog and training.

I'm like, this character is fucking garbage. What the fuck this piece of shit support character. And then I play against, you know, Iron Giant Rain Dog. And I'm like, oh, Christ. Ouch, Velma goes from being awful to unbelievably strong when you have a good one and a support character to tank or distract. As long as she can stand back and snipe and support, she's doing amazing things, but she needs that distraction, you know.

And yeah, like and then there's things to as well. We're just like, yeah, you're you're whatever that tag attack used to be or tag ability used to be is now just the solo version of it, which is extremely limited utility, you know. I mean, and then the other bit to where it's like I mentioned it at each time, but like the perk adds something to your special move that is like important and massive. Yeah, no, like the the difference between Superman

with the extra range or Superman with the the fire on the ground after the stomp is like a big deal. Yeah, Bugs Bunny having a taunt that just becomes a landmine to put in the fucking middle of the stage is a world of difference. Being able to use the rocket punch to set the the star for Garnet instead of having to actually use down B in the on the spot wherever I want it to be is massive. It's like it adds

because she has bad recovery otherwise, right? Like she's got basically her jumps, which you you got to go with. And then like you can use her neutral air to maybe try and get back. But this is but the star is what's going to save you in a lot of situations. I find that really helps with it. So it is clear that like the perks are intended. That's what that that's that's the way I would really like to see attack DK turned down in general a little bit.

And I say this as somebody plays mostly Bugs Bunny and Superman because OK, I knocked somebody up, right? They're in the air. They're trying to fall back down to the stage. I can up a them forever, right? Like that that up attack with Bugs with the bat, not beating that once you perfectly just through it. Like it's going to be absolutely everything.

What possible reason am I to have to stop doing that? Other than the game going stop it. You've hit them too many times. It's too good. Like tone the move down then. So that I because what are my options? Nothing. There's no option other than this. And it's just it's super good.

Um, if Superman knocks you to the top of the screen and you're in that upper 25 percent, let's say, and he flies up towards you, you fucking know what's coming. Yes, it's the grab and pop and like you're out. There's no avoiding that unless you spot dodge it perfectly. And so you have to wait for that call out moment. I feel like there are yes, situations where that like and again with Garnet, you know,

you feel that decay come on a lot. The only way to make up for it is by putting on some damage perks. You know, putting on some triple jump perk for her, for example, I do really like how the perks are very minor in terms of statistical upgrades. They max out at like 10 percent. Yep, that's it. You stack up that you can do some wild shit. Like like we put on all damage perks one time and stacked them. And it was kind of nuts.

We had a little game plan going that was like two people punching you equals. You get to 100 immediately. And that was pretty sick. But anyway, for the most part, man, it's it's it's it's a yeah, this is a pretty solid launch for them. I have to say, this is going to sound ridiculous coming out of my mouth. LeBron James's kit is pretty interesting. It's pretty interesting.

So he has a really interesting kit. Yeah, putting a really a normal human basketball man in your game is usually pretty boring, but because he's with the cartoon characters, all the ball mechanics and the stealing mechanics, it's he's weird. He's like a weirdo in this cast. You know, the the ability like, yeah, part of his loadout, the ability to fucking pass to your partner, your partner's attacks all become a ball projectile.

And when that ball hits the enemy, you teleport to them into a combo dunk, which if you are off screen is a spike. It's fucking sick, you know, it's it's it's really great. And then the fact as well that like, like the things where like Aria can like steal the opponent's face like Kirby or steal the friend's face and use that, you know, or like use the knife to teleport to the enemy or use it to stab you and then teleport to you like it's pretty it's a it's a unique way to design this game.

And I think one of the other things is that like, I don't know if you saw the video of it comparing itself to strive. OK, so the rollback is quite good, unless one of the people is fucked up. But that's usually the case with any fighting game. Children on Wi-Fi are going to be a problem. Yeah. So what it was is, OK, hey, kids, I want to play a fighting game. And it goes to boot on PS5 and goes like from boot to match. Oh, yeah.

And it was it was you have already finished a full length match on multi versus before you even get to the the Heaven or Hell Dual One. Let's rock in in strife. If you're not using tootsiegeki, it's a three minute boot up. If you're using tootsiegeki, it's 45 seconds. Um, but multi versus you can queue up like like, yeah, probably in. Like, in that time, you can get into a match. I cannot possibly get across how important it is that when I feel like

playing multi versus, it is like 90 seconds from that thought in my brain to me playing a match online. And it's 60 seconds to the lab while you're waiting for. Yeah, like it has created a situation in which, like, like when I wanted to play Street Fighter or Strive, I'd be like, huh, I'd really like to play some Strive tonight and sit down and get it with versus. I'm banging out matches in between like notorious monsters and 14.

It gets better with mods, but it's not not by much. And I've never you want to talk about how fucking impatient like Smash players are. I've, I couldn't believe it. But when I saw the, um, so that rollback mod, uh, they can't even wait for the kids to grow up. Well. Check it off the list for this week.

Um, when the rollback mod came in for melee and there's the modified like tournament version of the game that you can play, uh, slippy, uh, um, uh, which was made by fizzy, you can boot the game up. And as soon as you do, it drops you right onto the two player versus all the rules set mode. Like, as soon as you click the button, the next thing you hear is, choose your character. Right.

You know, like the level of like, we don't want to fuck around wasting time. You could not trim the fat any harder than that. You know, so, um, yeah. It, uh, you're enjoying the aftermath of, uh, I saw somebody say it can't even wait for a negative COVID test, which I also think is really good. That's a good one. Yep. Yep.

Anyways, so, you know, uh, it's, it's basically at a point where, um, the fact that you just boot up right away is, is also massive and, and, and like, yeah, it feels good. I just, I know we'll never see it, but I do want to know how many of these bad rollback matches are children on wifi. Cause you're fighting, you can tell when you're fighting children. You, you know, um, yeah, I just give me the percentage. If it's 85% wifi, then you never played fortnight, but this is what it feels

like, feel it, feel it. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I, I want to know if it's 85% wifi users, then fucking hit me with the truth. I just, yeah, I am curious to know which side it's on. You know, um, so, uh, so I just want to talk a little bit about the character select, um, so I did unlock, uh, cake as the skin.

Oh yeah. Uh, and I can confirm that just like Shagworth, um, it is absolutely the voice actor that played cake in like three episodes total. And what's more important than that is that she has just as many unique voice lines as Jake does. Yes. Um, which is a whole new character skin and it's an entire skin. It's, it's kind of wild because it, it opens it up to like, like, you know,

the, the character slot fucking clone discussion around smash. Yeah. Now that is stupid. Do you want cyborg Superman in the game? Yeah. He'll play like Superman and he'll just have a bunch of quotes and dialogue as cyborg Superman. Right.

Like, yeah, um, um, like Yuri in, in with Jill's colors is Gil's colors is not as hype as Gil sounding like Gil, you know, like actually do it. And yeah, the, the, uh, the alt costumes do completely have that, that effect. That's, that's awesome. You want, you want what, what Batman character do you want? Do you want Robin or fucking Batgirl or Terry? Yeah, fucking skin them up and get the voice actor and they're going to play this like, like it expands the potential roster enormously.

The other thing is that LeBron came out after the beta was out for a week and it sounds like Morty's coming out next week. So it sounds like that massive gigantic list is well underway and they might be doing like every two weeks. The pacing is, which is intense. The pacing being that, like, if there's a new character, like every couple, like every two weeks or so, you're constantly being like, oh shit. Yeah, I guess I got to go see what that's about.

Yeah. Yeah. And then they have a six month break when they, they blew their load and they make the new characters and they have the season and whatever. Also, like with the whole, like dailies and whatnot, again, with the whole free to play bit. Um, I was surprised that they would let you do your, those, those quests. You re-roll them one for free.

The others are, you know, paid with the, with the gold or whatever. Yeah. Do it with bots though. Fuck it. You can do it with bots and they let you do it. I was like, oh, really? You're not going to be stingy about that. Interesting.

All the weird ones I do on bots because fuck getting three assists a goddamn real game. Yeah, I'm, I really didn't expect that. I thought they would force it out of a real game and then make it so that you have to prolong your progress, but surprisingly not. You know, so, okay, sure. Um, let you get all your cosmetic shit or whatever you're looking for that way. And then the trade, uh, and then, um, um, perk training as well to be like, okay, like two or three matches in, you can now just equip whatever perks your

partner has, uh, awesome, really great, really smart, just, you know, um, way to help a new player catch back up and, you know, get, get like not completely lost in the, in the, the, the matches against really strong players. Hey, man, I, uh, would love to keep talking about this. I got to take that dog out and I got to stand up myself. I've been holding it in for like two hours. Same. So I will be right back.

Okie doke. Um, so yeah, that's a whole lot going on. Just want to give everyone a quick heads up as well. Uh, next couple of weeks are going to be, uh, pretty busy and hectic. So I'm not going to have a normal recording schedule. Um, I'm going to basically be out of town visiting some in-laws and doing some stuff. Um, so I'm going to be gone and we're going to have an irregular recording schedule for at least two, three weeks.

I'll still, uh, have the podcast set up with me. So I'll be able to record podcasts remotely. Um, but, uh, otherwise the regular LP and stuff is not going to be going on. And yeah, no, I'm not going to Evo this year. Unfortunately going to be missing out on that. We'll hopefully catch the announcements. But anyway, all this to say, uh, this week schedule is going to be like the, uh, yeah, we're going to do a week of, uh, this week, pretty normal, I think, except for, um, no

get into fighting games on Saturday. Then next week I'm going to be gone except for the podcasts. And then after that, it'll be like one or two days and then it'll be gone again. So basically LPs are going to go on break for a bit, just a, just a heads up. Um, it'll get losers next week. You're stuck watching me. There you go. It'll get normal again.

It'll get normal again by the third week of the month. So there's the heads up. Okay. Well, um, now that we've done one fifth of the podcast. Oh, I mean, it's been a buildup to the end of Elden Ring, the beginning of dead space and the end of Mass Effect. End of Mass Effect. Well, yeah, no, no, it's all the things happen simultaneously.

Yeah. So I got two things going on that don't have to do a video game. So I guess I should get that shit out of the way, uh, right now. One, if you're watching the video version of this podcast, what you could see is that I'm able to lean back in a new chair. There you go. I got my, my M body came in the mail. I put it together.

Yeah. Um, well, I really can't. It's assembled. What the fuck are you talking about? You basically just roll it out. No, it is not assembled. You absolutely have to assemble a significant portion of it. I don't know what you're talking about.

The two M bodies, uh, I got were the legs had to go into the thing at the bottom. And that was pretty much it. Oh, well, I had to, uh, I had to put the, the, the spine. You have to undo, you have to undo the, the part and then clip in the spine. And then you have to screw that back together and then to clip it on top. And then you have to put in four screws on that. And then you have to put the, the seat of Jester in. Okay.

No, I, I mean, for me, it was mostly knobs and stuff, but like I didn't have that on the one. Anyway, no, no, I had to assemble. Anyway, uh, wow, what a great fucking chair. The very first day I got it, I had a, a double stream where I decided to play to Zangief, what are you doing? Hey, I had a double stream where I had planned to play two games. And I was like, I don't know if I could do two full streams back to back, not even a single butt hurt, even a little, not even a little bit of butt hurts.

Just excuse me. Just, just, yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep. And there we go. Don't chew that. That's a pen. You will die. No, I'm not going to do it again. You already got the gift.

All right, a bit. All right. Hey, so my, my, my, my fat son decided that he wanted to write on the inside of his mouth. Oh, fucking moron. Don't do that. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, no, this thing is super comfortable.

It's absolutely worth the money. It's a very expensive chair, but like it is night and day, not just between any of the setups that I've sat on in my streaming or LP career, whatever you want to call it, but in terms of any fucking office chair that I picked up at Staples over my entire life, it is, it's great. They're great. It, and my feet are on the ground. It does what it promises and, and leaves you getting up from it after a long

period of time, feeling normal. Feeling like, oh, my butt's a lot. Maybe I should have stood up more than once in eight hours. But aside from that, what chair is it? It's a Herman Miller M body. It's a good chair. It is prohibitively prohibitively expensive. Oh boy, is it?

Do not talk about it on my stream and people are like, what? It is a very good chair. It is completely unaffordable. Yeah, but they last like, like 20 years. So, and you can reupholster them and shit if you need to. I mean, that whole thing about, you know, like, treat it like a car, treat it like a bed, it's going to, it's going to be a lifetime investment. It's like, it makes, it makes sense.

It's just, it sucks that the average regular chair. Yeah, I couldn't have some basic engineering to get this type of safety. And, and I, I felt very good that I got a 15% off, but even that's just the tax. Oh, I bought them both used. I fucking, I, I key gg'd that shit. And I, and I, and I saw them, uh, sit for sale. I hope you enjoy sitting in a pile of cum. Yeah.

Well, they were in the box, but they were just, you know, not from the actual place. So, um, I love it. There you go. That is my review of the chair. Good chair. I also have something of a more personal note to, uh, to discuss in which I recently, uh, on a whim decided to spit in a tube and send my DNA off to a 23 and me DNA. Analylsys, uh, company in order to find out genetic traits and ancestral background.

You're in the database now. You know that, right? Database. I am aware. I'm in the database. And, uh, that means that, that thing that you made, you know, you're in the database. The thing that you may or may not have done or set any other criminal in your family might have done is now totally, absolutely.

You can fucking, you're going to be logged. They got your data. Okay. Yeah. No, they got the, um, who was it, the golden state killer or whatever. I think there's somebody that was like a killer that was like unsolvable for a long time. And then, um, someone related to him did a 23 and me and they're like, Oh, wait, who are you?

That's awfully close to the evidence we found on these crimes on the back then. Oh, here he is. He's an old man now and they fucking found him that way. So it was pretty wild. So there were a couple of things that I was looking forward to on this. Um, one was, I'll have a, I'll have a chart of my ancestry. The other was that I was a little bit concerned. I was told that my dad had a wild period in his youth and I was concerned that I would

like put the DNA in and be like, you have 16 bonus siblings. I do not. Okay. In fact, when I, when, uh, when I punched in my fucking DNA into the family chart, the closest I could get was like a cousin three times removed in Alaska. Like, nope, everything is as it appears. Okay. And confirmation that Paige and I are not related.

Excuse me, sir. I'm waiting for the butt. I do have my ancestry results, which are far more interesting. So I am 89% French, which is not French enough for Quebec. I'm 9% British, 1% Scandinavian, 1% Italian, and most surprising of all, I am 0.1% African. Sure. Hey, well, allow me to introduce you to what we like to call the one drop rule. You know what's funny?

You say introduce, but when this, when this came up, I turned to the page and some friends of mine might, well, Willie taught me about the one drop rule. So I'm basically black, right? Is that how that works? Would you like to take it for a test drive? You know what? You know, you know, there's, there's something, so, well, you've been, I've been friends with you for decades, right?

And let's take an example of a good friend of mine that I was talking to about this, my friend Striden, everybody on my channel knows him. He's, he's the head mod. He's a good guy. And he says to me, Pat, don't trust Willie. Willie will tell you basically what you just told me because he thinks it's really funny to trick you. And he's right.

Take her for a test drive. This old beauty. Get a feel for it. Get your hands on the wheel, feel the clutch, feel the, the, you know, shift gears a couple bit. Take her for a test drive. Come on. What if you like it?

What if you like the feeling too much? That's the real, that's, you know, you might, you never know. I can't. Well, if I like it, then I can't stop. I'll just have to do it in secret. Um, I mean, you like poor punch mom, like you don't even know. I'm just like, I'm going to get you one of these days. One of these days.

She's like, I'm not going to say you're bringing in your inward past white people trickery. I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, hold on a minute. What about when you're singing your favorite hip hop songs and no one's around? Not even then. What do we do? And she's like, no, I don't. Cause you never know. People could be around.

What if we'll see, we'll see. So I guess I am Dr. Spaghetti now 1% Italian. That's like a whole meatball. Right. Confirmed. Absolutely. A million percent.

And dude, fucking 9% and you're, and you're loyal to the queen. You're part of the Commonwealth. You might as well fucking get the tea and crumpets out right now. So here's, here's, here's where this actually leads into. Apply for a license for that knife. Here's where it actually loads in. So I was not, uh, ready for this. But in the past week, I've been playing the Witcher.

I've been playing live, alive. The remake of live, alive. And also Xenoblade Chronicles three. I think it's live, alive. I thought it was live, alive. Damn. Okay. I can't, I can't get an answer because everyone just talks to me in text.

Right. But regardless, all of these games have voice acting and literally every single one of them has just an astonishing amount of British in them. So live, alive or live, alive has a bunch of characters all over the Commonwealth. Um, Witcher has a bunch of fucking dumb ass, like, like criminal sounding British people. But Xenoblade Chronicles. Oh yeah. Dear God Lord hell.

This is now the third game in the experiment that is aggressive British dubbery. And it is, it is, it is so British that it feels like a made up fantasy language that these characters are speaking. Like Xenoblade Chronicles three has your lady healer start yelling bollocks and people are committing like side quests starts with core blimey core blimey. I mean, I think my introduction to this, like this dub world was through the last story. And like the, it was such aggressive British dubbing that they brought in multiple kinds of British.

They had like, they had the Cockney, you know, the Londoner slang, and then they had someone with like a Northerner's accent and like, they've got, they got Ronnie's voice actor doing a Welsh cat girl. Right, right, right. Yeah. That's when you, when you know, when they're going hard on it and it's like, okay, we have to do something that would be the equivalent of like a Southern Texan draw. What do we do?

People, people are doing like, they're calling people mop its. There's a guy into like a cockney accent when you see a rare item going, oh, that's a fancy do door in it. And you're like, God damn. Wow. Fuck. It's crazy. I was listening to someone speaking.

God, what the fuck is it called? Shit. Scouts. Breton. Breton? I've heard of Breton. So. Yeah, they have 50% magic resistance in Skyrim.

So it's also a, it's a Celtic province in France. And it's, they speak like a language that is French and Celtic at the same time. And it's. That sounds awful. It's fascinating. The worst thing in the world. It's your hearing. You're hearing like, yeah, like all, you're hearing like the French accent cuts coming

in on a completely different language. It's wild. Anyway. Yeah. So I just wanted, it's, it's. It's funny though. It's consistently hilarious. Yep.

Yep. It is. It is interesting that like every time something gets dubbed, there's always a lingua, there's always a linguistic equivalent in your given dialect of, or in your given language of like, this is what Hicks sound like. And this is what city people sound like, you know. Yeah. You know, you can't say Ben versus fucking, you know, or can't say Ben rather.

Yeah. All that shit. It's just like, it's, it's, it's what we do. And there's always an equivalent that you can find that'll, that'll be appropriate. So I will say that despite the fact that Xenoblade is going as hard as it can, it's so, it's so British at times it is a kind of difficult to understand for me. Like it's, it's like, I don't, like they'll say a sentence like, I don't know what a single sentence meant.

Despite that, Witcher is actually even weirder about it because everyone in Witcher 1 talks with a fucking dirty fucking cockney accent, right? Just intense. Except for any character that matters, which is where it gets actually very strange. You're in what appears to be Fantasy England and every random piece of shit on the street is, or is it Witcher? Yeah. Right?

But anyone with a human name has an American accent. Oh, that is. Anyone that matters has an American accent. Oh God, it's like, oh no, if we don't do that, they won't, you won't care about them. Yeah. Oh God. And like, it's, it's super fucking weird. It's absolutely fucking bizarre.

You can, you can tell kind of who's important based on how difficult it is for like me to understand them. When I walk up to Fat Fred in the goddamn inn and he goes, oh, we fought for money, you won't care. I'm like, okay, well Fat Fred doesn't mean shit. But if I go talk to, I don't know, the priest who's the most important person in the, in the early game, he's just got, oh, Witcher, I don't know what we're gonna do about this. And it's like, oh, okay, he's like a normal human.

Okay. Like there's a weird, like subhuman fucking form of average person in the Witcher game where they talk with the British. I wish other games had the balls of disco Elysium to just have like a ton of different accents and a ton of different types, you know, that are like just, it's a fictional world with real settings, but you're still getting the vibes of like, you know, something similar to what sounds like a French accent, you know, something similar to what sounds like whatever is going on with Measurehead, you know, like, I wish that they would have fucking, you

know, like, like make it interesting and not necessarily just like sweeping casts for whatever, whatever region and then go like, okay, like, make no mistake, I love me some fucking Paul Dobson, some Steve Blooms, you know, Jennifer Hale, we're talking about all that stuff. But there definitely are times where even with like Mass Effect, I'm looking and I'm going like, okay, so is every single quarry in going to have the exact same voice? Or are we going to mix it up? Because it seems like the Asari get to have a couple different voices.

Chorians are all one person right now, you know, there is one guy with an American accent in the fucking Korean race, and he's basically an action hero. And I think that's why he has an American accent. Because he sounds like a fucking drill sergeant. You know, and Volas and Hanar and all of them, it's like, and you admittedly Kotor, same idea, right? You play, you talk to enough NPCs and you hear the same voice actors coming back around to do secondary roles.

So understandable limit of your budget. So here's, here's, here's why that is. It's because the translation chip in your forehead is translating them to accents that would sound palatable to your human brain. Of course, you're getting babel-fished. Yes. Yeah. Also, you remember Dr. Michelle from Mass Effect One, the French doctor?

Uh, which one? Gareth goes and hangs out with her and you shoot some dudes in her infirmary at the very beginning of Mass Effect One. The red-headed doctor's got an intense French accent. Ah, drawn a blank. Okay. Anyway, point being, like the Mass Effect setting actually sets up that the idea of race or culture in a human society is pretty gone because we've been intermixing in space for

so long. So there's really just a distinction between, you know, space and, and Earth kind of like Gundam. Meanwhile, you're running into Chakwas and, and Michelle who are like, oh yeah. And, oh no. Like everyone has super intense like Earth accents for some fucking reason. Stupid. Um, yeah, I, I, I, anyway, I would imagine that, uh, if not for limitations, they would

try to get a couple people to be like, not every volus is going to be that. Yes. Yeah, every single one. Every single goddamn one. That's right. They're all the same. Or might as well all be the same guy. Or just get, or I guess you, or cast people that are like fucking Billy West style, like

just like switching back and forth with multiple voices and just able to turn it on and off or like Hank Azaria. You know what actually kind of bums me out in Mass Effect 2 very early in the game, there's actually the opportunity to talk to somebody about this, this exact topic. Billy. Yes. Okay. Um, but I don't want to, it's a cute little joke, so I don't want to mess with it.

But basically, if you run into a Turian on the Citadel, ask him why you don't see any female Turians around. Okay. Um, I mean, lore reasons, they kind of explained that like Turian females are rare because they're like usually doing their breeding thing with the eggs. There's a, there's a difference between the, the dry codex and actually talking to a dude about it. Also, you're thinking of Solarians.

Oh, you're right. Sorry, my bad. Turians. Yes. Okay. Oh, I remember Dr. Chloe. Yes. Yes.

In the med lab with the, yeah, thing on the wall. Okay. I remember who that was now. Whoops. Um, right. Oh man. I love how your memory went to the med lab with the thing on the wall, which I absolutely also remember.

It's where you get a med kit thing on the wall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yes. Um, all right. So in actually talking about the games that I played, uh, yeah, which are still the

most jank fuck shit in the world, I might have to restart my say from a little bit earlier because I walked up to a guy and started talking to him and he started talking to me about parts of the plot that hadn't happened yet, uh, just immediately sequence broke like a huge proportion of the main quest just by talking to a person out of order. Um, bro, that game's a fucking mess. Um, Xenoblade Chronicles three. Do you remember, you must remember this when I talked about playing Xenoblade two and playing as Rex and how Rex has his big action moment where he runs for it and goes, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah. Um, Xenoblade two, I've spoken to people, apparently Xenoblade two is going for like a, like a kind of laid back or kind of upbeat kind of start before shit hits the fan. Uh, but instead it ends up just being like fucking cringe like I thought the first couple hours of Xenoblade two were fucking cringe. Just cringe. Stop it. What's what's missing remark in Xenoblade two, um, the voice acting, the setup, the stall

sorts of stuff in Xenoblade three. They immediately start you off with war and death and horrible suffering. But more than that, you know the, what I'm going to call the inciting event in a JRPG. You have your setup and then you have your tutorial and then you have your inciting event. Well, the inciting event in Xenoblade three is like a 45 minute long, incredibly choreographed like eight person action cutscene that goes on forever. And it's just stellar. Um, like it's just, it's like, I don't know how to describe it.

Like it feels like I'm, it feels like a big action scene happened and then I'm, I'm watching like an Onamusha intro. Because each Xenoblade game, um, its own thing, uh, okay, all right. Well, I guess I'm just, I'm like, I know that Xenoblade Chronicles three just came out, but I'm like, there's definitely more than, there's more than three of those, right? There was X, there was, or, or was there just like one, two, I want to say that Xenoblade Chronicles X is completely separate. Okay.

Okay. All right. Uh, now I can kind of tell that they're, uh, like the Chronicles ones are somewhat related because you can see the meccanus and bionus in the game's intro and then they just never talk about them ever again, uh, but I, I'm going to assume that for the most part they're totally separate. Okay. Uh, aside from that and aside from the fact that it's a fake MMO game, it's got, uh,

it's got weird MMO combat that's very satisfying to me. It has better side quests that aren't burning me out so far and it just seems like a much better, well put together production. On top of that, this is the first Xeno game that I've played in a while in which you get to have robots that actually look like the robots from Xenogears like to the point where the first one you get looks exactly like the well tall from Xenogears even with the black, blue and red. I wonder if the Xeno franchise is going to ever do an a fourth like reset.

Maybe not that. I don't know. Cause like this is like a Nintendo franchise now, right? Xenosaga was, was not. So no, it feels like if legally they get into a situation where they got a restart, then they might. But, um, it feels like they're the kind of, it's like Blade Chronicles is, is what it is going forward unless like, you know, um, they're not doing it with Nintendo anymore.

Probably the weirdest thing about it. And I felt very justified because I started it up and I'm like, well, I played most of the series on and off to some degree. And it's actually like three completely different series at this point, maybe four if you want to put X in there. So there's actually very little that, that crosses over. It's anime and there's probably going to be robots. Right.

Um, and I'm playing it and like the only things that are absolutely must like must be there is, there's going to be a big golden obelisk called the Zohar, which is basically God. That's mandatory. And the important thing, whatever the important fucking thing is, will have red metal in neon green. It is that is, that is the design aesthetic of the thing that matters. But they can never get any more specific than that because there's three different companies that literally own a different franchise.

Well, luckily the Zohar is not owned by Nintendo. It's an ancient like Kabbalah Christianity thing. So they get to get around that. But so I'm watching it and I'm watching the cut scene and I'm like, what's going to happen? And they pan over to a big neon green fucking thing and I go, oh, there it is. There's the important thing. How can I tell it's important because it's the right shade of green? And sure enough, it was the important thing because it was the right shade of green.

Have you ever wondered why the character Pira or Pyra or whatever it is? Is that color scheme? It's because of that. But yeah, it's it's better than the other two that I played. It seems good. There's a robot. The cast seems interesting and it has excellent direction. I'm eager to play more.

Unfortunately, I also started playing Live Alive, a game that I had never heard of prior to its announcement of its of its remake. Did you ever hear about it? Yes, I remember seeing that. OK, so I remember seeing that name on the list of SNES ROMs that's on every fucking site with Emula Doris and Juegos. And I remember as well hearing that it was a really cool early like version of what was the successor to that because they're comparing it to like FF6 and like Chrono Trigger and

Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger. But what's what am I thinking of? Wasn't there? No, wait, I'm thinking of Terra Nigma and Soul Blazer. Anyway, yeah, Chrono Trigger and Live Alive as a thing, but like also the the time frame stuff where you're jumping around to different cast members and like all that was another really cool.

You think of Saga? Saga Frontier? I don't think so. Anyway. See, could it ever more? No. Wasn't there something? I feel like I could tell you the right name and you wouldn't.

No, no. Yeah, I don't have enough. But wasn't. But like, sorry, wasn't there? Yeah, it must be with the multiple protagonist thing where they're like, yeah, if you like what was going on that. But anyway, a highly respected old game with fucking wild multiple time zones and characters in it and shit.

So, yeah, I never played it and I never heard about it. It's timeline in history, like doomed it to be super buried. It was it came out six months before FF6 did in Japan, never got released here in any way. So, I started it up and first of all, it's using that Octopath 2D, 3D aesthetic. It looks very nice. It has voice acting for all the important stuff, which is also very nice. And I can't fucking believe this game came out in 94. Well, this is a remake.

Yeah, no, but it's experimental now in terms of what it's actually doing. Okay. It's fucking zany. You start the game and it just goes fucking pick character, pick a time period. So, I picked present and all you get is a fucking character going, I need to become the greatest fighter of all time and kicks you out to a street fighter to character select screen about who you want to fight. Okay.

And then you fight six dudes and a boss. And that's the whole time period. Okay. I never get to move my character once. And there's characters that are supposed to be famous wrestlers or fucking Hulk Hogan or whatever. Yeah, yeah. So then I go, okay, I'll go far future. And in far future, you're playing what is essentially a 1994 send up of the classic 1976 movie alien

that has no combat at all. None. So there's a genre switch up in each. It is a pure adventure game in like a RPG, JRPG shell. Yeah. And then like, oh, what if I played the, the, the ancient China one in which I'm playing as a Sifu who's trying to find characters that to train to become the next Sifu. And it's like, okay, well, your main character is completely maxed out and God like, but the fighting system

is built around teaching your shitty party members your moves so that they're actually good. Or you go to ancient Japan in which it's a stealth mission and the whole thing is a pure stealth mission. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. It's so goddamn weird. Full on genre switch. It is absolutely more ambitious than Chrono Trigger or Saga Frontier or any of the games that are directly inspired. I feel like, well, because of all the comparisons and, and those like contemporary lists, you expect an RPG.

I certainly, that's what I thought it was, you know, huh. And then I, well, I know. Dude, I had, I played it for a whole like three, four hours. I didn't level up once because I had a character that only learns moves and a character that doesn't fight. Yeah. And I also saw this people saying that like, it gets even nuttier the further on you go. Like, yeah, there's a momentum to it. So that's cool, man.

That's, that's, that's definitely something I'm curious about. It's absolutely fucking super. Who's behind the remake? Is it just Square internal or did they get like RPG factory to do it or something? No, no, definitely not RPG factory. They only make shit that people think is going to be good and then you don't care about. Let's see. Live, alive, our classic directed by blah, blah, blah, blah.

Fucking, I don't know. I think about the remake just info on the original. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. No, the game's fascinating. It's absolutely fascinating.

And if I feel robbed that we never got it back in the day, like this would have blown people the fuck away. Also, it was fan translated, I think it was. But I mean, I didn't know it even existed. So how could I have checked it out? Yeah. No, it's, it's great. I would recommend if you have any love for classic style JRPGs, I could not recommend it more. It is so goddamn weird and fascinating.

I was talking to somebody. There's a Wild West, you know, section in which you're playing a gunslinger. And as so, unlike every other character, all of your moves are exclusively super long range. Okay. Because your moves are pull out your pistol and shoot someone. I'm looking at an article here that basically says that the this game's remake was made possible due to the success of Octopath Traveler. I guess, according to Nintendo being pleased with that developed by Historia. Okay.

Hey, man, I'm just like, if this seems to be doing well. And if you're going to use this style to remake one off fucking old JRPGs, then yeah, keep going. Now that rules now that like I've done and I'm kind of willing to do like JRPGs as LPs, you know, and depending on whether the whether whether the, you know, the momentum of what's going on is good for is conducive to like a long run. Yeah, there's a there's a bunch of stuff on the list that I'm definitely considering. FF six kind of made it possible in my eyes to be like, OK, FF six mission. Do it. Oh, trust me, like more than anything. Believe me, I know.

I like I've never been more in love with the first like couple missions of a game that hard. Well, I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what right now. If you start a fucking LP of front mission three, I will fucking do the other route. OK, OK, whichever one we go. OK, so I mean, I've talked to I sat and I had a conversation with Reggie about this about like which roads to go down and obviously I don't want to overlap. Like long RPG LPs like together. And here's the thing.

Yeah, like playing live alive, Witcher one and Xenoblade three. That'd be stupid. That'd be a dumb thing to do. OK, but but you also rotate games. I stick around to finish them. Right. Yeah, I write it out for better and for worse. Like, yeah.

So for example, for worse is I saw me in two, which I'm not going to finish on camera that LP is cursed. I've made no progress in like six weeks. Mm hmm. OK. All right. So so let's so let's let's let's be candid then, right? Like that is super sick. And I would love to do that because I want to know, right?

I want to know. But would people rather see. Like that front mission. With the with the with the double route bit. Or would they rather see FF tactics? That's tough. Yeah. A lot of people like FF tactics.

I hear it's a very good game. Right. Would I actually I think more people would want to see tactics than they'd want to see front mission three. So that's where I'm like, well, hold on. If I'm going to do a tactic RPG right now, that would probably stop the fucking show. Well, no. What you would want to do what you would want to do is you would want to wait until November and you would want to do poker.

Let us clean together fucking redux, which is coming out with full voice acting. That's a possibility as well. That being said, like if I'm just, you know, fucking blowing wads here, like, yeah, this is I'm thinking about a lot of this shit. There's stuff that I'm not mentioning as well, but I know that like that's a classic example of like two fucking really great games. I'm way more interested in playing front mission than tactics, mind you. But I do know that for a bunch of people, for anyone who didn't say FF six is my favorite,

those people, their answer was probably tactics instead, you know, or seven. Like that's the thing. So yeah, it's a discussion that I'm thinking about like considering like, OK, when. And how and if I should approach that. But it's not lost on me how sick a fucking front mission LP would be either. The problem with front mission is that each route is insanely long. That it is a it is a commitment. It is it is they are like the re like the idea of like I'm going to do front mission

like which route are you going to pick because you know one has the time to do both. No one. They're too long. They're way too long. And they're so insanely different as well from the jump like the moment you branch. So like, yeah, but I've just that's been stuck in my head. It's living in my head rent free for years now. You know, and some other stuff like once the once the JRPG and our T.

TRPG door opens SRPG excuse me opens up there. There's a lot of things that are worth considering, including shit like I. I'm like, there's shit that I would never consider. But I'm like, you know what? For example, I am curious to know how good and how solid Dragon Quest is. And like Dragon Quest, like 11, for example, or I know I'm going to I'm going to stop. I know that they are stop you formula now thing. But it's it's it's a bit that I'm like, this thing has been going for a long time.

There's a lot of them. They're very good. According to the the fan base that like sticks on it. I want to know what's going on with this franchise. Right. These are all things that I'm considering when I'm looking at the list right now. And then all. And I picked that that space because it's also a short thing to jump into while I

consider what else is coming up. Okay, well, as your longtime colleague, but more importantly than that, as your friend, Dragon Quest 11 is the game that everyone loves. I even love it. Did I even come close to the halfway mark on my own time? No. Did I come even close to one third of the game on the streams that I did of it? No.

Okay, so here's the thing. Dragon Quest 11, more than any game I can think of in the last couple of years is the ultimate fucking do it, fucking do it, fucking do it. No, I'm not going to watch it, but do it though. Do it. Do it. No, I'm not going to be there to see it, but do it though. I see.

I see. Okay. I mean, I just after Elden Rings length and I was doing aggressive two hour episodes, everything is called into question. No, no, no, no, no, because Elden Ring is part of the absolute evergreen fucking franchise known as people will watch anything that says from software on it, no matter how shitty you are. Like it is.

It is. Dude, I like there have been times and I'm streaming my eye with the stream. I feel like getting some good views. Why don't I just play Dark Souls two for fucking six hour? Oh, wow. Everyone will show up to that because everyone watched anything that says Dark Souls on it until they fucking die. Not all beloved classics are beloved equally.

Well, the other thing is that Dragon Quest 11 is just it's it's it's how to put this the Tim Rogers review of Dragon Quest 11 sums it up really well. And that's why so many people in the West don't get it. Dragon Quest 11 is to be played on Sunday nights after your bath before you go to bed before you go into the office the next day to do your salary. OK, that's what Dragon Quest is. Dragon Quest is not exciting. Dragon Quest is not innovative.

Dragon Quest isn't even particularly interesting. What it is is a fuzzy warm blanket to wear and feel good. OK, I mean, I will say this, I have a memory of Dragon Warrior for the Nests that we played a bunch of when I was a kid. And I still remember the pacing of that game and how that went. And I would expect it to be barely changed from that day from is what I seem to hear. You're right. You're right.

And the other thing is that the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Seventh Stand user LP came to an end because of how aggressive the Dragon Quest like nature was in that game. And it made the encounter rate unbearable. Yeah. So I don't know about you, but talking about streaming and LP and all that, the JRPG like breakdown for me has basically been solved. And the number one question, and I will just go on Twitter and ask this, does this shit have voice acting?

Yes or no? Damn. Is a pass fail at this point? That is big. That is big, but FF6 had no voice acting. FF6 is fucking Final Fantasy 6! So there's more than pass, it's pass fail with an asterisk. Yeah, it's pass fail with an asterisk.

But yeah, like I'm like, so here's my heart of heart, hope of hopes. You know that everything in that Nvidia leak came true, like every single thing so far. One of the things on there was the Final Fantasy Tactics re-release, remaster, redo. And I'm just thinking like, War of the Lions with voice acting would be pretty great because Tactics Ogre is getting goddamn voice acting and that is the same writing style as War of the Lions. Okay. That'd be pretty excellent.

Now Dragon Quest XI does have voice acting, it absolutely does. What it also has is about three hours in between it as you are just good old fashioned dungeon crawl in an overworlden. Hitting those random battles, yeah. And to make sure that it's not too tedious for you, you can just put the goddamn auto battle on which will solve every single fight perfectly for you. So you can just kinda wander around and chill. Dragon Quest XI is a great game that I will absolutely go back to when I'm not,

I have time off or something like that, but yeah, it's just... These are all multi month commitments essentially. DQ11 is one of the only games I know of that a friend of mine... Yeah. Yeah, you definitely want S. It's one of the only games I know of that a friend of mine who tends to go nuts and completionist everything was getting to the end and was like, I am really tired of this 10 out of 10 game.

Like I am exhausted. Yeah, okay. I understand that feeling. Interesting. Okay. So anyways, interesting, interesting horizons. Yeah, I got a guy in the chat saying the right thing. If you're gonna play any Dragon Quest game, you need to head back down to fucking Yokohama

and fucking play fucking Yakuza 7, the best Dragon Quest game. Of course, of course, actually. Yeah, where's the lie? So far it's, I believe it. It literally does even feel like Dragon Quest. I'm not even joking. But yeah, that's, I mean, that's shit with the fucking, the British people. By the way, somebody said you're gonna drop Xenoblade 3.

No shit, I'm gonna drop Xenoblade 3. I even said that when I put my schedule up. That game's like 110 hours long of pseudo and low combat. Are you fucking crazy? But yeah, you wanted to go check out fucking Live Alive, which I am gonna finish, and more Witcher 1, which I am gonna finish, as well as Xenoblade. And I have the preview code for Cult of the Land this week. Go down to twitch.tv slash pat stairs at.

Very interested in Cult of the Land. I'm very glad Devolver sent me over early code. Cool. Quick word for my sponsors. This week, the podcast is sponsored by... Is this correct? Let me just refresh the page. Do your thing.

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Okay, what's going on? Couple things. So just before we hit the button to go live, we got an update for Project L. What? Really? Yeah. They just dropped a little teaser saying one confirming Illaoi is in the game. Yeah.

All right. So that was my number one list pick when I was going through the art and the roster and going, Hell, yeah. Who do we make a fighting game character out of? That girl, the fucking the buff girl, the buff lady. There's your grappler. There's your grappler.

With the Eldritch God like weapon. It's Cthulhu. It's fucking Cthulhu. With the Cthulhu in the jar. Yeah. Illaoi confirmed right off the bat. Dude, she could play like goddamn Aghanos. Seriously.

So what's interesting is there's a whole blog article about why they picked her and what the design philosophy is. So they address the fact that League has so many characters to pick from that when it comes to picking them, they're going to be very hard. They're going to be very selective about who and what and why and excuse me, they want to make sure that like every pick is not just fitting for the genre, but also like addresses a number of criteria creatively that they want to go with. They want them to be not just faithful, but like even more.

They want to like the description was kind of like it's not just about being like a faithful character, but it's about them being like more than they were as a in League. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Ruins King, the RPG also had that going on. And I think the quote that they went was like, they can do what? Oh, shit.

Yeah. Of course they'd be able to do that was what they want you to say about every character. Right. So it's it's the only thing that's kind of a bummer because that that roster is gigantic. It's fucking so big. Right. And it's like they're obviously going to skew towards older characters because they're more well known.

Iconics. Like just because the characters older doesn't mean they're better. There's a bunch of fucking winners. But here's the question. At the ass end of the roster. Where does it allow we fit into the new old. Sparrow. She's very old.

Okay. Very classic. Yeah. All right. I mean like I like I Darius is there. Ari is there. Janks is there. Echo is there.

Wait, she's new. Oh man, I'm losing my mind. I don't know. Well, I mean a lot of the blog article is fluff. But it it sounds like the picks are based on this and me being like I'm very I'm very happy about it. Obviously again from all the hundred and some odd characters I was like I think that that's a good fit for a fighting game.

It seems like their picks are going to be not just mainstays though. Like it seems like they kind of want. Hey fucking league players have lost their damn minds where I'm like I feel like it'll always like old and people are like oh she's like relatively new. The character came out seven years ago. Shut up. I guess relative to the first version of the game or whatever. Yeah, I guess.

Yeah. Okay. Are yun and yang new? No. It came out fucking 2002. I want to know 99. But like it's not Jesus. But it's like that's way after the World Warriors and Alpha, you know, like yeah.

So yeah. I mean shit. I mean before that if you want to go to a new generation, right? So 97 really. Anyways, the it seems with that whole big long winded thing about like how they're going to approach the selections that they might be essentially buttering up the idea of you you're not going to just get old tried and true favorites. So be prepared for some fun choices, you know, but it might also like fucking create waves.

But I assume that anyone that is a fucking merch machine like a Timo is just going to be there because that's cash money shut up. Okay, no, that that's I'm going to tell you right now. That's not why Timo is going to be in that game. Timo is going to be in that game because they want people to fucking scream and break their sticks because they need a character in that roster that is going to absolutely enrage every person in the world. It's going to get talked about their computer.

Yep. Sure. Sure. By the way, I play Timo. Okay. Because I mean, because creating that feeling in someone else is what I live for. We talked about the the card version and then the in league version. So the fighting game version is going to be nightmarish as well unquestionably tiny hitbox

like Yoda with traps. But they also and they said like, yeah, no, no surprise obviously, but it's going to be free to play as well. Right. So yeah, no shit. There's going to be some shit coming at EVO. Hey, you motherfuckers think the cost to costumes and multiverses is high. Get fucking ready for Project L's fucking alternate skins being 40 bucks.

Alt skins as the cosmetic versions of yeah, like, but like it's not going to be all skin characters, right? That's never a thing. No, it'll be all. It'll be, it'll be, you know, a fucking hip hop or Timo. Whatever. Yeah. Okay.

You know, or whatever. The music video versions of the characters. Yeah. Well, I mean, the fact that they announced like what was my number one with a bullet when I looked at that list of characters is. Bodes well, I'll say bodes very well. And I mean, barring anything more interesting. That's like a hard main lock unless she's got viper like inputs or some shit.

Who knows? So not so she can fulfill three different roles based on my experience with her as the league character and the RPG character. She can be the grappler. She can be the agonist big body blocker. Or she can be unironically the Eric Kunay flood the screen with bullshit. Yes. Now check this out.

Right. And this is why. Remember how we talked about when Radiant was making the patch notes in Rising Sun Thunder. They were so honest about them and they told you exactly what their intentions were. That is part of what's discussed in this announcement as well. They talk about her. They talk about why. They talk about all the picks and ideas.

And they literally tell you what kind of moves she's going to have. She's going to be big body. She's big body. And they talked about how, OK, if we just wanted her to be faithful, we could have her tentacles come out and harass you at different ranges, right? That's too much. And that they had a design. They had a design that would involve her being like up close with a short fast tentacle and

then mid range and then long slow range far away tentacle, right? And then from and then while you're being harassed with that, she could like come close to distance. But they specifically tell you like they're like, we scrapped that that kit because that made the tentacles the main the main star and her as a character. It should be about the fact that her God is supporting her strength already. So she needs to be the main thing hitting you. And then if you successfully land hits, you get bonus shit from the tentacle God.

OK, so it's a loop it in. We're animations or no more. I think more like when you land a hit like a screen harassing tentacle will come out and be a part of like her offense, but you have to successfully get in there first. Oh, so instead of Aganos's wall stopping you, it'll be a tentacle slapping your ass as she's pushing you as she's rushing you down. Right. OK.

So the main thing is she's rushing you down and then her her like large God, whatever tentacle weapon, Cthulhu thing will amplify the rush down and like mix you up and shit. And but it's mainly about being a big body rush down character because that's what her design philosophy or whatever is about. You know, I have to say. So we've been talking about the state of fighting games and free to play and all this future and all this shit. And it's for four years.

It's too late. Multiverses and Project L are going to grab the free to play spots. Good. Like they they they multi versus absolutely grab the mascot fighter free to play spot and I don't see anything unseating it. Good. Project L is absolutely going to grab the quote unquote real fighting game spot. Let let let these these legacy studios look and watch their lunch get taken and wonder

what happened. Right. I don't know the numbers on multiverses. Of course. Of course popular fighting game of all time right now. And like all the Japanese studios that we know and love that make fighting games are looking at this going like yeah of course the thing that we're blue in the face talking about.

All right. Here you go. There's your lunch. I got no problems whatsoever if new good things come out and fucking take take the money that's on that's been on the table for the last two decades. By the way. I've solved your tactical RPG problem. I wouldn't call it a problem but well you're sorry your strategy RPG conundrum let's say

at that because I remembered something particularly about front mission. Okay. And that's that front mission the first remake will be coming out in the summer of twenty twenty two which is a upgraded remake of the original game and I was curious so I went on to the Wikipedia entry for it. Understanding front mission and its entirety requires playing both through the O. C. U. and U. S. N. campaigns. They each have their own unique and mysteries the latter of which is only fully explained

by playing the other scenario and that is do this summer which is over in 30 days. Now that is part one. Yes. I don't know if part one is at all like. Okay. I mean like three hooked me. I'm going to but like yeah. Okay.

Well that's worth a look. That's worth a look then the timing of my my my my picks on shit that's about to get remade is interesting though in that space's case I don't mind going back certainly that's no that's going to be a different game that's that's going to be a different game when we're talking about tactics ogre or the front mission one or offense tactics that will be look we made the graphics nicer and we added voice acting and you know we we improved some mechanical stuff so it's functionally 99% the same game. Okay.

When you're looking at dead space that's going to be like Resident Evil 4 to Resident Evil 4 remake or Resident Evil 2 to Resident Evil 2 remake or something like that. Okay. Yeah. That that's good information. And yes project L more info when Evo drops we'll see what they probably a trailer for allowee if anything because right now it's just some artwork. Lee I have a stupid question is Evo happening.

Not right now but it is it happening like tomorrow. It's happening this weekend. I feel I saw I saw it the purple Sharpie who first of all glad it makes me feel nice when I follow somebody and they go yay. She does great work. Yeah. But I saw her talking about her being a goddamn announcer for multiverses at Evo and she's like next week I'm like what do you mean next week Evo's not is Evo.

Oh Evo's happening this week. It's happening. I just fucking completely dodged all of it like it like it wasn't like it didn't exist. It's going down. We're going to we're going to I'm going to I'm going to try to tune in while I'm on the road so it's going to be weird but it does in fact start this weekend. So you think we're going to get anything more than like a like a baby trailer for project L I'm so fascinated by that game but it always seems five years away.

I think we're going to get more than a baby trailer. I think we're going to get. I think there's a panel where they're going to discuss like stuff in detail actually. I think they've been teasing a panel as well as like an announcement trailer. So yeah it's very strange watching that game and them obviously having no like like nothing over their heads in terms of hurry like no pressure no time pressure. Nope. It like you don't see games get made like that.

It's weird. Make it good. Take your time and every once in a while when people are like hey what's happening with that. Oh no we're doing it here. We're doing it. Don't you worry you know and yeah I think the I mean well with multi versus we heard the announcement a while ago but like seems like there was we don't know how things were

working behind the scenes but with project L I mean with ever since ever since rising thunder it's like there's a slow methodical approach to the way they're going about you know making this that seems like they want to leave no stone unturned. They don't want to fuck up over one dumb little thing on launch you know don't launch with a package that's going to be unhyped that's going to be too short that's not going to interest people casually that's going to have not enough single player content you know the don't don't fuck up with the money like there's just a lot that can go wrong and people are already standoffish on the genre.

It's got to be a knockout from day one. I just checked Tony Cannon's fucking Twitter and he's like nothing coming till later this year like the little video he put out about the Lowy is like all that is going to happen there's nothing at Evo. I thought there was stuff at Evo. I thought I said okay. In the beginning of the of the trailer for it I thought he was saying that like we get like Evo's coming up and you know there'll be like more there but in the meantime we're

going to introduce this idea or whatever with the Lowy but. Oh it's Tom my mistake but yeah just yeah apparently. I must have I must have misheard that. Well my mistake excuse me. Like the big news is that the confirmation that it will in fact be free to play and will come later that's it. All right. So something also that comes to mind here because I've gotten enough pokes about this

that I think it should be brought up is that numerous people have let me know that into the breach on Netflix is actually not a Netflix in app game but it is a separate download that is available to you with your Netflix account that then gets you to download the game as its own separate thing which has a bunch of new missions characters and options and endings and a whole bunch of bonus content as well. I have a question about that. As well as an update to the original version of the game so in the end the thing that we were fearing which was the idea of it being a Netflix band or snatch style control it

while watching the video thing is not at all what's happening. So I have a question if I if I'm no longer subscribed to Netflix could do a sign up for Netflix for one month download it and then uninstall for Netflix and then keep the app. Can't keep the app. I have no idea. It might validate your account on that's my fucking question. It might validate your account on startup. I have no idea.

But yes it's not just a Netflix port with all the extra stuff. It's an update to the regular version of the game as well. It's just that the new platform is what's you know the announcements are focused on there. So that is a update to what's happening with that. People are saying it does check your subscription status. Okay. What a piece of shit. Just sell it.

Just sell it on the store. You can update your steam version with the free update for the new stuff. Yeah but I won't play it on my phone when I'm when I'm on the car. Anyway that that's that's that's the thing. So there you go. Addressed. All right. What else is going on?

We got to move. There is because no thing nothing nice can ever happen. That's right. Over at the Kotor remake the game is paused indefinitely as a result of the Aspire studio heads essentially being fired the designer excuse me the director and the designer this month were fired and that has led to the project being on hold and no word as to whether that will ever continue. Yeah it's not.

That's dead. No one's contract allows them to speak about the situation at the moment. So NDAs are going around the deal for the licensing rights expires in 2023. They're not going to do. Oh no. It's been in development for about three years and they do have a vertical slice but essentially no telling whether it's going to get back on track as a result of two key staff members getting fired.

So hold up a second. Kotor one remake is is on indefinite hiatus which to me says dead and the black sun quantic dream game still hasn't even started development. They were hiring. Don't know what. Yeah and they don't know what that game is going to be. So it sounds like a good time for third party Star Wars projects. Some people that spoke I guess off the record said that a disproportionate amount of time

and money went into the vertical slice demo and that the project's current course wasn't sustainable with the timeline especially. Yep. The game was supposed to come out. It was going to be anthem. The release was supposed to be end of 2022 but the realistic target would be based on like now. The more realistic target would be 2025.

Yeah I mean I think that fucking Star Wars is going to re up the license for a couple years for a studio that fired its senior staff and hasn't done anything. I imagine not. But I guess like the only thing I can look at here as a like bronze copper lining is like they know clearly that Kotor is beloved enough to warrant getting a remake. It's just a matter of getting a team to fucking do it. But like it's green lighting that project is not a pipe dream because it's you know it's there.

You know what they need to do. They need to put a fucking they need to put a quest in the Kotor remake in the new vertical slice where you go back in time to fuck Karth's wife and then he cries about it and then you go back forward in time and make fun of him about it and that shit will get green lit in a second. It's fuck Karth. Um no you need a force ability that allows you to mind control and take control of Karth. Okay.

Then you are in Karth's body and he's forced to watch but he can't do anything to stop you. Okay. All right. That's it's specific. You know as you're as you're going through Mass Effect and you're encountering space Karth and Black Karth and all the different Karth's over time. It's wild how that one character became like the weird archetype for every single like first

party member in every Bioware game like every single character that is the first one is always blank Karth. I mean they follow the archetype to a T. What can you say? In fact the most interesting thing about fucking Kotor 2 is the not Karth. Karth. Yeah. That's Atten's defined by the fact that he's not Karth.

The not Karthness of Atten is what makes him a great Karth. Yeah. Absolutely. Get that Karth chart up. What that Karth chart? No I don't mean birth chart. I mean Karth chart. Karth, Karth, New Space Karth, Smug Karth, Fantasy Magic Karth, Chinese Karth, New Space

Karth again, New Space Karth again, Fantasy Advisor Karth, Fantasy Star, Sword Karth, Black Karth, The Other Black Karth. And then the bottom of the goddamn list is Bikin who is not Karth. Super likable, better than Karth to Tommy Gaishi. Bikin is indeed not Karth. Can't make that mistake. That is a, yeah, you need a control group, you know. Anyway, Wild Shit.

So, other things going on. The trailer for Cyberpunk Edge Runners dropped, which is the studio trigger cyberpunk anime. Shit looks hot. Looks like a fun trigger anime with fun trigger characters doing fun trigger things. And it happens to take place in Cyberpunk. Yeah, Gene and Tim Rogers talking about Cyberpunk has made, I'm making the decision that 1.1.6 comes out the next one. I'm gonna give that game another shot.

Apparently it's good now. A lot of people have said that it's improved. I heard that too. Which actually makes me even more like bummed out about the way it released. And that we're watching a game get finished in real time. Either way, I suspect based on this trigger trailer, because there was an original trailer, I think, and this is a trigger version trailer or whatever. I suspect this is gonna be the best part of Cyberpunk.

Probably. Looks like it might just go that way. Because it's defining aspects, flavor, traits, whimsy are all much more trigger defined than Cyberpunk brand IP defined. Which is what I like. So, I'm excited for Edge Runners. Shit looks good. And it's them doing what they do with the setting, the aesthetic, the colors, all that shit.

I'm not gonna go as far as to say that, oh, this style should have been the entirety of what Cyberpunk was or so. Yes, say that. Because I think that Cyberpunk and its art choices are not the issue. It's the fucking rest of the game and the way it launched, right? Yeah. So, anyway. It's one of those things where around release it was impossible to judge the game fairly

because every time you started to enjoy the game, it would just shit on you. It's like, how am I supposed to, right? I should watch the Tim Rogers video again. I mean, between that and the goddamn fucking, yeah, Detroit Become Human manga, it feels like anime and manga are gonna step in to save these cyberpunk genre franchises. I gotta say that Detroit Become Human, Tokyo Stories or whatever, that's like the shittiest name of anything in the fucking world. Like, it's already the name of a fucking city.

It should be called Tokyo Become Human, but that's not the fucking brand, is it? I'm looking forward to my androids sitting under the kotatsu in Detroit. Anyway. Detroit's a feeling. Detroit's an aesthetic. Detroit, right next to Yokohama. They turned the Evolve servers back on and everyone's confused. Why?

Why would they do this? Because apparently there's a dedicated fan base that like has wanted more Evolve online time. And the weird thing is they've turned it on to give it like another lease on life, but you can't buy the game anymore. It's been delisted and it's still delisted. So the only way to get it is to have it already or to get your hands on one of the key codes that is already like minted, I guess, but like has not been claimed. So there's like some places where they they're people still have those,

but otherwise a new player cannot get a copy of the game. So, you know what? That's fine. It's just it's it's weird, but they're they're turning the servers back on. I think generally, like, I mean, I've talked to I feel like every time there's a story about a digital game going away, my brain goes towards preservation. But like I it's so weird that a solved problem is now unsolved because of the modern market. The idea of PC games back in the day having a LAN match option where you could always still play multiplayer

by having two computers on a network together. Or, you know, Unreal Tournament 2004 lets you play the entire game with fucking bots. Sure, you know, that was a solved problem like a decade ago or two. And we're now in a realm where it's like, no, it's actually just we're making these new problems. We're unfixing these things and we want games to go away once we decide to pull the servers down. Hey, I have I have something to say about evolve. If you're sitting there and you're like, man, I really wish I could play evolve right now. Don't do that. Just go play Deep Rock Galactic instead.

Better asymmetric monster game. Just a better game. OK. Just left for dead with dwarves and bugs. OK. It's just it's just better. Well, I that this type of behavior is where it's like, OK, they turned the server back on. That's cool.

I would hope that the community that likes it has figured out how to get their own custom server browsing going and just run that shit themselves because every time you sell a game like this and then take it away and make it so that people can no longer do anything with it. Oh, no, fuck you. Mod that shit. Put the community server in. Let them do what they want. I mean, did you know that if if if something's infinitely reproducible and can't be bought for money, you can't technically steal it? Sure. Speaking of community mods.

We got an answer to the church in near automata. Yeah, it's fucking fake, but super cool and really impressive. It was an elaborate ruse meant to garner attention towards the fact that a team of modders has, in fact, found the way to do aggressive modeling and aggressive mods for near so you can do a whole new slew of shit with their their the tools they've created. Essentially, the game had been like slight like you could do it. You could couldn't do anything near what they were able to do up until this point. Good one. Yeah. They, they, you know, cracked the code, so to speak, and decided to do it in this way, which I mean, for what it's worth, not only did it garner attention and become a new story on multiple sites, which when people usually get to this point in a game, it's not at all a story.

It got it got a response from both Yoko Taro and another dev team member, even if they were their response was just to say no comment. Yeah, no, Yoko Taro retweeting something that he absolutely 100% knew was fucking fake going, I can't comment on this. Like what what an absolute piece of shit. What a great thing to do genuinely just because that that really got the ball rolling on what what is this is like he can't comment. Why can't he comment? Is it is it like a marketing thing? Is it what is it? Yeah, no.

No, it other games certainly don't have multiple news stories covering when the modding scene figures out how to do like wild, you know, importing from other games and other importing of assets and shit like that, but pretty cool in this case. So we can expect to see a bunch of wild new shit from the from the fan community for near. And then just a couple of the things one PlayStation announces the backbone one. Have you seen this? It is a plug in device that you put your phone on. It's essentially it's an existing product that is a modeled after a DualSense controller. Your phone goes in the middle. Doesn't this already exist?

So yes, this one is PlayStation specific. It seems in that it's a difference. It seems like the the deal is that using the remote play it. Well, I know. Could you use like an Xbox controller on your phone and then use PS app remote play to play your PlayStation? Totally. Okay, it looks like it's just a branding thing. Okay.

I backbone controllers are quite good and are also available for the Android. So the way this thing looks is that it's like, OK, so then the whole thing is just that it's it's a it's a it's a PlayStation controller branded version of it that like looks like the stick and inputs and D pad are like DualSense like. So if so, then it's actually not that big a deal. This looks like a great piece of kit that you could attach to your Android phone if you want to play PlayStation one games and on the road. I have connected my. Is oh, it's yeah. Okay. So the PlayStation does an Xbox one version as well.

That has got a different style of D pad and although the stick and pad location are kind of in the same place. Okay. So yeah, it's it's pretty much what's strange is that the PlayStation edition is only for iPhone. You can use an Android with a PS app and again, like any X controller to sync up and play. Right. Yeah. Okay. So could you also do a Bluetooth device connection from your DualSense to your phone and then.

Man, I don't know. I'm never I'm never going to use these connected device. I tried it out because basically all you got to do is if you hold the share button and the PS button for like three seconds, it does a Bluetooth pairing mode. So then you just do a regular pair and it seems like it works. But if so, then you almost don't even need to go with this. So yeah. All right. Well, then fair enough.

But either way, either way, that's not the only playing games on your phone news because. I don't know if you've heard, but the stadia social media account is clapping back. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So the story starts with a rumor that was posted to the Twitter account killed by Google. And of course, as the name implies, they talk about all the projects that get killed by Google. In this case, it is a long letter that is essentially someone saying that a coworker and friend of theirs has recently. Let me get the wording there.

Yeah. A coworker and friend of theirs is now a social media manager for Google and they had a large seminar in California past weekend and yadda yadda yadda. They figured out that essentially they're going to be shutting down the stadia servers and that there's an exit plan that they're starting to roll out. It's going to go the same way as Google Play music. Yeah. And it'll be a slow killing off of stadia. So don't be surprised to see it starting to be slowly killed in the next couple months. And that led to, you know, stadiums online getting real worried and asking if this was in fact true to which the stadia social media account replied that stadia is not shutting down rest assured.

We're working on bringing more great games to the platform and stadia pro. Followed then by another tweet, which says just a heads up an old coworker friend of mine is now one of the social managers for Google. They had a large seminar in California past weekend and long story short, you can now play wavetail at no additional cost on stadia pro until August 1st play. And here's a trailer for stadia game wavetail. Here's the thing. So they're clapping back. You can't fire shots at stadia. Here's the thing.

Not get lit up. Never caught lack of these companies kill projects. It's not even certain that if it is going to be killed soon that the people in charge of the social media even know. It's quite common for these projects to get killed behind the scenes and then you get around to telling marketing when they're done. Well, well, that that sourpus attitude is not appreciated by the state stadia social media account pat because the best part is if you go look at the replies to the clapback, the dunk, the epic win. You can see you can see this the account then congratulating itself to everyone in the replies that goes. Oh shit. Oh snap.

And the stadia account is like, yeah, drop the mic. We fucking told them what share like to all your friends. Let them know about our epic dunk. So yeah, there's like 50 or there's like all these like they're like there's more tweets congratulating themselves on their dunk than the actual dunk mind you so that's good. That's good. Yep. You know what's not a mic drop when you run back out on stage and pick up the mic to talk about how cool your mic drop was and then drop it again. Uh, it's good.

It's good. I approve. I encourage you. I'm sure that won't look bad in hindsight. Oh no. No rage rage against the dying of the light. Do not go gentle into that good night stadia by all means. The Americans are very far away.

They will never defeat the Iraqi army. They are definitely not storming up the staircase to get me right now. Do you remember that? Was that fucking? It was the Iraqi propaganda minister during the Iraq war who was talking up the Iraqi army as American soldiers are like walking to camera to get him. Okay, that rings a bell actually I think yeah. That dude was good at his goddamn job. All right, let's take some letters.

If you got one you send it into castle super beast mail at gmail.com. It's castle super beast mail at gmail.com. And we have got one coming in from How about this? All right, somebody asks what about Neco arc fuck off. How about that? Anyway, what's Sean want to know? Oh, well, yeah, there's new multi blood characters.

Neco arc. Who gives a shit? Go back to the bathroom. Hey, Wolves and Pat. A bit ago I played through zombie you on my old Wii U again. And that game lightly fascinates me to no end because including the fact that it was pretty much an outlier to the trends of horror games at the time when it came out. It was the closest thing we had to a traditional triple a survival horror game limited resources emphasis on sound design combat. For a few years came out at the peak of the action focused horror re five six style games and the run and hide combat less horror like outlast and amnesia.

Pretty much the only triple a classic survival horror until res C seven dropped a few years later, not counting indies like lone survivor. Are there any games you can think of which came out during a dry spell of games like it? This is want to point out that zombie you and zombie whichever because there's versions on other platforms now that game is great. That game is weirdly great, especially for a launch title. OK, so because I'm trying to figure out what they're describing here and it's like on one end of the spectrum. There's the no fighting at all games like outlast and amnesia. He's saying and then there's the tactical crazy resident evil do all your moves and suplex the zombies games. Yeah, no, that was an era in which survival horror became action horror exclusively or what I'm going to call panic horror, which is no ability to fight back at all.

There was actually no survival horror games for about eight, nine years, which are the in between, which is you can fight, but you have limited resources. Yeah, OK. Yeah, I think that's a very unique situation. I'm not sure how many like in between games for other genres come to mind. But I know that like Battle Fantasia came out as a 2D fighter on a 3D fighter on a 2D plane before others really did. Minus slap happy Rhythm Busters and an era of like more or less MK deception, the deadly alliance and so on and so forth. So, you know, that's a weird in between or there adventure games kind of like they had a they had a burst and then they died again. Tell Tell Walking Dead really won.

They don't really like adventure games and they played a bunch of them. Oh, right. Yeah, it feels like they went away and then Walking Dead One was the next big one on the map, but they did make like Sam and Max before that. And so, you know, there's there was stuff. Unless you're Japanese strategy, RPG gets one game every five years. There was a period in which there were no Phoenix Wright games coming out, but they did put out Harvey Birdman, attorney at law. God, that was strange, wasn't it? Yeah, we tested that.

That was a big one. And it was a it was a court game. It was, you know, like Phoenix Wright Light. And there's obviously Street Fighter Four, which came out when fighting games were dead. Well, I think the point of this is the in between before the return and after. Yeah, horror did split into two different directions, but I can't think of many other genres that split so hard in either direction. And then there was nothing back in its original state. Horror keeps everything about the horror genre is is terrible and is fucked up and no one's ever happy.

Fair enough. Oh, you know, what's a good one? Fucking classic style computer roleplaying games. Like fucking like the the CRPG went from Baldur's Gate to Kotor, but then it went to Mass Effect. And now the company that makes your CRPGs is making goddamn shooters that they tell you are RPGs, but they're not. They're fucking shooters until you had stuff like Pillars and Divinity and King May the Pathfinder come out. All right, let's take one over here from now to X-10 says hello, Super Fuck Beasts. Today, I'd like to tell you about my very embarrassing moment at a recent con.

Guesting at the con was Takahiro Izutani, who I wanted to get an autograph from one of my on my NGS4 case. When I got in line, he was tabling with someone else. Turns out it was Harumi Fujita, who worked on the Mega Man 3 soundtrack. Didn't know who she was until I didn't know she was and muttered it to myself. Someone standing behind me in line, heard my muttering and said her name and said she also worked on MGS4. So when it was my turn, I asked for her to sign my copy as well. She shook her head and the helper at the table informed me that she worked on Mega Man. And I hurriedly got my autograph from Izutani, shook his hand, thanked both and ran away.

I wanted to pile drive the guy behind me so bad. You fucked up. See the mistake there. Was trusting some dickhead. Yeah, and not pulling out your phone and doing a quick Google before your turn to confirm the information because you were set up to fail. That's embarrassing. Both of those people will remember that moment indefinitely as the time that someone botched the signature request. And yeah, that's all that dude's fault.

And that's going to stay with them. That shame is burnt in. I can't believe Naruto X would do this. Naoto X10? I said what I said. Good old Naruto X. Okay, well, clearly you do know this person as that is the correct name. We hung out at that magfest.

Okay, they're great, but that's fucking embarrassing. To this day, they're probably still telling stories of the time that girl asked her to sign the wrong game. All right, like they're drunk at a bar going, you these fucking people come to the sign. I worked on Mega Man. God damn it. These kids don't know shit. And also, this lady did the music for Mega Man 3. She'd be worshiping at her goddamn feet.

That soundtrack's incredible. Here's one from Azzy. Hey, Universal Bloodsport Advocates. It finally happened. When if you stole my card and spent $120 on V-Bucks, I had an account on the switch so I could buy him games, but purchases are locked behind a password. For some reason, it seems like Fortnite is the exception to the rule and allows you to buy things willingly without even prompting you for a password.

Why does Epic allow stuff like this to happen? I'm sure the prominence of this is happening and getting more and more frequent. Because they ended up getting $120. Yep. Yep. So that's why. I mean, that Apple lawsuit shit just makes me think of, you know, they started that beef with Apple over the V-Bucks to begin with.

They want those fucking V-Bucks no matter how scummy they can get them. They want children to match the button. I'm sure that they have a back room deal going with Nintendo if every other game is forced to have a password. And usually, I notice that, like, yeah, microtransactions in, like, other games I've played push you into the store loop which don't, which force a password or a login depending on your account settings. If Fortnite gets around it, I guarantee you that's because they have a compliance waiver. Like, there's no way they're going to be the exception to the rule with no other game following suit.

It's because they're Fortnite. That's probably why. Yeah. And one more over here. Random fan says, hey, Willie and not Willie. Found this Reddit thread that you thought you'd get a kick out of. The summary is that a corporation had a party in Alabama at a plantation with period-appropriate themed outfits. Enter the lone black employee of the company who jumped at the opportunity to dress as a slave and attend the party.

The images posted show a woman in her looking in complete horror as the guy at the party showed up dressed that way and the party was canceled swiftly. Images attached. So there's a Reddit thread. This reminds me. God, is it an Eric Andre bit where he and some, some, like another guy on the staff dressed up as fucking slaves running away from the cops and they would like crash like Civil War reenactment fucking, you know, those nerds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the reenactment.

And then they're just like yelling out like, don't forget about slaves. So, um, at a glance here, there's a whole thread and an AMA with the dude who did it and everything. Um, fucking fantastic. Was he in Peel? Perfect. Excellently well played on this one. I love the look on this dude's face. Yep.

He's dead panning it in every photo. So good. And the awkwardness around him as people are in their Victorian era or whatever outfits and just dressed up for the period appropriateness. Because it was the good old days, you see? Yep. Back when everything was simple and you'd go down to the manna and you'd see Mr. Dossy and Mr. Dossy would tell you that he wants to marry. You go, no, Mr. Dossy, I can't while the slaves are toiling in the background. Yeah.

Um, the period appropriate, period appropriate plantation party slave. I mean, that's a great, that's a great alliteration too. Yeah. Um, I think the thread is coming up. The third is called company throws corporate retreat at a plantation in Southern Alabama with period appropriate costume ball. Only black guy that works for the company shows up dressed as a slave. This is great. It's great.

There you go. It's exactly what you think it is. Beautiful. Excellent. That's good. I like that. All right. Oh, we're not, we're not going to top that.

Okay. We're done. Long, long week this week. Long, long show. Enjoy the show. Did you enjoy the show? Yeah, it was fine. Great.

All right.