Castle Super Beast - CSB 183: HK-47 is the Anti-Littlest Hobo

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps The Silent Hill Majority "I Am Not Qualified To Answer The Krogan Question" The first Disco Elysium like Halo Infinite: We just can't Assassin's Greed The Littlest Murder Hobo You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://GreenChef.com/SUPERBEAST135 and use code SUPERBEAST135 to get $135 off across 5 boxes and free shipping. -- Go to http://expressvpn.com/SUPERBEAST for an extra 3 months free. -- Go to http://buyraycon.com/superbeast to get 15% off your order. The Halo Infinite fall/winter roadmap has been released.Halo Infinite’s support for local co-op is canceled Except it’s already in the game. Prey Director Thought Using That Name Was A 'Mistake,' Was Assigned By Bethesda Sony and Tencent Buy Partial Stake in Elden Ring Developer FromSoftware Team Reptile: We are convinced that releasing the game this year will not take it to a level where we would be personally satisfied with. To create a fulfilling and unique game we are extending the development time of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to summer 2023. 1996-released arcade side-scrolling action platformer Osman coming to PS4, Switch in 2023 Assassin's Creed Mirage has been officially announced by Ubisoft

Excuse me? Excuse me? Hello? Uh, Donde esta la biblioteca de Silent Hill? Uh, past the highway that's all fucked up, go opposite direction from the school and near the diner. Uh, bienvenidos, HD collectionista? Uh, muy bien, si, claro, claro, claro, ni muy lleno.

Mucho baddo. Caralo. Caralo. Okay, um, she, she starts with an oozy, dude. Yeah. I'm like, not a, that's, that's a very metroid way to start the game. Yes, it is, isn't it? Uh, I was, I was caught.

So, I was contacted twice, right? One, I just, my, my Twitter DMs blew up and was like, you got to stop them. I'm like, what, what's happening? And then the, the, the, the thing came back that was only you can stop it. I didn't even get through the part where I was talking to the person. I had the moment like, you can't, you've gotten, come on. And I get over there and as soon as I load the stream up, I, it's, it's the confused face of you going, what?

It's not the, and I'm like pages here and I'm like, I'm going to, I'm going to call them. So you got to call them. I'm going to call them. Now, now, um, in everyone's defense, uh, you're not crazy. I do recall years of being told about how bad the HD collection is. I do recall. But I also recall, um, a extra heavy emphasis on two and how bad two was.

And yeah, no, that's definitely accurate. And, and three as more of a, yeah. You know, and I was like, okay, so that's an air category. Um, and then, yeah, and then someone went like, it's, it's, it's, it's fine. And I was like, okay, but ultimately I'm like, well, I'm not going to go for that. Like off the bat. So I then went and searched on the PS app and found no copies of Silent Hill available for purchase in any way, shape or form.

Oh, of course not. And then, uh, I searched on steam and I found no copies of Silent Hill available for purchase in any way, shape or form, uh, at least the not the homecoming down besides homecoming downpour. And I was like, oh boy. And then I turned on my Xbox and then I searched on that. So like basically I do the thing that I'm going to do with, I do with the classic games where it's like, okay, is it available on any old platforms?

And on the, and that's, that's, well, that's what it turns out to be. Um, but the, the Xbox version did have it. And then the, yeah, the, the misunderstanding that like it's really, it's, it is, it's bad across the board. It's heavily focused on two, but three is bad enough to not bother. It's like, okay, got it. So I think, I think when you're talking about looking for it, I think it bears mention that um, Silent Hill's like preservation issues are so bad that two is the only game I can

think of ever that it's not just play the original release on disc for the PlayStation two, right? It's play the, the re-release with the greatest hits box specifically Jesus because they re-released uh, they, they put it out on Xbox that had the bonus campaign and the new lighting and then they re-released it on PS two as the greatest hits version that had the new campaign. So the original PS two version doesn't even have, uh, like some lighting tricks and, uh, the, the Maria campaign. So like, are the PC versions of two and three just considered abandoned where?

So the PC versions of two and three are considered to be really cool if you can get your totally legit copy off of Amazon. Yeah, okay. Does that, does that answer your question? It sounds like, uh, might as well be where. Dang it, stop that. Might, might as well be where then. Yeah.

All right. Yeah, might, well, I mean, no, Konami doesn't give a fuck. Konami doesn't give a fuck about nothing. Uh, though, though loading it into, uh, loading it into like Spanish was not what I expected either. I don't understand what happened. So yes, we're, so I popped in Silent Hill three. Uh, I, you know, I, I, I basically got my, my, it turns out I had a, a, a PS two disc. Uh, uh.

It's crazy the whole time. Stuck in behind my shelf. I didn't know it was there. And when I popped it in, for some reason, a Spanish copy loaded up with all kinds of weird stuff and a save. And it must have been because it was in Spanish and, um, the controls were on type B and like, Oh, that's got to be an old save file. Cause I couldn't, it was so confusing to the disc somehow. Yeah.

And so what had, what ended up happening was I remember I was pressing, um, back for map. No, no, back for inventory and triangle for map. And I was like, that's not right, but maybe I'm just, maybe that's what it is. You know, and then, and then when I went long enough and then eventually went to the, to the controls to read, to check out the quick item button. And I was like, Oh yeah, this is on type B. This is completely fucked. So yeah, uh, big old dumb shenanigans, uh, which will be included in the episode one of Silent Hill three coming out,

uh, this week on the channel. I want to give a shout out, uh, to, uh, uh, moderating friend and, uh, yours and mine, quick quick theater for the person to contact me. And I'm going to give a shout out to one peach saliva who was the person who was like, You got to call that dude. You got to make that phone call. It's a group effort. Really.

It's a group effort. Talk him off the ledge. So the, the entire, there was part of me sitting there watching it. I'm like, what if I just didn't do anything? So the, that'd be more fun. Well, so the entire voice acting, uh, track has been redubbed but not replaced. So it plays at a higher volume over the original voices. It's, it's, yeah, it's wild.

It's, it's, it's crazy. And also it's, it's, it's the persona gang, uh, you know, the Laura Bailey's and the Uri Lowenthal's and right. The people that you would expect and like they're like fine. They're fine. Right. But one of the things about silent hill one, uh, two and three was that the people that they got off the street to do the characters were then modeled into the game as the characters.

Oh wow. So that their performance would be the same as the person. So like, I don't know if you've ever seen what guys see. He looks like. Yeah, I do. He looks like James. You see the actors are the characters, which makes it extra wild. I got a really good look at him in terrace house.

Yeah. It's extra weird that you would ever recast it. Hmm. Okay. All right. Anyways, all, all things aside, uh, once, uh, the, the, well, once we pulled out of the parking lot and got on the road with that. Um, yeah, that's a silent hill game so far.

So good. Um, it definitely starts them. Like it's, it's that point where it's, if you're coming back to this, it's the third time around. So I guess we're not going to do the slow start. We're just going to go barreling into it, which I kind of assume is probably how it goes with horror movies as well. When you're like a numbered entry in a, in a franchise and you're like the third or fourth horror movie, you're probably just going to get started with the, the horror shit way

earlier, way sooner. So I went and, uh, I went and took a look at you going through it. And you got hit by the, the roller coaster. Uh, got hit by the roller coaster, which is the, which is the end of that sequence. But, uh, if you fucking die in that sequence, it just skips right the fuck forward. Yeah. That's the, okay. That makes sense.

Right. Immersive intro. Um, yeah. And, uh, yeah. It, it, you know, I mean, not much to say so far except for like, we're back in and we're doing it. The only difference is this time, um, way less set up and like, I guess pretext for trying to figure out what's going on and who we are.

How do you feel about dick monsters? I mean, I was hoping it wasn't so overt. And then it, oh, no. And then it just became nonstop. We're on our fourth one probably. And now it's kind of like, okay. Okay. Uh, yeah, this backstory is probably going to be bad.

It's, it's like, listen. So we, we did saw how to. So we established the monsters look like what the main character. Okay. What, what's our teenage girl's fears? Dicks. Cancer. Walnuts.

Dicks with cancer. You got to crack walnuts too. Um, yeah. But yeah, no, uh, it's, yeah. And, and, um, you know, and then there's just the, the, the normal. The normal bits of like, okay, what can we do? How do we move? How do we shmove?

Uh, you can still play footsies, but unfortunately you can't do a backstep. So it's a little bit harder this time around. And this is fucked up because it's like in the wrong order, but everything I do tends to be this way. Like I'm looking at her and I'm just like every time my brain says Ashley, no, wait, Heather, because there's a, you're not that far off. They came out like within one or two years of each other. And it's just, it just, it, I have to overwrite correct every time because

look at her. Yeah. You know, it feels like Ashley was like, oh, we, I guess we took Heather and then we did a different thing or maybe they're just parallel designs. It's just parallel. But they, they have, they, there's a lot of, yeah, there's a vibe that they share. Um, in any case, uh, yeah. So on hill three, uh, so far so good.

Um, hey, let me ask you because you, you're the, you're one of the, so that we're old men, we're horrible digital boomers now. Um, uh, I saw Lance McDonald posting about this on Twitter just a few days ago and it was perfectly timed, which is the, the, the kids now, the kids who are like, I, my first game was the halo three, right? You know them ones that are 20 now. Um, it is impossible to overstate how fucking crazy it was to get a PlayStation two when silent hill one and three came out four years apart.

Like silent hill one is bordering on 3d stick figures and silent hill three is like one of the most impressive amounts of 3d modeling ever. And those were within a four year period. Yeah. Um, I mean, when we were bringing this point up last time and I was, I was, uh, struggling to remember the exact mean, but I think it was, uh, that final fantasy one and final fantasy 10 are like 10 years apart or 86 to 2001. No, 15 years apart.

And then 15 years after 10, you're at, well now, right? Or large, just a couple of years ago and the, the, the obviously the curve in the technology and everything like that was, we have a fucked up sense of, um, console generation jump quality expectation because, because of that going from, you know, nest quality to fucking, uh, yeah, FF 10 quality in 15 years and then 15 years passes again and then things start to change way, way less. Um, because we're just, we're starting to curve and then we're hitting that slowing off point, you know, it's weird diminishing returns.

Hey, let me add, you, you, oh no. So you, you just played the dead space, right? And that came out in, in 2008. That, that was a little bit ago, right? It's like, well, we're far, we're just as far away from dead space now as we were from like FF fucking three space came out. Oh, it's weird. Anyway, um, here's a random one.

Actually, uh, well, you know, when you go live and everyone types live LIV? No. Okay. I'm like, is that a, is that a meme that like? Yes, it is a meme. It is, it is, uh, it is a response to the devolver 24 hour stream, the devolver E3 live, live show, live. LIV?

Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's what I believe. Anyway. Hey, well, let me ask you something. I have a, I have a big question for you. What is it in your heart that you woke up one day and you said, you know what?

Yeah, let's kill those kids. That's how I feel. I think we don't have nearly enough dead children littering the floor. Right. Okay. So, uh, we're playing Mass Effect two and Mass Effect two is getting really, really good. And yeah, I just did. Morden's loyalty mission.

Loyalty mission. Yeah. And holy fuck, man, um, especially after like, like digesting that it's so fucking, it's first of all, um, it is exactly what I wanted from this game is to zoom in on this, this issues or zoom in on this part of the backstory and then take it to the level where, oh no, you've got the guy right here. And not only is he right here. He's Mr. Space Mengele.

He's sitting down and he's like, let's talk about it. Let's talk about the Genophage, you know. So, um, yeah, that is as you do as you, as we have previously discussed, the most fucked up thing about, uh, the franchise so far and the backstory to it. And going into it at every corner of that, like that loyalty mission as you're walking through the, the labs of the, the, the blood pack, the blood packed, um, or whatever. Yeah. Um, you're yelling at him going, what the fuck is wrong with you?

And you're trying to figure out like, like, yeah, essentially like, like you're like, okay, how can you be such a monster? What do you need to tell yourself to sleep at night? You know, and then he, the answer is data. And then he starts going down this line of reasoning point by point and I'm listening to it and it's, it's, it's fucked. It's, it's, it's, but it's like, it's warm. Well, no, that's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is it's fucked and he's, and I'm looking at him going like, okay, so what is your, like when you're looking at, for example, because what you see is a, um, a dead pregnant Krogan, uh, covered in a sheet and then he reacts viscerally to that. And he goes, this is a waste of life. This is wide. Why do we do this? What will like this? We need to stop a male on and, um, and you're like, why the fuck would you give a shit,

dude? Look at all the, look, you're the engineer of the massive space murder. Um, and, uh, he's like, yeah, no, uh, we didn't do it this way. We didn't have any, we didn't have any dead bodies like this. It's a waste of life. You know, and then he goes, and then you're like, you must have tested on some one, some thing, some people. And he's like, uh, nothing that can do calculus, I think is what his answer was.

Essentially only Varen and dead tissue. So he goes out of his way to explain that like, oh, they did it ethically, which is just insanely uncomfortable given the end result regardless, right? Yeah. No, we conducted our unethical science experiments under the most ethical controls possible. And goes through it piece by piece, even, and then like, it goes like, I had to go in myself. I had to check on it myself.

I had to be the one couldn't trust this with anyone else. Right. And so you're like, okay. I initially was expecting, like I, at first I thought I was listening to cognitive dissonance. At first I thought he was separating reality from, um, what he internalized his actions to be. Yeah. His own personal view of it versus the reality of the actual consequences.

Exactly. And that that's how he was, you know, again, dealing with it. So the quelling the guilt, so to speak. And the more it goes on, it's like, no, not quite. He's actually confronting it. And that's what he, and he's being straight up about what he's saying. The thing is, is that he's like, when we look at it and we weigh all the calculations and we look at every possible permutation of it, and we put all the numbers down and you put

all the data down, the data down, you go, Genophage or Genocide. Right. And, uh, it is something that leads. So then you go, okay. So the question now is you're going, all right, it's a pile of bodies versus another pile of bodies. Which of these pile of bodies is preferable? And it's like, okay.

In one case, you're, uh, it's a pile of dead Krogan babies. And in the other case, it's a pile of dead Krogan warriors fighting to, into oblivion with humans and Turians until they're wiped out because that's where the results would lead. Right. And then it's like, okay, um, and, and he's, and he, and he says is like, it's infertility rates not killing. And then you're going into that argument of like, it's like, oh boy, okay.

How are you framing the, uh, I guess the, the process of getting pregnant as a Krogan and such. Now we read in the codex that they carry, they talked about pregnancies and being carried to term only one in a thousand is carried to terms. So I still, we have not yet experienced any confirmation of the process, but people made reference to eggs or something like that. No, no, they, they, they lay a clutch of eggs. So we didn't, we didn't, we have not seen any, we haven't seen anything like that.

We have not seen anything. You're not gonna. Okay. Well, there's, there's like one or two codex entries. There's a, the codex entry that we had made reference to, um, uh, uh, one in a thousand pregnancies being viable, right? So when hearing that, Reggie and I both took that to be like, okay, we'll assume this is similar enough to mammal, um, reproduction, but, okay, um, yeah, and, and, and then kind

of puts it down and goes, well, let's walk this through then piece by piece. Are you saying it would be preferable for the entire Krogan race to be wiped out as a result of nothing happening here? And the answer is no, that sucks. That's not a good or preferable outcome. So then you have this really shitty decision to make where he's like, well, then I'm going in and the other, and the thing that makes this interesting too, and why it's so good is because it's a sci-fi setting.

So you can't actually have, um, so the idea of like things being wrong, something going fucked up or whatever, it's like, he can kind of like hand wave that and go, no, no, no, I did it perfectly. I did it ethically. We're essentially doing a hypothetical. It removes the realities of the, of the complicated messy, Socratic argument and go, no, this is the criteria. This is the criteria.

This is the criteria. Yeah. This is all of the problem. Yeah. So as he's walking through that, I'm in the mission taking that narrative in and going like, okay, um, I'm hearing what you're saying. So you, but you kind of are, it's got a lot of good points. He's real smart.

So, um, I mean, we can go on to the, the next part of it if you'd like, but in the moment, the last bit before you get into the Mellon side of the discussion, which enters and brings some new dynamics into the matter is, uh, based on what he's putting down here. And I haven't been given reason to think he's lying because he's being very, exactly, right? He goes more than straight up, never even tells you even a minor falsehood. So he goes, death of all Krogans, or we do this. What per, what outcome do you want? So, uh, if we, if you'd like, you can give me an answer to that and then we can move

to the next part. Okay. Well, uh, I have one detail that I want to bring up. Do I have, is it a detail I know about? That's my question. I'm about to ask you, uh, do you remember, uh, his specific involvement in the Mellon in the Genophage, uh, and its maintenance? Like what his literal specific task and job was, I believe it should have come up, um,

because the actual Genophage was hundreds of years prior to when he was born. It was 19, it said 19, 1900 BCE, but oh, I, that I didn't know. If it, if it happened, if it happened prior to him being around, I did not know that. I thought his job was in, I thought he was involved in the, um, research and data and and like essentially like the, I'm fairly certain it's come up. I'm going to, I'm going to turn off the emote only for a moment. No, you know what the lifespan, the lifespan means automatically, it must have, you're right.

It wouldn't make sense for him to have been there at the start of that because the, the timeframe does make, yeah, you are, you are correct. Yes. That would make sense. So people are pointing out that it, it absolutely came out that Morden's job was not to invent the Genophage. The timeline does not make sense. The, what Morden's job was is that the Krogan were naturally and very slowly healed.

Yes. So it was going from one in a thousand viable to one, so what he's working on is re, is redoubling the efforts on it. Right. Yeah. Um, so this is where the, the, and this is where we get to like the, the mail-on section and, um, I'll just head it off at the pass and say, if I'm staring at that moment in that conversation, um, I'll break down exactly how that, how that went down because I'm

sure you're very curious on, on how and why we came to those conclusions and stuff, but extraordinarily. Uh, but the idea that I think I would have come to looking at it is that there's a difference between the Genophage at the time of the Krogan rebellions and then the, the, where it is today and the after effects and what that means, right? So when you're asked to make that decision and it's an imminent threat versus, uh, when we're in the later years of it, you can start to have a discussion about whether or not the same level of instigation and urgency, you know, uh, applies now the way he's describing

it, he's describing it from a place and from a point of view of, um, where you're kind of, he's describing it in a way where you're in the moment when, if you're alive during the Krogan rebellions and you're, and you have these two choices coming down, uh, what are you choosing to do, right? Now that's the thing and the, and one did definitely put enough down so that you would understand that this wasn't a just, uh, this wasn't just like, Hey, we're rolling out the final solution. Um, no questions if ends or buts.

There was enough put there to be like, yeah, but the Krogan wars were getting pretty bad though. And you're like, okay. If you say so. Yeah. Um, and then in this discussion, he puts down an argument where it's essentially like, okay, if you're describing in the moment, perhaps in that, um, con in the context of when the war is happening, Jenna Fage versus genocide, and he's certain that the end result would

wipe out all the Krogan life. Like how are you supposed to go the other way with that? Right? In that moment, are we, wait, are we talking about mail in? Are we talking about, uh, Morden or are we talking about the original creators? We're talking about the original creators. And then when I'm talking to Morden, that is what I'm thinking about, right? I'm not, uh, and so, uh, that, that's kind of where I was being walked to what he's

describing as essentially in that initial decision point, this is how bad the situation was. Right. So I get that. Now, the reason I bring up a Morden's particular involvement is that he is making Jenna Fage arguments. However, the Jenna Fage healing by itself at a very slow process, needing him to re up on the situation is actually a completely different set of ethical arguments than the

original because there's always, there's always the possibility that it healed to a, uh, like stable level instead of a, you know, a natural level. Right. Right. Okay. Yeah. The other thing is that the, the one thing that comes up and it's not explicitly stated, but if you think about the math enough and you think talk to Rex, it's the

original Jenna Fage numbers were calculated wrong because what they thought they were doing was giving as much as possible. Yes. No, but yes. But what I'm saying is it's never going to be explicitly stated. It has to be inferred. The original Jenna Fage numbers were wrong. They said, oh, one in a thousand birth rate associated with their current society associated

with their current lifespan, exactly, blah, blah, blah, would actually be replacement rate. Right. It would be like 2.1 or 2.2 for our modern society in terms of births. They did not take into account the, the cultural effects on the invalidating 99% of births. So now the real Jenna Fage is actually way below replacement rate and that and the race is actually straight up dying out. And that has, that was my conversation point for the entire duration of the, after that

conversation happened is, okay, now Morton, talk to me about the cultural effect. Talk to me about how fucking depressing it is to be a Krogan. Talk to me about what you think and how you parse that aspect of it, you know. And so far, the, what we get is, again, he says he, he went in, he saw it up close himself. I checked in, he's like, and, and wanted to, you know, be on to Chanka and, and then he gives you the, it had to be me line, you know. So that's not, I want, oh, that line is so good. It's amazing.

Oh, it's super good. It stunned us into silence, you know, as, because, and basically, because you're like, you get that when you're, and there's like a, you have, because you, there's a middle option to that discussion and me and Reggie are just looking at that going, you can't fucking pick the middle option. That doesn't exist, you know, say one of these fascist or communist things or fuck off. So yeah, he gives, he drops that. And then you're like, okay, that's, we're just going to have to leave it there.

But I definitely would love to hear what he thinks about like the, the, the basically nihilistic warrior looking for a place to go die because what's the point? Why? Yeah. You take a, you take a warrior culture and remove its ability to have children. It's hopeless. Or you create a nihilism culture. And that's where I want, I want to know what he believes on that because if you're, you're

taking all things into account, you're not a, what would the term be? I guess a social biologist or a, no, he's not, he's a chemist, he's a, he's a geneticist. So you're, you know, you're, you're not stuttering, studying cultural geography, right? But like, so, but that's where I want to, I want to know more about these things. But again, it's, we have to just wait and see, right? But the male on conversations, no, but, but that's, but this, so you, so you, as you rightfully said, Hey, I can still hear you. I'm just going to get more water.

Okay. As you rightfully just framed, right? There are multiple conversations happening and you are being asked to keep up to speed with them as they go at the pace they're giving it to you while new pieces are being introduced slowly, but there's the initial point of the Krogan rebellions, the Rakhni Wars and everything that they talked about with the first calculations. Then there's fast forwarding from, I guess, 1900 BCE, I think they said, to the current day where they're seeing the natural fight back, as you mentioned.

When you first meet Morton and he's in his, and he's on the, the Nitormendi, he's talking about how he's working on doubling down to, to, to, to compensate for the natural repairing that's occurring. Yeah. Right. Cool. So you have that second discussion. Now you land on Tachanka and then you meet Melon and you meet the fucking guy they kidnapped

and that changes the dynamic again, right? Because Melon is like, fuck this, right? This was wrong the whole time. I need to undo it and I can undo it, right? Right. And it's like, okay, so how are you going to undo it? And it's like, by any means necessary. To the point where we're doing Nazi science, unethical, wait, there's a detail there that's

important. Okay. You're doing unethical Nazi science on volunteers. Everyone in that goddamn lab is a volunteer. You're doing unethical experiments on volunteers, yes. And then the guy you meet who's in the back room goes, I'm here because if I can't fight and I can't be a warrior, then the least that I could do is give myself to the cause of curing my people.

And then they point out that it's like, actually, that's not what's happening. This is specifically the blood pact is going to run with their data and they're going to replace all Krogans. This is not going to help fix the Krogans as a general society. This is going to be some fucked up mutation of it. And then you're like, okay, so the Krogans behind this, this specific clan, they don't give a fuck about Genophage restoration for their whole race. They just want their own thing, right?

And they would dominate at that point. And then Melon is like, yeah, I don't give a fuck whoever it is, this whole, this just needs to be undone regardless. And then you go, what about the Erdnauts? And then it's a little line, but it's a line that goes, yeah, Rex is too weak and he wants nothing to do with this or these experiments, right? He would not want to participate in this, essentially. And it's a line that like, I don't know what the implication is beyond Rex is not down

with this, you know? And I wish that when you go back and you talk to him that you would get like some more of his thoughts on that, but you kind of then, you pull the gun out and then, or rather, you talk to Melon and Melon's like, yeah, I don't care. I'm doing this regardless. And then he goes, well, then you got to go. And then Morton shoots him and then you have the data there and you're left with that decision. Now, is that wrong?

Is that not the line? Oh, I'm checking. I checked. Don't worry about it. There's a line where he- I'm doing so quietly. Yeah, there's a- So that you can keep going.

There's a line where he specifically says, where you go, why not use the urdnot clan? And he says Rex is too weak and wouldn't want anything to do with this or didn't want anything to do with this. Yeah, Rex probably isn't down with, you know, individual experimentation. Okay. It was always my takeaway. Okay. So, fine.

Rex doesn't seem like the kind of guy that would feed people to the science robot. The way Rex feels about this will definitely inform a lot of how I'm going to feel about it. And I'll get there because I ultimately, I'm like, I will trust, I think, what he says if he has a take here, but like there's a difference between him leading and basically Krogan- Yeah. You know what I mean?

Like, I feel like- Yeah. Rex, I'm interested in what he would have to say about the matter. And when I went back, he didn't have much to say. So we'll just have to see. Yeah. Because it's Morton's loyalty mission. So let me ask you-

Oh, no. But anyway, so just to say that like when we get to that point where I'm like, okay, you're kind of like, your dialogue options are essentially like, during the loyalty mission, you're challenging Morton and he's pushing back and you're challenging and he's pushing back. And then even when you agree, it's still with a challenge, you know, and he's like, yep, I know. And then you get to that final point where it's like, all right, do you let Melon get

shot? And it's like, you can choose to, I guess, paragon intervene or not. And at that point, I'm like, well, Melon and what you're up to and the way you're going about this is not that like that's bad. And you being willing to do this in any context that could lead to a future disaster is no good. So regardless, Melon's entire take on that is fucked up. But when you're like, what do we do with the data afterwards?

And I'm staring at that decision point, a couple of things happened there ultimately. But one was I was trying to exhaust dialogue on the left and then it ended up being a hard choice. Not for not for that decision. It ended up being a hard choice. Yeah. And then weirdly, the save broke, not the save broke, but the stage broke and I couldn't exit the mission.

And then I reloaded in and then, you know, and then again, and I was talking with Reggie about it and stuff. And I'm like, okay, at that point, I'm looking at it and going, I think you have, yeah, you have essentially three types of Genophage we're discussing here. You have the initial point. You have the Morton job to double down. And then you have where we are with this Melon data. And I'm like, in my head, I'm like, okay, you never know.

This is unethical data. It's the way it got here is fucked up. Rex wanted nothing to do with it. It could save the day in the future or it could lead to ruin. I have my hand up for a second. One detail. There's actually four Genophages that you've dealt with. Oh, Jesus.

You forgot one. And it's easy to forget, despite the fact that it's very important. You've actively destroyed the cure on Vermeier. Vermeier. Vermeier. Now, yeah. Yeah. So by you, unironically, literally destroying that cure, you essentially re-up the Genophage

yourself. Five if you want to count O'Kir, because O'Kir had two glass-born, right? And he basically said, I'm willing to sacrifice as many Krogan for useless, towards whatever his art, towards the army, as long as I get my one that will be born and will defy the Genophage, you know? So there's multiple instances of trying to get past it and artificially breeding Krogan. On Vermeier, if I'm not mistaken, they were clones that were then indoctrinated immediately, weren't they?

Their original Genesis doesn't go into a lot of detail. They are obviously indoctrinated instantly, but I assume a lot of that is actually just proximity to sovereign. Literally everyone in that building was going to get, I'm not sure if it was cloning, but it was portrayed as a genuine cure. Okay, because the impression I walked away with after seeing the, because there's a bunch of them in test tubes, is I walked away with it going like, oh, okay, they're cloning and then indoctrinating essentially two born Krogans.

So yeah, so you're looking at that and you're like, okay, this is a case of like, this might either save the day or go horrible or lead to horrible ruin. That's the pick on it. And what I think not knowing the future ultimately kind of like guides my vibe there is in that scene, the line about Rex and the idea that, and essentially like I guess the idea of like Morton speaking, you know, Morton convincing me in that conversation that like they really had no other fucking choice. Yeah.

Kind of makes me go, okay, I never would have thought I'd be standing here and in agreement with this decision, but the alternative sounds so fucked that if, if the opposite of what you're telling me is all the Krogans are going to die, then I'm going to go against the option that is all Krogans are going to die, right? Now if it turns out that that is not true and that I am not choosing between all Krogans dying versus them not, then that means that I chosen correctly. But that was what I was weighing was essentially him saying genocide versus genophage in each of those decisions.

So I'm going to say right now, I disagree with his characterization of that because he always frames it as the original inciting event, like the 400 years ago version. In the span of his and your lifetime, the Krogans increasing their dismal birth rate by 10% over a decade is not going to suddenly lead to their whole planet exploding, right? So the problem, the problem, though, is that you're making the call as somebody who is, I guess, definitely not as aware of the numbers and the science and the bullshit as he is and you have to trust his word on so many things that you're after when you're going to put a hand in to call it out, you have to be certain about that point because there's

so much that he's right about. So when the you know what I mean up to that point, I have a question for you from a in game ethical perspective, right? Do you think that the genophage was a bad thing to do? Now I don't want to hear it's the better of two options. I don't want that to be removed. It was a horrible thing to do. It was the most fucked up thing to do.

And if you go back and watch the entirety of the playthrough of Mass Effect One and up to this point in two, you will hear nothing but holy shit, the solarians, what the fuck is wrong with them. This is insane. So in that case, I have to say that my personal view and apologies to the audio listeners for the visual bit is that all discussions with Morden, Malon, Rex, etc. about the viability of this act or evil act or whatever all result into a big can of jerking yourself off. Oh, the numbers for people that could be convinced by a series of nice and pleasant logical arguments.

OK, I see that and I break it down to even further brass tacks and go when the left decision is the Krogans will die at all times and you're operating with that. If that's what you're operating with, I don't care about your the jerk off analogy. That's not what that's what's happening in the past. But that's the but that's the point of the but that's the point of like why you would ever consider that route is what I'm saying. And if it's wrong and if it's wrong, if it's wrong, if you're missing the info, if you're taking the the the if you're taking it to be a choice that it's not, if it's a false

choice, then you're making a bad decision off of a false choice. Right. Let me ask you a question. What and this is going to get a little more in depth or a little more in other words, in other words, because because but because because here's because like it is a bad thing to do. And the only time ever you would stop to go, oh, my God, because what the what the fuck do you actually have to go this road is when you're like, are we choosing between this

and everything dying? That's the only time. And if that's not what's happening, then you never go that road. Yeah. So here's here's the thing. This I don't have any interview. I don't have any backstage information. This is just my personal inference and people can can disagree.

But what do you personally believe the historical analog from reality? The genophage is actually referencing because there's two that that come to mind very clearly. One is Tuskegee and one is the the the Japanese bombings. Yeah. The atom bomb. I took I took it to be the atom bomb. So the atom bombing, I think, is a fair. It's fairly clear.

It's like the decision at the time was do we have the most violent, bloody, casualty written invasion ever, ever? Or do we do this big old super war crime? So I talked to I talked about, you know, to end the war prematurely. I don't know if I talked about it on the podcast, but I talked about this on Elboy. OK. Well, so now if we're if you want to leave the realm of video games here, I talked about this on Raido Kuzanaha LP.

But we had. I had I had just finished listening to Supernova in the East, which is a 30 hour breakdown of what happened in World War Two and like the Pacific War and what eventually led to the end results. It was bad. It was the most fucked up thing ever, the most fucked up thing ever. And the bad theater, Pacific Theater was a pile of shit. And when you and like the absolute like the the the like the nothing that life was worth,

you know, during that conflict is well, anyway, it's I mean, there's obviously a reason why like our entire modern era is shaped by the things that happened back then. Absolutely. It's you know. And so the thing is when you go into that and like what Dan Carlin does is he breaks it down. It's such a really a really good way going into island by island, what it looked like and the results of essentially, you know, everything that Iwo Jima Okinawa, all the islands

they went up to and when it essentially when the fighting stopped and there was nothing left but like the Imperial Army and the the villages that they were, you know, based in there was just this there was just this this thing of showing how they would rather kill themselves and die than be taken prisoner and it then extrapolated further and got worse and worse and you can go on and you can see all the details of it and then you can get to the point where they start pulling out the slogans where that's say 100 million dead for the emperor in Japan and then how they essentially go if we land and we start marching in what's going to happen here and essentially some of the most insane of the Japanese military

at the time were actively promoting and OK with the idea of the entire nation committing suicide. Yeah, arm every civilian, every single one fighting to the death. It would have been like, you know, I'm going to assume that the average person listening to this has at least a passing knowledge of the situation. So then and the thing what I what's really important and good though to state here, though, is that this is not a and therefore we are saying that you had to go drop these bombs that murdered fucking every like it's not and therefore this it's not that right.

But what he's what he does is he's just he's framing this idea and he goes, OK, so if you were the one that had to sit there at the time and if you had to be the one that was taking this data in and if you had to be one of these decision makers, right, who are tough. I can imagine. And then also like the ego of these characters involved. He paints the picture of like, you know, the personalities, the types of people they were, how they were often concerned with their legacy and lots of little bullshit like that.

Things that would affect whether you're thinking about the amount of lives at the time. And it's so you get a really total picture of the of the horror of it, you know. So that just to say that it's not it's not a build up of, hey, man, they had to fucking do because that's jerk off bullshit, as you just rightfully said, right. So the point that I want to make, particularly using Mass Effect, I think it's very obvious that that's the historical analog it's pulling from where it's like, we would have had to have a huge bloody war with the Krogan and we've probably resulted in either a near or total genocide, yada, yada, and then and so forth.

And it is portrayed, the Genophage is portrayed as a necessary evil that is a decision that maybe you or I could never have possibly made similar to the talks about the nuclear bombardment of Japan, where the Genophage argument breaks for me. Is that it feels like when Malon, it feels like when Morton is talking to you about tweaking the Genophage to make sure it takes, my brain goes to some asshole going, you know, Japan's building its military backup, looks like we're going to have to hit him again. Like that, that's how Morton feels when he talks to you. Now, yeah, it was the worst thing ever and yeah, it was a very complicated time and no,

it's not that complicated time anymore, but I'm going to have to double down on a 400 year old decision because it was the right decision then. Or tweak it. So it's the right decision now. Tweak it back to the numbers that we currently, that we wanted to sit at and like not adjust over time. Yeah. And then of course, it goes, all right, so what is behind that decision?

And then it goes likely back to him saying simulations. Krogan overrun, the aggression, Yadayata, Turians and humans, wiping off the face of the earth or rather the face of T'Chanka. So like that is a different, like you said, it's a different Genophage, it is a different discussion and in the game, it's bringing you these facts as if you're in the moment of the wars and then you have his job, but you're not, but you're not in the decision. You're talking about the mail on data, which is even further pulled away from it. So this is, so yeah, that's the thing is if the choice is, if the choice opposite the

Genophage is the guaranteed genocide of the Krogan race, then that choosing the guaranteed genocide of the Krogan race is always the bad decision. But if it's not, then obviously the Genophage is the bad decision. I think it's confused because I don't think anyone actually brings that up as the alternative in the moment. They bring that up always over and over of like, well, when the war was happening and we made the decision, those were the options available and everyone keeps still having the conversation as if the problem is new and novel, which it isn't.

It's actually old and tired and it is not like, let's say, let's say Melon cured it flat, right? Just flat cured it, right? Today, right back to that would take like decades to catch up, right? It would take, it wasn't, whatever. I guess. I'm just saying, I don't know. It's fascinating to me that you could have inverted your opinion so strongly after like

some talks. I mean, I feel like it wasn't strong. I feel like I was reluctantly looking at what I thought was the extermination of the Krogans and I thought I was choosing against that now. So all I can say is, if that's not what I was choosing against, then I was wrong. But that's what I thought I was choosing against. And I look forward to seeing where these games go and what happens, but I don't really know what else to say here.

Let me ask you a question, because somebody just somehow broke through emote, only emote to ask a legitimately good question, which is why I'm going to rephrase it into a question, which is how do you feel about volunteers who allowed themselves to be prodded and blown up with super lasers having having their explicit sacrifice thrown into the trash? It's horrifying. I like decisions that I'm glad I don't have to make as you have a big old boner as you deleted their data decisions that I'm glad I don't have to make on a regular basis as a as a human being that's fucking.

It's gross. It's fucked. It's insanely fucked. You know, I think my, you know, I think my favorite part of that quest line is my absolute dead on absolute favorite part, you're having a big fight and a big screaming match between you, Malon and Morden about the reality of what's going on, what they're doing in the Genophage, right? You know who would be really nice to have in that room?

Rex, any Krogans, any, any Krogans, anybody was grunting the room with you. Tally was in the room. Yeah, no, she doesn't give a shit. Right. If grunts there grunts a weird lab bitch, so he doesn't really give much of a shit, but he that's what it's like. That's the thing is I was wondering about what his interjections would be, but he's also kind of distant from the idea of, like, of what's happening there.

But then he also joins the urdinates as he's like, oh, I think I like this, you know, but maybe this is a bit extreme, but he's the whole situation just screams like a bunch of old dudes going, guys, we have to make some decisions for the blacks and the women. Uh, for their own good. We gotta, we gotta do it. No, none of them are here. No, that come on. The Krogan can't make decisions for themselves.

What are they crazy? Look how warlike they are. The nature of that mission and the nature of the video game is to not have a character like Rex with you during that conversation. Yeah, no, to force you to answer it without him there. But yeah, obviously that would be if Rex were there, it would just be like, I just look at him the whole time. There'd be.

So here's the thing. And then walking back and not getting aligned is that for the stuff regarding like there's stuff that you will deal with that has to do with Koreans, right? Tally can always be with you as, as a primary source and representative and you can go, Hey, what do you think about this when you deal with Cerberus? You always have the opportunity to bring Miranda or Jacob along. The one time, the one time Rex's name came up in that conversation. I laser focused on it.

You know, you know why? Do you know why that's the case? Do you know why you can't bring Rex? Well, because it's because Mass Effect one had the fucking thing. Yeah, it could be dead. Yes. And this is a microcosm of a problem that will grow larger and Mass Effect two and three have it worse than any game I've ever seen, which is anything can happen.

Characters can live or die. And it's like it would actually be incredibly vital and important to have a character that you already know that is directly impacted by this have a larger role, but they can't so because they have they could have been they could be dead. And this is why I assume this franchise is so beloved because the knock on effect of one character not being there in two is large. But the continuing fucking cascade of that butterfly into a third game that also has to not has to remove whatever the effects of two would have been must

be massive. So so, you know, and I know that there always needs to be a feasible game design way to remove and replace, right? So I'm curious to see what it looks like when we when I land onto Chanka and Rex is not there leading it when someone else is. I wonder what that looks like, you know, but I talked about it a little bit when I went through three and the solution to important characters being dead is really inelegant.

You either get a literally unnamed replacement to fulfill the task of like hitting some buttons or flying a ship or I there's a there's a great video guy put out that you might want to watch afterwards, which is can Commander Shepard say the universe with no friends. I forget the exact name, but it was basically like a proportion of the game's storylines actually just completely break and don't have or that go from A to B to see anymore or K dog turns into a huge piss baby and says me and walks away.

Yeah. Um, yeah. So you start to see little bits and pieces in two, but three has this wild variance where there are storylines that just actually don't make any sense. So if we can go, there's no one in them to act. Yes. So if we can go back, though, to the fucking dead baby discussion for a bit. Yeah.

Um, that you love. Yes. Can't get enough of them. Uh, when the. To what I was, what I was going to say is that like, I think when examining the information on the table that's here and then like going like, OK, what are you actually choosing against? If the decisions were not correctly choosing against what an outcome that is

guaranteed Krogan genocide, then me being too stupid to not understand that context or missing the information or not recalling it properly is exactly why I'm not the kind of person who should make these kinds of decisions. The exact reasons why that would happen, that kind of mistake would occur is because I'm not the kind of person who should be, you know, so that's exactly it. Playing this game is I am making those decisions that I think are super fucked and gross looking at it going like, well, if you're telling me the alternative is everything's going to die, then holy fucking shit, I guess we have to do the

thing that's not going to lead to everything dying. And if that's wrong, then it's like, oh, well, then I'm too stupid to read that. And then that was, then that's wrong. But I don't know what else to say on the matter, except for like, I think that makes sense, you know. I think what would have been appreciated even for somebody like me, I knew what a decision I was going to make even before I went on that mission kind of thing, was that there's no one at any point makes an argument for the Krogan that I

think is important, which is it's so often portrayed as well, if the Krogan go back to their old breeding statistics, then they're going to become a dominant military force and then the only solution to that would be genociding them, right? Or vice versa. But I feel like it doesn't really bring up the fact that the current state of Krogan society is a guaranteed slow genocide anyway. It is. And what's what's crazy that they introduce in Mass Effect One is that the

Krogan's so, okay, in one, you find out that the Krogan's had a crazy birth rate to make up for how fucking often they died in their war on their home planet. And then the Celerians raised them out of that and accelerated that amount. And so like Celerian involvement is more than just a gentle genocide. It's also the same hand that is overcorrecting, you know. Yeah, no, it's it's the it's the most. The other thing is like, is like Mass Effect is obviously based on good old Star Trek and the Krogan are like the the prime directive problem writ large.

Right, right. It's like, well, why don't we just go to planets and just give alien races all this new technology and you land on Tachanka and culturally achieve those themselves. They can be nuts. You land on Tachanka and then the update in the codex goes. So yeah, the Krogan split the atom. And then that's what led them to the Dark Times. And here they are in the post-atom split world.

Like they got nukes and then used them for casual warfare. Yeah, it's it's really a great detail because I don't know what the image I had of Tachanka was in my head, but I assumed some kind of very wild planet. No. And and then you get there and it's like it is destroyed modern day looking cityscape. But most nuclear holocaust. But the part that I love is the architecture is brutalist in design. It is it is functional.

It is slab. It is like fucking just that post-Soviet cold, you know. And you're like, yeah, what the fuck are they going to be doing? Interior decorating for a grenade to come flying through the window. Like, you know, what are we doing here? It makes so much sense. And so, yeah, it's one of the coolest fucking things. Like, I'm so happy that in a game that is like this geared towards linear action,

you can still have these macro level discussions with characters. And that was a fucking big one, you know. And I want to point out before we go any further, the video I was referencing that is really cool is called Can You Beat Mass Effect With No Friends by Many A True Nerd, which goes into what those games look like with everyone conceivable dead. And the answer is a fucking mess, like a complete mess. Yeah. Yeah, I wish I was a pre-cog, Ben.

I wish I was a pre-cog. I wish that, well, first of all, I wish that every decision that was not that was just information gathering, lines of dialogue. I wish that, like, there'd be yellow and white lines so that you could kind of, you know, be like, OK, just gathering info. OK, this one's moving forward. But yeah, and then the other thing, too, is I'm also someone and this was in the moment as well.

I'm also someone like I could stop and think on a split on like a screen like that for a long time. Yeah, to the point where it would be even more annoying to watch, because a lot of people like a lot of people hate a habit I have of like pausing the game to have a discussion about something. Because, unfortunately, I wish I had the ability to do it while moving forward and such and being succinct, but I can't. My brain is to is that it has to like get a thought out and then move on

to the next one because I'm not moving at the speed or whatever the case is. It's a habit and some people like it, some people don't. But in those types of moments, the amount of time I want to spend like thinking about the is long. Yes. Yeah. Because I have to think about the history of every like, for example, I mean, we started the podcast at noon. It's one thirty right now.

This has been almost the entire show so far. You could easily have done this inside your own head. Certainly. But I had I had an inkling coming into this that I would be gun to my head forced to explain my positions. So the thought is I'm like, there's things that I will look at a codex on and be like, oh, fuck, that's a detail I forgot. For example, when we were landing on I want the planet where Tally was doing her stuff and like the Gath

were were rolling and and and fucking, you know, attacking. Oh, you meant fucking Cal Rieger. The coolest goddamn quarry in in in the entire fucking game so far. Like, holy shit, what a bad ass. Cal was the best. Thankfully saved him. I can't believe how cool he was. What a hero met him.

And then, yes, in that right before going like touching down on that planet, I was like, hold on a sec, Reg. And then let me pull up the codex, went through back to the Gath entry and a very important detail that I forgot was that the response to Gath self-aware the self-awareness of the Gath was to exterminate them. And immediately, like, like step one and was destroying them all. And and therefore, Yomi layer two is no, please don't, you know.

And that's a very important thing when you're looking at the history of how fucked up the the the aggression has been between these two and where they're at now and how bad the Gath are, etc. And the threat and the dangers of AI is like, yeah, motherfuckers, Matrix, Zion, whatever you want to call it. Right. Your step one was, oh, God, kill them all. You know, all of them. So that was an important detail that I was like, fuck me.

I forgot about that right before the way the way they talk about how the Gath stole their planet is such like a bunch of fucking sore losers. Like, we'll see. But oh, no, Tali tech talks about it in one. Oh, yeah. Well, yes, they're they're they're I mean, they're salty and they hit the flotilla and now they're flying around and we'll come back. They're like, I can't believe the Gath did this to us. Yeah. And it's like, are you are you serious?

And then the and then the Krogans, but it's kind of like how like you land on T'Chanka and I'm like, you see you round one corner and they're like, oh, man, one day those two are going to get what's coming to them. Yeah. And you're like, oh, is this entire planet a bunch of dudes salting up, going, oh, man, it's going to be so good when we take it back. We're going to fucking do it, guys. It's like, yeah, you're the whole planet is just bar talk. Everyone's around the bar putting doing also have to remember

that terry and hostility to humans is because humans upset. Yes. Military hierarchy. Yes, exactly. You know, and we're working on those dreadnought counts. But we're listening to every Krogan on T'Chanka is just doing Irish car bombs all night and going, all right, man, one day, you know, we're going to do it. And it's just like it's fucking sad. But yeah, anyway, I think that's

that's about as much as I got on on that discussion as it goes. But the game doesn't actually go the game doesn't actually turn to you and go, hey, do you think that Jennifer H was a good idea? It it takes you through this these multiple steps in the history. And then the the last and final point in that conversation is what do you do with the fucked up data

from the third generation or fifth generation version of this coming from a bad person that a good person didn't want anything to deal with when you're being explained by someone who's doubling down on something that you might not need to double down on anymore. But his rationale based on the original time makes sense. It's the current version of it that you're going to have to question. Like you're so there's so many steps removed from that initial question.

Right. You know, by that point. Yeah. I have one last thing to say in your defense personally. Um, you so most so a lot of games are a little different to go through outside of their own time. Right. So like FF seven doesn't hit quite as hard when you play it now because it's not coming right off the Super Nintendo and stuff like that. Mass Effect has a very unique and different problem.

And that was that Mass Effect one came out in 2007 and Mass Effect two came out in 2009 and Mass Effect three came out in 2012. I'm sure you remember at the time how absolutely violently shit hot those games were when they came out, how they were just dominating. Everybody's talking about stuff and how popular they were. And as well, how everyone was talking about how their choices would roll forward. What this led to is for someone like myself

and a weirdly high amount of people compared to the average game. Which was if you beat Mass Effect two and you went all Paragon, you know what? You had tons of time to do before Mass Effect three came out. Do the entire game over all renegade and just keep that sequence of events on hand. So like I really overdid it. But I know I had a bunch of friends who had like,

well, here's my Mass Effect one Paragon, Mass Effect two renegade save for when three comes out. Here's my Mass Effect one renegade, Mass Effect two Paragon save for when that comes out. And here's my double double on each side. And then I'll just pick. I'll just make the decision later when the game comes out based on what I feel like by actually going through the series

in order, the all at once within a relatively you don't have the buffer that everybody else had. Everybody else had over a year to just go, yeah, I'll just go through the game again and change it because I just I feel like doing something different. I mean, I also feel as if with time, the positions of pro and anti scub eventually become like scub supremacy versus what that is that

versus deleting, deleting the word scub from everyone's minds via men in black flashing light, you know, you will never have even thought of scub. That's not the problem. The problem is that now that Mass Effect three is out and complete and the legendary version is out and complete, it turns out that morality or not, there are actually a series of right and wrong answers.

There is so the genophage one isn't a good example, actually, but there are a couple in which it's like, hey, this guy's a dick bag. Should I shoot him in the face or let him go? And the answer is in some cases, if you let him go, you'll hang out with him next game. Or if you let him go, he'll kill a character you could have hung out with next game. And therefore, there's literally like this answer doesn't do anything but delete something later,

which has led to a lot of these becoming super intense, right, particularly if you're streaming it. Well, and that's the other bit was the. And this is like really the final, the final bit is, yeah, we're streaming this and like we're doing dumb things. And we're, you know, like I hope in the end, it's a fun thing to watch, regardless of how this plays out, because I knew going in with the first one, for example, I was thinking, however it plays out,

whatever decisions get made, that'll be fun. You just you just roll, you know, so. Yeah, that's that's ultimately of the at the underneath everything that I'm thinking about. But yeah, I'm just I'm just shocked to be on the podcast with woolly loves dead babies, men. I'm just it's just it's kind of surprising. It's funny because I could also envision very easily an alternate reality

where you're just like, yeah, just kill them all, dude. Sure, just go for it. You want them all dead. Yeah, how many Krogan's dead do you want? We can serve up another group. Just kill them all, right? Let them just let they all get wiped out. You love it.

It's a tough more. You love them getting wiped out soldiers and dead infants. I mean, those infants could have grown up to be soldiers. So really, you got to you got to snuff them in that crib right now. Just take this big old pillow and hold it over the egg clutch and just mash. And the and the yeah. And then, of course, it's like and then when at what point are they alive or not inside the egg?

You want to get into the weeks? Should we get into the trimesters? Is it is it is the genophage hitting them with some plan B or is the genophage? Because you know what I because here's what I said. This is what I said. I was like, OK, what if the genophage was it was a automated self energizing turret? And the moment an egg hatched, it just zapped it.

And then it counted 99 and then it left one and then it then it turned off. And then that's basically what it is. Right. So would that be any different if it was a gun that shot them? The moment they hatched, would it be any different? If it were that versus their their stillbirth thing? Yeah, it's tough. So my last thing that I want to say about Mass Effect, I love those games. I cannot wait to talk to you more about it, basically.

The answer is yes, because you're it would you're in the you're in the meat of the game. By the way, how do you feel about Jacob's portrayal? Oh, wonderful. That full that fucking quest line is like. Oh, gross. But. You know what my favorite part about Mass Effect is? I could argue with you about this for another hour.

And I think there'd be value in that. Meanwhile, how many Batarian children would you kill before you got an erection? I think it's one because they all got to go. And what a massive, hilarious failure of the game where like the like you have the Krogan and the like the gas are pseudo sympathetic for fuck's sake. But then you get to the Batarians and you're like, oh, yeah, all of them. Just right now. Can we genophage them with like a big bomb, please?

So something that something that I was I was saying a while ago was that like these motherfuckers are literally just planet cracking and or down with the idea of planet cracking. And that's fucked up. And. Someone made an implication that like the Krogens were the same and that they were also using asteroids to destroy planets. OK.

OK, and it's so deep in a codex entry or one of the books. I can't quite tell you which. So it is discussed that garden planets in, in, in, you know, in the sci-fi universe are crazy rare. And the biggest war crime you can commit is to environmentally damage a garden world, right? In Star Trek could be called an M class planet. OK.

And the Krogan were literally like like asteroid nuking planets into dirt. OK. During their rebellion. So here I got to just say again, I feel like I don't remember reading that or hearing that yet. No, it's in there and it could be on like a singular planets entry. And maybe and like if I did and I'm and I'm not remembering it, then yeah, I'm a I'm a fucking idiot.

But if it's something that I didn't know about and I and it should be taken into account, that was something I would definitely take into account. I feel when looking at like it's like, is your race down with just destroy just planet glassing? Are you? Yeah, ruining planet. Are you down with planet glassing? You know, because, yeah, that should that's a factor in whether or not you got to go.

So I just, the Terrians have slavery as a religious institution. Yeah, so that's where I'm just like, what was the entry? That is that something upcoming? Or is it something already passed? It's in there somewhere. But like I really do mean there's information all over that you sometimes you run into planet entries and the planet entries are like this planet was like horribly ruined because of X during, you know, with some historical footnote.

Yes, the the Krogan RZ on I feel like if I feel like if Colony Colony if Krogan Colony drops were front loaded. Yeah, we would be having a little bit of a different discussion. I have to say that statue in the Presidium is like hilarious. The longer the games go on, like the amount of the amount of like nightmare shit that has been done to the Krogan and vice versa. And it's like, well, they got a statue though. It's so they got that statue.

It's so weird being like. How do I put this? I don't know what happens and you do and 2000 people here do and thousands more on on the audience. It's very strange thousands of you all know what the future holds. And I don't. And I'm like also what sometimes I got to read something more than once to to get to not to make sure that I have all the facts that are worth

bringing up at a point. So if I forget a detail that's in a really important detail, I it's also something that's not committed at this point. I don't, you know, anyway. I don't know, man. Like here is a minor detail about the Krogan reproductive system that you may not know or remember. They have four balls.

Yep, quite. They got quite. Yep. Now, the reason I mentioned this is that I think it's been mentioned to you three times by now by various sources. So you would think it would be important, but it's not. It's just that the writing team is like, we want to make it really clear that Krogan are the stars of part eight of JoJo Leon.

Exactly. That's the most important reference of all. Also, calling people cloacas pretty good, too. Pretty high up there. That's good. I like it. Yeah. The Krogan are like the best fucking sci-fi race.

Yeah, they're great. And again, we're still waiting to hear more about the delivery method. That's what we're still missing on. But I'm I'm I'm holding out for just autonomous thousand shot gun and every one in every thousand shots, there's a blank. And it's just just floating over every hatchery, you know, like. All right. Anyway.

So Mass Effect is fun. Though you can't see why you're you you did Horizon, right? Well, yeah, you did because you talked to you talked to Carth, Carth has been a fucking. Caden, Carth, G fuck. Yeah, OK, he's he's retroactively become a car. So you're like deep into it. The game is like obsessed with character.

Like the game actually has like very little plot whatsoever. It is it is. Hey, man, you want to hang out with your space buddies? You want to do space shit? And as a result, I really feel like it's a perfect example of like. Man, games don't need to have a big bad even. Right. Like Mass Effect 2 is like this close to like the cowboy bebop fantasy game.

There's like as long as what's what's the big bad? Oh, we have to go fix this problem with Morden's old colleague. As long as the writing's good. But not everybody knows when the writing is not good. Yeah. And if you have bad writing and then you're just doing nothing hanging out with characters that are uninteresting, that's not a fun time. That's that's like the worst.

It's not good. OK. Ah, how's your fish? Dead. You didn't take care of them. Jeno phaged. Yeah. Just poor I just tapped some gentle.

Like he's I tapped some gentle flakes into the to the top of the pretty deep. I'll ask him about his fish and see how they're doing. I bet they're doing great. Like, no, no, they're not. No, my hamsters around. Yeah, the hamster can't die. Yeah, I didn't even hamsters a boulders gate reference. I can't die.

I forgot I bought a fish. I just know. And this the man who can't even keep fish alive is supposed to be making decisions about the future of the Krogan reproductive system. So it seems. Um. Yeah, anyway. My mouth is tired.

So I have other stuff, but but you take it and I'll come. Yeah, what's up? All right. All right, let's see what I do this week. Well, the most interesting thing I did this week is Paige and I watched the twenty seventeen version of a murder on the Orient Express, which is obviously adapted from an older version of that movie, which is adapted from the act of the Christie novel, which I did not know the plot to.

Right. Man, what an old fashioned style fucking murder mystery. A man was killed on the train. And one of these people did it because we're on a train. Let's twirl my little French moustache and and talk to people and figure out about who would who would do a murder. Man, I fucking love a murder mystery. And this is a good one.

It's great. That's it. That's my review of the movie. Old movie. I like the part. I like the part where I didn't know who the killer was, which was about ninety nine percent of the movie, which makes me really happy.

I hate like I'm not a genius, but I do like a good murder mystery. And like I can't think of anything that kills your murder mystery harder than absolute certainty that you know who did it. Even if you're wrong, if the if the if the story like builds up in a way that it makes you like, oh, I'm sure it's Jimmy. Right. Even if it doesn't turn out to be Jimmy, that removes a lot of the a lot of the impetus to follow along with the story. Whereas this does an extremely clear job of like little piece here,

little piece there, little piece here. And like even when I'm like, I think it's so and so. Right. But I'm not sure because I don't have enough. Right. Like I love Phoenix Wright. I think Phoenix Wright is a great game series. But if there's one thing Phoenix Wright does wrong, that many, many, many, many murder mysteries do wrong is Phoenix Wright is solvable early.

But the story has to catch up to you. Which is just the worst can't say that for murder on the Orient Express. I know I'm very late. The story is like 800 years old. But yeah, good movie, very good, liked it, liked it very much. It's kind of how Knives Out is good, because it's just it's doing doing the good thing.

It's a mystery who did who did it, who did it and like, yeah, there will be twists, but that's the point. You know, there's going to be twists. Let's go. Yeah, very, very, very good movie, liked it very much. Yeah, not much else to say, honestly, what else the fuck did I do? I went back to Ultra Kill and beat V2. Man, Ultra Kill.

God damn, that is just so it's been a long time since I fucked with it. And as such, I can't quite tell all the little tweaks, but I can tell that there were some. That that game is being like polished to a fucking mirror shine over time. Again, not a whole lot of in-depth things to say about Ultra Kill, other than damn, Ultra Kill is so fucking good. God damn it. The only the issue I think is every time I come back to it, I'm basically going to have to start from scratch in terms of getting there's not decent at it actually that much to it.

No, but it's but your own skill. I mean, small, your own skill. You're going to have to rev the engine up again, you know, as with any good character action game, really. Let's see what else is on here. I did a sponsored stream this week for a game called Gerda, a flame in winter. Which I feel kind of bad because you ever get you ever get the sponsor email and you're like, okay, this looks cool. And then you do it and you're like, I think I might be the only person in the world who even looked at this game once. Despite the fact that it's actually quite cool.

So full disclosure, I was monetarily compensated for streaming Gerda a flame in winter. So take my opinions of it with a grain of salt. However, that game is really cool. It is the first disco Elysium like I have seen. Huh. It uses the disco system of walk around, talk to people, use resources and dice rolls to get through conversations. And it takes place in a small village in Denmark where you play as a Danish German woman in the not very interesting time of December 1945. Oh, with the Nazi occupation there.

Well, if you're if you want to perk someone's ears up saying a disco Elysium like is a very aggressive way to do so. Yeah. What's this game called again? It is Gerda, G-E-R-D-A, a flame in winter. It was 44, whatever. It's in the World War two with the Nazis. And you're you're dealing with you're dealing with the local Danish resistance. You're dealing with the Nazi occupation.

You're dealing with the townsfolk of various Danish and German ethnic origins. And as you are talking mad shit or playing along, you're getting little fucking points associated with how how much of a piece of shit you're being about the occupation or the locals or whatever. And then these will factor into your dice rolls as to whether or not you can convince your collaborator piece of shit cousin to lend you some documents. Or whether or not you can sneak out some medicine from the local clinic and who you would give it to. It's really fucking cool. And it it it feels bad when when I was streaming it on the day it came out. I was the only person on the earth streaming it like on the earth being incentivized to do so. And and being paid to do it.

And it's like oh man that's sad. Good game. You should genuinely check it out. But like damn hashtag sponsor damn that game needed the advertisement for real. It currently has 15 positive reviews. It's very good. It's genuinely very cool. Well I don't nod.

I was wondering what they've been up to. Yeah, no. Right. Came out of nowhere. Okay. And that's more or less it for me. Gerda a flaming winter. Let's see.

Did I talk about Wesker? No, I did not talk about Wesker. Wesker came out in Dead by Daylight. And he needs work. He desperately desperately needs work. So Dead by Daylight has a has a public test branch that they let people play with all the new characters before they're they're actually sold. PTR. And they run that.

Yeah, they run that for a week or two. And Wesker has his dash. That's his power. His power is that he does have the like straight up 20 meter dash that is bordering on instantaneous. And if he hits you, he grabs you by the neck and either slams you into a wall or tosses you for like 10 feet and hopefully you hit a wall. Here's a question. If you're controlling Wesker and you do it, does he instantly teleport to the location? He runs.

He runs to the location. The camera. The camera follows his like invisible movement trajectory. No, he doesn't go invisible at any point. So it actually doesn't answer the question in in any way. He doesn't he doesn't leave vision at any point. I see. Okay, okay.

But so he he grabs survivors and he slams the walls to damage. It's a really cool gimmick. There's a problem though. He had a hitbox on the front of him that was quite large in the public test. And the problem is that it would hit the environment all the time. So what would happen is you would go to grab somebody and you just bounce harmlessly off like the wall that they happen to be next to because the hitbox was too big. So they toned it down. They cut the hitbox in half.

And now what's happening is that when you dash on people with Wesker, his hitbox is so small that you will physically clip through other players and not grab them. It was massively over corrected. So here's hoping they tweak that in the near future. Apparently they are working on it, but who knows how long that would take. Of note, it's not DC Douglas. It's a different voice actor, but he is in fact fully voice acted unlike everyone else in the game. Ash from Evil Dead has some Bruce Campbell lines, but Wesker has so many lines of dialogue that they actually added a subtitles function to the game. Because he talks every time he hits you or every time he gets a pallet dropped on him and will say, oh, oh, Pinhead has some lines.

I was going to say of all the guest characters, they don't, the ones that talk don't talk minus like Ash. Well, in terms of horror, very few people talk. It's Pinhead and Wesker, but Wesker will literally pick you up and tell you seven minutes is all the time I have for you. And do just a shit ton of barks like constantly. He will not shut the fuck up. So it's cool. And has that always been the case where you could try the DLC for free on the PTR? Yeah, you could try the DLC for free on the PTR, the PTB for maybe a week.

And they tend to use that for balance testing, which never works ever. Because they always make a change to it. And then the change is either bad or not enough. So then they have to then they then it goes live and then they have to change it two weeks later. Every time a guest shows up in DVD, it's a monster, right? Like the hero or the characters. Ash, Ash from Evil Dead and Bill from Left 4 Dead are the guests from that are not monsters. If you had also the you've got the reasonable cat like almost the whole

resume classes in there. You have Chris, you have Jill, you have Leon, you have Heather from Silent Hill. Stranger things as well. Okay. Yeah, you got the Stranger Things kids, etc. Okay, there's a couple of them. Yeah, you've got Aaron and Annie. Okay.

And yeah, as costumes. Yeah, as costumes. And you also have colossal and female Titan as costumes for some of the other characters, which is the absolute weirdest shit in the entire world. Just, I mean, we're incredibly strange. Surviving a monster. Yeah, but the monster is like 8 feet tall. It doesn't make any sense.

But that's pretty much it for me. If you want to come down to the channel and watch some more shit this week, what am I doing this week? I'm going to finish The Witcher. I'm going to finish Prey. I'm going to start Batman. I'm fucking. I want to do Batman. I want to play a Batman game, so I will do the Arkham Asylum.

I'm doing the remaster because I plan on going through them. And I know you had minor problems with Arkham Asylum. Yeah, well, so, I mean, when I first booted it up, it crashed on me in one of the opening cutscenes on the old PC version. And then I was able to get it working. But the main issue was, yeah, the music at certain points is copyright claimed. Yeah. Did you know that Arkham City can't be hooked by OBS? OBS does not understand that Arkham City is a program.

What? That is a bug that has never been able to be fixed. Oh, Jesus Christ. Like it just doesn't exist. My God, man. Okay. Wow. So like the only way to do it, the only way to do it is to do display capture.

And when you do display capture on Arkham City, the game just starts to freak out. And doesn't want to. Doesn't want to it. I'm always okay with just plugging in a goddamn Xbox, you know, and going back to it the old school way. People are saying window capture works. Not the, not when I tried that a couple of weeks ago, it didn't. Just abjectly refused. I mean, it was weird when booting up the PC asylum and getting a warning message that like your specs are not good enough to handle the ragdolling physics.

And you're like, I'm running a fucking 3080. What are you talking about? Well, yeah, but the games programming was made so that it was looking at a list of web video cards instead of actually checking it. Certainly, certainly. But either way, it was, yeah, clown shoes. Um, yeah, man. Good. If you're going PC on it, just, you know, I'm not.

Okay. Well, fuck it. Good. There you go. I also thought that you could get that on Xbox, but you fucking can't. How strange is that? As a classic. Yeah.

I really thought that you could, it was a backwards game. In fact, it's not. No. Yeah. That's why I ended up doing it that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, true. But like, you can still, if you have the physical copy, you'd have to, you could do it that way, you know?

No. No? Only Arkham Origins. No, but if you, like, if you plugged in a 360 and popped in the disc. Oh, yeah, a 360. One of those things. One of those retro consoles. Yeah.

I had a retro console, like a 360 floating around. I got one plugged in right now. Yeah. How else am I going to play Samurai Showdown Sen? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. But yeah, that's it for me.

You want us to see my stupid show? Go down to twitch.tv. It's pretty much every day of the week starting at 4 p.m. Pacific. How about you, Will? Okay. So, back on this side. Yes. So we talked about Mass Effect 2.

We've talked about Silent Hill 3. Those are both pretty good so far. Other things. Well, I mean, did the, the dignity stream, the wooly versus dignity stream. Oh, yeah. How'd that go? That was, that was a lot of fun. That was a lot of fun.

Stupid shit. Definitely enjoyed the, what, just the lowest of low effort in terms of like, do we just sit there, crack some beers and click the play button? It's very strange, isn't it? It was quite fun. What was really cool was the, the twist that I introduced was a lot of fun too, which was I collected sources from two different places. So I had a Twitter thread for people to submit videos, and then I had a Reddit thread.

And then in the Reddit thread, upvoting was going to be taken into account. And then with two separate lists. There was effectively a race to the bottom with, with both tracks. And every time someone fucked up and killed the flow, we switched over to the second list. So. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. So the idea was, and the way I describe it is like, the vibe is when you're at a con after

the dealer's room's closed and you're in the, you're in a hotel room with a bunch of people. You're having some drinks and then you're watching some YouTube shit. The YouTube party in the con room, right? Yeah. If you're the guy that puts on the dumb video that just doesn't go over, lasts way too long. Hey man, hey, do you want to watch this 25 minute small film that's about Team Fortress? And it's dead serious and it's not entertaining or funny at all. The spy's going to get on the train and the train's going to go, oh man.

And you just kill the flow. We now switch tracks. Turn over on downs. No, no, no, no, no, no. Watch the whole thing. It's really good. It's really good. So, yeah, I implore everyone to don't be that guy.

That's the vibe you're trying to avoid. Don't be the one that ruins it. If you think that fake clip is going to have the whole squad laughing, double check to make sure. But in the end, yeah, that little aspect of switching back and forth was a whole lot of fun and added some flavor to it. So there will... One of my favorite videos is like, hey, here's a guy's YouTube video from him doing an LP that's like 600 views over 11 years.

And I'm looking at it and I'm like, it doesn't seem to be very interesting. I'm like, is this your video? A guy who posted this? Is this just your old channel? Yeah, it was dope. And then also, I'm bringing in my own submissions to show. And Reggie's going to bring his submissions to show as well. So there's going to be a little bit of that in there.

The highlights are going to go up on Woolly versus the algorithm, of course. So be sure to tune into the second channel for some of the good bits and pieces. We've already identified some of the new dank lore that deserves to be shared. Yeah, I've similarly decided I was being overly cautious and was not allowing clips or even the VODs, which I've now unlocked so people can go back and watch that garbage. I kept an eye on it to see how it would go. And then the fact that there's a level of filtration for most dangerous DMCA-able things is in place. So then I put the VOD up, it didn't get claimed, it didn't get silenced.

So I'm like, okay, we're going to leave it. And if anything happens, then we're going to react. But for now, I'm putting it up because it seems to be okay. And then there will be highlights coming. The thing is, though, is while I am operating, going forward with the like, yeah, try to keep it under five, you know, we want to keep it moving and stuff. If something's over that length, but it is pretty good, then they're like, it's extraordinarily unlikely, but it might land.

It's just you got to roll a d20 on it. And you know what? I got to say, someone rolled a d20. Yeah, don't send titties. Titties are bad. Don't do that. Someone rolled a d20 and they landed a 20 and we watched all of Astardis. Of course you did.

That shit was hot. You know about Astardis? No. I don't know. That's wild. I know about Warhammer, like via you guys, osmosis stuff and memes and bits, but like, not actually consuming any of its media. Yeah, Astardis was fucking sick.

And that's a one man army putting in a labor of love and you can tell. I'm glad that the end result was they literally hired this man. Mm hmm. Yeah. And then they hired that man, but then also threatened everyone else with a gun if they did not also get hired. Jesus Christ. Okay.

Is how that went is that the games workshop deal that came down was, hey, do you want to officially make stuff for us? And a lot of people said no. And they were like, okay, well, your channel will now. Oh God. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

That's what killed fucking the emperor has text to speech and all sorts of shit like that. Okay. So. Joy. Joy. Or perish in obscurity. I see.

Well, um, that that being said, it was not surprising to find out after the fact that a lot of people apparently got into Warhammer because of that video. Yeah, not surprising at all. So now the thing is, is if there's a whole, if there's more of those and like, you know, there are a series of things that come out every once in a while, then yeah, that would get anybody in. That's fucking that's hot shit, you know, even without context. Um, but, um, I like the part where the sniper shoot the guy on the feet and it doesn't do

anything. Oh, I mean, it cuts to some humans that are not wearing space marine armor and I'm like, what are we doing here with this? Why am I seeing flesh, you know, and skin? That's crazy. You know what I discovered? That it's not just me that wants to watch 12 to 22 minutes of a guy, uh, sanding down an old screwdriver so that it looks new.

Oh, I mean, so that type of restorations like, uh, punch mom gets into, got into those and showed me some and they're quite cool. I wouldn't watch it on a stream, but they're soothing. There's, uh, you know, putting together an old clock, um, taking apart a watch and putting it back together is pretty cool. That's nice. That's a nice one. You know, all that, all that.

Um, but anyway, uh, and at the same time you got your fucking, uh, YTV commercials and your, your, your bait blade intros and just, yeah, it was, it was dumb. It was fun. But, uh, we're going to do, we're going to do some more of those. Um, I'll let you guys know, you know, when the next one's coming. Um, it was very exhausting to go, uh, a full six days. Uh, cause that was like, that was streaming basically every day of the week there. Um, because usually Fridays are.

Fridays are off and then Sundays are off. So that's my, my weekend, but by putting it on the Friday, it killed that one day. So, um, I'm going to have to figure it out going forward. But, um, yeah, I've been doing six days for about a month now now. And I was like, Oh, why is that so much easier than usual? And then I'm like, Oh, right. Because of my chair. There you go.

Um, oh fuck. We dropped something nice. Perfect. Uh, yeah, it's a bit more different. I have to coordinate with, you know, Reggie schedule as well. And, uh, we got to see how to make it work. But, um, that's, that's, that's gonna, that'll be a thing we'll do. I'll let you know.

Um, I'm not sure exactly, uh, uh, how we're going to, we're going to pace it out right now. But I feel like we're going to be, uh, watching the super cuts people are making of the side by sides of the same videos being sent to both of us. I look forward to seeing what the fuck. I don't know what that's going to be, but I didn't even smile at Joinkie Splanky. Yeah. Well, that's like, exactly. I mean, I was like, what the fuck is this?

And then a bunch of people went Pat loved it. And I'm like, Oh, okay. Yeah. That's not me. I love a lot of stupid shit. The fuck? Yeah. So that's going to be one of them.

We're just like, Oh, hey, Pat, woolly loved this. You should watch this. Don't you love it too? Like send me the stuff that woolly loves like photos of dead lizards being stomped underneath his boot. Can't get enough. Um, yeah, the actual, um, schedule we're probably going to go with right now is I'm thinking we were saying maybe like, uh, uh, the first Friday of every month

to do a little, do a little special thing. Um, and then I'll put the thread out with the submission, um, form and, and y'all can dump your stuff in there. I'm thinking, but, um, I'm worried I'm going to literally die on these streams because, um, like, you know me, if I laugh hard enough, the breathing just goes away. Just goes away. Um, I might do it more often than that though. We'll see.

Um, that first one is definitely a good time and everyone seemed to enjoy it. And, uh, the numbers don't lie. Certainly there they are. They're pretty big. A lot of people tune in, including literally, uh, my wife who does not give a fuck on a normal circumstance is like, oh, but I can watch this. You know, well, that's embarrassing. And it's like, oh, oh, honey, now you're done with your, your little video game toys.

You're going to do something that people all go good. Yay. I can get into this. I wasn't into that thing you were just doing or that other thing or any of those things, but that I can check out. So I'm like, that's that, but that's it right there. That's the appeal. I can't.

I can't. The appeal is you don't have to be into anything to click, to click on it and get in. I can't wait until the day that you start this podcast telling the story that you were, uh, telling punch mom how you were getting ready for the days, get into fighting games. And she looks at you and she just goes, you know, well, I've always wondered what are fighting games? But even actually, yep. Ah, yep.

And so as again, every time that I bring this up, I am going to thank the wonderful and magnanimous wife of mine, peach saliva for pressuring me into giving this a shot because I was like, that's stupid. Nobody gives a fuck about that shit, which was the same thing I said about streaming in general. And I'm like, and she's like, you should really stream. I'm like, ah, that's stupid. Nobody gives a fuck about streaming.

And she was like, no, you should. I'm like, oh, okay. Well, peach was right. She was right. See this, this sucks. And then by Osmosis over here where, and then she also showed up to make sure to like, uh, uh, through that Osmosis influence also guarantee that oinks would occur. So I, I, I was, I, that was a weird experience because I was streaming something else at the

time and I could literally hear her cackling. And then I look into my chat of a different thing and see like page is tricking them into doing bullshit. Now, my good. Yes. To be, to be fair, you are also saying this into a microphone on a podcast that you were so reluctant to do to begin with. So everything begins the same way.

Somebody gives me a good idea and I go, that's good idea is stupid. And they go, no, it's not. I go, ah, maybe. And then later I'm like, wow, that was a really good idea. I'm glad that I supported you from the very beginning and that I was all aboard the whole time. Never doubted for a second as, as Paige says, I thought this podcast was going to be a great success.

And I've always said that I've always said that cool. Is there anything more infuriating than like somebody fighting you on something? And then when it goes well, they're like, that was right there. Told you. I was right there. Yeah. I told you. In fact, there is something more infuriating.

It's such an asshole. It's I told you and I can't believe that you didn't believe in it. I don't think I've gone that far. I don't think I've ever done that. No, but we know, we know somebody who has. And I do remember that. That's like, God, I'm still mad about that. That was like 15 years ago.

You asked if there's anything worse. And yes, the one thing more worse is I was on from day one is the full switch of not only was I on from day one, but you were the one that was off. So I have, I have some argument on a bus with a friend of ours. And I argued with him for like an hour and he's a fucking stubborn ass. I was like, I really don't think that. And we agreed to disagree. Then he goes and tells woolly, oh man, I just argued with Pat on the bus for like

an hour and completely inverts the entire conversation. At which point when woolly comes to me and goes, did you really argue with so and so about this for like an hour? But what? No. Are you serious? And then when I called him out on, he's like, oh, I must have forgotten. I must have forgotten how that went.

That day, if our positions were switched, would you have? And when I have yours, yes, I switched our positions actually. Oh God, I swapped them Dante. Um, anyway, that, that story, that story could have gone to a place in which that person tried to convince me that it was me, in fact, who shat my pants. There you go. Eventually. Um, I believe you shat your pants, Pat.

What? So, so, uh, uh, honorable mentions for the week as well. Um, for the, uh, a couple indie games we checked out. Um, one is World Fighting Soccer 22. And this is NBA Jam rules applied to soccer. Um, World World, what's it again? World Fighting Soccer 22. Now, if you're among the younger crowd, that might, you might, it might need to be Street, NFL Street, NBA Street.

But really it's NBA Jam because it's 2D. It's not even the 3D part of it. So in 8th Street, it's more that one. Check it out. It's just, you got your team. Um, you, it's a soccer on a 2D plane. You have two buttons, three actually, uh, turbo, jump and kick. And when you hold turbo and kick, it's a shoot.

It's a shot. Otherwise it's like a pass kind of thing. And you can dive kick, you can, uh, launch the ball and you play a game of knit hog with each other. Yeah. Yeah. As you make it past each defender and then you make it to the final goal and you try to make it. And you try to kick the ball in the goal with your turbo and then the goalie. This looks rad as hell.

It's super fun. It's so fucking sick. Um, it's what soccer was always meant to be. I, I, I wanted a Shaolin soccer game. We're never going to get one, but this is fucking great on its own. Um, real simple, real good. Uh, every team in the game has like their stat points just like juiced up to whatever, like, uh, there's like four bars to go with. America is 100% offense and mild and everything else.

Canada is 100% defense, mild and everything else. It's taking a page out of the wind jammers school of stat distribution. Um, world fighting soccer 22 on steam. Um, and then the alpha three school of, uh, user, uh, interface as well. Just goofy light funds, scrolling things. Uh, lots of you can't give it up. Go for broke vibes. Uh, yeah, I had, we had a ton of fun with it.

Every bones came over. We played, we did some local and it is the second game I've played in recent years that on pad started causing my thumb like stress. I had to put the fucking glove on because I was doing more inputs per second than playing like Naga Ryuki or, uh, any other high action game like playing like a Marvel three or something like that. It fucking hurt my thumb. You know, which I mean, I needed to, I mean to ask, I didn't quite pick it up until you said that. Uh, is your hand all right? My hand is okay. Your right hand.

I noticed there's like a thing on it. Uh, oh, in the video. Yes. Oh, I literally watched you hold up your right hand earlier and he had a blue thing wrapped around it. Oh, no, no, no. Oh, okay. This is a headband. I just have a headband.

Oh, you, the way you held it looked like your hand had been wrapped. Yes, I was playing with my headband. That's all. Oh, my mistake. My mistake. When I play games that require like a lot of input, like I did for this game, I put on a glove that has the fingers cut out and the thumb is covered because like it just, it hurts a lot otherwise. It helps with this motion, huh? Absolutely.

That motion is very important to make sure you don't want to hurt yourself doing that. So when you are, um, yeah, when I'm playing this, I put that on and it helped certainly. It's a game that requires a fuck ton of d-pad input. And it's also the game that led to the second live rage quit in Get Into Fighting Games history. Oh, really? Yes. We've had two in our history. This is the second one.

So, um, spirits were broken. Damage was taken. Tune in to see it happen. Yeah, it doesn't happen very often, but every once in a while on Get Into Fighting Games, a live in-person local rage quit might occur. And, um, you gotta, yeah, you gotta keep an eye out. It's, um, it's that kind of game, man. You know, kind of makes you feel it. You know, that reminds me of those old videos of people playing net play of that fucking Konami soccer game and just rage quitting right the fuck out of it.

Uh, ISS or? I don't know the name of the Konami soccer game. Okay. Well, in any case, um, yeah, that's gonna be, that's gonna be a good time. Uh, so, yeah, coming soon, Get Into Fighting Games, we also took a look at, uh, a game called Mega Knockdown, which is pretty wild. Um, it is a, there's a demo, uh, is what we played. But essentially it's just a turn based fighter. So I've had this idea in execution before.

It's very weird because it's more of a proof of concept that it isn't a full, a full game at this point. But the proof of concept does actually work. And it's funny because I've had a similar idea and I've designed it in this way where you can play it almost like via cards. But, um, you have both players take a moment to input a direction and an attack and then it puts them to, and then it plays both together. You know, and in that moment, the speed of which goes first, the recovery, the distance, all of that gets factored and it matters. But then you go back to a paused state and then you make the reads again. So, um, it's, it's all about hard reads. It's all about downloading habits and, um, yeah, it's turn based.

It's pretty cool. Yeah. They also used, uh, a bunch of sprites of German, uh, apparently. I guess just because I think, I think there's just like a bunch of available free asset fighting sprites, uh, of German. So they use those and that's what. Well, I mean, German put out like some green screen stuff. But also, I mean, I don't know if you know this, but German is like a composite, uh, AI diagram of what looks like when you combine a hundred different photos of serial killers. I see.

Okay. That's, that's why he, that's why he looks like that. I don't know anything about German. Um, so we're, we're finding out via this game, uh, mega knockdown. And yeah, it, it, it turned out to be a lot of fun because, you know, like there's like a grappler archetype. There's a Zoner. There's a, there's a Shoto, you know, a bunch of the stuff that you'd, you'd, you'd, you'd know, you'd know and be used to. Um, and then you have no one to get mad at, but your own predictability.

You know? Nah, the game's bullshit, man. It's turn based stuff gives, uh, extra importance to certain kinds of reads and that's just not, uh, this is not fair. It reminds me a bit of a Yomi, the card game, you know, like when you're like, you make a hard read on somebody because they're playing too predictably. And then it's like, yeah, this wasn't about execution. It was, there was no timing involved. You just made the same bad decision four times in a row and lost as a result. No, no, games, games, bullshit.

Um, so yeah, mega knockdown was, uh, I think it's, uh, pro, I mean, hopefully they'll, they'll get it. I'll into a further state and, you know, I don't know, maybe add uniqueness to the, to the, the, some of the, the, the, the sprites and designs and stuff. The backgrounds are just like, like basically like wallpapers from Google. Um, but in execution, it was, it was certainly fun to make reads, talk shit, et cetera. Um, and then the last game I played was Mega Man X fighting arena. It's a Mugen Mega Man X fighting game. That's all you need to know. Okay. Got it. Got it.

Does, uh, no, X fighting game. Okay. Okay. Cause I'm just thinking like, cause I would want Magma's Regroup X4 in there and I would want his sound effects to play as, as needed. Unfortunately, only six characters in this 2019 demo that I played, uh, with X0, Sigma, Iris, Alia and Command Mission X. But played like a Mega Man X fighting game. It was pretty hype, fun, juggling, wild shit. You know, um, zero has like stuff that feels like his Marvel and his Tatsunoko incarnations. X feels like X. You gotta fucking, you go, you can go see combo videos of it on, on Twitter.

Um, they've been updating quite a bit and you know, Mugen's doing what it does. Mugen fan projects with a lot of time and effort put in, uh, start to look pretty cool. So, uh, yeah, we got, we got these three little things coming soon. So, um, be sure to check those out over on Woolly Versus on YouTube, on Twitch and, uh, Woolly Versus the algorithm as well on YouTube as the side channel with good short dumb clips coming out, including things like, um, playing Z-Ball in Dead Space and having, uh, the Necromorph, like, as a defender, edited into the, into the footage, knocking the, swatting the ball out of the air. And, uh, dumb shit like that, you know. Um, be sure to subscribe. We also got, uh, Top 10 Dokapon Betrayals.

Oh my God. How, how could you possibly, there must have been so many. Oh yeah. But we've got a, we've got a, we've got a Top 10 boiled down between both games. So, uh, yeah, check it out. Good times. Uh, I actually, there was another thing that I fucked with and I would like to talk about it briefly. Are you familiar with the game Binding of Isaac? I'm, I've heard of it. Yeah. Uh, so, uh, it has a new expansion. I don't know how new, but another one. So there was Isaac, rebirth, afterbirth, afterbirth plus, and repentance is the new one.

And supposedly it's the final one, which I think they say every time. It feels like they say that every time. They definitely said the last one was the final one when I heard about it. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, that's a lot. Anyway, uh, I heard some iffy stuff about afterbirth or plus, but everyone seems to be very happy with repentance. Um, so I loaded it up and had a decent time. However, uh, I don't know when this happened. It might have been associated with repentance or not, but at a certain point, um, uh,

the people behind, uh, Binding of Isaac decided that they wanted it to be a pretty good game and then finally made the decision to make it a really good game. Um, because now once you have beaten mom once, you can mod it and the game will still allow you to unlock things, which allows you to mod in the number one by far most popular mod ever for Isaac. A library. What does this item do? A library. Yep.

That experience of you pulling up the giant JPEG with a bunch of shit on it and just like going, okay, okay, hold on, what, what, and just sitting there for like two minutes, three minutes each time, like, dear fucking God, man. So you can't pick it up first. You have to wait because you might ruin your build if you pick it up. It's interesting because I can absolutely understand the desire to like keep the game clean. You just learn. Um, but now with the amount of stuff they've added, there's like thousands and thousands of items

and you look at their descriptions and you're like, I would have had, I would never have been able to intuit this. Right. I would never have been able to use this over a couple of times and just learn it unless I like, you know, northern lined it and just, you know, played Isaac every day. You are now that guy. Yeah. Um, so like this, this steam workshop available mod that doesn't break the game and just when you walk up to an item just in the upper left corner gives you a detailed description of its effects.

But it's still a mod. It's not, it's not the game itself. It's, it's kind of crazy that that was never added in as an option. It's, it's, yeah. When I'm playing, for example, vampire survivors and I see something for the first time and I go, Oh, what the fuck is that? You get it. You get a brief description that pops up and the description is like a one sentence thing that may or may not give you enough information. But then you use it a bit.

You're like, Oh, okay. I think I get it. And right once you get it then and you have it in your glossary, it'll pop up. It'll give you the description each time. Like there's enough going on that like, and it's just not so many items. It's like as well that you're going to get lost in a sea of thousands of variations of things. Right. So it's a game where you have enough that you can memorize and learn over time and it still tells you anyway.

Yeah. That is wild with Isaac and it's, it's a deliberate choice, certainly. There's an, that feels like it's a, we want you to not have full control over your environment. You know, like you're going to have to take risks walking into things you've never seen before. There's too many items that interact with each other in unclear ways. I think it's like, I got an Isaac here and there, but like I'm essentially starting over and the idea would take me like 10 years to learn how, what all these combinations of in an organic method. So yeah, no, as a result, the game is now to me anyway, way better, way better. It's the difference between game design philosophies that are like in favor of the player asserting absolute dominance over the system or the system always having dominance over the player.

Listen, so I know it's a little annoying, but I really want you to think very hard about what kind of items you want to pick up and take with you and which things you think are going to be more valuable to sell at the merchant. And what players here is you want me to make six trips between this spot and the town by a fast travel so I can sell every single goddamn item on this corpse or I could just fucking hack that goddamn inventory limit so I can carry as much as I fucking want. Certainly. In this case, you're looking at I'm on a good role. Is this a run killer or not? Yeah, I literally going to suicide my character. Is this a run killer? That's all it really comes down to, you know.

Yeah. Anyway, so this is an but this what you're describing is a is a fan update, not an official update then. Well, the game now officially supports Steam Workshop. So yes and no. Right? Like the mods are now officially sanctioned. Officially sanctioned. And the game even tells you, hey, install every mod you want as long as you kill mom first once.

But any particular mod is obviously like up to you or up to the player base. Well, it's PvE at the end of the day. So yeah, yeah. Who cares? Cool. All right. I got to take a break. I got to stand up.

BRB. Alrighty. Someone points out that the Krogan volunteers that that sacrificed themselves in that experiment did not have informed consent because they were not given the full picture of the of what was happening. And they were sacrificing themselves thinking that one that the results would be something that they weren't. Yeah. So there's a difference between knowing ethically what's going on versus not knowing the truth of what's fully going on. You're right. Which is why you should have destroyed that stuff without contacting any Krogan authorities without their consent.

So that they wouldn't know what's going on. I mean, god damn, if only someone could get on the phone. If you could just grab your cell and just be like. Rex! Can you fucking get down here? It just got real hot. If only. If only.

Yeah. It's impossible because Rex could be dead. Okay. What we should do is take a quick word from our sponsors. We should. This week, the Genophage is sponsored by. Green Chef. The podcast is sponsored by Green Chef because what we're going to be talking about right now is the best way to get yourself some.

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Thank you, Raycon. Thanks, Raycon. I just want to make sure... Let me take a look over here. I just want to make sure that... Hard. Goddamn. I remembered to let you know how delicious the beef tenderloin with pot roast style gravy and garlic mashed potatoes was.

Oh, that sounds great. I did let you know that. It was really good. Good. All right. Did anything happen this week? I think like nothing happened. Ahhhh!

Well, a couple things. Not a lot, but some things happened. Something fun just before we started. Oh, really? So they came out and dropped the Halo Infinite Roadmap for fall, winter. And on that roadmap, they started talking about what they're planning to release and how they're going to release it. And a lot of folks are like,

Motherfuckers, we're waiting for the game to get good. Could you stop with the... Could you hurry it up? Because, you know, piecemeal development is starting to become the norm now. In their announcement with the roadmap of the features coming, they also effectively canceled local co-op, saying that they can't focus on it right now. So don't expect it in the near future.

Local co-operative play is not going to be available in a Halo game. I want to point out that the head of 343 back when Halo 5 came out was like, we understand Halo will always have split screen co-op from now on because it's vital to Halo. That lie didn't even go one game. Well, technically, he didn't lie. Because on Twitter, mere hours later,

it has been discovered by the fans that co-op does exist in the game and you can access it back door unofficially by using a glitch found in the menus and you can play your own local co-op mode that works fine. They've played through a couple stages, enemies spawn fine, everything is going swimmingly so far, found by ZennyIC on Twitter.

Seems like... The implication a lot of people had was that they probably couldn't get the co-op working on the Xbox One because it's cross-platform, right? They would have been able to get it working on the Series X, they would have been able to get it working on PC, but, right? No, they got it working on the Xbox One, it works completely fine.

So now no one knows what the fuck's going on. Basically... Like, why? Like, literally why? In one minute, you can see it involves creating a lobby and joining up with someone online and then dropping out of their group and then going offline

and then having a second profile signed in and then it'll just load up split-screen play ready to go right there. So I've been following Halo on and off since I got into it and... I don't know what's going on over there. I've followed... You've followed devs a long time, right?

How does this go? What's happening? And the output coming out of 343 in the year or whatever it is for Halo Infinite is so small, I can only imagine there is some kind of either social or massive technical problem that they are just fighting every day on everything because, like, nothing is happening with that game.

It's crazy. I mean, on a QA level, when a feature, like, exists like this and seems to be fine, people have not found any crashes or issues with AI or anything yet, there's possibly a massive one that is, like, just undiscovered

or something that will still, you know, pop up in the following days, although it's been three days since this has been discovered. But, like, when something like that gets pulled, it's often because, yeah, there's a large, horrible glaring issue that'll become obvious to anybody who uses it. The way this is sounding

is it's sounding more like a weird business decision lie of lies, where we're just going to lie to you and tell you that, no, fuck off, we're going to have online co-op good to go, but offline, nope, not going to happen, and the other sputtering failures and problems that this game has had that I've been hearing about the entire time, make it sound like it's one

on a pile of many lies they've been telling. Yeah, no, there's some kind of technical thing going on as well, because, like, I remember back when the game came out and for, like, five months, people were like, I just want to kill a Slayer playlist, and the explanation was that, like, guys, we can't.

Like, what do you mean you can't? Like, well, the playlist thing isn't that easy to edit. Like, what the fuck did you make this thing out? Like, what the hell are you fucking doing? I mean, it seems as if it's just another, like, a lot of things that happen this way, and every time there's an anthem or a fallout, 76 or whatever the fuck,

just anytime there's a horrible launch, really, you can just look at it and go, like, okay, so this just needs, it just needs more time, right? You just need to give your people more time, but the state it's in is because, as a publisher, you're refusing to give them more time. Is that what's happening here? Yeah.

I don't know. Every, you know, like, we're hearing, I mean, Cyberpunk, we started hearing about the QA stories and the other things going on with it. That was, like, fucked on a much deeper level, but in many instances, if this is a thing that is going to be patched into a state that would be acceptable six, seven months in,

maybe even a year in, but you're just pushing it out the door early because you just don't want to take the hit any further or you think it needs to start making money prematurely, well, then you can't be surprised when people are fucking pissed off at it until it gets to a decent state. It makes me, it makes me feel that

there's a situation happening where, because I've spoken to some people about a couple of games, one of which I'm sure you're familiar with, where a problem arises, some kind of problem with the workflow or the engine or whatever. You know, okay, cool, how do we fix this? And the answer is go back in time two years ago

and don't build it like this. And go, well, what do we do now? And the answer is kind of, I don't know. But there's nothing that is more embarrassing. Well, there's a lot of things that are embarrassing, but one of the most embarrassing things. Oh, wow, hold that thought. People are pointing out the April Fool's event

starts tomorrow. Tomorrow. September. Almighty. April Fool's September. Good times. Oh, wow. Good times.

That's wild. Uh, yeah. Well, anyway. Just, but there's something about like, you know, I guess just bullshitting your way through like bad launches and then part of it being, just being caught with your pants down when you say a feature is being,

you don't have time to focus on it when it already exists. You know, like this, it's that, it's that finding the DLC on the disc in Street Fighter Cross Tekken moment of what the fuck are you talking about? It's all right there. We can see it. Why are you lying?

It's, it's your pants down. Ass out. Taint for the world to see. Um, and don't see my taint, please. And like you're at this point, like you got to be praying that some insane crash of like gargantuan proportions will occur

if people start doing local co-op to show you like, look, see, told you. If it's a flawless feature with no problems whatsoever and you're just lying about it, like they deserve, they deserve all the heat and then some, because you're taking away a feature that's also one that I only played a couple Halo games.

I don't know too much. I'm pretty new to this franchise, but my impression is that playing locally is kind of an important thing that's been definitive to the franchise. I'm not the biggest, I'm not a huge Halo mark. Right. I didn't have a big history with the series,

but when I played like co-op at like a fucking game store with some dude in Halo three, yeah, no, that fucking ruled. Those games are, are, are way up there for good co-op. It's important. Couch co-op is dying for various reasons, but like the one where

it's like, no, we made it and we're just going to pretend we didn't, is not, I never would have expected that to be one of the things that we'd be hearing. I, I, we, someone put the work in and we just said no. Anyway. It got caught. So, uh, yeah, that's, Oh, you got caught, huh?

That's, that's a, that's a funny one, that fucking, uh, obviously, it just went down. Um, beyond that, good, good luck to the, to the roadmap. Wonder if we're going to get a, The roadmap also sucks, by the way. The, the, like, let me get, let me pull it up. Well, I was just going to say,

I was wondering if we're going to get a response to this in the form of like, okay, we will be adding it, shut up though. Season three of Halo Infinite coming March 7th. It's going to have a new gun. What the fuck is to, like, it is laughable. Um, yeah. All I can say is just like, sucks to be a Halo fan. I'm, I, that, that's a bummer guys.

Sorry to hear it. Didn't have to be this way. Uh, people in the chat are pointing out that seasons in the Halo Infinite were supposed to be three months long. Season two has been out now for 10 months. There's a lot of beloved legacy franchises that as I catch up to them, I find out, oh God, it sucks to be a fan of this thing. Stop here.

Stop. It never, like, all of them. Mass Effect, Silent Hill, talking about Halo right now. Like, every one of these fucking games, dude, it just, it doesn't pay off. They all fall apart for the same reason. The studio either mandates certain things or they take it away from the people who made them good and give them to other people. The six that can't handle the success.

Yep. Yep. Publisher gets inflated. It's, it's wild. Um, there's something else I want to say, but it's gone now. Don't worry about it. Okay, no worries. Well, um, speaking of mistakes and, and...

Oh, by the way, Gears of War has the exact same trajectory. That's what I want to say. Oh yeah. One, two, judgment's okay. Three, stop. Just stop. Uh, people didn't like the combat kids, huh? No.

Uh, so speaking about just publishers getting in the way of quality. Uh, you've been playing Prey. I've been playing Prey's 2017, which I've been intermittently calling Psycho Shock because, uh, I've been led to believe that that was its original title, which makes way more sense. That's a really cool title. Well, turns out Bethesda stepped in, uh, before the game launched and told Arcane that, uh, this game will be named Prey. And the team was like, but that doesn't, it has nothing to do with Prey.

There's no connection. It does, and they're like, doesn't matter. They were forced to call the game Prey. Oh, people are also saying Neuroshock, which is also a better name. Um, yeah, no connection to the 2006 game. Um, and we were all confused when we saw that trailer. Uh, and it essentially just came down to Bethesda, looked at it as a marketing decision. Um, and, uh, yeah, the founder, uh, who just did this interview was more or less talking about how everyone was super bummed out

because they made what they thought was a brand new IP that, uh, they wanted to not be weighed down by a connection to other things. And Bethesda said, no, make people think it's connected and use the name that we have. So, um, there you go. I'm, I'm going, I'm going through the game right now. Uh, and I played Bioshock one and two, uh, because that was it's, it's, you know, in, in time predecessors of its genre. Um, and, uh, I'm pretty sure that calling it Prey killed that game. Because the only thing people would think of is either the canceled Prey to, which it's nothing like, or the original Prey, which was a, just a hard ass shooter, which it's nothing like.

Someone says legal decision they wanted to spite machine head who was suing them. Was that happening at the time? It's quite, yes, it was happening at the time. I can't confirm that that's why, but, um, uh, human head pursuing them at the time. Um, and it made it so that like, like, I'm streaming the game right now and people are coming in going, I didn't know this is what that game was because they thought it was just a fucking shooter. They did, the fact that that game is System Shock 3, just straight up, it's literally just System Shock 3, came across to basically no one, specifically because of the marketing and the name.

Well, it's just wild how the idea of something, um, in most cases when a studio forces a name that is recognized on something, it's in the hopes that the recognition will help it sell more and inflate it. Well, not necessarily. See, Zenimax at the time was in this weird position where when they published things, they were trying to intentionally bomb games hard enough that they'd be able to buy the studio. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. You remember that? Because that's what happened to human head. Uh, they intentionally fucked up development of Pray 2 and then canceled it so that human head would be so broke

that they'd be open to a hostile takeover. I mean, is it more likely that it's an option select because you get paid on success, but if it fails, then you get to, you get the studio anyway? Well, that was the thrust behind the human head lawsuit, is that Bethesda had given them a situation in which the game couldn't come out and be successful, specifically to try and buy them, which they did try, and then human head pretty much rather disintegrated rather than be bought, whereas Arcane did get bought.

And Arcane is now a Bethesda studio. Jesus Christ, that's fucking weird. So, uh, when this game got developed, and this is, I guess, the weird part, is when it got greenlit, like, were they, they were, this was a, they weren't building their own IP, they were building an IP that was going to be Bethesda owned. If they were able to, if Bethesda was able to come in and force them to change the title like this. I believe so. Yeah.

Okay. Because that's, I guess, always the, the, the core of thought is like, from the inception of a project, is this something that your studio is building as its own thing, or was this always under the umbrella, and in which case they can make a last minute decision, or not even last minute, but just a completely nonsensical decision like the title on this one, which then effectively works backwards in making people recognize it, and then not helping it sell copies, you know? Yeah, but that's, that's, that's what that's about.

That's Bethesda's method of buying game studios is to contract them to make games that they then bomb, so that the value of the company decreases, and they can buy it up more cheaply. Yeah. Well, yeah. It's the same story. Every, every story is the same story. It's just, it's like, yeah, the, the same, the one we just told about Halo Infinite is the same story here, and it continues to be the same thing until you can get away and just make a normal ass video game again.

You know? Oh, go on. No. All right. Well, yeah, it, it, it all just, I'm just thinking of like Microsoft and Blizzard sitting in a room, and Microsoft being like, now listen, is there anything that's going to happen in the next six months that's going to drop the value of Blizzard? Nah, man, it's all good.

Okay, I'm going to buy you Blizzard for this amount of money, and you're promising me that nothing bad is going to happen to the value of your company. And Blizzard, man, sipping on his breast milk latte, thinking about how he's going to go back to the Cosby Rape Room, goes, yes, absolutely, absolutely. So, we can continue this forward. This time around, though, we can say Tencent and Sony have increased their partial stake in purchasing from software at 15% apiece, I believe, is the ownership. Yeah, not shocking at all.

Elden Ring made a ton of cash from software that can seemingly do no wrong. Buy more of the company, get more of your dividends. I mean, the one thing they can do wrong, I guess, is, well, not that they can really affect it, maybe, but is lose more and more of their ownership over themselves, I guess. Yeah, but that's what happens every company when it goes public. Of course, of course, and that's how you make the money, and it all makes sense. You basically don't want to own any of your own company. You want all the, take the company, ruin the company.

I don't care, just give me the money, give me the money. Yeah, man, so 30% or so, maybe give or take. And, you know, like, we'll see, they're probably, I mean, if Sony's looking at this, they're probably thinking like, okay, they're going to keep making stuff that'll be multi-platform, but we can definitely get more exclusives going and have some say in that matter. You just, you know that it's not going to stop at that 15% there, that 30% there, that keeps going. And eventually that company starts to be less and less recognizable. It's just, in all of these cases, well, you know, we'll see where this goes,

but in all of these cases, it's just like, God damn it, it fucking sucks that, like, a developer that puts out something of quality that ends up being a humongous hit does not get any power in the situation. And the more successful your hit is, the less power you have as a developer. Money. It's kind of wild how that works. Money, money. Yeah.

But it's the kind, you know, it's like the difference between an artist who blows up off of SoundCloud versus an artist who blows up off of a fucking boy band creator label, you know? You know who's the freest artist in the world, Willie? The freest creator of all. The people commissioning drawing, sorry, the people drawing up Elmer Fudd's dirty, unshowered feet if he were a wolf man. Well, that's true freedom right there. Until that gets popular enough that WB gets interested and tries to copyright Big Chungus,

because I believe WB now owns Big Chungus. I feel bad for Sterling because I saw the thing and they were like, God damn it, I knew I should have fucking copyrighted that fucking word. I mean, always remember that Big Chungus is actually a term that was used by JSS, James Stephanie Sterling to refer to a friend of his asshole, like literal butthole. Big Chungus. Big Chungus existed for a mere three seconds or whatever the time frame was. It's now the dominant meme.

Granted that even its own self, Bugs Bunny. So you know, obviously, that means that a multiverse's costume is in the works. Yes, that is what that means. That's the only reason why they'd be putting forth legal action towards that. How can the meme be so powerful to be more popular than Bugs Bunny as Big Chungus, a character that doesn't even exist? Well, I think the idea that I show a child in the future, Bugs Bunny and the kid goes, is that the Big Chungus will make me just jump out a window and kill myself and just die?

So let's say that before Halo Infinite dropped, 343 came out and said something to the effect of, we're convinced that releasing this game this year will not take it to a level where we'd be personally satisfied. So to create a fulfilling and unique game experience, we're extending the development time to whatever. Do you think, instead of putting it out half-baked, that that would have been a decent way to handle the situation? Sure, totally, man. Okay, well, thankfully, that's what Team Reptile is doing, because they're basically saying bomb rush cyberpunk, cyberfunk, it's not ready to go yet, they've got to delay it to summer 2023, and no one has an issue. Take all the time you need, thanks for the heads up, do your thing.

But that's cool. Okay, fine, have a nice day. But what if the head of that studio, instead of doing that, said, Bro, everyone here, dog, we love working 15 hours on this shit, six days a week. We're crushing it, I don't make anybody stay here. I am the boss, but I don't make nobody do nothing. We're crunching it, because we love it. Definitely, definitely not trying to desperately get this game out before the Dead Space remake.

Definitely has nothing to do with that at all. I'm Glenn Schofield. I'm an idiot. Callisto protocol physical copies will be shipped with blood stains and tears on the disc. I think Glenn Schofield's tweet about how I'm not forcing anyone to work 15 hour days. We all just love it here. Might be the most brain dead fucking, do you even know how your own company works? Shit, I've seen in a while.

Hey, Glenn, if you're the boss of the studio and you do 15 hour days, six days a week, and you say it's because you love it and you're a team player, you're basically telling anyone who doesn't want to do that that they suck shit and that you hate them, and that it will come back on them, because it means they don't care enough. Shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less. I love that we actually have a game studio that fulfills that ideal, which is Supergiant, which is like, wow, that Hades game was made by people putting in their nine to five and chilling the fuck out, and that was one of the best things I've ever fucking played, and it was a huge financial success for them.

It got there. I remember when it was announced a long ass time ago, and then it got there, and then everyone was like, yo, you fucking played Hades? And they say, yeah, that was the only thing people were talking about when it eventually got there. You know what happened with 14 a couple of months ago? They said, hey, guys, we're looking at the work schedule for the next couple of years. Ambitious. And they're like, we're going to have to delay some of these patches because we don't want to crunch the employees into dirt.

So patches are going to come out two, three weeks later than you're used to. So instead of three and a half months, it'll be four months, maybe four months, one week. And everyone went, yeah, okay. And it didn't even make a fucking, no one even knows about that unless they watched it live because it didn't make any fucking news. Like, just make it good. In conclusion, just hire a big buff lady and have her sit and do the makeup and paint her green and then do practical effects and then have her to work instead. And then you don't have to have your VFX artists pulling their fucking skin off. You know, I was excited for She-Hulk and I saw a couple clips of it and I'm not going to watch that show.

I'm going to watch it probably. I still want to see what's going on. Because, so the show has like a woman empowerment kind of angle because of She-Hulk, obviously. And it's trying to go for that and it's kind of like laughably condescending and that's fine. And that's kind of funny except for the part that it's a show that was mandated to make She-Hulk slim and not muscular because it wouldn't appeal to Macho Dickhead. Yeah, yeah. And the whole thing comes off as like disgustingly insincere. I mean, we talked about this when the first trailer dropped and it was like the difficulty of like slimming her down and all that bullshit and all the nonsense of just like, okay, coward's got it, no problem, no issue whatsoever.

But there's a weird thing too that is like... It's female empowerment, but we have to make sure that guys who are afraid of muscles can still masturbate to our main character. So as long as when she's muscular, if there's a, you know, the abs are on prominent display and such and everything is there, you're good and you're fine, you're good to go. But if it's normal clothes over that bulkiness, then she's going to look too bulky and clothed and there won't be anything gratifying about that. So that's a no-go. Can't ship that. Nobody wants to see that shape while covered at the same time. I don't fucking know, dude.

It's so weird. I think she Hulk should be a giant trapezius with a wig. Either way, regardless of all of that shit, I'm just looking at it going, yeah, you know what? Like probably should have just gone practical effects. Like you can do a pretty solid job these days. We've gotten pretty good at that shit. And then like having a practical effects, she Hulk talking to a big CG Bruce Banner would be like the weirdest thing ever. But fuck it.

From what it sounds like, it would have been better than what we're getting now, which is rushed CG. And then artists that are like, yeah, we don't have fucking time. This sucks. It's just like both on both fronts, you're abusing your artists and they're not getting a job that they're happy with done anyways. Paint paint paint the muscles green. Call it a day. You have to get like, then you'd have to get somebody with muscles and that's gross. You know, I'm also reminded though, I'm also the Batman, right?

Yeah, the Batman movie. I haven't seen it. Is Colin Farrell really playing the penguin? Yeah. Because like I saw a thing where they're like putting him in like just a hundred pounds of fat, ugly guy makeup. And I'm like, wow, anything, anything to avoid actually casting like a shlubby looking guy. Like absolutely anything. I mean, I'll take it over his bullseye.

Lest we forget that he played fucking bullseye. But yeah. Fucking Danny DeVito is the greatest penguin of all time because I could look at Danny DeVito on the street and be like, ah, it's the fucking. It's literally. And then go hug him because I love Danny DeVito. Yeah. I also am reminded of how the, I think Kelsey Grammer was like, I am never doing this beast shit again. Oh yeah.

Sitting in the makeup chair for, I think it was like six hours or some crazy shit before shooting was brutal. I would tell you the story about how Worf came back to DS9. No. So Michael Dorn played Worf, right? And so him and Brent Spiner became pretty close because Brent Spiner played data. So on TNG, they would have to come in five, six hours before everybody else did because data was going in full body paint contacts, right? And then Dorn had the fucking prosthetic for his Klingon shit, you know, the forehead stuff and the hair, right? And they, they were, they were doing way longer days than everybody else as a result.

And so he finishes TNG and he's talking to, I think it was the, what's his name? So the guy wrote about Sargalactic, I think it was. And he was like, man, I am fucking never doing Worf ever again. That that shit was awful. Can't stand it. And then they ask him, well, do you want to come back for Deep Space Nine? And he goes, absolutely not. I'm never getting in that chair ever again.

And then apparently they just literally added a zero to his check. And he's like, okay, cool. When we started, when we, when we doing this. Slide that back across the desk. It's like, all right, all right, honor, honor. Yeah, good, excellent, good, great. There you go. That zero had much honor.

That'll fucking do, baby. That'll do. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, anyway. I just answered a text with my voice. I'm losing my fucking mind.

Please look forward to bomb rush cyberpunk in summer 2023 or whenever it's ready. We're in no rush. We've waited for Sega for fucking 22 years now. Hey, do you want to hear something funny about when it's done? I got a last week, I got a fucking email and the email was update 74 or something of Project Phoenix. And it was like, we're working on this character. And I'm like, you cannot possibly seriously be carrying on with the fantasy that this fucking game will come out. You fucking lying pieces of shit.

Speaking of ghost song got a release date, if you can believe it. Project Phoenix, Japan indie RPG, a million dollars of its hundred thousand goal. Oh my God. Check out the date on that. Oh my God. No, no. As you said that word, like thought memories came rushing back. I was like, I fucking forgot this existed.

Well, yeah, no, because we talked about, I remember talking about the Kickstarter stuff. Me and Liam both hit the same point where we were talking about Kickstarter games. And Project Phoenix was the one where we both had, it was the first one where we were both like, oh yeah, that's never coming out. That we threw that money away. Gone. Right into the trash. Original ET, original estimated release date was 2015. Yeah.

Kickstarter. Totally on its way. Totally on its way. 2013. Oh my God. Yep. Okay. I thought Kickstarter pages after like 10 years would just, you know, recycle themselves just automatically.

There's an update on that page you were probably looking at. Yeah, it's a 2019, latest update. Well, I literally got one in my mail like a fucking week ago or so. Man. Well, I suppose you could always be comforted by the fact that when your game is 10 years, 11 years in and nothing's going on, most of those backers probably forgot it existed. Oh yeah, absolutely. So you get to just, you know.

Cool. All right. Yeah, I saw that ghost song thing. I think buttons put a screenshot of it up on it. It's like, I can't, like, what the fuck am I looking at? What do you mean? This has a steam page. Anyway.

I don't know, man. Anyway. Well, why look forward to future games that don't exist when you could look back to past games that do exist? For example, have you ever heard of Osmond? Probably not. But if you have. No, I have not. If you have, you know, it's some good shit.

After Strider came out and was an awesome arcade game, left the whole world wanting some more Strider. And in fact, some team members of the group that I want to say made that then broke off and started recreating Strider in various forms in various other places. Trying to get that magic again. Osmond was one of those games, came out in 1996, and it's a Strider clone. It is unabashed, unapologetic. Oh, that's nice. It is a straight up Strider clone from the same designer. And if you ever got to play it, it was pretty fucking, it was cool.

It was fun. So it's actually finally getting re-released on PS4 and Switch next year. And yeah, it's a weird one. It's one of the weirder ones, but it was also known as Cannon Dancer. I want to say, I think I touched it or talked about it at some point in the past a while ago. But I fucking love me those Strider games, and this is one of the good clones. They're good. Yeah.

That's what I have to say about it. Great for speedruns. Feels good climbing up walls, running in weird angles, fighting bosses upside down. And cool animation in Osmond as well. It had a budget. So how do I write this down? O-S-M-A-N. Man, I sure don't know what that is.

Osmond I or Osmond Gazi was sometimes transliterally archaically as Othman, was the leader of the Ka'i tribe and founder of the Ottoman dynasty. There you go. I don't think that's what I'm looking for. Video game? I mean, it's named after... Here we go. It's named after that because it has a cyberpunk Arabian setting.

There we go. Now I can see it. Yeah, I see it now. Oh, this looks fucking cool. So yeah, that's going to drop. Man, that looks straight. I'm looking at the 96 one. Man, that is obviously just straighter.

Yeah, I did play it back on the old channel. Okay, yeah, there you go. Osmond, good shit. Cool. And speaking of ninjas with arm blades flipping upside down in the Middle East. That could be anything. There are like 10 games like that. Assassin's Creed Mirage has been announced.

Nothing else except for... It seems like the setting based on that first picture is going to be Baghdad. Cool. Or back then, Persia. Cool, man. So actual Prince of Persia, actual Assassin's Creed in Persia, finally officially stamping out the franchise from existence once and for all by just taking the setting while they're at it.

I would like to... So I played Valhalla a little while ago, and I don't know how it took me that long, but I got to a question in Valhalla where somebody was like, you need to find Jimmy Ragnarok or whoever the fuck, right? They'll help you out. And I go, okay. And I got to Jimmy Ragnarok and Jimmy Ragnarok says,

hey, you need to find three people in these places, and then I'll help you. And I got three people in. And then I went back to Jimmy Ragnarok and they're like, now that you found those three people, I will help you. But first, and I'm like, I'm done. I'm completely over it. Like, the formula is just slapping me in the fucking face.

Now you're talking about the... Over and over and over. And this is the new formula because the recent games reinvented all that and had the good combat, right? Yeah, but it's just literally like every single fucking step of every single fucking quest is the formula every time. And it's like, I can see, I can like matrix C where every part of it fits because this quest has exploration and this quest had more combat

and then this one had more fucking climbing. And I can literally just see the fucking spreadsheet and the fucking diagram where it just fucking goes, well, this section of the fucking game needs to have four missions where you climb a lot. And it's like, I fucking can't anymore. It's the Ubi feel. The Ubi feel is inescapable. You guys have been talking about it.

Despite having never played a Far Cry game, it sounds like that has the exact same thing going on. Far Cry actually has it way worse. Ubi feel non-stop. JSS, James Stephanie Sterling put out a great video a while ago. I think it was, though. But basically describe how like they were playing Far Cry 4, I want to say it was. I'm getting some details wrong, but the thrust of it is like,

yeah, no, if Far Cry 4 had come out as the first Far Cry game in a couple of years, it would have been awesome and they would have enjoyed it a ton. But instead it was like the fifth Far Cry slash Assassin's Creed came out. I literally just called it Assassin's Creed. That's great. Nice. And how all of those games were so similar that none of them could feel good at all. Because they were all just the same.

Like think, think of how less excited you would have been for Elden Ring if you got a new From Software style Dark Souls From From Software every nine months. If Elden Ring was just actually split into like five and we've been getting that with a different year on it practically for the last five years. Yeah, that sucks, man, because you know, there's always that big reveal setting thing they get and then there's of course the big actor that you get as well. And I go like, yeah, maybe one day I'll try one of these. But in my brain, I'm expecting to feel first person towers and first person Ubi maps

and first person Ubi feel Ubi missions, all of it. Did you know that Ubisoft's racing games also have towers? I think I did. I think I did know that. Was there was there a bit about Project Cars having I don't know if it's Project Cars, I forget which one it is, but you have to drive up a little mountain to get to the tower to ping your fucking... The crew, the crew, that's what it was.

Right, right, right, right, right. Just literally unbelievable. You know, that's what's keeping Skull and Bones, right? They can't figure out how to make the boat climb a tower on the ocean. You know, I just, I just, I bet that was a significant design hurdle for them because the ocean doesn't have height. It doesn't have height. You have to ride a wave up real high.

I, dude, just, let me sail and let me unlock shanties. It's real simple. I'm not a complicated man. Anyways, if you two are not a complicated person, you can let me know over at CastleSuperBeastMail at gmail.com. That's CastleSuperBeastMail at gmail.com. And we can read some letters. Hey, what do you got for letters?

Let's see. Here's one coming in from Mike who says, Mike here with a short simple question. Over the past couple of years, I've been reading manga again. I really couldn't see my friends much during quarantine. And I've been getting around to a lot of the series I never would have finished back in the day. I'm reading Vagabond. I'm about halfway through and I love it, but I have a problem.

Now I know, now no one I know is a manga reader, meaning the only person I will ever know that cares about this. Meaning I will be the only person I know, no, it's my fault, that will ever care about the series. So my question to you is, would you rather have a series that gets like an anime adaptation that may not live up to the manga or just have it remain only a manga, only to be read by a few who care to do so? I absolutely don't think that watering it down just to get it out there

to a few more people is worth it. I think it's fine if it lives up to the best of its ability within its medium. And if an adaptation lives up to the best of its ability in that medium, then that's fine too. I think you're kidding yourself if you think, if no one you know reads manga, that all of a sudden you're going to know tons of people who are going to watch this particular anime if there were to exist. No, just start playing any online game and just keep talking about it

and eventually some other manga nerd will go, oh man I love that! And then you can like chat them up. I haven't watched Legend of the Galactic Heroes The New Thesis, but so far it doesn't seem like it lit the world on fire and convinced a whole lot of people to go pop in that franchise or go give those books a try or go check out the old series. It's literally the best fucking show I've ever watched

and I don't think the new version season of it that they dropped I don't know where did much to get the interest going. Like, I bet you if I loaded up FF14 right now and went to Limsa Lomensa and fucking said, does anybody here like Vagabond? Two people will go, man that's my favorite thing. I mean, every once in a while you go back long enough and then someone goes, yeah, I love that thing

and then you're like, cool, what's your name? And he's like Hidetaka Miyazaki and then you're like, oh, okay. And then he goes on to make a thing massively inspired by the thing you're into and then now everybody goes, wait, what the fuck? What's this berserk thing that inspired Dark Souls? And it's like, oh shit. There's always-

Some book. You know, it's out there, it's a thing. Oh, you mean this anime with 26 episodes? I'll go watch that. No, no, not that, no. Oh, you mean this 2016 thing? Okay, I'll go watch that. Definitely.

No. No. Now I'm sad. Yeah. No, I'm someone who, like, I want things to be as good as they can be for the given medium they're in and I'm not against a good adaptation at all but if it's not gonna do that well

then don't bother. So, yeah, I'm okay with things staying in a medium where I think it's, you know, if it's not gonna get a good adaptation. Then don't. Then don't. Also, you get to feel like you're better than those people, which has its own value. Sure, you can sit on top of that gate

and make sure that no one makes it through. Ah! Guardians of the Gate. We keep, we are the holders. The keepers of the gates. Anyway. We got one coming in from, let's see, over here. Gingerbones says,

Dear residents of Castle Super Beast, long-time listener, first-time caller, recently had the pleasure of attending Pax West and I went to a Q&A panel featuring David Guider, the writer of CRPGs including Baldur's Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, and Kotor, as well as Dragon Age. During the panel, David mentioned the inspiration behind the character HK47 being accidental.

It was due to him having two weeks of free time after writing out Jolie Bindo. The sole inspiration for HK47's unique personality was brought out by a marathon of viewings of Canadian TV show, The Littlest Hobo, and playing with the idea that what if The Littlest Hobo was helping to kill people instead, ending episodes with massive explosions,

The Littlest Hobo putting on shades and walking away. This helped to create the vile, eccentric, wit and popular habit of calling people meatbags. I... I... I... I literally can't believe that there are like six people on the Earth that that would mean anything to, and I am one of them. HK47 is the anti-Littlest Hobo. Oh my god, that makes so much fucking sense.

Oh my god. Holy shit. What are some of your favorite inspirations behind a writer's character? Nothing's gonna fucking beat that. That's... that's... I got nothing. I mean, you all... that's also a like sniper-scoped shot direct into the heart of what's interesting

as a weird Canadian gaming podcast. That is... wow. You nailed it. Wow. That was a headshot. That's it. I'm... I'm totally... Yeah, I will say one thing about David.

He did a really good work, but I think that my favorite... I think the favorite thing that he ever did ever in his writing history was he named the Dragon Age setting Thedas. Like, T-H-E-T-D-A-S. Okay. Right? That's... that's the continent

that... that Dragon Age takes place. So, that's the Dragon Age setting Thedas. The name of the continent is literally the Dragon Age setting. Yeah. Yeah. Man, what are we gonna call this thing? The direct Xbox is not a...

I don't know. It's fucking Xbox. Some shit. It's not a snappy enough name for the kids. Yeah. Um, no. I really gotta say that the Xbox story is funny, but also, if you can take yourself back children to the time before Xbox, Xbox might be the shittiest name

for any device of all time. It's astonishingly fucking cringe in 90s. So, um, a quick search here, and I can confirm that this story, as told in that person's Q&A panel, is absolutely confirmed because a tweet, which I'm going to retweet from 2011, which has no likes or replies to it, it seems.

Uh, I'm gonna dig this one up. David Geider at PAX West says, HK47 is the anti-littlest hobo. He goes from owner to owner engineering their self-destruction. That is incredible. I cannot believe that. That is incredible.

Oh, man. Alright, well no one else's email is going to be better than that one. That gentleman won. That's incredible. Well, folks, on that note, um, tune in. Got good stuff coming this week. Solid Hill. Mass Effect.

I have bad stuff coming this week. Can't sell it any harder than that. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.