Castle Super Beast - CSB 264: B.O.D.Q.

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps The Eclipse Resurrected Greg Sphinx Hunting and Wokestones Helldivers II: WE BEAT THE AUTOMATONS   Crafting is Bad Unless It's Good Uh-oh! Stinky! Watch live: twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://shopify.com/superbeast to sign up for a $1-per-month trial period. -- Go to http://factormeals.com/castle50 and use code castle50 to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next box. -- Go to http://dragonsdogma.com to buy the game and start your epic quest today. -- Go to http://buyraycon.com/superbeast to get 20% off your Raycon order and free shipping. Female Yu-Gi-Oh! player leaves tournament early because players smelled bad 劇場アニメ『KILLTUBE』Pilot Film - Knights in Tight Spaces Yokohama RX-78F00 Gundam will end its service (two years later than originally planned) Cosmic horror fishing game Dredge is getting a live-action film adaptation. Balatro's first big update hits public testing with new Joker mechanics, more Sonic the Hedgehog films aiming to be "Avengers-level events", says franchise producer Helldivers 2 players suffering crashes should "let the game rest for a while" says developer Arrowhead "A hotfix for the crashes is coming, but not over the weekend." On today’s episode of “Shut the Fuck Up,” the fan project to revive the defunct Friday the 13th Game has received a cease and desist notice from Horror Inc

["Sailor Moon Theme"] So was it the Eclipse that's done this? No. The Eclipse didn't do this. That's not who's to blame. No, it's me to blame. So yesterday I was running into like... You know when your modem just decides to tell you to go fuck yourself? The modem is responsible for this?

No, let me get there. Let me get there. But you know when that happens? Yeah. And you run the technical issues and then you finally get it fixed and you're like an hour and a half late and you're like Well, I was gonna trim right before the show so I still have time if I hurry and then you run in and you grab You grab the the small trimmer instead of the regular trimmer with the guard and you grab it from the bottom of your neck all the way up to the over your chin up to your

lip and you're like I just gave myself a dirt bag Harry Dubois fucking biker skinhead fucking cut. The Raoul. And then I called Paige and I sent her a picture and I'm like, should I try and save this? And she's like, you can try. And then every time I tried, I looked more like a criminal. And then I was like, maybe I can just go with the mustache. And then it was oscillating between like sex pervert and hickor. Other kind of criminal Boy okay, it'll be back next week for our faithful mp3 listeners pat has returned to Greg mode

That's egg pat no isn't egg pats when the head goes to though Yeah, but I got to get rid of the head, because the longer hair on the top of my head, sorry, the sides of my head. Okay, well there's only so much- And the nose beard is awful. There's only so much excitement that Baby can take. So- Oh, he doesn't care.

Really? Doesn't give a shit. Huh, because hair changing is one of those things that you always see in memes about. Yeah. Didn't give a single solitary shit It was wild I I was expecting like trouble okay, and yeah none I

It was alright. Yeah, I guess that's a bad. I mean that's that's probably good unless it's like yeah, fuck this guy Maybe but I got a friendly little baby, so maybe he didn't recognize me and he was just like hello Yeah, because it also is Probably less of a dramatic change compared to like someone with big dark hair and like a whole Shape change because you're you imprint the shape of someone's head and when that's possible when that changes It's like I make it come back. Well, what happened? Hey, well, I'll tell you what I was I was sitting here and I'm like There was like a there's a there was a less than there's are they have more than 0% chance That we started the podcast and you were just like I'm blind and I'm glad to see that you're not blind. I'm not blind

I'm very happy about that. Yeah, so I if you if you I take it that I don't know go ahead. Sorry I don't know if you checked out Google Trends lately But there is a sudden massive interest spike for the phrase my eyes hurt on Google in states that are in the direct path of the fucking eclipse. I learned a long time ago in childhood from magazines and my mom and various science class and everywhere that like, hey, when you're doing eclipse staring, be careful.

You got to know how to do it and what the windows of time that are safe and are not safe are and how to make a pinhole thing and such. But yeah, the eclipse happened and I went to go check it out. It sounds like if your eyes were not at risk that you didn't. No, man, I don't care. I was smooching my baby and making mistakes with my hair. So I initially also was kind of like in a not caring mood. I was also kind of nonplussed ultimately because I had been around for, there was two partial

eclipses I remember getting. I got one in elementary school and I got one during College and then there was a lunar eclipse that my mom took us out to go check out as well and In all cases it was like oh, that's that's kind of cool. You know cool Yeah, it was it was I was kind of alright and the the the the partials were like yeah Okay, I can kind of see what's going on there. That's neat. But it was never a total eclipse. So I was ultimately just like, yeah,

I remember going through these. And it was like, it wasn't that big a deal. But Punch Mom was really excited and really wanted to go and was like, oh, let's go check this out. And I was like, OK, yeah, let's do that. But I know that just having done it before, it was like, yeah, it was just a little fun thing. No big deal. The city was giving out glasses as well. So you had protective eyewear for everybody. That's nice. And yeah, it was one of those things where it's like, okay, so it's passing over Montreal, but like you can go a little bit further south to get closer to the center because if you're

on like over the whole city, you're going to get about 60 seconds of it. But if you go a little bit further south, you can get up to four minutes. Oh, that's quite a bit. That's quite a bit. So yeah, so it was one of those things where we went to go we drove a bit further south to get to you know Where we could get a bit more time in the Richelieu area if you remember if you remember your oh, yeah. Yeah and Then upon doing it and It happening. It was way cooler than I

And it happening, it was way cooler than I expected. And I went in kind of like, eh. And when it happened, I was like, OK, this is fucking cool. So by doing it and getting a longer version of it, it convinced me how rad that shit was. Because when it's happening, the lead up to it and afterwards is essentially like the sky darkens a bit, you know, and you see, you start to see like a bite out of the cheese, you know, if you're looking at it with the special lens and stuff. But up until that last, last little moment where

it completely goes over, that sudden moment of like, and now it's nighttime, and now shadows are weird, and now animals and insects don't know what's going on and are reacting weirdly. And that sudden effect is just really like, whoa. And then when it appears, and then you looked at it with the naked eye for that safe window of about a minute. And then when it comes back out the other side

and like a giant halo-ish form around it is happening, it's like, oh, yeah. People are going to get video in 4K and all kinds of cool shots from airplanes. We've got that Waffle House photo making the rounds. Yes, everyone who made a plan in advance did something pretty sick. I was like, yeah, that's good shit.

Good planning there. But as much as it is cliche to say it, it is like, oh, yeah, but looking around while it's happening, you're taking in more than I think a video is going to capture. Like, it's very interesting and crazy and cool to experience. And then on top of that, it was like, and the last time this happened on this line in this area was in the 30s.

So everything else you're going to get is a partial eclipse from here on out, unless you want to become a chaser. You know? Oh, I don't think so. Yeah, we discover, which I discovered, there's just like tornado chasers. There's eclipse chasers, of which we saw the spot we picked,

which was just on it. We pulled off to a spot that we just found on our own. But there was a couple from California that was there. So they were clearly looking to find themselves a nice spot. I don't agree with the term you're using. I'm sure that's what the eclipse people call themselves, because like tornadoes. Tornado chasers. Eclipse chasers. I'm sure that's what the eclipse people call themselves like tornadoes tornado tornadoes like eclipse chaser form out of nowhere

And like our random mm-hmm like you're not chasing something that you know is gonna happen 60 years in advance Yeah, it is calculated. It's not so much a chase but I also know that people like Chase bands across the countries as they perform in predetermined locations. Yeah, those people are freaks. It's pretty nuts. And ultimately, the word is kind of ruined because once upon a time, it just meant the

thing you drink after you take a shot. But it at some point became bug chasing like I had a I have I had a pepsi just now yeah, and I'm gonna chase that pepsi with a Can of purple monster whoa well as long as you're chasing it with a can of purple monster and not a pause load Okay, sorry, that's not the turn. Yeah, all right. Yeah Yeah So that's it. So anyways, Eclipses. No, I don't want to. Eclipses are pretty cool. And you know, it is one of those bits where when it happens to, it's like, okay, you can

see every movie cover, every poster, every moment of fucking KO KOF Kusanagi logo going off in your head and all these different things. It's like, yeah, there's a lot of lore and mystery around this sudden moment where the whole world turns dark. No wonder there's a bunch of fiction that's obsessed with that. But also there's apparently a historical battle where a Roman army was fighting while an eclipse happened, I think and They were all and everyone went. Oh fuck. Do the gods hate this or did we fuck up? Is this the wrong thing? You know probably So shit like that happening back in a time when you didn't know what the fuck was going on

shit like that happening back in a time when you didn't know what the fuck was going on would have been absolute sign that, yeah, gods are real and they are approving or disapproving or something. Something is happening and people are going to get killed if that goes down in the middle of a battlefield. Hey, let me ask you a question. I've been thinking about this all week about the eclipse. If you know someone and they looked at the eclipse and they went somewhat or totally blind, are you obligated to feel bad for them at all?

Pfft. I don't know what the education is for everybody on this, but I really learned many times the dangers of staring at the sun and especially during the eclipse. I feel like if they were a child, then I would blame the parent. Yeah, I got a lesson from my parents and then I read Ranger Rick magazine, which had a bunch of pictures of animals and then a little thing that said, hey, eclipses are cool. You can look at them, but be sure to make sure you know when to do it and only for a brief period. And then my teacher in school also reiterated that. And like when we went outside

to do it with the pinhole, it was like, again, do not look for, you know, the wrong period of time. So I guess I feel like there were, you know what I mean? There's multiple stop signs. I feel like we're about to enter into like an unprecedented era of listen, I looked at the eclipse and I've gone blind. You can't make fun of me because because something. I mean, I know that there's a lot of SpongeBob gifts getting dropped getting dropped. But yeah, not to mention as someone who then, so what I did was I put the shades on the top half of my eyes and then was able to like kind of look at both in a way.

The moment there's a very clear sign of when it's time to stop looking. Like it turns and then you see the silhouette, you see the burning ring and then the sky is all there and then there starts to be a little twinkle on the opposite side And then there's a very bright, but not painful Shine that flares out in your eyes, and it's a very clear indicator of like oh now's the time You'll know yeah, because the Sun is bad for you You know the moment where it starts to kind of be too bright and hurt again, but it's not completely hurting

That's the time to stop so Yes, don't look past the hey guys Welcome to the castle super beast episode 260 something don't look at the Sun Don't do it. I mean don't do it you can do it with protective material and the right precautions, but even then like No, you can and it's cool when you do it properly It's just it's the only thing in the whole world

literally That everyone is taught to don't look at that Since the very beginning. Yeah. No. It's insane to feel the pain and then be like, I'm going to take it. I'm going to keep it going. Because it really is like until the last like 30 seconds that you still can't look.

But anyway, that was a cool once in a lifetime, but not really, but yes, because I'm not going to go out of my way for it. It can be more often if you do want to go distances for it. But it's like looking at it now, to get four minutes of that vibe, I would be willing to drive a couple hours. I wouldn't be willing to get on a plane. That would be ridiculous, but I'd be willing to drive a couple hours and make a nice picnic out of it.

I brought my kites just in case, didn't have an opportunity to use them, but it's the kind of thing where you can find a nice activity to make use of it. But yeah, shit was was dope shit was dope Yeah, I'm totally dissent I don't know why cuz I'm in the astrophysics and I'm into into planetary shit and I'm just like It wasn't until it was happening

I didn't I felt that way too until it was going down and I was like, oh, this is a lot cooler than the ones that I've done before. I guess, I guess I'm just a, you had to be their hater. Perhaps. Maybe. Um, it, yeah, it, it, it's, it's way different to get the, the, the... Yeah, anyway, have you ever been dragged to like a party and then you're like oh yeah you know what this was fun oh yeah

it's a little it's got every single party I've ever been to in my entire life okay so it's kind of like that it's kind of like that it's kind of like yeah that was cool man that was dope a little bit of like that. It's kind of like, ah, yeah, that was cool, man. That was dope. Little bit of that, you know? That's the best way to put it. And, yeah, you know, now you get a bunch of cool pictures and you get to- Memories. Yeah, and then also it's pretty,

it's also fascinating to kind of like see, I guess like to, like as you learn the math of how that is all working and it's like, oh, the strip of shadow is like a band across the planet and the way that works is based on like, not just the orbit of the moon in us, but like this earth's rotation. And there's a cool like elements of the-

It's a whole mess. It is and it's pretty interesting. And it's also interesting to think about how like, you know, we're getting We're feeling the heat from a light source like infinity billion Unfathomable distance away from us But the shadow that can be cast is so instantaneous because it's open only happening from the moon's distance away from us you know, and so you see it's wild because um Like the moon's distance away from us. And so you see- Yeah, it's wild because the moon is the perfect size to cause these total eclipses to happen. It was a little smaller, you wouldn't be able to get it.

No. It was a little bigger, you wouldn't see the ring at all. Yeah. And again, lunar is a bit of a mismatch because the Earth is way bigger. But when you go with the specific order of moon in front of sun, it's that perfect covering. And it's also, yeah, it's that perfect distance where the shadow is able to be cast from just a moon's distance away. But then the temperature, you start to feel it get colder a little bit right away as well. And then the temperature, you start to feel it get colder a little bit right away as well. You know, and then the temperature change that shifts back once it's

uncovered again is like, wow, that's science shit. There was an era when I feel like, I mean, you mentioned yourself, but yeah, Punch Mom and I, I remember we were super into like science stuff and cool science posting and you know back in the day on Facebook There was a I fucking love science was a fun follow. Yeah back when it would actually you know Wasn't the dead internet Yeah, and then but also like dead adulthood Just like kind of beats the wonder out of you somewhat and you start being like there's cool stuff in there beats the wonder out of you somewhat and you start being like, there's cool stuff. And it's hard. Yeah. And I, but there is a point where once upon a time I would be like,

yo, Tardigrades, that's fucking crazy. What is this thing? You know, and there, and then, Oh, has that left for you somewhat? Unfortunately, I can feel it has. And I, and for punch mom as well, we've had conversations about how like, like yeah a little bit of that wonder and stuff is kind of gone But it's just it's it's dulled over in a way that that sucks Oh, that sucks. Yeah Yeah, like life finds a way to put the higher point higher stressors and things like I Didn't feel that way and I know that never, the shine never came off it. What happened was, is that like, actual advancements in astronomy have been slow, cause you have

to make bigger and bigger telescopes and devices. And they take years and years and years to fucking come back. But now I'm in the part where pretty soon,'m going to be able to just lie and say the moon's made out of cheese. There's that you can just go into that. That's fun. And yeah, laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. It is true that when we were kids, the advancement speed was a lot faster. Things were happening quickly. Discoveries were going a lot faster as well. It was more exciting to keep up with.

Things did slow down because budget cuts, because prioritization of spending. I would catch things about how it's like, okay, well, they have to build a bigger telescope and there's only specific places they can build it. But like in the- Well, there's one really good place to build a big telescope and that's in fucking space. Yeah, but there's also, but there's the other place, which is the mountain that Hawaii is, that's sacred to Hawaiians. And it's like, that would be a shitty thing.

So then it's like, okay, well, then what, you know, they got to figure that out. And a million small reasons why, you know, you don't get as many fast and interesting discoveries. But you do get shit like, yo, the latest telescope gets launched and gets cool pictures and we can see wilder crazier shit And at the same time I would say that like there were a couple of moments to where that whimsy that I feel like I'm describing being lost it was reignited with like Planet Earth 4k footage. Yeah, that was pretty good planet earth fucking brought that back hard for a minute and that was sick

pretty good. Planet Earth fucking brought that back hard for a minute and that was sick. Doesn't happen all the time, but every once in a while, I was like, oh man, I remember. Yeah, because like I said, there was a time when every, especially during Sabbath, during sundown Friday to Saturday, I can read my nature magazines. So Ranger Rick and Owl magazine were the shit and world as well. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be an astronaut and then somebody explained to me that being an astronaut was really hard. And I was like, I guess I'm not good enough

to be an astronaut. And then by the time I was old enough to fight that thought, being an astronaut just stopped happening. I Mean you can ISS astronaut, but you can't like whatever you know put my fucking boots on the moon Please you can do cool. Oh, we don't do that anymore. No no give up now, but you can do you can do You can do blog videos about like the water of fluid dynamics, and I don't give a fuck you know Yeah blog videos about like water and fluid dynamics and I don't give a fuck you know Yeah That's that's what it like astronaut nowadays means like chillin on the ISS and and making tik toks But yeah

Also Also there was the well, there's the other bit where I'm sure like the astronaut requirements for just athleticism and, you know, brains and you got to be the perfect ideal Captain America type human being. Yeah, and even as a small child, a small, small child, I was like, I don't think I'm going to look like Buzz Aldrin getting into that goddamn astronaut spacesuit. Height is a factor.

So it's time to give up and read my EGM and play my video games. Thank you. You ever see Little Miss Sunshine? Yes I did. Okay, so you remember... That movie is like... if you haven't seen the movie Little Miss Sunshine, it starts out like National Lampoon Summer Vacation and then just turns into like a really intense sad movie. Yeah At random

No good But in that it's the older brother, right? His whole storyline is one of- Yeah, it's brutal. It's brutal, having dreams that cannot be accomplished. And you kinda, yeah, I guess there's a point where you hit that. I don't think I've ever had the,

I've never had the astronaut dream per se. It's never anything like I never had that It was pretty much always media kind of related, you know, um But like I don't know I wanted to hang out on the moon the astronaut shit was like a side Like it was like a prerequisite. Okay, I had that but that turned into Like wanting to skydive and then that turned into yo There's indoor skydiving places where you can be like wait list for a minute See, that's that's goofy because to me know when I say like I want it to be on the moon Like when you said skydive I'm like, what is skydive that's getting closer to the earth when you're falling

Yeah, but you get to feel the no, I don't care about feel I want my fucking feet some moon Dust because it's clean and perfect No, it's fucking cool to be on the moon. That's it. That's it. That's it. It was it's it's so singular I think the coolest part about being on the moon is the gravity part of it It's so singular. I think the coolest part about being on the moon is the gravity part of it So that's why I think the coolest part about being on the moon is you're on the fucking moon. How crazy is that? It's holy shit. Yeah

Yeah, it's cool, but it's there's moon plants and moon animals around I mean Sure a bunch of Nazis on the dark side, you know, chilling, waiting, biding their time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Todd Madden's ghost lives up there. It's kind of like, I guess, like hiking in a way, where you hike to a spot and then you're able to take in that spot, and that's the payoff for going to that spot. When Paige and I went to Inari Shrine in Kyoto, right, we got most of the way up, and she was like,

"'Are you okay?' And I was not okay. I looked like shit right right I'm a small overweight little man who plays video games and she's like come on let's just go back down and I'm like I'm not gonna come all the way out to fucking Kyoto Japan and climb two-thirds of the way up a mountain. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Like, oh my god, I would be so fucking embarrassed. But yeah, for me, for me personally, and this might be a minority opinion,

but I'm like, it's also why I'm fucking loving jet packs and all that bullshit. The concept of gravity being fucked with weightlessness, jumping high, all of that is so, so cool to me. I love that so much more. You can get one of those water jet packs now. You can, yeah, water jet packs are sick. The arm ones are sick too,

but they require you to have an insane core. But I love all that, and that being a side effect of being on the moon for me, eclipses, the part where you get to enjoy being there. I would be way more into hiking if you could jump off to a different gravity effect and experience that at some point. At the end of the day day you have to realize something important

Is that no matter how many moon trips or eclipses? I see ain't none of that would have been a better use of my time yesterday Then just poking my little man in the stomach and calling him stinky that is that is in fact That does battle the eclipse for priority. The eclipse becomes a tertiary objective at that point. What's going on? Let's see. I smashed my phone to bits last week.

On purpose? No. Okay. No, not on purpose No, okay, not on purpose If I wanted to destroy something in a fit of baby rage, it would be my pillow And it would be and then you get like one punch into the pillow and you're like This just isn't yeah, this isn't what my like emotions are looking for. I suggest wraps. Then you go for a walk.

16 ounce gloves and a punching bag. Yeah. No, I was walking the dog and I got a text message and I pulled my phone out and my phone fell out of my pocket and it fell onto a little gravel dirt, knot sidewalk kind of thing. There was a singular pebble in there and It didn't cut it didn't break the glass it Destroyed the screen underneath the glass the glasses. Oh that yeah And so the bottom third of my telephone is ruined

Are you are you is that caseless that you're rolling? I've got the case that protects the back. But not the front because that's so bulky and horrible. And this phone did last me three, four years. I was going to say, what's your timeline on it? I was thinking about it anyway, so I was like, ah, okay. But it's so badly damaged that all my text messages are coming out like an insane person because the part that is no screen, like it's just black screen, is where the keyboard is.

So I'm just having a fat thumb it and just hope that's the people I'm talking to understand what I'm saying. Yeah. Older tactile phones were more resilient But when the screen did eventually bust on you you could still blind type and text just by hitting the buttons and well Tactile phones were more resilient unless it rained I Vividly remember having to run for cover because if drops of water got onto my Motorola, it would just explode I didn't have any issues with the clamshell. I was using

like it was more or less fine as long as as long as it's on the outside, but Huh, so yeah, I'll get a new phone so I'll probably be talking about a bunch of phone games next week because if you get a new phone you got a You got to justify it to yourself somehow by throwing something on there if you're good but I did yeah it's just I'm sad I'm sad about my phone I broke it I don't weigh I played way more dragons dogma which I see you also played more dragons dogma yeah kept poking at that mm-hmm mm-hmm I found the Sphinx the second time and I correctly defeated all of the Sphinx's

riddles. What a great fucking encounter. That is the best thing in the whole game. Easy. It is fantastic. I'm basically I'm basically holding out to see what that's all about While Wandering a little bit around like I'm kind of I was beelining for a bit and then I stopped to Do a couple side quests here and there but yeah, I want I want to see what this this big sphinx deal is Well, she's out of the way. So you got to really Get out there hmm to get a hold of her. And she has a bunch of riddles, and the riddles are all fucking great. They are great. They also are kind of not in terms of absurdity, but they are somewhat similar to not tax the feature point-and-click

riddles to a degree in that they require you to Intuit what the person who designed it wanted you to do Okay They're not like hey what walks on two legs and three legs and four legs, you know kind of Crying kind of riddle right there? They're like, use the game's in eternalized mechanics to solve this kind of thing, but that includes figure out the developer logic behind it. Okay.

Yeah, I'm glad you're talking around it and I'm legit curious to see what all this means. The one thing I did see was a video of someone jumping on a titty and grabbing on and then like I was like, what? Yeah, just jump on it. Yeah. It's fine. This game has its, I feel like the Itsuno looked at illusory walls in Dark Souls 1 and went, those are great.

And just went like, yes, let's work that into our own way. There's hidden flaps and doors, corners that lead to things that are not super clear on how to open and stuff. And in some cases it's a matter of like, you know, turning the right corner and baiting an enemy to like bash the gate open. I think my favorite one was there was a door I could not figure out how to open to the point where I had to, I had to like hit up Susie and be like, Susie, how the fuck do you open this door? I bet you I know which door, but go on. This cave. It's the one that connects to the encampment in the in the elf. Yep. That's the exact

I was about to talk about I was about to talk about that exact door and how I scraped in circles and I was like Oh, here's my other out. Here's my other exit to this cave. And then then there's this and I'm like, am I an idiot? What am I missing? And then I stupid? Yeah Yeah, and then in the past Susie and she's like, am I an idiot? What am I missing? And then I stupid yeah, then I yeah And then in the past Susie and she's like, yeah go back at night So skeletons open the door for you and like oh, no, no, no, no, no. I was there at night That's not at all what happens. So how the fuck did you do it? Well, it's not open yet, but this it is Initiate the next quest line step with the elf back in Vermind.

And apparently that leads to that door getting open. But if you do the first part of that quest and then walk up into that cave, you're just gonna be in a locked door. Oh, I left, rested, went back in, quit out and reloaded to reopen the fucking thing and. You have to initiate that part of the elf quest. The first part of it doesn't do it. What, but I did all his stupid shit. the fucking thing and you have to initiate that part of the elf quest the first part of it doesn't do it

stupid shit so That's that's one of the bits right I did I did his all stupid shit. He's chasing my dick Well, there's no skeletons there to do it, and I noticed in another cave that There was a zombie that you have to shoot from far away to bait you to come to you, which is perfect because I switched over to an archer, so I was messing around with that. So, yeah, anyway, whatever. People making up bullshit.

In this case, there was nothing to target. So there's nothing to open the door there. So that required the quest to continue. But then scraping back around the other side of that, I went up to a part where I was like, there seems to must be a way past this thing. And then it was like, oh, yeah, one section of this wall is breakable. But I had like I'm like,, oh God, the asset for rock that can be broken was there.

It's highly similar. It looks, it blends right into an unbreakable rock and the pawns never pointed out anything about it until like the fifth time walking through that area where it's like, oh, this area is breakable. And then Wooly the pawn runs to the area below and starts swinging at nothing. Yeah.

And I'm like, oh, he must be swinging at something here, but it can't be that, so therefore it must be this. And then it worked. And I was like, Jesus Christ, you janked into a, ugh. It's like, it's an illusory wall much fun playing this game and I and the further I get into it Okay, oh god dragons dogma one was like this, too I'm having so much fun playing this game and the further I get into it the less finished it feels Oh, yeah, it feels that way a lot once you get to, I'm sure you've seen people talk

about Batal, the Beestran Nation, to the south, you get to Batal and like the game's questing experience just evaporates. Like in the main city, that's like the equivalent to Vermund, there are four quests that I found talking to everyone i'm sure there's like one or two more but like it evaporates and the area is just as big as vermond so it's just like lots and lots of like man there's a lot of enemies

in this area and they're overlapped they're they're like aggro zones are overlapping onto each other so you go down there and you fight your fucking ass off. Yeah, it's this is the this is the game. Will he accept it? Of course, I accept it. I get that it's all jank in its way through. It's just it's it's very janky. It's janking in a way that is like sometimes I'm like, look at that jank go. And other times I'm like, that's not I, ah, look at that jank go. And other times I'm like, that's not, I don't enjoy that type of jank. You know, you know what's been happening? What's been happening? My sessions have been stopping based on when, when Dargons dogma crashes, which it's reliably going to do. It's, then it's time for me to switch over

to Helldivers. And then when Helldivers crashes, which it's reliably going to do,'s oh yeah then it's time for me to switch over to hell divers and then when hell divers crashes which it's reliably going to do then I can switch over to balotro and that'll be my night the game will tell me when to stop playing because it's been happening so consistently that's that's great did you do your pot your part eradicating the automatons over the weekend? I did my part, you know. We got them! They're gone! They're completely dead and they're gone and they're back and they have taken like 15 planets and it's worse than it's ever been. Yeah

In both cases what I'm losing upwards of you know 15 or 20 minutes of Roman and shit that's like god damn it guys god fucking damn it at least once it happened in a long fight and I Resumed just before the fight started so that was okay But like it's I found I can't believe how often both of these games are crashing. I found Dragon stagmas like I'm gonna use air quotes constant autosave

to wildly wildly vary in Terms of what it thinks is an important time to autosave Because I've had the game crash or I've left or you know save because I've had the game crash or I've left or you know, whatever and like I didn't lose anything. It saved it like five times a row. It saved all the right places and then I will have like what I can only describe as a mass effect one situation where you're like why was the auto save 30 minutes ago? Why?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least by getting your house, the in costs aren't a continuing thing. But you get just, you get, I want to say, like if a pod is about to ask you a question that you have to answer with a prompt, a with a not with a prompt with a gesture You get the first four words to actually answer the paw the sentence and then by the time the rest of the sentence plays out It's too late. So it's like master I think there's a treasure chest by the time the word chest is said if you say go it's like nope It's too late somewhere around these parts Telling me to go for the quest, right?

Go, go, go, go, go. I interrupted you saying the sentence, go, go. Nope, nope, the window's gone. So I'd like to clarify something that someone in the chat said because this type of thing needs to be clarified. They say that the, but the house you buy doesn't count as an in-rest rest so you don't get any RC it Absolutely does you're completely wrong your pawn just sucks and no one is hiring them

Oh, that's a lie. It's also been found that Capcom is auto hiring loser pawns every now and then Yeah, like no no no it 100% it does the whole like your pods come back from the rift and you know Wooly shows up and Dumps the fucking dump truck Shit that you're like I don't think I should use most of this yeah, and everyone keeps dressing him up and trying to put shit On him. I'm like stop dressing him up. I don't want that No, I'm in a weird place where like I have to buy completely new sets of gear when big page changes classes

Because I can't figure out what is stuff I've I've legitimately found in the world or what stuff that came back that was like wildly overpowered And so I'm like I'm just gonna buy a completely new set of fucking gear every single time Yeah, I'm just going to buy a completely new set of fucking gear every single time. Yeah. I don't care. No, I'm fine to just sort through and yeah, sell all the extra drunken stuff. But in any case, I've whittled down, I think, all most of the main up until that transition point or so. And I'm just picking at some of the dark spots on the map to see what's up, to see where it says,

OK, you can't go any further than here. Like, Batal, it's like, fuck you. And I was like, what if I put a mask on? And he's like, fuck you. And I'm like, all right, all right, all right. Hard limit. There's a quest that, well. Yeah, I get the feeling.

You can also just sneak into the country Oh, there you go. I mean, that's how I snuck into the capital to begin with so Yeah, I don't know and and also the the the weird and interesting implications of having a item cloning shop are like oh Break the game in many intentional ways. So, DD1 had the Forger, and DD2's Forger works the same. It is one of the most interesting things, putting in RPG, because certain quests, you can only get the good outcomes by tricking various people. Right. I felt that. Like, I can feel, I felt that.

Like looking at that, staring at that menu for a minute, I was like, hold on a second. What is able to be out? Just about anything. Anything. And there's a cost associated. So if you want to, yeah, fuck with the outcome of some quests or in some cases just like, I keep my fucking,

I want that jail key actually. I think I'm going to hold on to that. Yeah, keeping the real jail key is a really good example of what it would do. There's a couple of quests where people... There's two different quest givers that give you something really, really good. But they both want all of the same item. They both want five identical items. And so I was like, well, the correct solution here, obviously,

is to make a bunch of fakes and give each of them half real and half fake items. And it worked! And it totally worked, because they didn't check. Okay, okay. Because, yeah, I like, I'm getting, I'm getting me a Jadite orb copied, and I'll see what's gonna happen after that.

That's your little tutorial for the Forger that's like, hey man, what if you just, what if you just gave them both a quest reward? Um... Be awesome. Now here's a question I just thought of. Yeah? Can you, for example, forge...

I don't know, like a beggar's clothing? Yeah, totally. Would that work? No, because the quest changes as soon as you hand it over. Yeah, totally. Would that work? No, because the quest changes as soon as you hand it over. Did you get the, okay, so that- So I've seen two versions of that quest. Okay. I've seen the one

where I give it back to him, and I've seen the version where I give it back to his wife in the rich quarter. Oh, I did neither of those things. Yeah, you gave it to the poor girl. Yeah. I don't know what was your outcome there. So the poor girl outcome is disastrous, right?

Okay, you know about that. Yeah. I do, yeah. It's really bad. So the beggar quest in DD2 is the one that I showed off in my video where you just have to watch this guy for like 40 minutes. Yes. And just trail him all over town. So you get his clothes. If you run up to him and just give him the clothes, he's like, oh, fuck, here's five grand. Get out of my face. Okay. Okay.

And that's the end of that, right? If you give it to the his poor girlfriend at the bar. Yeah, the Beastman. She goes, what? No, but we were supposed to run away together. Thank you for this. And then runs off. And then the next morning a guard is like, Yo, do you know what happened in here? Because it's a mess. There's blood everywhere, and it seems like, it seems like dude got murdered, and then murder, suicide, because the beast girl kills herself too. Yeah.

Anyway, I don't know, it's a bloody mess in there. That's crazy. If you know what happened, tell me. And you're just like, oh, Jesus Christ. So, if you give it to his rich wife, she um, she's like, what? That sounds like bullshit, but I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to just nag him about a bunch of shit he's supposed to do around the house. And I'm going to just leave these clothes out where he can see them and we'll see what happens okay and then you

come back a couple days and she's like yep he's doing all his chores just like he's supposed to okay thanks a lot and then she gives you three of those rare gems which sell for like 7500 the optimal that's technically the best. The optimal outcome. Jesus. Because it's like, okay, it only shows you the two destinations, like her or the mistress. But you're like, well, fuck that guy and fuck the rich wife's like, two-lied attitude that you get while wandering up right off the bat. This poor lady, right? Let's go help her out. And that just goes horribly wrong. So it's like, okay, got it. So I was just like, yeah.

There's a lot of quests that they end and you're like, I genuinely don't know if that's the best outcome I could've gotten. I have no idea. Well, so it certainly seems like the most content outcome. Do you know what I mean? Like in Kotor, some outcomes are like everything all is well that ends well or the evil one. But then there's the like, oh, there's the outcome that has a whole epilogue of fucking sadness to it, where it's like, whoa whoa but that's the one that was written

out yeah there's a there's a quest I would have got that you you can get for your Gregor is dead right oh wait is the guy who brings you to the capital yeah that was he got washed okay so Gregor some some dude in the City Watch is like, bro I want to fuck Greg or his wife really bad He's always around so, you know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna send him to fight a Dullahan the headless horseman, right and You overhear this and you go tell the wife like hey, yo That guy's trying to fuck you and he sent off your your husband to fucking die

No, you gotta fight you go. Oh, no So you go to you go across the map to fight the Dullahan right and Gregor's there He's like, oh we got this guy and then the Dullahan just kicked his ass into the fucking water and he died instantly And because he was in the water. I couldn't resurrect him So then I had to go back to the wife and tell her the wife like hey Sorry, your husband's dead wait um but doesn't his body wind up in the morgue and Then she goes and becomes a nun and I'm like ah and then when I was in the morgue trying to resurrect a character for A different quest I see Gregor's bodies right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah um

But if I resurrect him now, she's not gonna D none Fuck it. I'm not wasting a wake stone on that yeah okay so I had the similar example I had the shadowy persons following you right who could it be it's like oh there's that fucker and I tackled him and then the games like ah you got me and then it's like oh do you want to pay him off or you want to get paid off, or you want to fight? And so I was like, yeah, fuck this guy, right? So we fight. And then in 0.4 seconds, my team and I murder him dead.

Like, right? And it's like, and then the quest just stays active. And it's like, what the fuck just just happened I just killed him why what's going on really reload nothing and it's like why I don't understand so I'm like okay fuck this and I look it up and it's like oh you're supposed to fight him slow enough that you get interrupted by Brent and he goes hey well stop it we'll take it from here and then they go interrogate goes to jail and you can yeah but we killed him so hard so so fast, that that never happened.

So then I had to waste a wake stone on him. There's a quest that Suzie talked about in her review, where a guy's like, hey man, I need to make a sculpture of a griffin, or paint a griffin, I forget what it is. So you need to fight a griffin and you know so I can really get a good look at it in my mind's eye and Susie describes that she like damn near one-shotted the fucking thing like Like iced it in like 10 seconds, and he's like well I'm I didn't get to look at it for shit

So this is gonna be really bad. That's pretty good. That's pretty good Yeah, no, there's definitely some fun moments like that I'm still having and I'm still properly annoyed by I just turned a corner and Like wooly the pawn is disappeared Just I don't know if you fell into the brine or but it's like it wasn't about brine. It wasn't about falling off a ledge and I can go pick you up. You just despawned from the from the world. Oh, I mean, you know, and so you know what it's like to navigate with you, buddy. And so I turn it is gone. and I'm I'm like, okay

Let me wander back to town to go to the nearest Rift stone to put to get him back and then I wander back into town and that's when a story event dragon attack is Oh, I know the exact one. You're so like oh motherfucker damn it So like it probably would have been important to have you be here for this experience, but I guess that's done. Did you talk to the spearman before he left? I had an archer lady that hung out and I talked to her. Wait, what town are you talking about?

Melv? Yeah, Melv. Okay, so Ulrica is fighting the dragon there obviously. But there's also a mystic spearman, like a magic spearman like Darth Maul dude doing flips on the dragon. Oh I didn't talk to anybody like that. Oh okay because if you talk to him there he'll just give you mystic spearman. Oh sick, sick. Okay, yeah, I didn't. I missed that entirely. But now that you've done that, he has now moved to his house.

He lives in Harv. Okay. So you can just go get that. I mean, there's infinitely missable things that happen in infinitely missable moments, the way things are set up here. I had maxed out mage, so I switched over to archer and was just hitting sweet spots and messing around with that for now. So I didn't get too close at any point. But yeah, no, it's just these, these, these jank moments that are that occur that are just like, that

is not like I did nothing wrong here. You know that is yeah, it's the game just decided It's it's a mix between oh, it's cool that it's like this and then five seconds later, but why is it like this though? So like one of the ones that I found that's really funny So the final one of the final source or skills is called maelstrom. It's the gigantic tornado and one of the final sorcerer skills is called Maelstrom. It's the gigantic tornado. And one of the things that I'm baffled by is why does the sorcerer love to target goblins or wolves right next to the ox cart with the most destructive spell in the game. And this is where I've learned the moment you get interrupted, jump off the cart, run a mile down the road and bait everything away and then start fighting. Because it like literally I start doing fucking lightning and like it feels like the character and camera

Just turned towards the ox cart and start Like I'm in the middle of zapping multiple enemies and it's smartly targeting and then just turns around to the ox carton fuck man Sucks. Yeah, weird. It's weird. That was very annoying. I love that game. Yeah, it's so great. It's so awful. Also like just running into again Just gonna fuck your shit up dragon on the on the mini map where it's like I'm still not ready for this that you are just making me run a mile the other way and circle around an insane birth To get to this stupid fishing village. The drakes go from completely unwinnable to barely winnable to, yeah, I got this.

That's the three states. It's not a gradient. It's three states. I came across a spot where I was like, oh I got the jump on one of these because of you you walk out and there's A ballista pointed at it You know Yeah, that was a rough fight for me because the ballista hit it in the head instead of the chest So I aimed for whatever I thought I aimed for the head. I thought that was the move

And I got some damage in and then I started kept using it while the fight, you know, happened. And then it got up close and broke the ballista. And then it just it turned into a slobber knocker. And like every other Drake fight, it's me running away, high tailing it while that fucking thing is on my ass. A huge proportion of the Drake fight is do you have a move that can hit the good weak point like a hundred Times in a second ah well archers are ready so like um I don't know if you've seen helm splitter or skull splitter on thief It's that spin move yeah, yeah, you have a spin

This is that thing the warrior move where they called skyward sunder where they do a huge slash straight up the maelstrom from Sorcerer. Anything that just has a vertical pillar of attack. I imagine the machine gun from the Archer would be pretty good too. You would think, but not really. On the shitty one that attacked the town it was good because it has like, it's glowing don't hit me here spots.

I actually found it weirdly successful with Warrior to just do the Skyward Sunder move over and over and over because it does so much knockback that what eventually happens is you do that and it just falls down. Once they fall down, I got really lucky on the last one and the Sorcerer cast Maelstrom on it and it did like 50% of its total health bar because the Maelstrom was directly inside its hitbox and the monster had fallen over and couldn't move. Okay. And you get the extra crit damage there too.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I'm having a very unique experience with this because I'm going about it picking non-melee classes first just to see. That is a weird experience. It is, but it's telling me more about how

these systems that are not the obvious ones work. After Archer, are you going to switch to Sorcerer? I did Sorcerer for a little bit and I didn't like it. Oh, that's right, you did. Yeah, yeah, so after that I'm gonna probably, yeah, I'm gonna go to something else, I'll see. But, cause it is like, almost like Souls, right? It's like, well, yes, melee is here

and we know all these weapon moves and stuff, but when you go into the non-melee, you go into magic or archer or other types of builds, you have, it's like you're on the edges of what the game's intending for you here. So like how well does this work, you know? I'm curious to see and... It's extremely, extremely different.

Yeah, yeah. Using magic in that game. Magic is just a, you're just playing a RTS almost. Like you're just, you're standing back in governing the fight, you know? Well no, Trickster is playing an RTS almost like you're just standing back and governing the fight. You know, well, no trickster is playing an RTS because trickster doesn't have any attacks. Oh, okay. Trickster is a 100% dedicated illusionist class that has no attacks.

So you're just supporting the team. You are basically creating aggro dummies that force enemies to attack the aggro dummy instead. Okay. You're creating walls that your pawns and you can move through but enemies can't. Interesting. That kind of thing. But yeah, but the feeling so far has been get to the high ground or get as far away from the action as possible and just, you know, zap.

And arching is like, it was that at first, but then like find some weak spots, snipe if you can. But then once you get the ability to use an arrow while on something's back, then it's like, oh shit, okay, we have a reason to get up close. I'm just going to cut it. I'm just going to stab it with my fucking arrow. I'm going to do it. And you get the Hawkeye jump kick back flip, you know. Which feels great. Yeah, it'd feel better if you could do a special arrow when you flipped backwards You know, but the fact that you can't is a little bit bummer

But yeah still, you know, that's it is interesting And so like yeah, like I feel like using those are telling me are teaching me a bit more about how the game Design is set up then just the like oh, yeah If you swing your sword up close and climb on something obviously that's gonna feel like what it feels like, oh yeah, if you swing your sword up close and climb on something, obviously that's going to feel like what it feels like, you know? Yeah. It's going to be, it's, that, the non-melee stuff is going to be the, it's like, you can't compare how that is set up to any other game that is similar, you know? The fact that you cannot-

No, it's pretty much completely unique. The fact that there's no lock-on, except for the one it provides you with, and you have to learn how to work a soft lock as part of the combat is weird, and I've gotten used to it at this point, but you're still, a lot of your combat is hoping that you're pointing at the right thing, you know? Like, Archer is like the most straightforward class out of all of them, because it works pretty much exactly how you would expect to work. There's aim the arrow, shoot the arrow, or free shot the arrow.

Archer has like a weird downside in that Pawns are better at being an archer than you are They're gonna like they're gonna hit the spots. Well, they they always They always free aim it but they free aim it fast. Okay So they they're like, you know, I if you've had an archer pawn You'll end up in situations where you'll kill a goblin and they'll have four arrows sticking out of their eyes She's because your archer pawn was just like lighting them up Yeah, so anyway, I'm

You know continuing to poke and again letting the crashes determine when I stop playing. How much have you been playing Helldivers? I'm curious. I got my jetpack, so I'm at least level 15. Oh, hell yeah, man. You've almost cut up to where I'm at. I only hit level 20 like over the weekend. Yeah, no, I wanted to get the autocannon and the Jetpack. So I was doing that. Auto Cannon just feels so goddamn good. Feels good. Feels good.

You got to sacrifice your back slot, but it does feel good. And then, yeah, I guess I was just trying to look for like cosmetics that seems dope, you know, like looking through the stuff. There's a bunch of good shit coming out this Thursday. Okay. But the Democrat, what's it called? Democratic detonation war bond. Okay.

So one of those war bonds is going to come out every, every second Thursday of the month. An extra battle pass? Yeah. Oh, okay. Every second Thursday of the month, that will come out until specified otherwise. I mean, admittedly, I still haven't unlocked any of them. I'm still on just the main one. See, that's fine because they're forever. Okay, yeah.

No, I- Like because they're forever. OK, yeah, no, I like they're they're forever. I'm just kind of I'm just picking at like if there's something I see that I want, you know, I'm just going to be like, I've got to work towards that. I I bought up to a thousand super credits, so I could. But I don't know which one I want, and I think it's the one that comes out on Thursday. And yeah, I'm also like, like, OK, I can see how now.

Like at first, I was like, I don't get why people aren't marking objectives on the map that they're going towards and stuff. Like, isn't this just the thing we should all be doing? But it's like, oh, no, everyone's clearing everything and just run. Yeah. So you get to certain difficulties just work differently. Like what difficulty are you mainly playing at right now? Mainly challenging. Yeah, same here. It's the first one where you get the medium samples, right?

I guess so. It's the one after medium, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mainly play medium challenging and the one above. I don't feel confident enough to go into suicide or helldiver. I did one solo on hard and just ate it. And I was like, OK, yeah, I don't have the equipment to handle this right now even. So in those difficulties, yeah, you load in and people just tend to split up in either pairs or just fan out and be like we're gonna just turn enemy generation off on this map right at the higher one though

I played a suicide mission for funsies and landed into landed in a base that had two tanks and like the turrets on the side and like a hundred enemies. And like it was go from second one. The take out the bosses missions are probably the most fun I find. I like those. I also did a suicide bug mission

and the bot breach has biotitans coming out of the ground. Oh, okay. The bug breach has just biotitan right out. One of the, yeah, what's pretty sick though is when I jumped on one of the harder missions and just like teamed up with somebody who's like whatever God level and Yeah, and every time a bot drop is detected

They're just knocking the drop ship out of the sky like yeah, and this is like oh, yeah, that's not even an issue That's just gonna and the ad maybe mop up the like two guys that didn't die in the crash. That's pretty impressive I want I want what he's having whatever the fuck that is is I don't know if it's auto cannon to the right spot or something better, but... So it's got to be better. It's got to be bigger than that. It's got to punch through heavy armor. So that's the EAT, the Recoilus, or that new laser cannon they put in, the Quasar Cannon. Okay. It has to be something that like just punches through heavy armor Also, is there there seems to be a way to summon

orbital shit without throwing a What you might call it like it seems like There's a really or I'm like maybe I'm just missing it But like is there own an advanced way to get things to drop faster by just Calling it in at a certain distance without a toss? Because I feel like sometimes I see people that I'm with that are higher level just walk up to a base and not toss a thing. I forgot what it's called. And then it just the beacon. Yeah. And then it maybe I'm missing it, but are you talking about the laser? As the laser comes in in one second the laser is yes, that's definitely what I'm thinking of yeah

The late the laser comes in instantly Okay, you still have to toss a stratagem though. Yeah, you always have to toss stretch But as soon as you do it comes okay, okay? Yeah, yeah, cuz it was it was like but how the fuck did that come so quickly? That was insane. Yeah, the, cuz it was it was like how the fuck did that come so quickly that was insane Yeah, the rail cannons also like like two seconds Like they're they're they're super super super fucking fast because they're meant to be like I'm I need this shit to go away Right now right now and as I'm looking to I'm also seeing like there's a bunch of stratagems that people just never used And I'm curious. I'm also seeing like there's a bunch of stratagems that people just never use. And I'm curious, I'm

like, is like, for example, the the mounted get a turret gun, is it just bad? I haven't seen anyone use that. It's not that it's bad. It's that it's not. Losing the ability to move is rough compared to the damage output. I've seen one mech in the wild. People just don't use that at all either. They're currently balancing. Every patch has minor balance changes.

This gets up up this gets down like the The future weapons war bond or whatever was called has like a stun grenade in it which changed the balancing on some of the weapons because Like the recoil this rifles a lot better and you don't need to worry as much about the reload when you can make a charger Stop moving before shooting it in the face, right? and you don't need to worry as much about the reload when you can make a charger stop moving before shooting it in the face. Right, okay.

There's also a pistol that fires grenades coming on Thursday. So you can swap your, cause think about all the machine guns, right? And how they're for fodder, right? Instead of the auto cannon, which is for heavy stuff. But if you have a pistol that fires grenades, now you can move things around in your grenade slot and still close bug holes and stuff like that.

Is it using your grenade ammo? No, it's a pistol. It's using its own grenades? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Okay. Huh. Yeah. Like there's a, I forget what it, I think there's a gun called the dominator

Which is like a like a not a like a not assault rifle like a battle rifle that fires like explosive rounds that punch through Like medium armor, so it'll take out like though the walkers like the pot walkers. Mm-hmm, but it's a terrible primary But it pairs really well with like the stalwart Okay Have you memorized your your fuck? No. Strategy of inputs. Yeah. No way. Absolutely not.

Yeah. Every time there's only there's only two that I've memorized. Redeploy the the the fucking airstrike, which is up right down right. And the laser, which is up right down right And the laser which is up right down down down Okay Yeah, there was one that was down down down that was like oh, yeah, that's that's that's simple But for the most part it's always stop squint Which one of these yeah, okay? Oh apparently I'm wrong. That's 500 kg. Not the laser oops Yeah, whatever it'll blow up it'll blow up good

So I guess I guess then the There is there probably there's likely going to be a third faction that'll show up as a big an event at some point so How do we feel about talking about data mined content with Helldivers on this podcast? We can give people a warning if they... Okay we're gonna talk about data mined content in five seconds. Five, four, three, two, one. So in Helldivers 1 there was a third faction called the Illuminate, which are briefly, briefly mentioned in Helldivers 2 as on some of the news tickers, they're

like, Illuminate sightings are fake and treasonous. In terms of expectation, the expectation is they will show up at some point in Helldivers 2. The leaked further expectation is that they will show up at some point in the near future because a bunch of their models and animations are in the game right now. Ah, okay So stuff is stuff is there as a also They've occasion they I don't know if it's Joel or somebody else But they if you look at the stats screens on certain planets If they have shown like illuminate kills on them

And there are occasionally hell divers playing on planets that are inaccessible right okay, okay? Yeah, I remember this from a couple weeks ago actually yeah, so The illuminate would come in from one of the southern quadrants The most interesting thing is that there are enough There's enough room on that map for four. That's exactly why, because I'm looking at the map and I can see that you have left, right, and then a whole lot of space for other things to be going on. In Helldivers 1 it was very clear there was room for three.

Here there's probably eventually going to be a fourth one, but when that shows up, who knows? It was some people, me included, expected after the destruction of the bots over the weekend that the Illuminate would come in today, honestly. But instead the bots are back with a vengeance. So we'll see. Who could have possibly seen that coming? Well, they could have stayed dead for a while and been replaced by the Illuminate. Right. Oh, that's a good one.

A little late, but that's still good. There you go. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, so it's gonna... It'll probably be like the six month mark maybe or you know some kind of milestone And I guess also I mean coming in from the outside not really, you know Coming in from the outside and kind of getting a feel for like what the actual scope of the game is now It's like oh, this is a lot smaller of a game than I thought it was

Yeah, but the the the live Campaign map makes it feel huge. Yes, yes, but when it comes down to it, you've got a couple mission bug types, couple mission these types, and yeah, you're looking at a map that is promising more with all the planets inside, all the sections, and then the big super Earth factual thing.

The most impressive thing by far is, and I, hey, if you worked on Helldivers or are currently working on Helldivers, please reach out to Pat at, Pat stares at on Twitter in my DMs. It makes me wonder how much of this game was completely finished and is being rolled out because there have been like a bunch of new guns just given away and like problem solving guns. Like you remember everyone was complaining about chargers having too much armor and there's too many chargers. Well here comes the Quasar laser cannon. It's a direct counter to too many chargers. Now we have flying bugs and there is a there's a anti-air rocket launcher set to drop in a week or two Like it's a burst. It does like an air burst

Okay What in it, you know stuff like that inhale divers one. What was the third faction like? the illuminate They're they're not the Protoss Helldivers 1, what was the third faction like? The Illuminate? They're not the Protoss. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. All right.

They're not the Protoss is what they are. Fair enough. We're shooting Zergs already. Cool. and zergs already so cool yeah uh blue lasers blue people floating psionics uh shields melee uh yeah the one of the datamined enemies they brought out are like kind of like a zombie freak alien monster which is definitely new um but yeah no it'll be... It'll... It's probably going to be focused on like tons of weird high power enemies. Okay. Oh, they also reversed controls and gave you hallucinations.

Nice. Okay. Cool. Oh, I didn't know that. That's good. All right. Anything else of note this week? Not really.

There's a lot of good games out right now. If you want to see me play more good games, go down twitch.tv slash pet stairs it probably gonna finish infinite wealth this week Okay, and Tomorrow Tomorrow in fact yeah, we're jumping back in on hell divers and Reggie's gonna get in there. So oh, thank God. Oh so we can.

Oh. So he's gonna be on what, the computer you're at right now? Yeah, perfect. Fucking great. So that's gonna be me, Woolly, Reggie, and Paige. The full four. And just as a potential backup, cross play was a thing, right?

Yes. Right. But adding people to your friends list on that is a fuck Okay, be really finicky. Okay. Well, I'll have a backup so that the the PS5 can join if need if needed If if absolute need be But that is a last resort because it is it's iffy. Yeah. It would be I mean like even adding like adding people through the game's own menu in Steam is way worse than just doing the Steam invite shit. Okay, you know what I mean? Yeah, it would be better for microphone purposes, but

we'll see what we get from this Yeah, so that's going down tomorrow That's 1 p.m. Pacific 3 p.m. Eastern 4 p.m. Eastern That's what just just said that Not three okay, it said yeah, all right. That's why yeah, that's what oh Okay, I said yeah, all right. That's why yeah, that's what oh I'm my usual my usual starting time for streams is 3 p.m. Eastern Yeah, so but we can we can bump it up an hour well It's too late now cuz I I've the we got I was gonna say you have higher weeks out a perfect

Human being it's only an hour difference. I'm so I guess I won't make much that is that is quite fine. No, no big deal Okay, meanwhile as oh before we go has Reggie played any on his own no, oh Fucking sick. That's not sarcastic. By the way, that's perfect Cuz cuz you and Paige have played a bunch so we need we need somebody brand new in there I mean last time was the first time. So oh, man. Awesome. Yeah. And you know, as much as I've had this point come up many a time, but Reggie is very much like another me in that he's he's had a very similar kind of upbringing is a very similar kind of history. And he a very similar kind of history.

And he also just- Like an eclectic history, you mean? He is similar in that, like, grew up like me in the city, not really, for example, needing to drive because you can just kind of walk everywhere. And has a similar kind of tournament history thing of, like, mainly just focused on fighting games. And that's pretty much all that he was really playing. So didn't get into games in general,

a lot of other genres, all the stuff that we've been looking at and covering over the years all the deck. Yeah, like, no, you just play fighting games and a lot of narrow media as well. So a lot of stuff he hasn't experienced. So honestly all three of you are kind of like that. Paige has an almost similar background to that where she just missed out on video games for like a five, ten year period. Still loved them but just didn't have availability to them and so like there's just massive blind spots. So a lot of my friends are like that too. There's a ton of people I know that are like that are like us in this way.

It's just when I come here and sit in front of a thing, I have the weird button. You and everyone here has a different way of going through things. And like, so yeah, I'm made to feel like such a weird outsider here. And I've learned over the years, very strange. I've learned over the years to like navigate this but I pro- but like the moment this is all off there's a whole lot more people like me that I know. It's just it's not like this. There are dozens of you.

You know, um, very much so. So uh, yeah, like you, I mean it's, it's not necessarily normies, because it's people that play games and watch anime and watch movies and do stuff, but it's just not the ones that- No, that's different. Like the comparison to, like, oh, it's like, no. It's not. Normie is the guy that I used to know

at the grocery store who's like, Bro, Madden! Taking time off work. Oh, cool, did you play anything else? Why would I play anything else brothers Matt? This gorgeous kid just just blew up. Sorry. What'd you say? Oh, I'm sorry The audio people it's all right the audio people here the audio people the mp3 people would Madden was like, you know

No, I the guy that were I used to work. I used to know who went yo Madden's coming out Oh, it's crazy. You could take days off work calling sick. Okay, okay Okay, and I'd be like hey man. What oh cool. I didn't know you even play games. What else do you play? He's like Yeah, yeah No, or my cousin who like played with Nintendo with us as a kid and was like, oh, I remember Street Fighter and then was like Yo, I'm hearing good things about this Assassin's Creed thing. Is it any good? Yeah, you And like, thinking about getting a console type of thing. You know? Like, that's, yeah, it's definitely not that.

It's people I know that are just, that I've worked with, that I went to college with. I played the games that I liked to play and I didn't really need to explore because I was busy. And the games that I liked to play were there. And I stuck to the genres that were the things that I was interested in, that I knew other people

that played in those genres. And things that like, would hit and come and go that were other genres or kind of just like, industry following as a whole was not at all a thing. That's what it is. You guys were industry followers. And like back with your, you, Matt, Liam, you guys were following the companies,

following the updates, following all that stuff. And I was working in that industry while not keeping up to date on those things. I'm like- That's a strange disconnect. I just had the things I cared about and I was content to look at those things in front of me. So-

Yo, you hear about that new thing at Eidos? You're like, what? No. I'm like, well, you work front of me. So, Yo, you hear about that new thing at Eidos? You're like, what? No. I'm like, well, you work at Eidos. So, you know, so like, yeah, like that, there's a, I mean, there's a,

a very particular flavor of like, audience member that I've come to know about. And it's like everyone here who's listening to this, who's like, I wanna know what's happening in the industry as a whole. And when I hear a company name, I've probably heard or I can think of

what they've done before. Or if I think of a franchise, I can think of the company behind it. Or if I think of an anime studio, or I could think of the works that they... And like that is like not at all most people I know. And most people I know are like, yeah, I'm really, I know a whole bunch people I know are like, yeah, I'm really, I know a whole bunch of people that are like, yo,

they love Jojo, they love Madoka, got into some Yu-Gi-Oh, and probably, I don't know, some other particular thing. You know? Probably some FFX14 and yeah, some random manga or something like that from back in the day. But like, it'll just be that little niche, you know? It'll be all of that and then like, X Japan, you know?

But so anyways, the long and the short of it is that Reggie kinda is coming in from that where he's like not just keeping up with a ton of things and doesn't have the ton of that experience So there's a whole lot that's new most experiences are new to him, too Well, that's fantastic. Yeah, it's cool. It's cool. Please don't please don't drop artillery in my ass That's my my please. It's not even an ask. That's just a please And I That's just a please. I can say overall with this experiment of expanding my tastes and horizons that in most

cases I can, even when it doesn't click, I can get it. I think... I'm sorry. I just jumped in. I didn't even finish my own thought. Okay, I, like for example, the biggest distance of Venn diagram I have with everyone listening to this right now is probably survival horror. And like having now done and gotten to what I think is the strongest craziest moment is the letter in Silent Hill 2. That was unbelievable.

That to me is like, I understand and I could have totally become someone obsessed with this if I played that when I was young enough. Yeah, there's a couple of those. There's that and then there's like playing RE1 in 96 specifically. When you're like, this is the most, like it looked like 10 years ahead of everything else.

It was crazy. But I am not chasing that Silent Hill 2 letter experience anywhere else. Oh, you're not a letter chaser? I'm not looking for that in any other game. And like I can get pulled into that experience sideways. Like Signolus is gonna pull me in on its art style first, and its own tone and music and aesthetic second.

And then I'll find out that, oh, this is a send-up to survival horror. But it got me on the first two things before I even knew what genre it was. No, that required no foreknowledge. Signolus is immaculate. And so I'm not going to be chasing that in the same way that I might chase something that was formative to me You know, but I but I can appreciate like yeah, I'm like, okay, I get that There's a whole bunch of and so anything that's gonna like land

Not even shy because there's some good survival horror that like doesn't hit that level anything that that hits like like oh This is mostly a bad experience, but there's some cool moments in here, is getting into the like, I don't know if this is worth it for me. I'm not gonna probably appreciate what's good here because it's not as special when it hits its highs.

So that's a really good segue into the thought I tried to formulate earlier, but totally failed. I have been trying to expand out to genres that I've ignored, blah, blah, blah, for a couple years now. And I still think the all-time most eye-opening experience was spending two or three weeks being like, I'm going to see what this League of Legends is about. Because I saw the high, what this League of Legends is about. Because like, I saw the high and I was like, yeah, that's pretty good. And then I saw the low and I just came off it going like, I feel confident making judgments about people who play this game as like a primary thing. Like I feel, this game as like a primary thing. Like I feel I feel confident like being able to spot the personality defect that allows you to go. Yeah, I'm going to queue into League of Legends at home. Okay. Yeah. I mean, look, I yes, I have that same thing with some of these genres are describing admittedly in a more optimistic way

but There are some dark corners. I am just not gonna follow because it I bro I would I would like for your own like Mental knowledge of the human condition. I would I would recommend everyone play one week of League of Legends, because seeing the low on League of Legends, it is so low and it's so fast. Like it's right away. It's right away. And just the idea that people are are like yes, I will have a 45 minute miserable experience for once a day man day mobas in my head are When I what I what that name attaches to in experience is five games of hots and guilty gear overchar is five games of Hots and Guilty Gear Overture. You know what, man? Like, that's all it is to me.

And I'll say, like, Hots is not as good of a game as League is, and probably not as good as Dota, but I haven't played Dota much. the way HOTS is built did not specifically activate every attack neuron in my brain while playing. Mm-hmm. Okay. HOTS does not accidentally create a violence-cing skinner box quite as effectively as League does. I can say though that like as anything, any game within that genre does have a chance with me because they're all primarily character driven and character design driven. Any game that is character driven is going to have a chance at being like,

yo, look at look at this model. Look at this art. Look at this design. Isn't that someone that you think is rad? Don't you want to play as that character? No matter what the genre is. And the answer might be, yeah, you know, it might be. But no, anyway, all this to say, there's some roads I'm just not gonna follow you guys down in and you're just gonna have to respect that. I can see from a distance how it's gonna go. Would I care if I played a game like a binary domain?

I don't know, but the interest isn't super high. But it might. It might. You know what the first part of binary domain is? It's that you are all, like, the really good parts of binary domain are, like, you finally have the wider, like, experience that I can actually take it and talk to you about,

grab this and this, right? So take, take the storytelling of the like a dragon developers and put it in a hell divers bot mission okay with no stratagem okay yeah because that like the main thing about binary domain is that it feels really good to shoot the robots. Right. And it's those two. Yes. Yeah, like I said, like I said, with that it's a maybe but like from from it would have been higher up on the list if it grabbed me any harder, certainly. But there's some stuff, but there's like deadly premonition, which a lot of people would love for me to go into. Great experience, amazing experience.

Top shelf video game. I couldn't be less interested. I just, and you can try to force it. That's part of the problem, right? You could try to force it, but I'm just being real with you. If you look at it like a busted piece of shit and go, ooh, that looks dumb. Ooh That's one thing right? But if you look like a busted piece of shit and go, I don't want I don't why

if Look, if honestly if I was a fraud I would pop it in and be like, oh, yeah While being like I don't fucking I just fake, you know what I mean? I would just bullshit it through and then, but I'm not going to sit there and bullshit my way through it. I'm just like, no, it doesn't, it's not for me. It's going to have to sit there. It's a really good example of a game that I did a sponsored thing of, which is Starfield. And I played, I played a like, God, I can look it up right now. How many which is Starfield and I played I played like god I can look it up right now how many hours of Starfield I played Starfield I played

forty one point three hours of Starfield so way more than my two hour sponsorship I played it for 38 more hours after that and then Starfield came out of the release cycle, right? And I saw somebody, I saw a couple people talking about Starfield a couple weeks ago, and they were like, do you remember things in Starfield? And I don't. I played that game for 41 hours. And I can remember like four things.

That was not that long ago. It wasn't. And like that seems to be a very common experience in that it's just so dead ass in the middle, five out of ten, on so many respects, that it just leaves. Because you're not forming strong enough memories. Yeah, yeah. For good or ill. Yeah, I remember that's what I was trying to find out about. And with that, I remember that's what I was I was trying to find out about and like with that just kind of like I think was

Just the the that that vibe is just not enough for me certainly somebody in the chat asks an interesting question How much of Skyrim do I remember from 2011? tons tons I could draw you a map of that shit right now I map of that shit right now. I could describe that after you get the fucking the the Redguard quest to fucking save that lady in the bar in Whiterun and you go west and you have to go around the giants in the the the wooly mammoths and you go into the cave and they explain to you that actually when you go back that she's actually a fugitive from the law and then when you get out to the the front of the cart

He hits her with a fucking greens free spell and her model just tips over and it looks hilarious Like I could yeah, no I could tell you all sorts of shit about fucking Skyrim Like that super easy or New Vegas or Fallout 3 or Fallout 4 even but I could tell you like a total like 10 minutes of shit about Starfield right now. Do you have any genres that are or similar things like what I was describing where you looking at it, you're just like, this just won't be for me. And it's not because of goblins. Not because of goblins. Yeah, almost anything to do with management. Almost anything to do with management in a

way that I don't have direct control or even pseudo direct control. So I look at the Sims, I look at, yeah, the Sims is like a really good example or soccer manager or anything like that. And I'm just like, or like a city builder. But not like Cabaret Club, right? No, Cabaret Club is different for one specific reason, is that you're managing it in real time. So it's like you're chasing that shit around. Right? But if it was like set it up and see if it works and leave it alone and have it automate and I was like, I don't know. I need to have a direct, even if it's just my mouse cursor, right? I need to have

a direct impact. On the world. On the world. On the thing. Okay. So I feel like I'm in control. Too much of an Excel sheet. I don't, yeah, I don't know how to use Excel. I don't wanna use Excel.

I don't wanna, like the, it's been like a long story every time like people listen to like the podcast or like my stream or the old YouTube videos for long enough They'll hear me go. They'll hear they'll see me move a character around and go no No, right. Okay bad. Okay had game Did Pat play satisfactory, oh, yeah, I love satisfactory satisfactory is great And I don't know if you're familiar with that, I talked about it a million years ago.

Yeah, I know, I remember, I remember, yeah. But the main thing about Satisfactory is like, man, I bet that game would be a lot faster if you built that shit from a top-down view. And then I wouldn't like it. But actually having to build your conveyor belts and organize your shit from the ground as a playable character,

that's a lot more interesting. Yeah, I feel like games like that can stand a chance with me, but they need to use all the like, neuron firing like tricks, all the little hooks and... Sass Factory's got... You build the conveyor belt and the system was like you just watch it go without you and you're like, mmm That's some good chemicals right there. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I I'm having a chemical right now I appreciate setting shit up like that. I I mean I Used to spend time playing the incredible machine back in the day, which is just creating a ruble Goldberg machine, you know,

a fucking mousetrap thing, and trial and error, trial and error, trial and error, until you get the thing into the goal. You know what, I have to say, there's like a really, so it's not genre, but like I'll have people recommend games to me, and an unappealing art style just kills it. Doesn't matter how good the game is, it could be the best game I've ever heard of in my whole life.

And I don't mean technically competent art style and I don't mean high-end art style or realistic art style. I mean just- Clear direction, but just not for you. Yeah. So like I'm asking people for advice on like phone games to get because I'm gonna have a new phone and I get like 45 different people go, what about Ark Knights? I'm like, okay, I'll try tower defense game. That's fine. And I go look at Ark Knights and like I will never ever play Ark Knights as until the day I die because the whole time I'd be playing Ark Knights I'd be like, eww, gross. Yeah. I don't, I don't wanna, right? And it's, it's the argument that you and I had like once a year for like 10 years where I'm like, why do these fucking robot games have to make all the crossover robot games have to make everything fucking SD.

They look terrible. And I had that same argument with Josh as well as I was getting into it. I was basically just having the argument with Josh through you. Yeah, and I'm right there because I'm like, I like these robots for their full proportions, you know, but it still was cool when it would do more than that, which you could get by doing certain things in the game, but it was all contained to this tradition of SD. I don't know. Yeah, so somebody will be like, man, you've got to check out this incredible indie RPG.

It's fantastic. And it's technically more advanced than a PlayStation 1 or PlayStation two looking game. But it just looks very bland. And then like, I'd rather have like a fucking GBA looking game like Undertale over there. Like, I don't, it's not about the technical or even, even the polygons or whatever. But if I if I look at it, it's dead to me right away. Yeah, there's kind of no saving it. I mean, I'm, I definitely have memories of that era where it was like

We took a thing that you know And we just replaced it with cute anime girls and made it play a bit worse than the thing But that's and that's all that and like I still have that initial like okay But if it actually is a fun thing after that then you like you know you go past that point and go like no fuck Yeah, this is yeah, this is a fun game to that, then you go past that point and go like, no, fuck yeah. This is a fun game to play. But I'm just never going to forget when fucking Arcana Heart or Arturo was there trying to show us

how good that game was. And it's like, no, you don't understand, though. It's super sick. And it's like, yeah, the systems are pretty sick. But that was a moment. And then, of course, from that era into Touhou now being a strong push. And it's like, okay, but is this a fun game to play

regardless of whatever's happening? Then you can get me, you know? I can move past that point. I have not even booted it, but I have, I swear to God, right here on my phone. I have Nikkei oh my god. What the fuck is this thing? What's the full name of this thing? Oh? Fuck God is a victory Yeah, because I'm like yo, I own ask apt to not to track don't track me. Please stop it what stop no don't do that

Fucking stop stop with all your questions no I have I have fucking kneecase sitting right here, right? And it's like Regardless of ass jiggles and whatever nonsense cover shoot into distance background thing I'm like is that gonna does that feel good good? Is it fun to shoot that way? It feels good when the girl's ass starts flying around the screen and you shoot the gun. I mean, it looked visually cool.

Like, it certainly looked pretty when it's like, oh, the enemies are in 3D and then the assets in front are in 2D and you've blended the two in a way that looks like it works. How does this feel? And if the aiming and shooting and stuff that you do is fun, that might be cool. But for now, it certainly is just a bunch of, yeah, it's a bunch of jiggles going on. Yeah, and I downloaded it

I haven't booted it yet, but it's there. You know I'm looking for that. I want to see if it's fun to play legit Yeah, it's a yeah, it's for me It's it's like and it's super weird cuz like deadly premonition looks like garbage like deadly premonition looks like garbage but for some reason it's it's garbage that's trying really hard and failing and that's appealing to me. You also have a ground to stand on with David Lynch. Yeah, Lynch. Twin Peaks, right?

Yeah, where it's like, oh man, you're trying so hard to rip this off and you're doing such a bad job. Yeah. And it's fascinating. I don't have that source material connection at all. So anyway, yeah, it is, but it is interesting. It is interesting.

I'll report back to see what the is but it is interesting. It is interesting. I'll report back to see what the goon shooter is like. Hey, I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. I played Alan Wake. I played Deadly Permission. I watched Twin Peaks and I watched The X-Files, all of which are like, hey, you know, it's spooky out in the Pacific Northwest. And now that I've lived in the Pacific Northwest for a little while and I've, you know, it's spooky out in the Pacific Northwest and now that I've lived in the Pacific Northwest for a little while and I've you know, we've done day trips and we've gone out to

Vancouver Island and Tofino and stuff like that and Yeah, the forest around here is spooky as fuck at night. Mm-hmm. Oh Oh, like if you're out at dark in the Pacific Northwest and it's like getting dusky Yeah, okay. I see it. Gravity Falls is my entry into that genre. Yeah. Yeah. It's like there's okay. Yeah, I get it. And that just makes me think what is Maine feel like at night? Because Maine is the other spooky location in United States. I I mean is this getting close to Fargo energy? I Don't know if it no. No, that's a different thing. Okay

Okay Well in any case threatening threatening Middle America is a That's a blind spot, but I'm You know, I have some curiosity about it. Anyway, over on my side, so yes, tomorrow Helldivers 2 is going down. Over on my side, there was an announcement this week followed by a demo for a game that is a sequel to a game I liked From the creators of fights in tight spaces comes nights in tight spaces. Oh really I didn't see this Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so check it out. It's pretty it's pretty cool They have us that nights like the nighttime or like a soldier man as in like the Knights and Dragons

Okay, Knights and tight spaces. Yes. So take a look at the trailer for that. There's a demo as well. It's color. It's up to the art style. It's color instead of black and white. Yes.

It's color instead of black and white. There's some pretty cool texture work going on. Visually it's very pretty. The music is awesome. And the main detail difference here is with a fantasy setting, you now control a party. You now have weapons. You now have magic. And you're still doing a card deck building roguelite, you know, Slay the Spire style

adventure. But you have, yeah, different classes and you have to use your deck of cards that is shared between all the classes on the board in a fight So, you know you can use like you'll put you'll draw a magic card But you can use you could only use it if you select the mage on that turn or you'll draw an archery card But you can only use it if you select your archer But each of these things makes it so that like what you draw you might not be able to use. So your balance of useful cards versus not useful cards is a little trickier in exchange for you

have multiple people on the board. And the way fights in tight spaces used to work, of course, was you played a spy. It was black and white, cool art style. And you kind of just moved around the grid and then did martial arts moves or weapon play to like take out everyone. Here you position yourself to do the same thing, but based on where your partners are standing on that grid, they do target the same thing you're targeting. So you have, you know, yeah, multiple ways to kind of approach the strategy of every every, every, every level. But it's it is a

game sequel built around the pun. 100% it is Oh, what it like a discord joke? What if nights and tight spaces lol, and then we actually made it. so that's gonna get real frustrating for them if they want to continue down this like sequel naming structure because that's incredibly strict it has to be IG H T flight s flights in flights in tight spaces likees that have to navigate around each other in the sky. Yeah but no, it's it's It is it is pretty it's pretty cool

the the main thing though that you didn't like from last time has not been fixed and I agree is The replay after you finish the battle is not a smooth fight sequence. It is a turn by turn replay of what you just did. God damn it. No, come in. And there have been two games that have come out since that do a way cooler job of that replay. Obviously, your only move is hustle and Phantom Brigade, right? Where the action plays out like a full action sequence. So I'm... It's... The memory is coming back as to why I thought I was so outraged by that the first time around.

I don't know if I even said it out loud last time. But because of the black and white art style with red that Fights in Tight Spaces uses, it reminded me a lot of Superhot. Oh yeah, true. And Superhot's massive gimmick is that they show you the perfect replay at the end of every mission. Right. And so the, like, just fucking do it. Just do it! So I think that, so the thing is that it is showing you the quote unquote perfect replay.

The problem is that it's a turn-based game. So it's taking its turns to play the enemy move, then your move, then the enemy move, then your move. Okay. And to make what you're describing, which would be cool, I agree. The move, the game would have to be more like action into simultaneous pause, into simultaneous action, into simultaneous pause. A bit simultaneous action into simultaneous pause a bit like playing

FF7 remake or any of the other two games I mentioned and I love that I don't wish more games did that but this is stuck with the grid and the turnbake sauce want um, I just want to see What Sam from vanquish looks like. Sure. When you're from when when you're fighting against him. That's that like I like you said that a million years ago and it's stuck in my brain ever since I've like, it's all I want. I want to see what that looks like.

But that I mean that aside though without a massive redesign to this game, it's still pretty fun to do that whole layout. Changing it to a party feels like enough. Yeah, it's a big change. It's also reminiscent of Hybrid Haven for the N64 back in the day where you stepped around on a grid, stepped into a piledriver range and then did a grab. So yeah, this thing, it's still pretty rough, of course. There's a story that's pretty nothing right now.

But as you go through your thing, you can reject different party members, sign up with different party members. It seems like who you build and work your team towards is going to be pretty variable every time. And there's some UI stuff that could be cleaned up as well. But at the end of the demo, they give you a survey to fill out, so I gave them some advice.

Oh, well, if they're going to give you a survey, then it's definitely in progress. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an early demo with a survey. So I'm just like, here's here. I answered what I thought they should do and stuff. But I still really like that kind of game. I still had a lot of fun with it. And yeah, the ability to plan moves out in that into the breach kind of way where it's like, okay, I'm going to grab you and then shove you to the side and slip past the enemy behind me.

And then when I shove this guy to the side, my archer now gets a shot on him. And then the guy that I slip past, I can do a flash kick and that'll take him out and then I'll move back a space and land. Yeah, this does sound a lot like Into the Breeze. Yeah, yeah. I want to optimize where I position the enemy and where I end up on each turn, you know. And I love that.

And if I can knock you into the point where the next enemy is going to drop on, then great. I'll block that for a turn. Again, very much like Into the Breach. I love that kind of gameplay. It's super fun. And Baba, Mobile Suit Baba as well, which was still weird. So so cool. It's a fun ass genre, man. So yeah, nights and

tight spaces was was cool. Check that out. Early. I also spent a little bit of time with Rise of the Ronin. And yes. Is that game good? I can't tell. So far it's cool, but I need to go a little further to get to the unique parts of it because the first couple hours that I did in session one

are all like stuff that is also in other Team Ninja games right now. So there hasn't been any of the, the most unique stuff you see in the trailers is the fucking Assassin's Creed, Michelangelo flight, hang gliding and then grapple hooking onto things, and all that weird tech and stuff. And here I've gotten a little bit of grapple hooking, that's a bit, and all that weird tech and stuff. And here, I've gotten a little bit of grapple hooking.

You have it from the jump and stuff. But for the most part, it does seem, until you have all the other stuff you unlock, like it's pretty close to Neo Wo Long and the other stuff they've been doing. The open world is an element that is fairly different. And something that's cool too is is you create a second main character that is part of your story. What's the point of that? Yeah.

So you create a character moment in the beginning. Your origin story is that there's twin warriors, twin blades, and you have to create both of them. And then shit happens, and you play out parts of the story with your own design. So that's interesting. Almost like I guess how, even though I haven't seen them yet in Baldur's Great, you created a second person as well.

But for the beginning of this game, until it gets to the more unique stuff, it feels similar to the other stuff they've done and that other stuff they've done was great. So it's fine. I Have I have a question and the answer to this question will determine whether or not I Ever play rise of the Ronin or look up on it from a distance with scorn in my heart What's the loot vomit situation? Uh It is not like neo What's the loot vomit situation? It is not like Nioh. There is loot, but it is not the same where you're walking through five to ten sets of armor in one mission

and then choosing which one and switching it up constantly. It is so far in the beginning that I've played Session, I've gotten two maybe options of what to put on, maybe three. Does it? Is it the kind of game that on PC you would be looking for a loot filter at all? I don't know. But I can say that it felt like I got a lot less loot than I did in Nioh. But I've only played the beginning,

and people are currently saying it's exactly like Nioh, so anyone who's played it more probably has a better idea. Oh, it's the same system, but the amount seems to be way less. The amount is definitely, it feels to me way less. I pointed it out by the end of the session that I was like, oh, I'm only picking between, like I picked up like one of, not each kind of weapon, but like I picked up like maybe like four weapons in total

by the end of that. Oh, Suzy says it's exactly like Nioh. Is it? Okay, all right, then I'll trust people who have played more of it. I do know that in Nioh, like I said, you get a whole lot of it and then managing the loot, managing the armor and how the abilities interact with each other and stuff is a huge part of it. And yeah, I didn't mind it, but you can spend a whole fucking long time

getting your shit optimized. I feel like I'll never ever have a meeting of the minds with people on this because when I was playing Nioh 2, I was told, oh man, just use the loot filter and just don't even look at anything above a certain thing and I just go, well then why is it dropping? And they're like, see, because if you want to.

And it's like, I feel like if you're making your game and the game is anything other than a Diablo game or Path of Exile game or Lost, what's it called? The Last Epoch game. Okay. Whatever, Diablo shit. And you're having so much loot vomit that you need to include a developer loot filter because there's so much trash to work through, you may have gone too far. Wait, though, hold on.

Actually, there's something I can objectively say is not like Nioh that makes a big difference here. When I played Nioh, one of the first things that happened was you see the red graves of other player characters and they're stronger than you and you can summon and fight them and if you beat them, they drop some good shit, right? And that was a cool challenge that you can ignore while you're getting used to the game. But I wanted to stop and fight the challenging thing right away.

So I fought a bunch of those ghosts immediately. In doing so and succeeding, I then immediately got 20 different things right off the bat. So much. And I got some really good shit right away. And this was all like mission one area like right off the bat. This game doesn't have those little online ghosts to fight to lead to that much loot.

So you're automatically not getting as much versus if you're dealing with the online system and the enemies and their drops as well. So that is for sure different. The fact that you have online loot coming in as well as the game's regular amount in neo made it made it excessive by comparison I Don't know man. It's just like I think back to like for whatever reason in neo It was like paralytic and I see people talking about like Borderlands of Diablo in which I had Absolutely no problem at all. So I think of the Transformers Platinum game and the crazy amount of needless loot in that where it was like an element.

That thing didn't need anything. None. None. I don't care about a blaster with plus two damage, but you're giving me 18 of them That was crazy. That was ridiculous Also even just discovering that different areas in in Dragon's dogma to will give you different styles of upgrades. It's like it's cool. Oh Okay, but I'm also now just like I'm not gonna go min-max that I will do what I can afford in the area I'm at I don't need to go to this town to get this particular thing That's that's more back and forth that I'm willing to do. I think I

You know I've had this conversation like ten times and I think the way that I always come down to the end of it is like the loot vomit I think the way that I always come down to the end of it is like the loot vomit is the secondary problem, because there's Diablo, there's Borderlands or what have you, right? The actual problem is the stupid amount of variability and granularity on any particular piece of gear where it has like six additional numerical suffixes of singular percentile points of specific moves. That is exactly like Neo.

Oh, well then just... Okay, back to score. Back to score. When I picked up a sky, I picked up a pair of pants and it said, yep, here's the six things this does and one of them is a huge bonus if you get the full set. So that's all there. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It is funny because it's like, some of those bonuses are ignorable ultimately, but if you want to optimize,

you're going to need to think about it. And if you don't want to think about it, then, yeah. There's no making that easier. But yeah, but although, did Strangers of Paradise do a bunch of that as well? Oh, it sure did. OK. Was it just the game was better than that convinced you to

Like it that didn't turn you away from it because other things were better There was a fat button on the screen that said optimize my gear In strangers of paradise And would optimize your gear for the job you were currently playing. I don't know if there's one in this. That worked all the way up until you beat the primary story. Okay. There might be one in this, but I don't know.

It worked a lot better in Stranger of Paradise than the others because it was like a specific class. Right? You were like, oh, I'm playing Berserker or I'm playing whatever. Apparently this has one. I don't know if that makes a difference for you, but apparently it does. It makes a big difference actually. Okay. So yeah, optimize button. Yeah. I mean, I get the feeling that the whole point of Team Ninja's iterative process here is to keep all these quality of life things in every game that they make going forward. I think they should iterate part of the game that they like out of it.

Because I don't like it. Look man, we've been down this road, crafting is just a net negative in my life. Like I just, I don't need it, want it, or care for it. At best it's inoffensive. You know, the longer the ingredient list, the more resentment I have. I have had a really, really complex relationship with crafting and video games.

If crafting is like a mandatory experience in order to enjoy the parts of the game that I want to play, it's very frustrating. Like, I don't like that Like A Dragon, Infinite Wealth has a crafting system for its weapons. Hmm. I didn't like it in 7 either. It's annoying and I'm annoyed that in order to get Ichiban's best weapon I have to build

it. I don't like it. It's a step of busy work obfuscation from the reward that usually would come in an older game design after you've done the thing to earn it. If the result of beating a Mega Man boss was, you've gotten the bubble gear, but now you have to go get the bubble ammo, and then you have to get the bubble case shell

from somewhere, and do five things, and combine them to then get the bubble gun, fuck, like, why? Like, fuck that. That's not fun to me, that's not interesting. It's creating an extra step that allows for more busy work, which is not the kind of game design that draws me in anyway.

You know, you're breadcrumbing a thing that didn't need to be breadcrumbed, and it's just annoying. God, delayed gratification in the worst way. On the flip side, when it's like Final Fantasy XIV crafting, I've actually enjoyed that a good deal, because it has its own classes and its own system and its own little game.

And I'm choosing to engage in FFXIV crafting because I want Gil from other players and also I can do things that help friends of mine if they need gear. Right? In my stint with Monster Hunter, Monster Hunter, the entire game design is a raison d'etre. Is about killing a thing to use its guts to craft something. So like it's I feel like it gets a free pass because it's the whole game exactly right and furthermore

Like the whole game you're getting a weapon and armor based on the thing you did and it's like it's the entirety It's all of it, right? The payoff is really sick for what you're doing in a way that is like yeah the whole point That's not gonna I'm not gonna that gets a free pass exactly It's it's when you insert it into somewhere else like I just described to you, it just doesn't need to be there. Your point is you want to get this reward, but by breaking it up into these delayed incentive systems you can make it so that you have to do a bunch of extra side quests in addition

to this main one to get the sword you want or whatever the fuck. Let's make a comparison between, boy this is going to be unfair, Rise of the Ronin, which has its suffix crafting system, and Elden Ring, which has the item crafting menu, which I don't know anyone. I have not spoken to anyone, either online or in person, that was like, yeah, that was really useful. I made a lot of items in Elden Ring so that I could, fucking, right? Yeah.

Cause I'm going to Elden Ring and rise the Ronin cause I want to wander around an area and fucking fight things It's not for me, but minecraft also gets a pass because that's also the point and discovery That's just Lego. It's just Legos But like that you're the unlocking recipes of how to whatever do stuff is also the entire thing That's all you're doing, is new type of rock. What if rock plus other type of wood?

But yeah, when it's not the game's design is based around the idea of crafting, but in fact the genre was fine without it and you just stuck it in there. Like fuck off with that. Anyway, so that was fun. So basically at the end of the day, Wully, what we've discovered is that crafting is

good when we like it and bad when we don't. Pretty much. Pretty much. But yeah, I can say that about almost any system that is like, if this is a system I don't like but the game is designed around this system, then yes, of course that's going to be fine. And then it gets complex because I remember Stranger of Paradise. We know people who are massive, insane people for Stranger of Paradise and how the DLCs

would ask you to engage in the crafting more because you'd get stronger and need stronger gear, to which I say, I don't want to do this. Why do I have to do this? To which they respond. That's a huge part of the game is its loot system. That's like a huge focus of the game is that it has that complex and in-depth loot system. And my only response that I can say to that is shut up I don't care get it out of there which is not really the most like open-minded or reasonable response I also did like come into Dragon's Dogma not expecting the faffing about in the forest and running back and forth shit to be like, that is the game. I was like, oh.

Yeah, that's like the game. I thought that was the busy work between quests that were going to be big dramatic epic and you know, giant arena boss fights of Splendor and team whatever. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know, big narrative fantasy settings. No, it's about wandering around lost in the muck. And running into NPCs who are constantly trying to turn your attention towards them. I hate that. That, that, God. Like, you played a little bit of Monster Hunter World and like,

you remember the scout flies that would snap your fucking neck off when you discovered something and like, you gotta look over there like stop it But don't take control of my camera away from me, please. This is the compromise for not giving you Quest markers. It's of any kind. Yeah, they're like we don't want to give you quest markers So instead we're gonna rip the controller away from you sometimes to make sure you can't miss things But it's like you can just use Be fine with the other one. Yeah, Anyway, that's what I'd be fine So that's all fine. Um, also this week we took a look at double dragon guided. That was a sponsored stream

That'll be coming out as Well as yeah, we'd play some skull girls checked out the DLC characters there short, but just quick thing to say on the Skullgirls DLC with Marie, Black Dahlia, Annie, and Umbrella. Really fun in that those are the characters that add subsystems to the way they play. And I kind of find similar to how Strive adds

subsystems to their characters. I was about to say, so they're guilty gear characters. They're kind of guilty gear characters. Yeah, they like, no one in Skullgirls that I can remember subsystems of their characters. I was about to say, so they're guilty gear characters. They're kind of guilty gear characters, yeah. No one in Skullgirls that I can remember really needed to have another meter as a part of their HUD somewhere. But here, these new characters do,

and it's at the top just under their portrait, where Black Dahlia has the ability to reload six different types of bullets, and that's a big part of her. And then those bullets interact with the way know, the way she fires them, different arcs, those are all different. But then she has a super that is a barrel that can detonate and she can kick the barrel or hit it or shoot it at you and then light it on fire.

And then that's a part of the system. She's got another super that is a TNT dynamite that you time and you can let it beep for as long as you want and then detonate it on top of the oil that you've already put down. So she has just weapons that play and interact with each other in a big cyclical way. It's cool to have that kind of setup for a weapon character with her. And then you've got Umbrella who has kind of like sin with the hunger meter. Umbrella has like a command grab that like you need to keep the umbrella fed but not overstuffed

because if it's too hungry, if it's too stuffed, it's slower, but it also gets a lot of advantage and can do big crazy shit. But there's like a magic sweet spot that you want to stay not starving, not hungry. And it's like, yeah, playing with subsystems on these DLC characters. Pretty cool stuff. And yeah, of course, Marie is out there, and she's pretty interesting as well. I like the extra characters they've

added with each round here. Fun game to come back to. Killers are still out there, jumped online, got murdered top to bottom, bottom to top. Killers are still out there, jumped online, got murdered top to bottom. Kills are always still out there for anything nowadays. Yeah, but to be fair for a game like Skullgirls, when I say I'm going to play it and I'm going to jump online, that's everyone's cue to go over to the Discord to report that I'm

streaming it and then to go get the stream snipers to come in and murder. So, you know, yeah, mission accomplished. That went down. Oh man, it'd be a shame if a really high level player came and beat me up at Skullgirls. So all of that coming out soon. But yeah, this week, more Helldivers, more Yakuza, and I'm waiting on I had an incredibly bizarre moment on My last infinite wealth stream in which I ran into characters From the cabaret that you were doing at the time whoa Interesting that's cool, huh? And they look exactly the same. Asset drop.

These bitches are in their 50s and they look great. Hell yeah. Nice. Yeah, and then this Saturday either, I'm waiting on confirmation, but we'll either look at Strive with Test Your Luck and if not that then we'll do Eddie Tekken. He's out and he's breaking that game apart'll do Eddie Tekken. He's out and He's breaking that game apart Eddie's really strong and again. That's Eddie Gordo That's it's kind of it's an issue some other stuff is it the same thing is that I'm gonna just hit buttons You can do you can do kick it kick it kick it kick it kick it can go nuts with him

But he also breaks the system in a couple other ways that are not shared by the rest of the cast He has a lot of shit that tracks that doesn't look like it should. But then they also updated the game itself to change some stuff. To have a mixed review score on Steam. Wall, yeah, wall breaking has gotten more inconsistent and weird. There's some stuff that's just busted. There's some bugs where in the middle of a heat activation, people are moving in the slot in the stopped time

So fucking you know listen, willy will they got a they got to get some? They got to get a patch coming what you need to do is stop complaining and what you need to do is buy ball For three dollars I think What they what as long as they say to everybody that what you're investing in with these ridiculous cosmetic prices is the eventual Waffle House stage. You are buying the Waffle House. Slowly but surely there's a battle pass that leads to Waffle House at the end. I heard Tekken was getting a battle pass for cosmetics.

I was like, yeah, whatever. Okay. And then like the day came out, I saw people saying, yeah, some of the removed cosmetics from Tekken 7 are in this battle pass. I'm like, oh, okay, that sucks. Actually, that actually sucks. Tons of shit. Shout outs to buying a bunch of points to spend that you can never spend the exact amount

you always have to buy more than the cost of the thing. Like literally Pachinko like, parlor, like tactics. The oldest, simplest trick in the book of how much you need versus what you, versus the pack that you get. You know, fucking Chuck E. Cheese tickets. You know what I mean? Like we're going back to the, the, the simple E. Cheese tickets, you know what I mean? We're going back to the simple ass,

like nah, you gotta spend more than you need. Nah, I'm just gonna play more Helldivers. I'm probably gonna buy those War Bonds because Helldivers has been so straight shootery about it and I'm having such a good time, I don't feel bad. I don't feel like I'm being taken advantage of. That's one way. I mean, for me, I'm happy with the good time, I don't feel bad. I don't feel like I'm being taken advantage of. That's one way. I mean, for me, I'm happy with the Steve costume that I have.

Yeah, that's the other problem. They gave it to you too good at the beginning. I have no incentive to go any further than what I've got. It's pretty fucking sick, so we're just gonna ride that out for now. You know, I bet there's a bunch of, I would like people to write in actually for the emails of like DLC costumes

For games that had like cosmetic shit, and you looked at it and go fucking I'm never gonna buy any of that shit I was awful golden weapons in overwatch the worst Can I just say gold weapon in anything? God always I would I Know wait, you know, stop stop. I Forgot I knew guys who liked gold weapons. They were the Madden guys I described earlier It's it is a it is a normie badge Unless you are piloting the Hayakoakushiki, the golden fucking char suit, like unless that's what you're rocking top to bottom, it's always garish and terrible.

Yeah. Such a bad idea. Awful. Hideous. Anyway, let's take a quick piss break, huh? Yes. Oh, wait, before, I forgot, part of my stream this week on Friday night, I'm going to be covering the 14 live letter

it's the last live letter before the Media event in a couple months, so they'll probably show off new dawn trail shit Is it a this is a trailer to the trailer? No, this is gonna be an announcement to the announcement the the job trailer will be at the next thing Okay The job trailer will be at the next thing. Okay. So the way that it works is the 14 patch cycle and release cycle and media cycle is so specific and never changes that people know what's going to be at each event beforehand. Okay.

So this one's going to be going into features into more of the graphics update. It'll probably release the benchmark Which is actually really important this time because dawn trails increasing the system requirements So I have a bunch of friends that are like, I don't know if my fucking old computer can do dawn trail So I got a fucking give me that benchmark So each of these there's more things to announce they haven't yet announced and then you get all of them by the time you do Yes, well well it's oh You're all the way out on this. Okay. Hold on. Let me let me backtrack a little bit. So Final Fantasy 14 does a live letter every

Two three months. Yeah, it is basically a State of the game and here's what's coming and if there's an expansion nearby. Here's some more details. Mm-hmm expansion nearby, here's some more details. So like the last live letter they spent like fucking 40 minutes going, here's the graphics on the new character models heads. Right. And then come, yeah, and then you get the side by side and that's, yeah, gotcha. Okay. BRB. This week, Castle Super Beast is sponsored by Dragon's Dogma 2.

Really? Check it out. But I love Dragon's Dogma 2! Yeah! So, Dragon's Dogma 2 is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. It's rated M for Mature. And if you haven't heard us talking enough about it already, that is a game that we have been spending many hours in recently.

From wandering around creating really accurate realistic looking versions of you and Paige and me and Reggie and spending a bunch of time in the character creator as well with the amount of detail you can go into. It's pretty awesome. I was able to even get my little piercings going with the facial details and the hairstyles and everything like that that's but that was really cool. Yeah, and you the pawn system that allows you to create a partner to kind of roam through the adventure with that is going to learn that you can give different vocations and different abilities. Recently,

Wooly was just the kind of person that was going into battle being trustworthy and and you know keeping it keeping it tactical and I thought it would be super handy to give him the ability to sort through my pack and every time it got heavy, just lighten the load, you know? Get rid of rotten stuff. The logistician specialization. Exactly. And that was awesome. So now I don't have to worry about that part of it because I used to pick up too much junk and now he's just like managing that. And then every time

he goes off into the rift, he's able to come back with a different hall. Other players can give him rewards. It's a pretty cool system. I made sure that Big Page had the ability to talk to elves. Yeah. Yeah. And as I'm getting to an area where elves are going to be popping up more often, that seems like a pretty handy thing to have. So I switched out to a pawn that would have the ability to speak elvish. Yeah, it's an asynchronous online play mode that's really unique and very interesting and different in how this game plays out in addition to the 10 different vocations that

you can pick for your Arisen and your main pawn. I've started out the game so far playing as a mage. I switched over to sorcerer for a bit, and then now I'm playing as an archer. You get the ability to kind of jump around. And as you experience each class difference, each vocation difference, the skills, you can mix and match some of them

on whatever you've unlocked in some of the vocation screen abilities. So yeah, you get a bunch of different ways to play the game and different groups you can roll with. If you want four archers, that's a very specific way to play the game that's gonna be very different from four fighters, right? Yeah, this is a As well a game where the world is pretty

Living and breathing I talked about how I wandered back to an old town only to encounter it Dragon seeds by a dragon and I had my main pawn was Was dead at that time. So I we had to fight it with one pawn down. That was a special event that was like, hey, you happen to wander back to this place just on curiosity. Something's going down. Hope you're ready for it. There's a lot of special events based around wandering back to areas that you didn't think

would have anything going on. Yeah. So even exploring that map, keeping up with what's going on as well, you'll never have the same experience necessarily. So very cool with that unique element as well. We've, again, been going back and forth in it. And I believe I tweeted out last night as well the location of a rift stone that you can summon some pawns from. The one that I found was, it said you can hire females pawns of large stature.

Large stature. Yep. So just in case anyone wanted to find out where that was, I put a little tag on the map there for you. There's all kinds of fun stuff you can do in Dragon's Dogma 2. So, yeah, go check that out. You can go to dragonsdogma.com to buy the game and start your epic quest today. Once again, available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC Steam, rated M for Mature. Thank you, Dragon's Dogma 2. I love you, Dragon's Dogma 2.

Podcast this week is also sponsored by Shopify. Cha-ching is the sound of a shale on Shopify and that is the leading global commerce platform that's gonna help you at every stage of your business. Bro I don't know what leading global commerce even is I need help. That's exactly why you need help right it's real simple it's the the the people that will help you if you are trying to start your business out and figure out how to take podcasting for example from talking into a microphone to a thing where you're like hey I have a t-shirt maybe I want to sell that it's some how

can I get a t-shirt to somebody and maybe you're gonna get some pins maybe you're gonna get a little sticker maybe you're gonna expand that shop and you're gonna try to figure out how to get it you know integrated on the on your YouTube page maybe you going to try to figure out how to get it integrated on your YouTube page. Maybe you're going to try to figure out how to get the shop working so that it ships to all the right places and maybe you're going to want to track all that data as you grow. So it's perfect for your first sale all the way up to, did we hit a million? Whoa. Whatever your business scales at, Shopify is there for you. It's got an award-winning help support system that'll help you with

every step of the way. It's powering 10% of all e-commerce in the US. It's a leading global force behind a number of brands, including Allbirds, Rothy's, Brooklyn, and millions of other entrepreneurs across every size. And yeah, they've got all the information that you're gonna want to see how your sales are going, what to do next, how to ship things out, who to ship it to, And they're in 175 countries. So really, it's if you don't know how to get that aspect of your business up and running,

Shopify is the place to take it. Yeah. You can right now, excuse me, I lost where I was. There I am. So right now you can sign up for a $1 a month trial at shopify.com slash superbeast, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash superbeast now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.

shopify.com slash superbeast. Thank you, Shopify. Thank you, Shopify. I love you. This week, the podcast is sponsored by Raycon. And Raycon is offering you those everyday earbuds, wireless, you can get amazing quality audio at half the price of other premium audio brands, and you can get the wires out of your life.

In particular, the latest model, you can get the E26, which, yeah, I was trying out and something awesome about it is its ability to connect to two different Bluetooth sources so that if you have, let's say, you're connected to your phone and your computer, you can have it know which one is active and then just automatically switch back and forth according to what you're using. And the moment one is not active anymore or not playing it'll just know to switch over to the other one. I don't know how this works the technology is crazy. It's incredibly useful for not having to re-sync multiple devices. I hate syncing multiple devices. It's crazy. I always

break it. Yeah so this is a great feature on that in addition to the 32 hour battery life with eight hours of playtime. So you're not worried about running out. And the optimized gel tips designed to fit comfortably in your ears and actually stay there. So that's perfect for if you're boxing, for example, and you want to move around and make sure that they don't fall out, go to buyraycon.com slash superbeast today to get 20% off your Raycon order plus free shipping. That's right, you'll get 20% off plus free shipping at buyraycon.com slash superbeast. B-U-Y-R-A-Y-C-O-N dot com slash superbeast. Thank you Raycon. Thanks Raycon. Thanks Raycon.

And this week the podcast is sponsored by Factor who are all about getting you the fresh never frozen chef crafted dietitian approved ready to eat meals in just two minutes. That's a lot of- Listen, there's only so long you can survive on cereal, walnuts, and banana chips. Yeah, you're going to need to do better for yourself, especially if you are trying to eat in a way that is balanced, calorie smart, if you're doing keto or protein, if you're vegan, vegetarian, or just again, balanced regular meals,

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Top of the top of the the the docket we got breaking news breaking fucking move what there was a yugioh day event in Japan and Player posted on Twitter that they met a female player at this yugioh event They exchanged some pleasantries and it was understood that this was the first time that the female player participated in an offline event after only playing Master Duel. That player then left the tournament halfway through.

So the person who met the female player was concerned that the meta environment wasn't too friendly for new players and he posted that he hopes that the female player wouldn't give up on the game. That post then went viral and the the female player saw it and clarified that she left halfway not because she was sad about losing her match but because she couldn't stand the smell in the venue. she couldn't stand the smell in the venue. No foreigners allowed, but you, Sninky, get in. We covered a story a couple years ago about how, covered, yes, like a fucking press journalist hat.

Whatever, man. We talked about a story a couple years ago about how there was a rule about hygiene that was introduced, you know, like, five years ago, probably at this point, that apparently Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments were, it got so bad that they had to make an official ruling on hygiene to say that you can be kicked out if you didn't spell good enough. See that was in the US. I see. So we've covered various forms of this story for Yu-Gi-Oh!

Smash and I believe Warhammer. It's a known thing. It's just a thing. And every community deals with it in a different way. The hygiene rule was not international necessarily. Okay, well. Fuck man, that's brutal. That sucks. That's, yeah, that if I was like a to and like, like that would be a time to have a real moment of self reflection. And like, enforce like that. That's that's where it's like, OK, what can we set up a booth?

Can we set up a quick shower and change where we'll we'll provide you with with, you know, here's a T-shirt if you need one. Here's towels. You know, like I just I don't know. That would make me very sad if I was running that event. So. A long time ago, I worked at a call No, that would make me very sad if I was running that event so a Long time ago. I worked at a call service call center service, right and There was a day

The the girl who smelled sat next to me And it was bad she was smelly and she usually sat in the corner and did her stuff, but this was a more central location. And the guy walked out and then he walked right back into his office and then he walked right back out and said, everybody go home. You guys need to take a shower. All of you need to take a shower. Yeah. And literally just tanked the entire workday after like 30 minutes and sent like 50 people home. And then we came back the next day. And it was exactly the same. And then that

purse they then they found a reason. They found a reason to let her go. Oh man. That's crazy. I mean, it's an embarrassing. Man, this is a person that was in some of my classes. That's an embarrassing meeting, but you got to sit the person down and say, can you do something about this? This was a person that was in some of my classes and she was like, I can't believe I got fired. And I was like, hmm, yeah. You should, did they give you a reason? She's like, no. They said something about like,

it wasn't a good fit or something. And in this situation, I'm like, I really wish you weren't talking to me. I wish you were standing further away from me in this class. If this were at any place that were not a fucking call center, there would, you would imagine, be a series of meetings to be like, hey, can you do something about this, right?

Because that happened in QA. There were- Really? In quality assurance? Yeah. Really? There's a level that's, it's not, the bar is not very high, but there is a bar. It's really low.

And there were two particular people that I remember did not meet that bar. And yeah, it was like, hey, can we take you aside for a minute and just, you need to do something about this. And in both cases, no, in one case there was no change. In one case, there was no change. In the other case, there was a change and it was extremely temporary. And then it went back to being the same after a very short period of time.

Yeah. I don't. Also, as you're describing that too, I'm just reminded of how like, I'm trying to pinpoint the exact time. There was an exact time in my life where I realized that like girls are stinky too. I want to say I probably made it to like grade three. What?

Or so like I remember, I just thought, I just remember thinking like, no, girls are always gonna smell like perfume. Like you never caught your mom like farting it up? Nah, that didn't happen. Oh yeah, okay. That didn't happen really. That's not, that was not going down.

No, there was a very, very fucking flower perfume, very very fucking flower perfume whatever type of experience I had were like this like yeah all girls are gonna smell nice and kittens and rainbows and puppy dogs right I grew up in a household with a sister was eight years older than me I grew up with no girls in the house until yeah much later yeah so that's it Yeah, no that that dream is dead as soon as no is dead. Mm-hmm There was a point and then around college it was like oh bitch you live like this like I Met a couple of those

Girls can whatever it was like Yeah, I'm a teenage boy whatever but my shits not together my my room is a fucking stye And then I saw like my what I went to my sister's apartment because she had moved out and I was like You you're the smart one in this family you Why is why is it why is this place look like this? Yeah. Like if you grew up, I'm sure if you grew up like with a sister, like in your immediate family,

you probably got experience, you got exposed to that nice and early and just like, ugh, ugh, fucking, you know? But yeah, that was delayed. And it's like, oh no, like the gross fucking boys locker room gym socks smell shit. Or the smell of the fucking elementary school lost and found. It's a very specific visceral memory that I have where you just you get hit by that

in someone's room and you're like, what is happening? Anyway, yeah. Yeah, man. No good. Equality. Everybody stinks. As long as you got gotta take steps though. I mean there was that one Red Bull tournament, Adrenaline, I took the photo when they just

had all the Smash setups with the CRTs and a little axe spray, a mini axe spray on top of each one of them. You know, maybe I'm not the person to talk about this because axe and all that stuff makes me violently ill. Right? Because I have a perfume allergy. But adding more smell to a bad smell isn't saving anything. For you, I understand you have an allergy that makes it infinitely worse

Right because that goes from yeah, but unpleasant to like chemically poisonous, but I don't even mean that it's just chemically poison on top of the thing unmodified Yeah, I know what you mean The thing is just if if there I will still take a Febreze over the noxious toxin scent as opposed to like no Febreze. No, no, Febreze removes smell. Febreze actually neutralizes smell. Axe doesn't. Axe is just a very strong smell on top of whatever smell you're trying to hide.

I mean, I don't know what then. Yeah, then I guess we're just going to have to install showers like it's like, it's like, oh oh man it smells like ass in here oh let me spray some oh cool it smells like lemon scented ass in here I mean for me the the Febreze mango fucking thing it just it goes on top of it it's all it is but that there's a reason why restaurants and public places put that in a bathroom sometimes because it's like yeah that'll do it'll be less it'll it's better than nothing it's not not the best solution but it's better than nothing you know just wash your fucking pits and your fucking genitals in your

ass but the problem is if we have to create a rule that means it's not landing it means it's just not it's not competitive it's not compatible with the current group of people that we are reach with our audience that we're reaching so man Like do you do a sniff check and banishment or yes, you know that like that's a that's a possibility Yes, you have a team of judges You have three people You know, I think I think like if you are in a hotel and you have like a room booked or something Then you could at least be like, hey,

you can actually go up to this room that we've rented to use the facilities there. And here's a Yu-Gi-Oh! t-shirt. Do you have something you can change into? If not, maybe we can provide that. Maybe there's a little bag you get, a little goodie bag that's like 20 No, no. Twenty bucks. No. Here's a change of clothes.

One of the TOs, part of your entry fee goes to pay the guy who smell checks you on the way in, and if you fail the smell check, they bring you outside and they fucking strip you down and they hose you down like a dog. Hose you up, yes. Yeah. With the big old, with the big old fucking extra strength hose spray. Yeah. Yeah.

Out back. Oh man. My tolerance for this is so low. The problem- It's so low. The problem is, is that what if it turns out to be four out of five people at the door? Like what then just what if your entire? Attendance like is it that's what higher strength blows up the whole building and takes them all

Then you drop the stratagem on your location Yeah, no, I'm I'm I'm you know Then you drop the stratagem on your location. Yeah, no, I'm, you know, legitimately like if you had to solve this problem, I think you'd have to just rent a room from the hotel and give people a bag with shit to change into. You know, that's all I can say because clearly warning people and telling people and putting a rule and making it a thing is not working No, the the salute the genuine solution is lifetime ban on first offense

The because the the the punishment is so severe that Like people will have to be careful about it. Sorry, I was playing with a little... Okay, I have a little Know John's... Speaking of Smash Brothers, it's a controller finger thing. You squish to just... It suddenly just turned really hot and the gel got really hard Yeah, you you add you yeah, so I think I've used it up to its limit And it now it's getting really really hot and I don't know why it's doing that So this is a I'm kind of concerned like

Is this toxic what the fuck is this material? It's probably toxic. It is a Smash Brothers item after all. Okay. The pocket warmers that I've used in the past have been... You should eat it. So the thing is is that this... Huh. This has not turned hot before. What the fuck is...

Okay, that's weird. All right. I've used pocket warmers that have been like the little cloth bag type thing. This thing has just been squishy gel for a long time now. What the fuck is a pocket warmer? I've never heard of that. There's okay, there's hand warmers that you can you can buy. Well, I mean, in Quebec, they have them all the time. It's oh, it's a little bag you buy and you shake a bag and then it warms up

and you can put it in your mittens or in your boots. What? Yeah, they sell them a Canadian tire. It's a big it's a it's a thing. Really? That's why. Because it's really cold and wearing those is infinitely more comfortable. And I would not do certain activities if I didn't have them. Oh, yeah, they're great. Just be cold No, I Yeah

My my my relationship with hot and cold is so fucked up I'm the I was that weirdo who would just walk out into the winter with no coat on because yeah I thought that cold you see I spent the first years of my life acclimating to the Grenada the islands climate and then I walked out back into this shit And and never fully quite got there again But the reason why I'm just super can that sucks. Yeah. Yeah, it really did. It was brutal the whole time When people when my friends would be like playing in the snow and you know like, oh, make snow angels or whatever, I'd be like, nah, I'm good on that, thanks.

I'm good on the skating, on the ice hockey, on all of that. I'm like, I don't need the cold. And when it was like, oh, snow job, let me kick snow in your face. It's like, oh, so violence then. We're fighting. No, that's different. You've chosen, you've kicked snow in my face like going ha ha snow job We're fighting now. This is how it's going down Yeah, no fuck that

But anyway, no this thing that I've owned for many many many for more than a year now has just been a gel pack But it's gotten hot and solid and that's never happened. Yeah, no you were talking you were talking about Smelly video game players and got really hot and solid and that's never happened. Yeah, no, you were talking about smelly video game players and it got really hot and hard. Weird. I didn't think this was a warmer like that. Okay, that's weird. All right. But yeah, no, lifetime ban for smelliness. Yeah, I think the tournament itself would get, will literally die. I think, like good, good, good. So that's not a constructive way of salvaging the problem. I think a more constructive solution might be one.

Hey listen, if only one out of five people don't reek, then you can have the fucking winners be the fucking people who don't stink like shit. All right. Done. Look, there's FGCTOs in the chat right now, Spider, what's up? Running you mad. You met me, thankfully things are not that bad in the situations where I've run shit, but having a room set up just in case is probably not a bad investment.

No, you know what, you know, okay, so let's talk, before, I'm gonna say one thing that's slightly unserious and one thing that is- DMs have come in, you've gotten DMs about it? Yep, yep, there you go, okay. So if someone's determined to be stinky, they should be sealed away in a room of shame to play their set.

Like fucking plastic. You can participate from a distance. Right. Well, you know, like a lot of Korean esports stuff, the two players are like sealed off in their pods. Right. Right. But on a serious note, Wooly, if I sat down next to you at a tournament, right? Like we don't know each other. We'd go, oh, hey, nice to meet you, Wooly. I'm your opponent. Okay. we sit down next to each other to play Street Fighter VI, right? And right before, right before we start,

I go, oh, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. And I stand up and turn towards you and just shit all over you. And just blast farts all up in your face and mouth and then go sit down and go, okay, good, good, we're good. That would be unacceptable, yes? Yes, you cannot, a ruling can be made on that. So if somebody walks in. A biological attack has occurred.

And is so smelly that their body odor is physically affecting the person next to them. Yeah, they are cheating There are already rules about this as like you like you can complain to a to If that if the odor if the odor is too noxious, you know Yeah, we already have that on the books. Like, like Yu-Gi-Oh is already a fucking lame card game for dorks. We need to move away from your shitting yourself, Nayet. And towards, I'm gonna go to the bathroom and wash my ass. I'm gonna go to the bathroom and wash my ass

Yes, the problem is that This is going to exist in any activity that is the chosen Activity of the no not yet not yet person right any any game and or hobby that makes itself Any any hobby that makes itself... Any hobby that makes itself like... It's the type of fixation the person that's not willing to shower is going to fixate on is gonna always have this problem.

If you get rid of this thing, it'll be the next thing. But there's a category that, you know, you're always going to run into this problem on. Yu-Gi-Oh! Smash and other like things. I don't think you are always going to run into this problem if you just ban them for life every time. next multiplayer IRL event for the next card game and or tournament game that requires okay you know what fuck it if you're if you're playing a game like this that has this problem never an in-person event never just never an input the smell problem means just don't even run it. Okay. Yeah, don't run the event.

Just have it online. Like I'm trying to figure out how to nail this where it's like there is a category of game and hobby that's going to attract people that don't like bathing and don't care about that because this hobby is the type of thing they can hyper focus on and not do that shit. It's, you know, like it's just, it sucks. I've told this story before and I'm apologizing if you've heard it ten times but I was walking with a friend of mine and she looked and saw the Games Workshop and said oh, what's that? Oh god, that looks cool, right? And she walked in and she took a singular step into the Games Workshop

And I couldn't see her face because she had her back to me because I went no don't Like I actually held on my hand and went no no, don't. But I saw every muscle in her body rigid, like just full freeze. And she didn't turn around. She backed out. Yep. And then we were on our way. The Games Workshop is, I don't know if it's as bad as it was. Some... It was wild in there. Some club spaces were different from others.

You might recall. Yes I do. Some club spaces in college were very different experiences. There was one club space that had immaculate hygiene, style, and makeup. And diagonal from that space. Exactly diagonal from that space. Was the other one. Was biocrimes, yes.

Alright. Anyway. Other stuff going on. All right. Anyway. Other stuff going on. Stop being smelly. Stop being smelly is unfortunately like rule or like, being smelly is unfortunately like rule or like it's like it's like thing it's item six on a list of 25 things that need to be addressed usually it is the bare minimum for participation in literally any part of society and this is the problem is that this tournament might be the only participation in literally any part of society. And this is the problem, is that this tournament

might be the only participation in society that you're looking at. Yeah, that's actually a really good point. That's a really good point. That's, yeah. I haven't been participating in society for six months, but that Yu-Gi-Oh. But there's a tournament.

I can go to that. I'm pretty good at that. I haven't been doing anything else but playing Yu you Gio might as well go try that out Anyway, all right So beyond that Yeah, so we talked about nights and tight spaces. We talked about how diverse. Oh, yeah how diverse to We talked about the crashes, but the official word on that was a hot fix for crashes is coming, not over the weekend. So let the game rest for a while.

Yeah, that was while we were trying to exterminate the bots, which was really funny. They're like, calm it down, guys. Everyone's like, no. Robots die now. Speaking of robots dying now, the Yokohama Gundam will end its service this week. That's the really cool one that could actually move and look around. Why do they keep ending the service of these fucking things? Okay, so there's Odaiba Gundam, which was replaced with from RX-78 to Unicorn, and they kept that in place. And I think they started probably working on this one at that time.

They also have new Gundam over at somewhere else set up. And then this one, they're retiring its service. I'm assuming perhaps it's because they're starting on a new RX78 that'll be even cooler that they can reveal in a couple years time. That'd be cool. Because that's what it was last time, right? The original Odaiba RX78 didn't move, but this one came after that one and this one was like one-to-one scale with it. So Fukuoka has the new Gundam. Yeah, exactly. So there's

at least three places you can go see to scale Gundam. But the cool moving one at Yokohama shutting down and did its last demo. But yeah, they don't say why. I mean, there's obviously a budget cost associated with like running this shit regularly and you know being a tourist attraction and stuff. They did it was supposed to shut down two years ago but because of COVID they extended it right. So it was planned to stop even earlier. That's nice they're like well nobody can see the robot because of the coronavirus. But yeah with any luck we might get one that actually can not just look around and move out of the hangar a little bit, but you know, get a little bit closer to actually

maybe doing like a last shooting pose or some rad shit. So yeah, if you missed it, you're gonna have to catch one of the others because that one's gone. That's the one that yeah I didn't get to see that one unfortunately. I've got some breaking news but it's not it's not has to do with video games or movies or anime or any of that nerd shit. Hey Willy have you ever eaten something called a Lunchable? Oh no but I know what they are. Yeah, I remember those.

The little- So- From back in the day, they would be the little stick with the cheese and or like little ham and crackers and stuff. Uh, been found to contain dangerous amounts of lead. Oh, what? Research shows that Lunchables also have plastic chemicals that have been linked to reproductive problems, diabetes, and cancer.

Oh my, yeah. Okay, so I don't know if these are Canadians specific or not. Lunchables might be a Canadian thing. But if you- No, they're American thing. They're American thing? Okay. They're provided as part of school meal they're literally just recess packs for kids like a Dunkaroos pack type of thing yeah the lead I mean is that a recent bit

that's today did they have them when we were in school? I don't know. I see Justin Wang talking about how he didn't like Lunchables as a kid. So they've been around a while. Yeah, no, my friends always had them. I never did because ham slices is not going to work. Good job dodging fucking lead poisoning, Wooly. Yeah, we're not eating ham in this house, so that's not going down. Um, Jesus Christ, man.

Cool, cool. Why do they always gotta put lead in stuff? What's the even point of putting lead in a food item? I don't think it's putting the lead in as much as it is. Like the process of creation is using shit that leaves traces of it in the food. Oh, that probably makes more sense, yeah. Right, somewhere along the conveyor belt.

It's in there. Like, you know, there's- Bro! Because stuff with fish and so on is more like like it's whatever the ocean was was doing at that period of time but yeah having a baby opens you up to the whole new world of nightmares okay because we have our little man right and he's gonna start eating food and all that and we're like, oh, what should we feed him? Oh what Gerber's having a baby food led lawsuit right now And then there was that company from China that was making the children's toys that they were supposed to be mouth chewable toys that also had

fucking Poison in it and shit. Yeah. Um, time to become a crazy woo woo parrot that just uses. We're going to, we're going to make our own baby feed the baby with crystal. We're going to make our own baby. Like, like, like just use, use crystals and magnets, you know, Jesus Christ. Like, like that. That's, that's the solution is like the the fucking The the bottle of baby food the one that's covered in plastic. I don't like

Feels like a fucking dice roll on to which one is poison And you don't want to be the magnet parent, but at the same time I wanna be the magnet parent, but at the same time, Lunchables had led them for 30 years! Wully, you know we ate or drank something that was full of cancer shit. Of course. Just somewhat in your neighborhood, there must be at least one person that's like a parent

that's like starting down this road though. Like, be careful. There might be someone that's like, you know, because of this Lunchable stuff, I can hook you guys up with some fucking farm to table slurmily. Firmly, Wooly, all I'm going to say is that Paige and I have, since moving to BC, definitely encountered some people that were very, very interested in healthy living. Yeah Very it starts it starts with the farm table slurm it might go past crystals and shit and then the next thing you know You're drinking your own piss and you're you're you're getting into anal bleaching Your whole you're holding your a your anus out to the sun. Wully, I'm...

Six months seems really fast for what you're describing. There are people that believe that if you hold your anus out to the sun, your body will feed. That seems really fast. On that, it just, for anyone confused, this is out there. There's, yeah. Alright. Anyways, speaking of cosmic horror, they're making a live action dredge movie.

Okay. It's been announced. That movie should have no dialogue. Dredge movie It's okay. It's been announced Movie should have no dialogue. Yeah, so here's the problem is I wish this announcement was for a no dialogue animated short I think this should be an animated thing that should be like 20 to an hour and Yes, well we both have the same idea of like, no talking. No. None. No. Just pulling up rad crazy shit from the fucking water, seeing the mayor gesture over to the

old boat, seeing the old woman in the lighthouse. You hold a picture of your wife, you know. All of that. You can do it silently, but yes. It should be welcome to foe. It doesn't have to be live action, but it's gonna be. But it doesn't have to be. Yeah, but if it is, it should be Willem Dafoe.

He was cast in Antichrist for a reason, then he was cast in Lighthouse for the same reason. He should be cast in Dredge for the same reason. He's got the face. Which, Willem Dafoe looks like a guy who made a deal with the devil. He's got the face. And you can also put a to with the devil. He's got the face. And you can also put a two-cut on him. He also loves the face. One of the most interesting details about a movie that was otherwise kind of unremarkable

was Spider-Man No Way Home. No, was that the first one? The new one, yeah. That had Wilhelm Dafoe and what's the guy, the octopus one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah that had the head woman to foe and What's the guy the octopus man he's the actor Doc Ock, but yes. Yeah. No, it's Can't remember but They both had opposing

Alfred Molina Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe had contradictory demands for appearing in that movie. Alfred Molina is like, you will de-age me with the robots so that I look better like I did back in the day. And Willem Dafoe was like, if you attempt to de-age me with makeup or the robots, I will walk. That's awesome. That's fucking sick. Like, Willem Dafoe knows that he's got a crazy person's fucking noggin. But that's his career, right? It's like Buscemi. Your face and your wrinkles and your crevices are your career.

Yeah. Okay. So I know it won't be a silent move like animated feature. That unfortunately ain't going to happen. So I'll settle for my second demand. There needs to be at least hard commit to a two minute bit of the captain just staring at his storage and trying to rotate a fish into place and then putting a hook over there and then trying to spin this codfish into place and then like the swordfish has to go on top and then just a really just ah and try to.

And then he gets frustrated and throws one of them into the ocean. And tosses one out and goes god damn it you know fuck that was a good one But and that I got a toss of that is the rock I Mean if not Chris Pratt so you know that's how that goes The rock the rock voiced by Chris Pratt The Mario thing has ruined Chris Pratt for me. It's like just like Hey, it's me Chris Pratt. I'm a Mario I mean look if you're if you're Andy on Parks and Rec and then you parlay that into Star Lord like

Yeah, you're gonna take that as far as it goes. You're gonna take every casting job that you can, you're in that position to choose what comes at ya. You're gonna take all the fuckin', take that all the way to the bank, anyone would. But yes, it just, now that's the punchline, unfortunately. Garfield,. Like what? Like what part of, you know, young fast-talking quippy... Anyway, whatever. What's wild is that, like, I remember thinking of this as

the Nolan North problem, right? Cause Nolan North has an incredibly wide range of voice acting talents, but everybody after Uncharted was like, do the Uncharted. Do the Uncharted voice. Smooth white man with the hair. And like it's happening to Chris Pratt, but because it's live action, it's so much, it's like, or mostly live action, it's violent.

It's just like, like he doesn't have enough explosive personal actor charisma to deal with being the leading man by himself as himself. Speaking of Avengers, according to the franchise producer, the Sonic the Hedgehog films are aiming to be Avengers level events. So that all the spinoffs can lead up to these big MCU like movies. Fuck yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's the only thing I can think of that justifies it. Absolutely. God. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's the only thing I can think of that justifies it. Absolutely.

God. Absolutely. I am suddenly brought back, teleported, to the year 2001. And I feel like we're catching Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and the Matrix sequels Well, I guess two years later Just everything is like these are dropping and now all movies must be a trilogy filmed Simultaneously, so what you're saying is like we finally healed after the events of 2001 Well now it's...

Oh my god. Now it's... Avengers formula, obviously MCU... CU's have been a thing for a while now, but just like... You had a Sonic movie, you had a second Sonic movie, it was pretty good, and now we've gotta turn it into an end game for every time a proper Sonic movie. It was pretty good. And now we've got to turn it into an Endgame for every time a proper Sonic title drop. Yeah, yeah Sonic deserves it more than anything else

Because Sonic has this wide-ranging cast of losers But it is kind of fun to see them all at once Couldn't you just like let this the knuckles show come out and see what happens, man? No! Can you just see if it's any decent? Oh my god. It's gonna be good, because Knuckles is in it. Sure! Just... but now we're pointing at the WrestleMania sign going cream, spin-off, and chaotic. this one will feature a character the size of the average human mother and then they all come together

for the eventual Sonic 3 but then Sonic 3 and Knuckles and then So on so on and so forth Yeah, man. Yeah Yeah, look blaze the cat. I love blaze the cat. I'm still, Blaze the Cat, I love Blaze the Cat. I'm still rolling my fucking eyes, dude. Put a Blaze the Cat in the dredge. But to be fair, which I don't need to be, this is a fucking producer talking

on behalf of the franchise. And what is their job if not to say exactly this type of shit, right? Yeah, man. It's basically every producer exists so they can get in front of a microphone and go, this thing will make the most money you've ever seen. Please give me more money now, though.

Speaking of people that shouldn't get in front of microphones, apparently there was a project to resurrect Friday the 13th with a fan mod and allow it to be playable, but it's gotten cease and desisted. It was announced on April Fool's, I guess, and it seems like possibly in an attempt to possibly obfuscate the bit. But the mod, it was not even an original game, mind you, just a mod to bring the offline game back online

and restore some cut content was immediately C indeed. So there you go. Yay. Yep. Good one. And the beat goes on and on and on and on and on. Play the gif. Dumb.

Dumb, stupid, stupid idiot. You know what people should do? Let's go. Let's go. Here we go. They should announce projects and put out a screenshot constantly. Oh! Don't work on them! Don't work on them! Oh, go the other way with it! out a screenshot constantly. Oh. Don't work on them.

Don't work on them. Oh, go the other way with it. Just, just, just constantly, constantly. No, this fails. No, no, no. Okay. No? I hear you and I think, yeah, over, just too much information, right?

Overload it. But here's why this fails. The retained lawyers for these companies love the idea of wasting time on fake false leads that go nowhere Lawyers are evil. The idea of a hundred leads that go nowhere But then being paid to C&D every single one of them right is awesome For that firm. You'll make partner on that shit Anyway, all right last there's a bit here that's just it's just this one's a visual is a trailer released for a project a movie called kill tube and

Okay, it is Sending me an animated movie coming out in 2026 and it is visually in 2026 and it is visually fucking insane and awesome. And just take a look and you'll understand. A lot of color. And your bit rate will die. Very fast. Your bit rate will die. I promise you it will.

But this is a movie that is being made that's gonna take another, it's coming out in 2026. So watch this and then forget about it. And then when it's gonna come back around, it'll be fucking insane. It's visual cocaine. Each of these cuts is like a year of work. Yeah. It's being made by an artist collective. Okay, so Kazuhaki Kuribayashi and an art collective called Watcha Jack and Kassen are working on this. Why is it so fast? I can barely even look at it.

If you want to approach something that is as woolly core as you can get, this trailer is fucking woolly core. Yeah, KillTube on YouTube. Don't watch it on Twitter because the Twitter... No, never watch anything on Twitter. The Twitter bitrate is just pixels blurred. You can't possibly keep up.

It's one of the worst video players ever. And if you can catch this in 4K, do so. Yeah, Synopsys. The Edo period never ended. The case system reigns. In order to move up, you got to kill on stream. Cool. Edo punk. never ended, the case system reigns, in order to move up, you gotta kill on stream. Eto-punk.

Yeah, I, so the same parts of my, the same hairs on my neck stood up watching this that did when I saw the trailer for Paprika, where you just see the colors and the shit just going, just going hard, that, that's my jam. I fucking love that. It never happened, but I got that from Urbance as well, that animated Kickstarter thing that never went anywhere, unfortunately,

but I like fucking, oh, I love when people play hard with the colors and shit like that. Incredible animation, freeze framing, multiple art styles, chaos. Hey, this is going to be a really strange thing to ask you, but I'm looking at KillTube, and this is unabashedly woolycore. Are you going to try Zenless Zone Zero? Every time a trailer has played for Zenless Zone Zero, I've been like, if one of these fucking Hoyo games is gonna do it.

It would be that one. If one of them is gonna do it, motherfucker. You know? Because like, it is, it's that style. Yep. I've seen a lot of Hoyo character design trailers and action scenes and someone sent in a big air battle with big explosions and fancy stuff and I'm like That's all fine. That's cool

But zedless trailer understands the aesthetic the color the designs the way the camera moves The the pauses the freeze frames the squash and stretch all that shit. It gets that flavor and I'm like, ah, that's really sick When I got that flavor off of some of those League of Legends music videos, I just watched those videos, to be fair, right? After Arcane, I went to go check out some of those videos and I saw some sick fucking shit, but that stuff is not actually League of Legends,

that's just supplemental material adopting it. If you wanna see a really fancy, oh God. What the fuck is it called? If you want to see like a fancy animation flex honk, I put out the fuck's it called. They put out a dancing scene that is just ridiculously. they spent just a ton of fucking animation money on it as a passion project. The thing is, of course, is that if you do something that looks woollycore, but your actual source material isn't, it's just a celebratory cool video, then it's like, I'll just watch the video and that'll be dope.

But if the whole thing you're making is that, then yeah, you might get me to take a look once or twice Zendla's zone zeros trailers have been fucking sick. Like I can't yeah the game so it's one of those weird things like I'm getting the new phone, so I'm like I'll probably give Genshin another shot and it has no controller support on Android because of a exclusivity deal with It has no controller support on Android because of an exclusivity deal with Apple. Like, Apple has the exclusive rights to miHoYo Games controller support. And that's disappointing, but at the same time, like, I am never gonna play a phone game with a fucking controller. The phone, like, I'm not carrying a controller in my phone, controller a fucking controller. The phone, like I'm not carrying a controller.

A phone controller in my pocket. Okay, so I was- When I go pick up food or when I go to the grocery store. So I was praising it, but that is ultimately what stopped me from beating World of Demons, the platinum phone game that you can play on Apple Arcade with a controller. Great game, really fun design. Awesome. Everything going on with it.

But to play it, you had to grab a controller and set it up and like play. You have to you have to. You had to like you had no. No, no, no, no, no. You could play with touch. But yeah, to play it like and to have it feel good for me. I think to my controller to it. But I'm not often setting up my phone on a table to sit there and play it that way, you know? If I'm at home, I'm going to play something on my computer or a console.

So the opportunities to play it that way were just fleeting. But it was awesome otherwise, you know? Yeah, I've played Genshin and Honkai with phone controls and they're completely fine. I assume it'll be the same thing with Zenless, even though it is a little faster. Yeah, but on a curiosity though, if you can give the option to connect a controller so that when I am home and I do feel like playing it,

I can do that, then that's fucking great. Well, Hoyo games also all come out on PC with full controllers. There you go, okay. Well, Hoyo games also all come out on PC. Full controllers. There you go. Okay. Yeah.

So, yeah. That's what it would take. All right. Let's take some letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail.com. That's castlesuperbeastmail.com. All right. Here's a simple one coming in from Kason who says,

dare LL Wooljay and Notorious PAT want to... Hey, man. Mm-hmm. Let me lick my lips for a minute. Something like a phenomenon. I wanted to know if you had a favorite working title for a piece of media you enjoy. An example would be how the Powerpuff Girls was originally called Whoopass Stew featuring the Whoopass Girls.

I did not know that. That's pretty funny. And the professor and they were made when the professor opened up a can of Whoopass. Really? I've never heard that. Other favorites are Disco Elysium at some point being called No Truce with the Furies. That is extra cool if you read Sacred and Terrible Error because you get the actual implementation of that phrase and where it comes from exactly. Ultimate Marvel was once known as Ground Zero.

I've never heard that. Huh. Interesting. And The Fast and the Furious had three Racer X, Redline, and Race Wars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what are your favorite projects? I mean, the one that jumps out into my mind is the Wii being the Revolution and the Dreamcast being the Katana. Exactly.

Project Revolution, Project Katana, Project Dolphin. Those are the big ones. Those are great. Yeah. Those are all way better than what we got. Oh, yeah. True. On the, yeah, on the docket, I didn't hit it, but Balletro got a big patch.

I'm looking for it right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's humongous. Yeah, yeah, it's a humongous patch. It's in beta, and then the full release is going to come out in about a week. I started going down the list of changes and it was like, okay, there's a couple of big things and then it's like, no, no, no, it's massive. It's changing the scaling of-

Oh, this is a very large- Yes. All high difficulty stakes are going to have anti-point requirement changes. It's going to change the way some advanced mechanics on higher difficulties work with legendaries. It's going to make it so that you always get a... Change the uncommon tag to make the uncommon Joker free? That's crazy! Yeah, it's going... It's a lot's a most of these again are happening at higher stakes main thing though is

this type of extensive changelist is Very interesting because it indicates that they're going to balance this game over time and keep up with they're gonna Aggressively balance this game over time Which is fucking interesting because I did not expect this game about cheating in cards to get balanced. I thought breaking it was the point. But it's like, yeah, the higher difficulties, admittedly, as you start getting to them, like I can imagine they can get really bullshit because one of them, for example, was there's a what's the there's a boss fight that that forces you to pick one card. And yeah, there's a change here that says, oh, that's not going to happen on joker-less runs, for example, where you have to beat the game

without a joker, you know, shit like that. It's like, well, you're just fucked in some cases. There's nothing you can do. So yeah, if you wanna see this thing that is like fucking a hundred different tweaks on patch 1.01c, that's gonna be rolling out soon. Yeah man, everybody's in. This is great. Did you see that some people have gone through the work of porting Bellatro to Android manually? I did not. I see there's, again, there's scam Bellatro iOS apps out

that are currently just stealing people's money and making them think they're getting game. No, I mean, there were people that like, here's how you install Linux on your phone in a partition to get Bell install Linux on your phone in a partition to get Belatra running on your phone. Yeah, I mean, because otherwise what? Steam deck and that's it, right?

So yeah, fuck. Yeah, big patch note for that. That's crazy. Any patch note whatsoever is like oh they're they're keeping up Thank goodness. I want the next patch note to be ported to Android Please that's a patch Okay, here's one coming in from chemo force who says Dear prawn Lords and shmup daddy's

My favorite bug is unique to a PC port of a game from Chronicles of Riddick doc assault on assault on Dark Athena Where I remember that yeah upon leaving the game running idle long enough for the the screen saver going to the screen saver Results in the game deleting your save file. There is no other fix that to simply disable screen savers all together What are some of your favorite bugs? So, I mean an all-time classic I just came across was in Dogfight 1942. Someone posted a bug that was like, I can't see the trees. How can I fix this? I can't see trees. And then the fix is set your computer date

back to 2012. Thank you very much. It works. Just like, like that's the problem. That's the solution. Incredible. Oh, man. Yeah, no. I mean a career of fucking terrible garbage that in many indicate, in many cases ends up just being indicative of like how lazy and or

lazy or crunched a dev might be on a given project. Yeah, one or the other. One or the other, you know. given project. Yeah, one or the other. One or the other. But one of the classics, fucking this car in this shitty mobile game causes shit to, the car doesn't work in this level and whatever, it was something bad, not like A class, but like B class was happening as a result and the fixes just remove all red cars from the game

You know, that's one of my favorite stories And then of course, there's the classic the dildo hunt in That's not a bug person. No that is that is Localization rules, you know, but anyway Yeah, set your set your your calendar back to 2012 to see the see the camera what game it is But my all-time favorite I'm sure someone in the chat will mention it was that it was discovered that if you uninstalled the game through its own uninstaller the Games uninstaller would go delete the drive

It was on and if you had installed it to your C drive where the game wants to be installed it would just format your C drive. Missed. Missed 2. And it would just break your computer. Man. The problem, the hardest, sorry, myth 2. Myth 2. The hardest thing too was that PC games did not have standards for a long time. There was just, yeah, do what you want. Fill out this sheet that puts it to display it's crock correctly on Steam,

but what it actually does, whatever, I don't care. Just do whatever. All right, and let's take a last one over here. Shumay says, are there any generally smaller mechanics that certain games do that after playing them make other games feel frustrating to play. Wasteland 3 has two great ones. Getting to loot an entire battlefield off of just one corpse so that you don't have to go and click on every one of them. That's a great mechanic. Some games have it and when you play those games it feels infuriating

to go to another one. Right. And the other is when you're controlling your whole group, you click on a door to unlock or trap disarm and the character that's most proficient will automatically go do it instead of the main one. Yeah, these are both fantastic, incredible mechanics that make it hard to go back. That's beautiful. Yeah, even though it's not, it does frustrate me to have to swap to Asterion to pick locks in dungeons.

Right. Um, it's... Oh, that's a function of the way the game handles multiplayer. Or having to get off my street server every time I want to pick up an item in or wave an infinite wealth. I'm gonna describe what I'm gonna term an anti-feature. You know how sometimes games will have animations to make things look pretty? And sometimes those animations will be you bending down to pick up an item? Yeah, remove those. You just want to click the button and have it

drop into your inventory? You didn't red dead to just remove okay okay what about though axe picking on or right that's fine because the whole point is that this takes time to pick at that's fine okay but just it's it's very similar to The olden days Hey, link you got 50 rupees. Wow, that's crazy. Like please stop Please I don't need it every time. I Mean, I think the ultimate in this is going back to any First or third person shooter before TwinSticks existed.

You go back to play a third person shooter on PlayStation 1 or GoldenEye on N64 and having to like figure out what type of, is it L1, R1, left, right, turning Mega Man Legends? I beat Quake 2 on the PlayStation 1 and that was wild. Or C, C buttons to strafe and then stick to move up and down but left right is inverted and you're just like, how? How did we do this? Woof.

Man. L1R1 as a part of your navigation is crazy. Yeah. navigation is crazy Yeah, do you ever play Kingdom Hearts 1 on the PlayStation 2 or did you just play the remaster? I think it was wait the remasters the same isn't it? The remaster has you controlling the camera with the fucking no, you know I don't know even when I saw some of Kingdom Hearts 1 I remember. Okay. I Okay. Well, I'm just I just unlocked a memory. I was like, did I touch Kingdom Hearts for like an hour or two? Because I vaguely remember that. I vaguely

remembered like touching Kingdom Hearts for like an hour or two. And it's like, No, no, no, no. In the club spaces at college, I asked our friend that we know the artist artist, who had it to record, to play the, she said, we were talking about it, she said how amazing it was, I was like, I don't have the console. So she recorded herself playing the first hour or two of the Kingdom Hearts, and I just watched that.

That's crazy. I watched my friend who recorded a VHS of them playing the beginning of Kingdom Hearts. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, no. Even though I had an analog stick, it was like use L2 and R2 for the camera because they wanted the right analog stick to be controlling your move set, like moving your menus. your move set, like moving your menus. I mean, Mega Man Legends, like after enough time, you still, you get used to it.

But, and it has- Well, it's built around it. Yeah, well there are boss fights where you strafe and you're running down, and you're running through the city and you're deliberately wanting to lock into a certain direction, but it still is just like, ugh. It just feels going back to that, it's just unintuitive versus anything afterwards where it's like, oh yeah, you can pick up and not think about it.

Anyway, that's the biggest one I can think of. All righty. Is there anything else like that? Nah, I'm done. I have no ideas. I mean, Monster Hunter thumb thing, right? Oh yeah, the ability to use your buttons to swing your weapons. Definitely hard to go back after enjoying that.

Yo, no, you know what? For any game like Monster Hunter, when they added item sets, that was a big deal. Because before that, you would have to go and manually put in all the items that you used, and it added like 10 minutes to every single hunt. I will defend analog stick to attack in three contexts, technically. Yeah, what's that? Raiden. Raiden.

Yep. And Fight Night 3. Yeah, that was pretty good. That's it. And Skyward Sword, I was right, I told you all. And Ape Escape, yes. Die on that hill.