CSB363: Microsoft Going Their Own Way

! Yo-Yo! Good afternoon, Willie. How are you? Not too bad. How are you? I'm feeling a little silly. I'm chilly, which is uncommon for me. You guys, Paige and I were streaming in here last night, but we were playing a PS5 game, we played Shadow of the Colossus, which means the PS5 was on. Heated up the room. Which meant it, we were like, oh, it's hot in here. I was like, I'll just go turn off the heat. So then I turned off the heat, and then we'd finish the stream, and then I thought nothing of it. Well, today is much colder than it was fucking yesterday, in general. So I came into the office. It's like fucking 12 degrees in here. Huh. Because I had the heat off. You see, the PS5 tricked me. Over here, I'm open in windows because we're getting too hot. But, yeah, no, that's, we're having the exact opposite. Shit's getting warmer. It's wild how a console can affect the climate in the room it is in. The PS5 is the most useful multi-purpose space heater I've ever used. Wow. It's crazy how much heat that thing puts out. Like, I have a full-scale PC right next to it that is fan-cooled. It's not like water-cooled, puts out half the heat at tops. It's crazy. But maybe certain games cause it to, you know, get that extra little, get a couple extra degrees out of it. No, it's like, is it on? Like, I had the console overheat and shut itself off playing Astro Boy. Wow. And Final Fantasy XVI. Wow. I have not seen anything like that. Yeah, I was streaming Astro Boy and I'm like, do-do-do. And then the PS5 said, fuck it, I'm out. And I'm like, I guess that's enough Astro Boy. You got a decent ventilation system going? Oh, Astro Bot. This shows how much I can trust it. I assumed you meant Astro Bot. Yeah, no, it's like standing, it's on like a coffee table. Like, with nothing around it. It's like fully exposed to the elements. Yeah, well. So, yeah, we, there's a, I guess a bunch of things this week. There is an uncommonly high amount of overlap today. So we should probably get a move on with some of it. How do you feel about the nightmare that is a human shaped homonculus named Ditto? I love that Ditto is getting pushed. I also love this. Because this is something that's been hilarious and fun and kind of creepy for years now. And Pokemon has not leaned into it anywhere near as much as it could have. And I think that it's dope to see this happening here. The weirdness of the human shaped like flopping around person pretending to be the trainer is great. I love everything about how weird it is. There's so many little tiny details that they're doing like a pretty good job in like general shapes, but anything specific is like complete shit show. Well, like the hat is melting off because it's not, it's just goo. It's just more goo. Jotaro style. And I would even say like the, like, you know that they wanted to lean into the weirdness part because the fact that when learning new moves, Ditto doesn't completely just transform and do the moves. I'm a half-asset. It comes out of the arms and yeah, you get vine whip arms or like, you know, water barf and all that stuff. And it's like, oh, you're doing the creepy thing that everyone draws the comics about, you know. It's great. Love that. And that weirdness also applies to Pukopia's like dialogue. Like I have not gotten that far into it, but like I had a squirtle chasing around a charmander who was like, bro, get the fuck away from me. Like you keep spitting water everywhere and it's going to get on my tail and I'm fucking freaked out. Can you not do that, man? I think overall, yeah, a big part of the bit here is like having the Pokemon talk and you can understand what they're saying and just hearing what the fuck they're up to or what their mannerisms are beyond just saying their name without having to be like Meowth or a special exception, you know. Yeah. And it's like, hey, did you know that these hyper-specialized animals are fucking weird? Did you know that Venusaur talks with an atta atta? I did not know that. I did not know that. Venusaur uses atta atta. That's weird. Yeah. Think about that one for a minute. Let that stew. Whatever that means. How far did you get when you were playing Pocopia? I had a moment of like almost sequence breaking because the moment I got, the moment I got the ability to punch the fucking walls open, I just went all the way to the coast and found the Magikarp. Yeah. That's actually like kind of what you're supposed to do. Oh, okay. Well then, yeah, I did. I just went all the way through. Did you hang out with Slowpoke? No, no, I didn't know. I basically just found the Magikarp and came back around. I found just some of the beginner ones, you know, not much. Yeah. So we're talking about Pokemon Pocopia for the Nintendo Switch too, if you haven't picked up on that. I'm really thrilled that I played Stardew Valley like two weeks ago to completion because it really, really helped me contextualize what the fuck Pocopia actually is. And now I have the pieces I need to understand the entire like village simulator genre from tip to tip because at the one tip, you have Animal Crossing, which is like nearly exclusively character oriented. Yes. Right? I need this kind of shit in my house. I need this and very little infrastructure. On the flip side, on the absolute ass into the world, you have stuff like Satisfactory and Factorio in which the only character in that game is pavement and pipes and machinery. The social aspect is not. It's entirely infrastructure. And this Pocopia lives on the, it lives on the like character side of that divide, but not as far as I thought, because I did discover pieces that will lead to future infrastructure. I need your help to make this island better, but I also want to make you happy. And so you're you being satisfied as a part of the goal to you're making friends and your friends are helping you work unlike just pal world, the world in it, which it almost feels like, hey, we got to cleanse the fucking palette a little bit by having the labor that these Pokemon do be voluntary help. And you're also making their lives cozier. Like when did Pocopia start development? The moment the moment power will drop. Does it feel no no no no no no I'm sure I'm sure Stardew and all that or from, but it actually feels like well it's it's Dragon Quest Builders three like that's like that's an existing genre that Tecmo co a makes that is literally this it's just Dragon Quest instead of Pokemon. Okay. But it feels like the idea for this was like within the power world hype cycle of we would like a wholesome working with your Pokemans. If this came at you pre Pats Pastures, you might have hated it. It did. It was announced before you started prior to Pats Pastures. Okay. And I was like who the fuck gives a shit about this fucking Pokemon thing you don't even fight. And I was saying yeah because I was like no that looks interesting right away. And I like the part where like it seems like a post apocalyptic post apocalyptic setup, you know, and the the I did like the ditto gross part. I did like right away. I was like, oh yeah, ditto is gross. I like it. And so now with the context of just cozy. So there are little bits and pieces that I can see actually will scale up not into like large scale manufacturing, but like definitely more than nothing. Like, did Scyther do anything goofy for you in your playthrough? Scyther, he helped me cut the wood up and yeah, that's pretty much it. Yeah. So like I need law. I need, you know, chopped lumber to make things. And hey, how do I get chopped lumber? I hand it to I had logs to Scyther. It's like, okay, I found a block that turns water pressure or water flow on and off. Okay. Channel. Okay. Yeah. And oh yeah, I found that. Yeah, you found that. That's right next to the Magikarp, right? Yeah. So the so I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to talk about the thing that happens right after. Like literally tennis. Whatever it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. So you need to make it rain for whatever reason and the tango was like, bro, you need a fucking slow poke in here. Slow pokes can make it rain. Tangos. I didn't even know there was an evolution. Yeah. And so I'm like, I'm going to go down and you get the slow poke and the slow poke comes out of the ocean right next to where you found the Magikarp, right? And you're like, hey, slow poke, what's up? And he's like, hey, and he talks like a, he talks like he's stoned and he's fucking slow and his dialogue takes forever. And the sloth from Zootopia. Absolutely. And so the quest then becomes like, Hey, you got to get slow, you got to get slow poke to go talk to tango over at the busted Pokemon center, right? And you're like, Hey, can you come with me? And he's like, I really don't want to, but can you, can you just water the grounds between here and there? So it's softer on my feet and build staircases the whole way there, please. And then in one of the loading screen tips, it says, Hey, did you know that Pokemon move faster on, on paths that have been watered and restored? Okay. Okay. Okay. So you get to building a road from the poker center to the, the, the coast for travel. And then you tell slow poke, Hey man, I got it. And he goes, okay. And he takes like 10 to 15 minutes to walk that incredibly small distance and like you can't make it go faster at all. So it's like, okay, fine. Fuck it. I guess I'll go put more decorations around Charizard's fucking patch of grass. Now, now I feel like there's a, also a fine line where there's an upper, there's an upper limit on how tasks can be handled. I think I'm, I don't know what the end game looks like here, but I have to imagine you can only bring a task up to your Pokemon and ask them to do it wherever they are on the spot and that they probably do not want any part of this game to be picking up that Pokemon and putting it here on a line. And having a task place where they're getting at it, right? Especially when you got the little builders with the fucking wood in their hands or those dudes, the assembly line is the assembly line is probably what they're trying to avoid imagery of. So what's, what's smart is that the default layout of the area, it makes it so that you need, you need grass next to a tree to get a scythe right and you need a boulder with shade to get a timber. So just so happens the two perfect spots to do that are right next to the poker center, which is where you probably put your work, work bench down. So the two guys you get right away that are part of the manufacturing arm of your Pokemon settlement happened to end up sitting next to each other, but you can go further like as long as you meet their needs and they're happy. Yeah, you can move these bitches around to wherever you could absolutely get a line of fucking trees and throw the grass and create the conditions in cythers and cutters. They just happen to live there. They just happen to live there. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, your whole is efficient because you can give him as many logs as you want and he'll turn it into hell. I'm ever many chopped woods that you okay. But this needs to be like they need to be free range no matter what at the end of the day. Well, you could do, you know, you could do you could build a house. Oh, no, you could spend the resource. There's a lot of resources to build a house and then you could make a row of houses and then you could fill the interiors of the house with the things that they need and want and that way you can place them wherever you would happen to like and their coziness can be maintained and then they would hang out right next to their house. Yes, yes, I see. You're basically making them just comfortable enough to not complain. Yep. And thus you have accidentally created the Pokemon middle class slash slash the surf state. Yes. And like I got to I got a little further where like I got a hoot hoot and he started to complain like a lot because he happened to be next to all the other Pokemon and his complaint wasn't that he was next to the others. His complaint is that hoot hoot likes a dark space. But my Charmander and my Charizard and my Vianzor and my Drifloon they're all like I want campfires and lights everywhere. So hoot hoot was miserable. I just chucked him off into the cave where you start the game, right? But now that means that any Pokemon that likes darkness or caves or rocks is going to end up there. And so we'll have a secondary Pokemon settlement of the cave people. OK. I I also got a combi, you know, early. That was one of the ones that popped up. He just gives you a bunch of shit he finds on the fucking floor. And that reminded me. I was like, oh, yeah, like all Gen 1 jokes aside, there was a bunch of cool ones. I enjoyed in like X and Y because Vespiquen 300. So it's definitely more than Gen 1. Yeah. Vespiquen was on my my final team in that. Besides like Zangus and Chestnut and Throw and Sock, you know. But no, yeah, it was it was a, you know, a little start like that was. I feel like the goal was implied to be rebuild the Pokemon center. And then you get your full town looking vibe, right? At some point, that's that's going to be the. So like after you get the slow poke there, like becomes this like very involved tutorial about raising the humidity of the area. Oh, and like the humidity of the area is like, OK. Hit those sparkly rocks on the wall to get more water into the area. Make sure to route the water to the horsey statue that's in the back there. There's more water. Right. Bring the trees back to life, plant more grass, you know, these kinds of things. You got to get this place humid. But at a certain point, the Charmander and Charizard are going to be like, this sucks, actually. It's too humid in here. I don't like it. I need somewhere drier. So now we need to create different spaces. Now we need to create the fire ghetto. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. We need to we need the segregation of the types. Yes. It's too wet in here. It's we to, yeah, natural environments, of course. And I got I got a little bit of a preview of where the game is going and like the very, very, very long thing. So if you feel like it, Willie, as soon as you start the game and get the rock smash, you can go look at what the game's post game content looks like. Oh, just punch your way through to it. So, you know, did you find Drifloon? No. So, you know how you're if you're staring straight at the poker center, there's like a wall that you can punch through to your left. OK. Right. If you go through there, there's a bridge that goes way off into the horizon. And in order to cross that bridge, you need to you need to have rock punch to pick up blocks and then blocks down so that you can cross the bridge. And when you go to cross the bridge, it says, hey, you you as a new player might definitely want more experience before you go to this location. Do you still want to go to this location? OK, OK. And I went, fuck, yeah, I do. And it's a different. And you walk through and the post game zone is Pallet Town. And it is. It is it is like four times larger than the area you start in, like from horizon to horizon, it's absolutely fucking enormous. OK. And it is completely flat. Yeah. Yeah. And it is like there's a mountain area in the middle, but it's like it's a giant flat space. It looks like a Minecraft map. OK. And this is where, OK, do you have most of the decks? Do you have all the technology? Do you have everything you want to do? Build your fucking whole society. However, the Ditto. Ditto restart civilization. Yeah. That's crazy. Like it's it's absolutely it's wildly intimidating. And I I wanted to check something. So I left and then went to go back in and it still told me, hey, man, this is for much later in the game. Are you sure? So until you like beat the main quest, it's going to be like, hey, maybe you're not ready for this. Maybe you should know what the fuck you're doing. And what was there was also a different, multiple different poker centers that had been fallen into disrepair. Right. I wonder if there will ever be any sort of hint or explanation or do we just leave it to the imagination? It's probably going to be some nonsense like the ending from one of the games took place and all humanity died or something like that. Something, you know, every all humanity evolved. Right. And joined up in the great big poker ball. Or they reached, you know, they reached enlightenment and they all became energy beings. Yeah. No, one one giant Pokémon ball, but one giant Pokéball that looked like Ray Ionami lit up and everyone turned into light and zapped into it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, humans and Pokémon used to be we came from the same DNA origins. But yeah, it is it is a good feeling, satisfying, good looking, charming, feature rich, good music. Like it's it's it's got a lot going for it. And on top of that, did those fucking weird and gross. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Um, it is it is funny jumping into that from it just in contrast, because I was playing another high octane game. Oh, you're playing the baby simulator baby trader space warlord baby trading simulator. And I watched you play that for like 10 minutes and I'm like, I don't know what the fuck is going on. Yeah, it was absolutely baffled. So no, so big. But the difference in just like firing synapses is massive to the point where like you need to be in a cozy mood. Playing Pocopia. If I'm depending on the mood I'm in, I might be like sleepy, you know, going through it. But for something that you can just pop on, do a little tinker in here and there, upkeep a little of this or a little of that. Maybe go find a new one and finding finding the Pokémon is fast and easy. You know, it feels like they have a like a very I like loaded in my game save. Like I streamed it and then I just like later that night. I'm like, I'm going to tidy up some of the spaces. And I loaded in and there were like three Pokémon waiting in the tall grass because they were night Pokémon. OK, time of day. Right, right, right. And that's Pocopia uses a real time clock. Yeah, OK. And so ultimately, that's another part of it, too, where just like discovering a new one. Like it happens so often and frequently that you're like, yeah, let me pop it in and go see what else is showing up, you know, which is nice if there's 300 of them to get. So yeah, pretty cool so far. Um, well done. I just it's one of those things that the only the only not complaint, but like the thing I have with it is I'm like, this should have existed years ago, right? We should like Pocopia should be a franchise on its third entry right now. I actually totally agree. I might take my my my, you know, blue sky character limit thoughts on Pocopia after I finished streaming it was. I think the Pocopia uses Pokemon, the brand, better than Pokemon games because it's like you get to actually dive into the nitty gritty of the Pokemon rather than them just being like move lists with a piece with a graphic. And and that's also what I liked about Concierge and, you know, this the the the Pokemon stuff or just like it's almost like Discovery Channel. Just like straight up focusing on them themselves and yeah, hanging out and the the the the what's the word? Whatever, biodiversity or, you know, the flora and fauna. Like, did you did you get a move from Magikarp? Yeah. Yeah. Splash or whatever flop. And it's like like Magikarp, this absolute dog shit loser, motherfucker gives you the ability to jump and it's the best. It's great. You could possibly get. It's an absolutely vital mandatory part of your kit. It's part of your budget. Magikarp is worthless doing it, flopping around. And it's the whole the whole tutorial is a joke. But then in the end, you're like, oh, it's it's literally a thank you, Magikarp. It's a platforming tool. You finished my kit for me. I love you. It was great. Yeah. So so Pocopia saw it so far from just a little a little preview there. I also very much follows like the Stardew. Like when I got to the Pokemon Center and they're like, you need to feed the Pokemon Center these materials. I was like, oh, OK, this is like the community center. And then I got the first like said, I got I did the first like cash in on the Pokemon Center. Do you know what the second set is? Who the second set of items is you need to feed me 10 of each of these farmed crops. Oh, after. And I like, oh, I have seeds. And it's like, no, you must till the soil first. Yeah. OK. Actually create society and then the Poké Center will return. And with it, Nurse Jenny will just be alive inside of it as it's built. Oh, I'm pretty sure Nurse Joy is like a clone or some weird shit. Like the Jennies are sisters. I think the joys are freaks. Not human. Not not human ditto all along. Oops, all ditto. Oh, did you fall off a high place? Not yet. So when you fall off a high location, you don't take any fall damage. But when ditto hits the fucking ground, they deformed and go and yeah. And splat back into a regular ditto. When you when you're crawling into the water as well, same thing. Ditto just becomes ditto, you know, and then has to turn back. The game never allows you to forget that you are a human facsimile. Don't get caught up. Don't get caught up in your human form. Like you're not a person. Every time you stare at your weird face and your eyes blinking. So I love that the title of the title screen in that game is made entirely out of photos that you have taken. Because every photo I take in Pocopia is me doing a selfie with the horrible ditto face. So just looking really unhappy. Just like while I'm like photo bombing real Pokemon. There's something kind of like kind of wild to imagining like humans discovering an island that is running as if people were there, but they're not and it's just Pokemon Pokemon can protect themselves. This is some fucking Yoko Taro shit, right? Like to come years later and find an island where structures and electricity and buildings are functioning and not a human to be found is peak fucking near. Yeah, we we really weren't necessary at all. Were we? Oh, darn. Anyways, that was one of a couple different things. I guess I'll just jump through some other games I was playing. I mentioned Space Warlord baby trading simulator. That is straight forward to the point. You need to you need it is it is you need you. You need to invest. You need to buy low sell high. And when you feel like life is about to take a shit on that baby, you short the fuck out of it. So I was I watched you do a full. Baby. Yeah. And you were like you were clicking like, oh, do you want to know about the baby's health or like baby's income? Yeah. And then you watch the life events happen and they discovered farming and they started a farm. They got a co-op. Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. And it was rising, rising, rising. Yeah. OK. And then they got shot by a security guard breaking into a building. Yes. Yes. And then the stocks and that baby crashed. Absolutely. You didn't hit any buttons. And then you came away with it having made money. And I don't know what the game was. I don't like. It's because because the deal, the deal is real simple. And if you watch, if you if you watch stock trading and you see the things go up and then then then shit happens and then it goes down, it's all nothing. It's all fake. It's all bullshit. And thus investing in the simulated lives of alien babies as they grow to like over one hundred and fifty years old, mind you, I mean, is is, you know, all that's left in in this space warlord economy. And yeah, sometimes, you know, like they'll they'll whatever enlisted the army or marry for love and have all these things where their stocks are going up in that baby's life. But then they'll challenge like Monsanto Corp. Or, you know, they'll get addicted to a substance and go and start abusing it horribly and fall back and then, or they might go to rehab and then up and then down, you know, and and it's real simple. If you buy low stocks and then the baby's life improves, then the stocks go up and then you can sell when it's higher and make some cash. So is the goal to short the baby right before they get addicted to drugs? Well, shorting. Yes. So the mechanic of shorting, because this is essentially the deal. I mean, if you if you watch the GameStop era, if you watch the the the Apes Together, strong, deep fucking value GME chronicles, right, the Robin Hood era. It's when you believe that the thing you're investing in is about to take a huge shit. When you think it's about to to drop off the face of the earth, right? And you are essentially buying a promise at the price that the thing is currently at and locking that in for a period of time. And if that shit goes way, way, way lower, then you make out huge. But the problem with with that is if you are, you don't have to actually have any money in your hand. You can just you can just completely. There's no there's no you can lose infinite money or you can gain infinite money. Whereas buying a stock, usually you're like, well, I'm spending the thing I'm holding to get that, you know. But the infinite potential of highs or lows, depending on how bad it gets or how great it gets is, you know, maximum profits. Therefore, you want the baby's life to get as horrible as possible to watch your watch your games, watch your, your, your, you know, better margins, better, how much leverage you have on this? Almost none in any direction. No, you cannot nudge at all. And that is what makes it so difficult. Right. What you can do is use the you have basically like aliens, psionic researchers that can give you a portfolio on what they think the baby's life is going to be like. And sometimes it's low accuracy for how long they're going to live, or sometimes it's high accuracy for what the floor price is going to be on them. And the consultants will basically give you a range that you can go, hey, for eight percent of the profit you make, I'll tell you what the life expectancy is of this baby, you know, and then you go, OK, sure, I'll take that. And then you know right before the time is up, when to get the fuck out. Because if you are expecting the baby to make it one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy years and then they start fucking joining a terrorist organization, right? Then you're like, oh, you see the heartbeat starts getting more rapid. You're like, oh, I don't know if there's one's going to make it, you know. And if you obviously are caught holding the bag when the when the contract expires, the contract being the baby, then you lose all your money. So that's bad. Well, this sounds. Like. Gambling. But it's not gambling. Well, hold on, I'm not in a casino. It's the stock market. No one's buying me drinks. There's no chips in my hands. What are you talking about? OK, my mistake. My mistake. This is real economy. We're this is real business. That's right. It's all right. And we're bullish. We're bullish. We believe we believe this is going down. You and your Barrett mentality can get the fuck out of here. I'm not fucking leaving. I'm tapping that bull balls and we're we're tripling down. And so when it turns out, right? I. So the thing is I was approaching it like like I mean, approaching it like real stocks where you're just like, I don't know, maybe now, maybe now. That seems to be a bad event. So maybe now. And it turns out that's not actually what you ought to be doing. I played it a little bit more afterwards for myself. And there is gameplay. And the game is there is gameplay. And the gameplay I was when I streamed it was not. I kind of discovered it a little bit, but playing the steam page for this playing it a bit for myself more afterwards. I discovered that the gameplay is actually a lot of reacting to the event the moment it happens and instantly buying in or selling out on the just frame. Right. So if you if the text pops up that says something catastrophic has happened in the baby's life within the frame, it pops up. If you can react quickly and hit that short button, you can maximize, you know, there is reaction time to this, which you are you are, which was not a part of what I expected because real stock market. I mean, you can you can try to react. But oftentimes everybody's reacting with their with their. Well, that's why, Wally, you would get a robot. You get a robot. React faster than you. Yes. Do it for you. Yes, you set your. Or. You would call your friend or or works adjacent to the industry and be like, what's up? Now, now, of course, if you don't have if you if you don't if you don't have the threshold for volatility, if you if you if risk is too much, then you can set your upper and lower limits so that when you automatically hit an upper point, it'll just sell out. Or if you automatically you can hit that you can hit or you can hit triggers. You can hit floors and triggers on the way up and on the way down. Now you're investing. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So you can put in a stop order that says, all right, I don't care what's happening. If it goes lower than this, get me the fuck out. You know, so you can use you can use the robots to absolutely control and tighten the situation up. But in the game, in the video game, what I discovered after streaming was just frame reactions is actually how you are meant to win and how you are meant to play. And the faster you can read whether it was a good event or a bad event and go the better you do. And then, of course, you know, when you when things go horribly wrong, you got a loan shark that can, you know, for at risk of your life, that can loan you some money to dig you out of a hole. And the great thing is that like you're playing as you're not just playing as yourself, but you're playing as the investors at the terminal that they're that they're investing in. They're you're you're and they're all different characters with different lives that are horribly fucking just the most ultra liberal nightmare. Right. One motherfucker is a ghost that is already dead and their life is tethered. And they're like, ah, now that I'm dead, I finally am free to play the stocks the way I want to without this mortal coil being in the way. You know, like it is it is it's crazy, you know. And I mean, even when you do like the first character, it's like you do well and like the ending paragraph of like their successful run is as the lights blink as the police are pulling you away, you look back at the size of the boat you got and feel a sense of joy before you get shoved in the back of the wagon. And the size of the boat you got is just is like that's your ending is like how much how good do you feel about the boat you got as you're being arrested 100% of the time. Oh, I'm looking at I'm looking at this loan shark guy. He's like a T-Rex and it says debt bailout and 10 grand, however, but next time he gets to kill you. Yes, yes. And when he does, you get a nice big prompt that says legally murdered. You know, so that's hilarious and such. But I bring this all to you with a fair warning while I was playing the game. I texted you about this. It crashed and when it crashed and I booted it back up, the same file was corrupted and it did not allow me to continue playing the game. When I went to click continue, it just kicked me back to the main menu. And when I clicked, there was no new, excuse me, new game, you were just stuck. So the game completely just stopped working. That like the A class fucking, you know, unshipped level failure. And I was able to solve it by going to the save, finding the safe folder and deleting the actual save and, you know, doing it that way. And I'm just reminded how it fucking it's so annoying that like steam games because everything's all over the place, saving is not universal. Whereas on consoles, it is actually quite complicated. Right. Some saves are in your documents. Some saves are in your app data folder. Some saves are in the game steam apps folder. Whatever the fuck they want to do, they do. Some games are in steam steam apps folder in documents, but they're all labeled by number and they're actually attached to the steam cloud save cache. So if you want to delete the saves, you actually have to load the game online, then go offline, then delete the same thing, go back online and make a new save. Because God forbid you start up the new save after deleting the files and then it updates with the cloud and then you lose what you just did. Right. It's horrendous. It's dog shit. It's awful. It's completely not user friendly. And consoles have this over steam by fucking leaps and bounds and miles. Like when you go manage your save data on any system, that's the game. There's the save. There's the there's the date that it updated. Upload or not. Delete whatever. And simple save data management is just something that after all this time, PC Steam can still still can't fucking figure out. It would be really nice if games if there was a like, hey, come on, can you save the save games in the God in the fucking folder that the fucking game is in? Yeah. Please. Like you still have to jump through hoops to figure out exactly what save your thing is because that's like you have more than one. Some games have saves that are options. Some games have multiple save files that are like each slot is a different one. You never know, right? They again, it's handled differently. So you still have to go digging for the right file. But if at least universalized the save data location, it wouldn't be as bad. But it's fucking awful. So in the end, I managed to do that and then I ran it back and then it worked and it was OK. But that is absolutely fair grounds to refund that game. If anyone like I'm like, that isn't I am willing to anti recommend this if you can run into a situation where the game crashes. And then if you're not willing, because I'm willing to go deal with the files and bullshit, but if you're not that then what then your game just stops working. And then every time I have to find a save file, I literally go to the PC gaming wiki. Yeah, because it's faster than looking around for it. Yeah. Or you have to are you run into the fucking discussion forums, you know? And and it's not something we're uninstalling and reinstalling the game makes a difference because your save file is not connected to that. You uninstall the game, you reinstall it, the cloud re put you know, down, redow loads your save and it's still corrupted and the game still doesn't work. So something even even a clean wipe does not fix the situation. So Space Warlord sounds like you had fun with that. Space Warlord baby trade trading simulator was a whole lot of fun. And then it wasn't kind of like day trading kind of like, you know, it truly, in fact, and the fact that the game stopped working for a while. It's almost like they took the shirt off my back, you know, the true Wall Street experience. We are not all going to get a congressional hearing has been held. You may not day trade until the saves are rectified. I did. I did. You know, Reggie was asking though, he's like, is there any accounts that we can follow, though, to like simplify this baby trading? And I was like, well, yeah, I mean, you know, Space Pelosi can fucking you just you just you spot you follow that and your shits through the roof. You know, you don't even have to make decisions anymore, really. Anyway, how do they know? I think just being in Washington gives you just an intuition. Space Washington, Mollie, Space. Space Washington being in space. You got to keep you got to keep the gimmick consistent. Yes, of course. Well, what else are we talking about? What Earth doesn't exist anymore? Of course, we're talking about Washington Orion's belt. You know, thank you. And and yeah, being out there just gives you an intuition for the way that the market fluctuates. It's simple. So so that that that was baby trading simulator. And I mean, those two games back to back must have been some fucking whiplash. The whiplash is insane. Whiplash is insane. And like the newscaster that's talking about how the market is crashing and how baby trading is the only thing like that. He's getting off the table to fucking scream at the TV about why you need to short the babies and how regulations ruined everything. Yeah, good, good, good times there. Good times. OK, so a couple other things this week. The. Yeah, so I had a time popping in Neo three. That game is really good. And when my son goes to school, I'll finally play the rest of it. It's it's great. It is really nice. Really good. Yeah, it's really nice to feel just the way the end wave of the quality of life that's been occurring for probably a decade now. The menus just go and go and go. But also you will you will find yourself drowning in the subsystems. Yeah. And this is what it is to come to later to a Neo game, you know, to find yourself at the the the life cycle that the previous two have won through. I finally get what people are talking about when they're like, don't worry about this, this and that until later. Because like there are like, you know, the for example, Neo three has the randomized loot, right? And it's like and now now that it will allow me to auto equip shit based on like defense, yes, I can finally see what they're talking about. And what it is is a one or two percent difference in my light attack stamina use doesn't mean shit compared to five more defense. Yeah. And if you don't care about like dealing because, you know, Souls game, you pick up some armor after you getting through getting through an area and it's like you randomly drops and you go, oh, shit. And it's a big deal to suddenly have your whole look be different and then have this massive change in your stats or whatever the case is. You know, yeah. But in this, you're just fucking grabbing purple, pink, fucking blue, whatever, all the different rarities and and as you're good. That's what it means. And as you're grabbing it, like the fact that it comes flying out of the corpse and you're just mashing the button, it's like, OK, you can make an option to just automatically have that fly into you. And then which I did. Yeah. And then when you go to your equipment, you pick what role do you want? We'll give you the best in slot for the role you're looking for. Do you want your equip load at medium? OK, be or hire. Yeah. So what I did is I had it automatically fly into my character and then I had it automatically set to B role for Samurai, a role for Ninja. Right. And then I set up an option that's pretty deep in there. You probably didn't even see it yet, which is I want you to just fucking dismantle every single white rarity item in the game. The instant you hit a fucking line. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. I would never like you play it for a couple hours and then you're like, oh, I'm never equipping a fucking white item ever again. Yeah. And I can imagine the final layer of this is and at the end of whatever background calculations you're doing automatically, put this glamour on and never change it. That. Yes. Exactly. Right. So you're like, I have my look glamour unlocks or did you even pick the fucking item up at all? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like you have your your glamour final look and then you're just eating stat changes as you play the game. So now people will say and they're correct that the games have had multiple of these features in the past and they totally have. But the one that ties it all together is just fucking put me at medium role now. Like that means I went from playing Neo2 where I was doing like half hour. No, and it's 10 minutes of inventory management after each level to fucking nothing at all. Outside of me doing the first big, big mega dungeon and going, some of these demon weapons have unique moves on them. I will put this one on because I want to learn the unique move. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But not even talking about the familiarity, but you then get into the whole like exactly setting the slots of each move, what you want it to be. And then on top of that, you the fact that I can go in and be like, you know what, I'm hitting this crucible and I'm hitting it a little underleveled because of the crucible, the cruise. I'm cruisin this cruise, the crucible. That's how you say it. I'm hitting this cruise a little bit underleveled because I'm L.P. and I'm trying to move things forward. Right. So what I probably would have done was on my own time was run around the first area and like, you know, see what every corner had and clean it up before we hit this. But in this case, I didn't do that. So I'm going in and I'm getting one combo fucking wiped out by the bigger enemies. OK, well, I'm stuck in here for now. So fair enough. Thankfully at each one of these bonfires, the respect is free. Instantly free. So like free with an item like hit literally three bucks. That's it. So I'm like, yeah, never mind. Actually, I'm going to pull my points out of strength and put it into deck so I can hit harder with my into skill so I can hit harder with my Kusari gamma. And then that'll help me push past some of these harder enemies. You know, just change your build on the fly between bonfires as needed with no drama associated for maximum fun. And it's like the characters, the challenges, the bosses, the movesets. That's all it's going to be hard enough. You're going to be challenged by the shit you're coming up against, you know, like they're going to rock you, they're going to exhaust you. You're going to get your stamina broken and you're going to get ripped in half. So like, yeah, make your build, use your points to the best of your ability. And if you also want to press R three to get your soul gems out of your pocket and add just the amount you need to get to the next level, one level up. Phenomenal stuff. So Neo three is really, really just feels smooth through all of that. And every edge sanded. And I haven't even seen what it's like to get back because I don't even know if a blacksmith is still a thing in this game or not. Oh, yeah. But I'm assuming so because, yeah, there's a whole lot of blacksmith shitting that you do the primary use of the blacksmith is to fully smooth out a part of the game that you don't even really realize at the point you're at to smooth out. And that is I would like to use a Kusari gamma. I have not gotten a pretty good Kusari gamma in a while. I'm going to feed the parts of all this bullshit I picked up into the blacksmith and they will use the recipe to make the best Kusari gamma I have. I will now have a leveled blue or whatever appropriate Kusari gamma that will carry me until I get the next one off of a drop. Phenomenal stuff. And as somebody who hates dealing with percentages below 10 in anything, I think 10 is the minimum. I think 10 is the absolute single digit percentages. I hate dealing with them. You were I want the lowest percentage I see to be 30. I'm telling you, like I'm like, and I'm most willing to forgive it when we're talking about crit because crits are crazy. But most things when you're telling me that I get a two to seven percent fuck off with that, right? So as someone who doesn't give a shit about any of that and will just completely ignore it and who wants to just use the move set against the enemies and enjoy the combat for what it is, it's nice that this is here. It's background and it's as engaging or as limited as you want it to be. The knowing that the strength of these games can be either the person who is struggling through but has an amazing set that can just let them eat, hit and fuck up and drink and get back in there. And you've got the ammo to bow and arrow everyone from a distance. And, you know, like you just don't engage because you've systemed it the encounter down or to get in there and then use your perfect pulsing and perfect ninja parries and perfect dodging to cleanly fight through. You can take that approach as well. And like, I'm obviously like, I like that part. So automate the rest, please. You know, I think one of the complaints people had is that they had weapons that like Kusaragama and they're like, oh, no, Kusaragama is a ninja weapon. Now that means I lose like half the stance moves, right? The ninja shit has so much going on with it that I don't. I don't miss the stances. And also there's now like like a shit ton of weapons. I mean, I bought the high and low stance, you know, for samurai mode, but I spent most of my time in Inja mode. The ability looks very good. It's so much. Yeah. The one you're staying higher on stamina, right? It's more it's more efficient to you've got the recovery. You're faster. You're faster. You've got better defensive options for dodging for rolling out. And then in the Kusaragama's case, it was the the tech move that used your meter was a front flip that that like damages that and crosses up the enemy. And then you end in an air combo state, you know, behind them. So I'm like, oh, that's phenomenal for a big boss wind up. I'm like, yeah, fuck you. I'm spending the meter to get through you, you know. You know, I have a this is this is a very, very aside. But like tons of games have crit and like certain games like hitting a hundred percent crit is just like, oh my God, that's I did it, right? Like, you know, so many of the chats at a four percent crit chance in like Hades to can like win you the game. Right. And I'm reminded of my favorite crit system of any game I've ever played and it's Warframe. So in Warframe, crit goes from zero to one hundred percent. And if you get a hundred percent, you get a yellow crit, which does more damage than the normal hit. But if you get the crit from up to two hundred percent, you can get an orange crit. And if you get it to three hundred percent, you get a red crit. And at four percent, you get a red crit that has a bigger number and an exclamation point. And then at four hundred percent, it has two exclamation points. And then at six hundred percent, it's three exclamation points. And it's like, listen, because you can get like a hundred percent crit within like an hour of playing the game. So fuck it. It'll just scale. It'll just scale infinitely. And then how much do you want? And the text just grows. The text grows. It's more explain exclamation points. Amazing. The game does that with status, too. Or it's like, do you have nine hundred percent status? We're just going to start stacking the status multiplicatively on the enemy simultaneously. Hell, yeah. One of my favorite things, recruit things recently was I had a build. I had a cat in Mugenics that had a the ability to every it had an overpower ability. So you can. So it had like a what was it? Increased chance of crit. I put some items on that basically made it like more or less guaranteed as long as it attacked in a straight line. It had like horse blinders on. It had a ability that made it stupid. It took intelligence points off its stats and put all those points into strength. So every less point of brain went into more strong punch. And then it had an ability that was every point over kill that you kill something with every overkill point. Every overkill point, it causes an explosion of the corpse to damage everything around you, according to the overkill points. Oh, that's a good one. So you kill a fly with 70 damage on a single punch and 69 of that damage is exploding into the surrounding enemies. It was so fucking cool. Phenomenal stuff. So yeah, good crit feels good. All this to say. Yeah, Neo's great. And whatever the fuck is happening with the story and the Tokun Gawa's and the yeah, we. Hey, I'm actually going to call that a big like I'm going to say. And I know a lot of people who love Tecmo, Koai and Omega Force will shit on me for it. I have played a fair amount of Tecmo, Koai, Omega Force games, and they have a really hard time making their stories like interesting because they they have limited themselves to like a batch of years or even fantasy years that is so strict. Like there is like a 100. Man, your period in Japanese history that they have put like listen, fucking games. OK, so there's a bunch of states. You see these states? Guess what? They're warring. They're warring. They're warring. All right. You know. Now, what's funny is that as somebody points out, Omega Force made Pokopia, but that's the Dragon Quest Builders guys. Like I like I've played Tokidin and some of the Dynasty Warriors and you've played the fucking Zelda Warriors and like it's it's all it's it's the it's the fucking John Romero it's pornography story analogy for video games. It's like that guy is there because he's a cool historical guy with a stag helmet. And then later you can fight him as a boss because that's cool. I mean, the commitment to even telling a human Japanese like a nation origin story is like at this point, you could just go full demon Armageddon like plot. You know, it doesn't have to be at all related to you know, I know. But I don't know. Or any of the three I finished like my second. I think it was a demo stream of Neo three and was asking people who had played more of the demo and then I played way more of the game. Like why did I travel back in time? Like why did that happen? Because your character doesn't speak or ask anyone about it. And the cat that goes with you just goes, huh, weird. And like that's it. And it's all I could all I could think of was like cuz because it's cool. I don't know. Time periods. All I know is that you got your little your little fuzzy animal buddies, your little your spirit stand furry creatures. And they are from another realm, but they're heavily invested in Japanese politics. They're big on it. They're super invested. They're dedicating their lives to the outcomes of who's going to take over and be this first showgun. Anyway, it's it's all whatevs. But, you know, as long as you see Atari Hanzo doing cool shit, I'm like, hey, there he is. That cool. That that fucker does a Zuna drop. You mean his grandpa and you think it's a different guy, but it is a different guy. And then you meet your own grandpa and you're the little cats like that's your grandpa and I'm like, who? But I'm black. No, no, listen, that's your grandpa. It's fine. It's fine. It is fine. Anyway, yeah, I knew three fucking solid shit. Yeah, it's a good ass video game to fucking play. I only had one real, like, actual complaint, which is I'm a map scraper. I like to scrape the map and the game like really strongly incentivizes it by like, if you if you scrape the map a little, it gives you like the points to go scrape more and then it goes, no, OK, now here's the little here's the couple of things you missed, right? And so I scraped the map and I have like and that's all I had done. So fucking overleveled, like like full 15 fucking levels above any new zone, like I'm level 40 something and the next story zone is 20. Oh, wow. OK, OK. Yeah. Like it's it's extreme. My for me, my only complaint is it's not like a generalized one. It's just a personal thing is I don't need that much small, little consumable futzing beneath the under the engine. Oh, dude, I haven't used a single one. I don't need the like under the hood. They're you know, the amount of things because you've got your on your magic and you've got your yin and yang placement. A chargeable on your magic. You've got your soul cores and then, you know, you've got an addition. Then you pick your your animal and then your animal is also your DT. And that's a simple. They just never remove a system. That it's just like it's all just it's all just legacy grandpa system. It's crazy. It's just it's it's insane. Yeah, you you feel like you're it does feel like a mobile game, you know, menu is running underneath your your soul's character. You want to talk about using the whole Buffalo and grandpa systems. So the other thing about the three and I'm not going to even call it a complaint because I think they're doing what they need to be doing is the setting is the setting and the setting does take place and effect similarly of the of a time in a real place, which means that Neo three levels sure do look a lot like certain Neo two levels, which should sure look a lot like certain Neo one levels. The Panku. So in the bottom left corner of the first map, which there are four, I think there's a that's open world. You're seeing is like one quarter. There is a cave and I'm going through the cave and I'm like, wow, this reminds me a lot of that cave from Neo one and that cave from Neo two like a lot like architecturally, game wise, palette, et cetera. And then I got to the end of the cave and I fought the fucking bat girl from the case with the psycho crusher. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm like, they are they are no fucking like from software. We'll like fucking throw a different like model on it. But keep all the animation rigging like the tree spirit shit here. It's like, nah, fuck it. It's hero. It's Hino Enma. It's the bat girl. She doesn't have a cutscene. OK. So at some point, look, I look forward to the fight on a boat with a giant demon in the docks level that surely will be in the three wherever that is. But yeah, yeah, that's that's fine. You know, I got I got no issue with that. I am curious to see if like, you know, after all this time and quality, wherever the fuck the end of this game's life cycle of quality of life ends up being there's two DLCs coming. But doing that probably going to be open world maps. I wonder if that's just to just to run around. Yeah, it is kind of crazy to just have a giant thing and not like these linear, not even linear, but smaller dungeon levels, right? Because it used to be essentially legacy dungeons where each each area. And yeah, this has legacy dungeons. There are like you go to it. And like there's a little island in the upper on the west side of the map that it's like it's got a special gimmick and it's a self contained little zone. It's got that legacy dungeon feel, but they are smaller. I then there's the the crucible. I wonder if we're going to see at some point just because this is how things happen. Neo for Williams return. Well, William was in to the engine man. What's he up to? What's what's going on? I don't know. Who knows? I don't know. But I feel like, you know, like, yeah, you've had your fun with your creative character. It's a return to the one is the only character that your main guy speaks. And so like that game has way more character than its sequels. Because what is a guy? Yeah. Yeah, Willie. What the white boy doing? What was he up to? Most interesting level in comparison of all the Neo games that I have seen. Anyway, is the first level of Neo one, where you're breaking out of the Tower of London and all the weapons are like British arms and armor. And the armor is British. Yes. Yes. And you put that shit in your box. Super weird. And everything that you compare to the Zippangu and everything that you pick up in the London area, you put in your box and you pull it out when you're in Zippangu and then you fight like a Britman souls character across your across your Japan game. Just in case you needed British armor. Yeah. In any case, so Neo three is great. Oh, the other thing about how big the game is and if it's easier, if you scrape it, it also has massive. The game starts on New Game Plus Plus energy. OK, OK. I like like it like it's actually secretly Diablo. It's not a souls game. That's it uses souls controls, but it's it's actually Diablo where you're beating the game and then you're running it on nightmare than Inferno, than Inferno two, then Inferno three, then double nightmare. Mm hmm. Well, I'm curious, like, is there a in the arms race between difficulties and builds, you know, do you can you get to the point of one swing, one shot, a boss, you know, does that even a paradise you could because I'm like, does that exist in Neo? I know it exists in other games. I don't know if Neo can get to that point. You know, it can. I'm going to guess it does. And then you go up a difficulty and you're like, we expected you to walk in here with that build. Here's some new shit. We have noticed we have noticed you've one shot all the bosses. So a new dynamic difficulty has been prepared for you. Like Neo has New Game Plus existing as an arms race of its own mechanical systems. OK, the bosses now have infinite life. However, if you kill them fast enough, then they'll die. Doesn't kick in. Yeah. All right. All right. So that's good. That's good. Also this week, I took a look on my own time at Slay the Spire 2. Yeah, I also played Slay the Spire 2. OK, it's good. It's good. It's good. It's it's Slay the Spire 1, but prettier. So I was playing it and I was like, because I've only played a little bit of Slay the Spire 1, right? And I was like, I'm liking this a lot more, but I legitimately could not tell you what is actually different. Interesting. It really just feels like a prettier, shiner version of the first game. The models have, you know, some nicer animation going on. And that's about it. Like and what I'll say is I enjoyed the first one, so it was very enjoyable. Oh, there's a co-op mode. OK, I haven't checked that out. Player co-op, which I will never play. OK. And yeah, the does have new characters. The timeline stuff as that if unlocks and as you do events and stuff is like a cool little like progression thing. I really like how so many of those photos are like a child's crayon drawings. Yeah, they're they're they're made in paint. Like as a player. I love it. But what I guess I'll say is like. I was hoping that the sequel game with all its success would like. Add a bit more animation, you know, to things. So I actually have an answer for that. Um, one of the reasons some of these games decide to go with a specifically like not low fidelity, but a a simpler art style is so that it is easier for people to make mods that integrate into that art style. Right. And also it's also it's also easier to just make more shit. And exactly, you add cards, add cards, add cards, right? And the game is totally fine without any of that. I mean, of course, it's just a thought of like, well, we know that the project was super successful, so the hope would just be like a little bit of extra flair on that. Because it is true that, like, you know, sometimes in fights, you'll get things like a special like a familiar will show up next to you or your floating sword or all these little things that like modify the actual fight. But it's really nice when you're playing like another another similar type of game. Let's say Darkest Dungeon, right? Yeah, where each attack, each thing you're doing, you have a nice big like, impact to it. There's a cool visual associated with the stuff. And with the cards, there's a lot of different cards. So I would get it would get hard to juggle all that. I don't know if I actually want there to be a different animation that matches to each card and what it says it does. Huh. But I do know that I'm looking at my own stream of the iron clad. I would prefer more than the one swinging animation. Yeah, I I would love. Over early access. Yeah, but but that's but to be faithful to the first game, that's how it was too. Right. Like it was just one base. Like the animations were nothing. It was just a card you're playing with a the animations. It's a card game. And then, you know, there's a visual backdrop that has a little bit of like representation of what the cards are doing. But I would love if the cards you played resulted in those attacks actually having an associated visual with them. Or even like. Slightly more. I know that Silent has two animations for for their attacks, but like Regent has one. You're sitting on the chair and and I was like, I could go with. Maybe like just different sparkle. Yeah, or like maybe some effect coming off this card. And I would never think of this the first time I'm playing that first game because I'm like, well, this is the brand new thing doing. I don't know. It doesn't know how big it's going to be, how successful. Yeah. But this time around with time and budget and planning and stuff, I kind of am just like, I'm more sauce. Little more sauce. I'm like, well, I mean, right now when I'm looking at it, I'm like, well, maybe if if it does OK, if Slay the Smire 2 does OK, which according to early numbers, it is one of the most successful games of all time. Maybe they will have time during the early access OK, period to add a little bit more juice. And you know what? I will even say like if it's too much to create these unique animations per card, per character and such, even just letting the card itself do the thing, you know, that's kind of a trick that like a lot of the collectible card games like Rune Terror and Artstone do. So like, let's say Ironclad whirlwind, right? Yeah, yeah. Like there's an effect where the character stabs five times and then there's an effect on the screen where there's like wind going. Like you could have the card physically spin. The whirlwind comes, you know, or lava shoots out of the car. Like let the card do the thing. If the card is the blade, you know, I have no that could be a super cool, elegant way to put the work on the card and not all into the character. But the point is, is that that's the only thing is like I'm enjoying this. But it does feel like more sauce would be really cool and make it more enjoyable. Now, I think that I am enjoying it more than I did. Slay the Spire one right away. And I played Slay the Spire one when it was done compared to this, which is in early access, and I don't know why. I think the cards are snappier. And I think I think I'm better at card games than I was. I think I think the pastures like style thing. I think you've exposed yourself and learned a bit more. And perhaps this time around, it makes more sense. Well, because when I played Slay the Spire one the first time, I picked up every single card that was available and then my my decks became unplayable piles of shit. And then people were like, no, Pat, don't pick up every card. So then I did multiple runs in which I picked up zero cards and failed. I'm like, oh, shit. And this is where we first had the conversation about deleting cards being good. And you were like, I don't get it. And then we kind of went over the idea of predictability and, you know, trimming the fat. Yeah. And then now I'm like, oh, I want to get cards that set me up. And I just want to avoid cards that don't feed into whatever set up I'm going. That's exactly it. However, it costs money to delete cards. So it's not an easy thing to do. You have to spend money to trim or to add, you know, you can do a build that involves just adding to your deck and get good cards enough to make it through and win, by the way. Like you don't actually have to cut cards. Like here's the problem. I discovered this when I played Ruin Terra. I like mill decks. Like I like decks. That's a term for just adding and adding and adding. A mill deck is your milling through your deck and that you were just adding just a fucking million fucking cards to your deck. OK. I fucking love it. I love adding a million cards to my deck and specifically my hand. So like there's when I was playing Regent, there was I accidentally stumbled upon. No, not not Regent. I the silent I stumbled upon a that's not what mill is. I guess I'm stupid. I stumbled on a fill your fucking hand with cards build. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Draw where I draw six cards off of one card. No, it wasn't even that. It was like you upgrade your shives and then I got the ability that was turn every card in your hand into a shiv. Oh, yeah. OK. Exactly. Yeah, I have. Yeah. The other character I forgot was like I had a card that's like turn every card into a rock, right? Yeah. And then upgrade the rocks so that. Oh, yeah. So that it's rocks plus. And now I've just got like fucking 22, 22, 22 problem solved. You know, mill is to toss into graveyard. I actually also like that. OK, that's the deep deck from from Ruin Terra. Sure. So I guess I do like mill decks or you get or you can go for heavy exhaust where you're like you've got a card that's going to you exhaust as much as possible. And then you've got a card that's going to benefit from as much exhausted cards you have, you know, and even that is decent because you're like, OK, well, it's gone for the rotation of the of the rest of the battle. So you're ultimately trimming the fat that way, too. Yeah, there was a there was a set of conditions I saw with silence where it was like throw a card away when you use this. I'm like, why the fuck would I ever want to throw away a card? And then I started to see cards that were like, play this card for fucking free if you throw it away. I'm like, OK. Yes. Yeah. All right. Or it plays itself from the exhaust pile once you've played it, you know. The thing that Slay the Spire, though, has that and both and the second game does that is like surprisingly weird about it is it's a very quiet game. Without much not even just the sauce part now, like the overall fanfare is very is very ambiance. Yeah, you have a map. You click the map. The fight starts. You play your cards. You beat the monster. You go back to the map and the Bastak. It's it's made for just fucking running. Yeah, you know. And I mean, there's there's games that are made for running. You can fucking roll through doors and shoot shit and in fucking enter the gun and a bunch of these little these indie games and stuff at the time. But yeah, it's just like very much like, all right, we quietly move up this map. We've we beat the big thing and the big thing kind of dies quietly too. And then we move to the next. And it's it's a very restrained game, you know. But that all that all that said, cards are fun. So, you know, the cards are the high priority here. And it's again, I have not seen enough to see like the newest parts of it, because so far early on, unlocking, you know, the previous characters and playing similar builds to before, it does just feel like a shinier version of one. I'm really like the mechanical was different. I really, really like the two new characters. Regent is a ton of fun. I like a secondary mechanic, but also the Necrobinder and Ostie. And did you play a run with her? What did I get? I got she's the fourth character. She she is skeleton. I unlocked her. I didn't do a run yet. OK, so Necrobinder's mechanic is that you always start with Ostie, the hand, the the the the bone hand. OK, as a second character on on your screen. And Ostie starts with one HP. OK. And Ostie will always take damage first. Oh, interesting. And her special tag is summon and it's summon and then a number and any summon that you add will add to Ostie's HP. And Ostie will also gain an HP every turn. And Ostie's attack cards scale with their HP. So he's your he's your block. He's your attack and defense. OK. And so if you put block on you, the damage goes through your block first and then hits Ostie and then hits you. OK, OK. So you're just you're just building up like this big fucking summon that takes all your hits for you. And so I had a build where like I had I had Ostie attacks that scaled with Ostie's HP after I buffed him up. But then he had a bunch of zero card attacks. And then he had attacks that were free if Ostie had already attacked that round. Yeah, zero cost. Let's go. Love that shit. It is awesome. Um, super cool. It's interesting to see the the sequel that like kind of goes so safe by the by the what was what was there before. There's a sequel sequel. This is an invalidation sequel. Yeah, yeah, this is this is a tech end. This is a replacing the previous entry. Whereas I just mentioned Darkest Dungeon, but there's a game where you're like, oh, this is a different video game for the sequel. You know, we're doing or changing up the formula entirely. And, you know, whether you like it or not, like you are not playing the same game here. And yeah, I think I think you can always find a happy medium or a place to explore new ideas. But in any case, I enjoyed it. And I think I'll, you know, click back every now and then. Oh, same here. Yeah. But it's a it's a quiet little quick little run, you know, and and and and. It's very clean. Yeah, we'll see where that goes. Offstream as well. I also I have a bit annoyed that the games main like huge like, oh, my God, feature is something that I just don't give a shit about at all. Like I'm not the biggest co-op person in general. But like like a card game is something for me to play at one thirty in the morning before I go to bed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's not a feature I'm going to give a fuck about. Absolutely. So yeah, there is that something else I played off stream as well was the motherfucker, I'll get to my week. Relax. Yeah, yeah. No, we're going to get through these. And then we got to take a break as I got to feed this dog. Then we'll get to your real week. And then I have my slop discussion. I played a bit of vampire crawlers. The demo. Yeah. Did you do you play that? I did. Yeah, I talked to you about it last week. Yeah, we saw you. We went. Yeah. Yeah, it's the move the fucking camera. Yeah. It's. Now I've had more time to think about it. I don't like it as much as fan press for hours. I was bored. I get far enough in. I was bored. I'm I have to be real. I played it. Yeah. I went through. I was bored. I found the pacing of it was just like it was slower and I get what's going on. But it wasn't really. I just you get to the fight and pull the card up. You took the thing like I'm like, yeah. This is I don't know. It wasn't grabbing me. Each encounter almost being and the fact that it wasn't encounter like I'm playing that by survivors, obviously, you just sit there and shit just fucking happens. But I'm down for the version of this, which is no, no, no, crawl around the dungeon, get into a fight and like fight the thing. But it wasn't. I don't know. I just it wasn't kind of fun enough. It was you queuing up the attacks and wiping through the enemies as they were there and then going to the next one. And I was kind of like I'm fighting. I'm going deeper into the thing. And I was kind of just getting bored of this, you know, the progression. I don't know. I think the progression needs to be faster. Yes, way faster. So it feels like so the card system is slower than the the move your character system. So like to me, Vampire Survivors started when I got my first evolution. Right. Ever. Like I think it was the blood whip, which very early. And then I was like, oh, the dopamine. And like I did get an evolution when I was playing the demo. It was the same. It was the Santa Water Revolution, OK, which made a huge difference. And I just started flying fucking through that shit. OK. But it is slower. I have a feeling that it has the same exact ramp that Vampire Survivors does. But I think it starts more slowly. There is, though, a difference. And I think that as a dungeon crawler, it's it's accurate to this because you're moving and aiming through these corners and picking fights. But the stop and start of picking fights reminds me of what I hated in high aggro. RPGs with random battles. Yeah. Of like there is a pacing break every time. And then, all right, go, go, go, play, play, all, play, all, play, all, play, all, play, all, all right. Where's the next one? Same couple of enemies. It's a couple of bats. Play, all, play, all, play, all, all right. And like I'm like, I either let me just roll through this as a smooth, like they're here, they're dead. We move on or oh my god, I'm dying back up. Like let that kind of play out in that way because, you know, in vampire survivors, that's you're not having a start and stop encounter. Now you're in the fight. Now you're out of the fight. Here's the next group of bats. And that little pace break for something that is ultimately you're throwing the Bible, the bats die, the bats die, the bats die, whatever, makes it feel more tedious. Something I didn't really think about at all when you're just kind of like walking forward and, you know, like, oh, maybe back off a little bit because the bats are coming too fast. I don't know. It just it didn't hit a point. And maybe I got to put more time in to see a nice big combo explosion and see get the feeling of, like, you know, ripping through the enemies. But the walking around and picking fights and starting and stopping of the and this part of the genre felt too tedious to me. Just made me kind of stop. I yonned a little bit and was like, OK, I think I'm done here. You know, after unlocking a couple of characters. So we'll see. But at the same time, I didn't enjoy persona Q. You know, I played a I bought that for a train, obviously. Yeah, I bought that and went through it and I was and, you know, made the thing and then you got you make the map and then you kind of discover. And I was like, oh, yeah, this is this is kind of boring to me, too, unfortunately. And, you know, I like the pieces of what's going on here. But I never finished it because I just I got too bored and it was too tedious. So like that's another example, something where I'm like the maybe it's the genre of crawling and encountering fights in this way. I would be interested to see how you reacted with something like I have the pohola to or something like that. But those games no longer exist. They haven't been made in decades. Well, the one the one that's in UFO 50 was a lot of fun. I'm there's a dungeon crawler in UFO 50 that was great. I forgot what it was called, but I enjoyed that. But I think thing is that like dungeon crawling in that like perspective has been like it's been dumped down to basically fighting and exploring. And it removes the third part, which is a puzzle solving in the fourth part, which is interacting with the environment. So if you play like like a very old TSR, like Dungeons and Dragons game of that nature, like I have the beholder or something like that, there's complicated puzzle layouts. There's the old D&D system. There's clicking on hidden pieces of walls, invisible walls, teleporting, you know, all sorts of stuff. Yes, there's. Rimrock games did stuff like that as well. Whereas in entry in Odyssey, I got the feeling and a strange journey. It's like you fucking move around the environment and fucking fight. So in UFO 50, I think Val Brace was the name of the game. And you are, you know, one year, like you have this kind of little punch out sort of a thing to it. That's cool, right? With the fights, obviously, it's nice to be able to see your character and dodge and move and attack. But you're also it's because it's a shorter game and things are tighter. It felt like you were having, you know, your encounters were more varied. You'd run into different enemies more often as a result of the game, the game being much shorter. And I think if I ran into, you know, 20 bats and then eventually I got to the grasshopper and the skeletons, it would have been more tedious and I would have enjoyed it less. And if that's how these kind of games tend to go, then yeah, it does. Oh, wow, Val Brace is like way more. I'm not watching it now. I like, wow, this is way more about what I was talking about. OK, like a true honesty. Yeah, you're picking your targets. The each enemy has different ways to actually defense is a is a thing you have to pay attention to and how and what to target, what to hit and how. And it's great. It's really, really cool, you know. But vampire survivors or crawlers, rather, right now represents just like the bad part of it to me. And so I hope that gets better and improves or at the very least. Speeds the fuck up and, you know, lets you just kind of like get going with it. So anyway, yeah, that was that. Couple other things, but do you want to take that break now first? Yeah, I got to feed this dude. All right, bear this dog is hungry. And when he gets hungry, he attacks me. Oh, he's very strong. Well, all righty. So. Yes, next. And this is this is, I guess, all part of a larger discussion here. I. Decided to check out zero parades. Oh, good. So that I could see what was going on. Zero parades for dead spies by Zahum. Check this out off camera as well. And it is an interesting thing to. It's definitely interesting. It's an interesting thing to look at this. Because it it it. Yeah, it gives me. It's it's you're watching this this game that is, you know, the history of it. So you know what energy you're going to take going in. But as you're playing it, you. So we talked about it before you mentioned, you can see the parts where, hey, look, this is the exact room from disco. At least you remember. Here's the part where you walk outside and there's a boat. By the side and you have a conversation with a dude on a boat off to the to the left and here's the rooms and the scenes and the moments. And here's the closed studio that's all in the dark over here and all the little bits of disco that are echoing something that you're already familiar with. Right. Um. And that's all there. And you're like, OK, you can see what cleanly is just lifted. And hey, do you remember this thing? Please like what you're getting here. It's more we're trying to remember. We're trying to remind you of the thing you liked. Please, please enjoy it. Right. But then you outside of that, you go, OK, so what else is happening? You have a setting that's, you know, being established with, you know, the world and the politics, the different factions. They're all taking you on these journeys as they're establishing what each thing is. The character you're playing as is the spy that's a fuck up and is more self serious than Harry is. Um, but overall, you're going through this presentation that, you know, is it has the bits and pieces, but has these moments of like, you're going on a tangent here. And I know that this is lacking the soul of, you know, what disco was going for. But pardon me. But what is most remarkable about this whole thing? I played a couple hours of it, right? So I went and played about 25 minutes. OK, I went, I went a good ways in. I didn't beat it, but there's there's a lot to go talk to and figure out there. The thing about it that's most, most remarkable is that it's fine, right? In that the assets are nice. The art is well made. The music is great. Is good. There's some voice acting that's not present because it's placeholder, but some that's there is is good too. Some of the tangents they go on are interesting. Some of them are not. Some of them feel like you're being quirky for quirk's sake, but others are presenting ideas of a setting that might be interesting to learn about. It's all there. It's all competent. And if this were someone that you never heard of making a game, you would come into this going, huh, OK, OK, there's some interesting stuff here. Let's see where you're going with this. It is only knowing the history of this. It's a very strange feeling that presents the problem. It's only because you know the story that there's an issue here. I think it. Yeah, because I think it would be disingenuous to come in and go, what a piece of shit, right? Look at this garbage. Absolutely not. That's that's patently unfair. That would be a lie. It is not. It is a functioning, fine video game that is an RPG that is echoing disco Elysium style and trying to offer more of the product that you consumed and enjoyed because we are the license holders that hold it. But you and because it's just based on knowing the deal that makes that weird feeling ever present in it. And like the fact that you're going to something, a thread you might not question where you're like, oh, that conversation just seemed a little pointless or you're trying to be weird, but you didn't really go anywhere or that that charm was kind of missing there. You might not pull a magnifying glass out for those moments, but because you know the story of Zaom here, you are willing to do that and put this under the microscope. And, you know, for all the creative people and the writers and the town, the artists or whatever that are all working on this, it's under the shadow of this stolen work and shitty energy. And I was bringing this up when I was talking about it yesterday, but it's kind of like when we talk about the AI art analogy, because the idea of objecting to it because look how wonky it looks and looks so stupid. Ha ha is the wrong. I do you miss the point. The point is not that because it's going to eventually get good enough to fool you. So don't focus on that. It's the it's the fact that a person didn't make this, right? And so here this is going to be something where we know the deal and people we're talking to here probably as well. But I think that it'll also at large probably be something that people who've heard about this disco Elysium thing that was a pretty fun game. Oh, here comes the next one. Oh, cool. We're going to play it. It'll make its money. It'll probably end up being just fine. Um, not everyone is hanging on. Yeah. Not everyone is hanging off the news and more or less or getting into the dev stories behind the scenes. And like this ended up being a bit of a discussion with chat yesterday about like how much people know about this stuff versus just us diving in because they are part of our jobs is covering these things. And the average person doesn't know about this. And it was. And so this was the bubble we're in. It was perfectly encapsulated by the fact that Reggie walked in and sat down and was like, so what's the deal with this one again? Right. Um, and I had to recap him on the deal with zero parades. And he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Right. And he sat there through the entire disco Elysium play through and loved it and it was just like, yeah, I don't know. This is the next. So, okay. That's is it good? And it's like, well, no, but it's like, that's not the point. The problem is that they was stolen and the people credit is, oh, yeah. Okay. It's a whole thing. So we're going to talk a lot about theft today. So somebody who, you know, is other people that, uh, I know that I've, I've, uh, talked to that I've told about this release and other people that have gotten in might just just to similarly kind of go, oh, yeah, it's the new thing from those folks. Okay, cool. And just leave it at that. And that's enough for the game to make its money exist, be successful, be a solid game, whatever. Like that's, you know, so we're in a world where like nothing about what's being shown to you is going to, um, betray in an obvious manner, like the problem with the game, it's all going to be based on what you know about the story. So I've had two like thoughts kicking around in my head. The first of which is that when you played disco, Elysium very early, I mean, before leaving the room, you know, but definitely by the time you get to talk to Kuno, you get this overwhelming sense. Like few games have ever made me feel that the people who are making it, they don't just have something to say. They have so much to say it is exploding out of them. Bursting at the seams uncontained. Absolutely. Oh my God, they have many, many things of notes they want to talk about. I'd go and if you go see more of that energy reading the fucking Eternal Summer Manifesto. You know. And when I played zero parades and to be fair, I only got about 20, 25 minutes in. Yeah. I got the overwhelming feeling that their bosses told them to make another disco Elysium. Yeah. Yeah, that's that was like my my my takeaway. So the core artistic like scream coming out of that game is I want to keep my job and make a video game. So while and that is that is the case and that is definitely present and there. I played about four and a half hours of it. And there's moments where you you meet this like angry hipster, the old man that sells music and is going on about the the majesty of this particular format that's so interesting to listen to that you that it's this it's this self erasing disc that is never meant to be played. And it's the ultimate hipster format of music that can only be played once and and it goes down. It explores this whole idea of that, right? And then that that is related to the dude who you find who's zeroed out on the couch because, you know, whatever the music is erased. And and if you and if you go into that, you have these moments of tapping into the inland empire and the spirituality of your character connecting to other worlds and other things. And, you know, it's doing those bits, right? There's other moments where you have characters who are being. Being like there's the there's your authoritarian. But this time instead of Blue authoritarian, it's your red authoritarian on the wall, communist, there's not enough. There's not enough bricks for to receive the bullets of the people that we need to line up on them. And then there's the cop who's just like, hey, man, can't people just be OK with things being decent for a little bit? Things are fine, you know, and it's it has these things of like, yeah, there's characters here that may or may not want to say something and writers that may or may not want to say something. But above them all is the light bending money lender. Who is ultimately bending the light to make this whole world exist. And that is the foundation of the game you're playing is built on that. And you can't you can't ignore that part. I foresee this game being a a fairly good tasting facsimile of the best hot dog I've ever eaten. Is that the word of the week? The facsimile. It might be. We're on. I don't know. We're on you six. Oh, no. Oh, no. I'm going to say that the most likely timeline we end up with. And ultimately, the one that will be the probably the most depressing, but thus the most disco is there is no real. There is no true successor. Disco is a moment and it happened. And then it was a one and done. And what we're going to get, right, is you got you got zero parades for dead spies over here, Za'um doing what it can to be like, hey, please continue to give us the money you remember. Also, check out the Amazon series. That's not going to happen. And a billion other things we can do with the site. P right. Um, you got Tangerine and Arctic formerly known as triple X night night shift. And that's a couple of the people that were at Za'um going to found dark math. No, but it needs to be the whole. But we and they're going to do what they can. But you know, who knows what that will end up being? Similarly, you've got Hope Town with and that's long due. That's a couple of other people that are like former staffers and folks. And they've got Lenvall Brown with them on that Kickstarter, and it was successful. So they, you know, we'll see what that becomes. But who the fuck knows, right? Eternal summer is out here screaming. And we don't know if they actually have anyone around that can make a video game. But I hope they they track one down because the energy is cool, but how to convert that into actual product is difficult. And then you've got Red Info, which is where Curvitz actually ended up. And their project is called Corinthians. You know, so this this whole thing is exploded into all these places that it'll never be the same again, and nor nor should we expect it to. But if all of these things come kind of come out and end up being disco like games that are fine. I feel like that's the most likely timeline we're on. And it'll just be this kind of weird like, oh, disco kind of became a commodity. Here we are. It always was. But I think what really matters the most to the form and joy stays this is a great possibility that could possibly happen is that all the successors of the movement all scramble and fight and scrape and kick and spit on one another. Fighting for the title of the true air and the true air is likely completely unrelated to all of them in any way whatsoever. Because there's no. Tell me how much you liked esoteric ebb. Esoteric ebb is great and esoteric. But here's the thing, because I can see the setup and the tee off to slam dunk this and to go that that's the one who takes the torch. And I go, no, not really. It's doing its own thing. It loves disco and takes that form. But it's also my point. Yeah. Yeah. And it but it also loves planescape torment. And it's also just off doing its own bit. You don't need to loves planescape torment, dude. You know, it really does. It really does. And we don't need to force the mantle onto it because I think it's like, no, it's very clear that it's a fan of the thing and it's doing something else. But it's great. No, that's that's my point. Like my point is that the mantle goes to that, which does not want it or care. Right. So the most interesting thing about esoteric ebb is that it started out as a planescape torment fan game. Yeah. In 2018. And then disco came out a year plus later. So the writing of this game started. It is off of planescape torment. So but the structure was exactly later adapted. Yes. To disco structure. In fact, what I was saying is that I feel it's painfully obvious, but you can tell this is a living, detailed D&D setting that somebody came up with a long time ago and probably played lots of campaigns with their friends in it. And they have a Bible of this stuff. And they've been working on a way to turn this into a game. And then disco presented the container format nuts and bolts of how to actually have this dialogue happen. And we're going to take these ingredients that already existed and put it through the disco Elysium juicer to get that way of interfacing with this world. And it's an entertaining way to interface with the world. So it worked out great. So yeah, I played esoteric ebb yesterday. And it was definitely the most enjoyment I've had from, you know, these this post disco world. And I really thought thought that, like, you know, taking the classic high fantasy D&D setting of like the stats that you'd know and stuff and adding the, you know, the voices in your head bit to it, the fact that you're this cleric. And yeah, exactly. You're not pulling the helmet off. And every character you're talking to is what I will say is that this feels like a much smaller game. But as a result, every character is a fleshed out encounter discussion. It feels like in order to make the indie game version of a disco thing work here, which, you know, of course, disco was to begin with, but even smaller in scale, I'm imagining you want each of these characters to be someone you're talking to for half an hour, you know. Yeah. So like disco was the war inspector game inside a city block, but like, you know, depth of the ocean, but wide as a puddle kind of thing. And ebb feels like it's like, no, smaller, tighter, deeper, even smaller. Because, you know, talking to, um, talking to call me manana is not the same as talking to Kuno or Everard. Right. Yeah. Kuno and Everard are fucking full on experiences ass in the good spot and the couch. You can fucking hit that for an hour, you know, and, um, sure enough, esoteric ebb, it was like you wake up off the table, you're in the zombie dungeon and it took like 45 minutes of just getting up and wandering around that basement before I got upstairs. And because we're also reading out the lines and doing the voice acting with each thing, it's taking a little bit extra long as opposed to reading through it. I spoke to a guy at raw fury. He sent me a code and I was like, I played the demo. This game seems really special. You should give Chris more money for voice acting. And, um, the official response that I gathered from raw fury was. Yeah. Yeah. No, at the, at the, at the end of the stream, at the end of the stream, the dev came, came over to the chat and was like, Hey, thanks for playing the game. We're like, Oh, okay, cool. No problem. That was great. Voice acting. Voice acting. He actually read it. Chris responded and was like, it's expensive. It is very expensive. Yeah. But like that, but like very straightforward, but it saved disco Elysium. Disco came out twice. Cause when I looked it up, I was like, disco came out in 2019. Sure did. And that first experience with it was me reading through, talking out loud for an hour going, Oh boy, I don't think, I don't think this is going to work. And I know we would like to believe that, um, the text only experience is all you need for a game that's good to be successful. But seeing it and having it go through word of mouth on different channels, on different Twitch, on, on YouTube and spreading, et cetera, with the voice acting and taking people approaching it more willingly made a huge difference in how much that game spread. So yeah, don't, don't discount that. It was a massive deal when the final cut came out and then the game exploded because you could see the potential there, but a lot of people were just not willing to actually engage. It was huge. So as the, as the primary form of game advertisement that currently exists, you and I, um, it is, has actually become kind of astonishing for story based games, how much full voice acting like adds to the word of mouth slash like knowledge of the game's existence. Right. So like pentamint is an incredible game that I can't, I don't think I don't, I never even heard of anyone streaming it because it's like, it is just much like planescape torment, much like disco, much like eb million fucking words. And fucking endless, endless oodles of fucking texts. Can't, can't fucking can't do it. Me, you and Paige all streamed disco Elysium in 2019. And we got to like the body and all of us called it quits after like 90 minutes to two and a half hours with shredded throats going, wow, what a cool game. And I think, you know, as I can, I can see, uh, uh, some folks might disagree here. The more accurate, uh, descriptor on that is disco Elysium without the final cut and without the voice acting would have been a profitable, successful obscure game that was like people would talk about and it would be not, not super huge, but it'd be great. And it'd be, and it'd be a darling and it'd be like a sleeper hit. I think the final cut is what brought it to a major, major level of like awareness and success. You know, it was a, it's the level it was at before was a moderate level of success comparable to other indie games that we like that other people don't really know about. Can I, can I hold up my hand for a second? I, somebody in the chat says, by the way, uh, uh, large streamer Joseph Anderson, who I'm a fan of also streamed disco and pentamint without any voice acting. Wow. Uh, have you seen a Joseph Anderson video? No. It's unshocking. He puts out like eight hour like video, video reviews of like games like Witcher. Holy shit. Like that man can talk. That man also has time to save because he pisses in the sink. Okay. Oh my God. So like, I don't like, yeah, I'm sorry. Okay. I'm sorry. I got, I, I don't, I don't have the, I don't have the gumption. Um, so what I, so what I can say is that I've, I've deliberately worked on the ability to do games that are text heavy so that I could be able to approach something like this and handle. You have definitely like strengthened up your thrusty. I was, I was, yes, yes. It was, it was training to be, to be, to be fair, you do have the ready tag. Yes. From your buddy. I'll have a boost. Doesn't help. No. How did you approach it? Uh, which one? Ebb. I played the demo for 40 minutes. Okay. And then I, and then I switched to a different, a different demo. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Then I think I played life of a Goldman after. Okay. Cause yeah, yeah. Doing a full day of it. Like at the end we were like, you know, um, and I was just tired enough that morning too, that like as the different stats were kicking in, I'm like, I can't even come up with or keep track of voices on these right now. Like I eventually it settled into place as I got my caffeine and felt better. But the beginning of playing it, I'm like, Oh man, dude, like I'm going to take, you take, I don't know, whatever, just bring it. And then eventually things settled into place. I can say something. Yeah. Um, and there'll be times where it's like, you know, I'll be like, okay, like off camera, I'll go like this and Reggie will go for it. Or sometimes it'll be like, okay, he's like, he picked int and I picked an int character and then he was doing a bunch of lines where you click on the extra context and it wouldn't shut the fuck up and started becoming Wikipedia. So I'm like, all right, let me save you. We'll alternate between int lines because this nerdy, stupid build won't shut the fuck up, you know? And, uh, yeah, we got the fun, uh, unintentional double-fash combo of big strength, big int, you know, fascist, crazy, fascist, awesome. And I'm the only one that should be allowed. Me and me and Paige loaded the game up. Uh, and we, uh, she built a cleric and we ran through the, the intro and getting off the table and then I ran a different cleric that I did in the demo. It's man, there's a lot of variability. There's 18 subclasses. You have all the stats, which they brilliantly give you each. You have a big text wall for the full description of what each stat does. But then if you want to just get to the brass tax, you've got a bold, does this, does that, does that. And then an even further bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, you know, um, to get the feel of it. And then underneath you've got these backstories that are all just like bonus points and it's got 18 variants because it's taking each that and giving you plus two plus one, um, combinations of all of them. You know, I, I'm, wow, the variability of that. It is so much going into a builder that is, I mean, it's not Baldur's Gate fucking three, you know what I mean? No, but it's definitely, there's more like disco Elysium is a, a, a Trotsky novel, masquerading is a video game, right? Esoteric has like some fucking video game in there. Yeah. Yeah. You get into fights, you do stuff. Absolutely. You get into fights. There's a combat system. There's the spell system. There's subclasses. Um, something interesting too, uh, about, um, disco and, and because I was reminded of this while, um, playing, uh, Zero Parades is that like, uh, it, it also is something that if you're not someone that read that, read a bunch of books or is, or, or so, um, it kind of trains you or gets you used to like pros and, uh, it gets, and the idea of like when you're, when you're going through text at large, sometimes scenes will be, sometimes you'll cut away to places and moments and things that you can't see depicted and it's just describing it to you, you know. Um, and, uh, moments of world building are happening that you're in, your imagination is basically carrying you forward. But if you were, the movie of this is, is, uh, uh, is playing out simultaneously elsewhere, but, you know, while you continue to stare at the, at the current scene. Um, so Esoteric Ebb is not really doing that. It's very much in the present. Um, but at least from the high it's that what you're getting is out every time a word is said, you're getting a Wikipedia on what the history of that race or war. Or, or, is that it? Or is that like the specific stat you're talking about? It, that's it. That's doing it. Oh, that right. It's like, it is encyclopedia. Of course it is. And, um, some, and a lot of the time it's bringing up, you know, historical context and sometimes it's just, it's going into bringing up a bunch of bullshit. That, like, we know what the thing, okay, shut the fuck up into, right? Um, and then, uh, yeah, you've got to give the whole political element of like each stat is a party that you can, you can lean in on. But it took like, I felt it, it took like three hours to get out of that basement and see the outside, you know, and, uh, that was four conversations later. Yeah. So that's the way this game is going to go is there's a dude up top the stairs. There's a person right outside the door and another person underneath that. And each of those is an Everard's length conversation you're going to go through. Um, and if you're in the mood to have that joust, you know, then great, like this is going to deliver all the fun of what you enjoyed about disco with, with this, this own, uh, high fantasy D&D style system. Um, and affecting your outcomes and relationships and so on. But, um, I feel, I, and this is just a guess. I feel like if you want maps and sprawling environments, this is not going to be that. This is not going to be that place. And, um, my impression is that Plainscape is like at times just big dungeon go. Right. The con, not every moment is about conversing, uh, uh, to the nth degree. Sometimes you're going to just walk past some zombies and skeletons and zap them. I don't know how much this game is going to really do that. You know, I, it's, it's, it's a lot closer to disco than it is to Plainscape in that respect. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Um, real fun stuff going on there. And, uh, the, yeah, the, I guess the, the, um, the, the, the, the bits that you're left with, I feel like are like, okay, every one you're talking to is a quirky D&D, uh, style monster character, race, et cetera, that a bit of a send up in a lot of cases. Uh, wait, in what way? Like they're, they're pastes. Sure. I mean, they're, they're archetypes. So yeah, like when you walk out and you see, like the stats themselves are archetypes of the types of the types of characters people would play a hundred percent. So when you see cool buff orc lady, you're like, yeah, if you're playing this game, you're probably going to dig that. Like anyone who boots this game up is probably super down for handsome orc lady. You know, and, and, uh, the bait that gets laid immediately after, uh, the conversation with her begins. Um, and yeah, we take that bait. That's fine. I, you know, we know what we're walking into. Um, but what, what I was surprised by too, is I guess it was like, you know, by the end of the session, it was like, oh, someone joined my party. And, you know, like you have Kim in disco and stuff, like there is a party, but I kind of was reminded like, oh yeah, like the cover of this games art shows you a cleric and a goblin and another person. And like you're probably going to a gang, a D and D party is going to go out and do a thing, you know? So, um, yeah, I'm, I'm looking forward to checking out a bit more of that when I, when I, when I get a chance. Um, but I'm also wondering if, you know, is weight maxing the right play here? You know, this might be a situation where weight maxing is the right move. I don't know. I think I don't fucking know. I like, like, uh, I looked up the how long to beat and it's approximately the same size as a disco. Um, ish. Interesting. I'm like, and I'm like, disco took a long time. Even though it says it doesn't, even though it says it doesn't, like how long to beat is, is, is made by people who don't voice act the fucking dialogue. Yes. Exactly. Just read it. They just, or in some cases don't read it at all. Or click through, skip through, or quickly read internalize and keep moving. And to be fair, like they're like playing Baldur's Gate three, for example, I know that no one, even on your own time is reading all that flavor text. No one is. It is impossible. There's just any amazement. You know, I mean, every book you pick up, every single highlight of every object and every journal, like get the fuck out of here. You're not doing that. You're, you're coast, you're surfing on the gist for. I gotta tell you, I know at least, I know a couple people in this, in this chat live right now that absolutely do for, for sure. Z's. Okay. But they're non-human. Okay. You know, I feel like the, the intended consumption at some point is like, read until you're tired and then move on. Yeah. No, intent is not, intent is not of note here. There's a guy in here that's beaten Baldur's Gate three, like fucking 14 times. Yeah. That guy reads all the books. Right. Right. Right. Um, anyway, so I'm going to decide how to, how to approach this. But what I will say is that, Hey, this cool little fan thing that, uh, is doing its own, you know, set up of genres that, that it loves them. This creator that loves DND, Plainscape and Disco made a fun indie game. That's worth checking out and buying. Esoteric ab. And boy, does it love the word esoteric. Oh yeah. You know, it'd be, instead of calling things arcane, things are just called esoteric. And like, I want to say we voiced that out maybe like 20 times yesterday. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, it was fun. And, and I also say it was rewarding to fail through because that's the other thing I wanted to, to like, kind of test is I'm like, okay, playing this on the streamer brain means yeah, content push means, you know, run into run into failure and see what happens. And because you're playing a disco, like you're also hoping that you'll trip over the wheelchair and give the double deuces on the way down. Yeah. But, um, and I, I can say here that it was definitely rewarding to fail through and it paid off for, you know, failing checks as well as succeeding in them. So, uh, plus it was nice to see a lot of people in chat freak out going, Oh my god, the scene went completely different for me. Yeah. No, that's always very, very, uh, uplifting. It's like, ooh, that's exciting. If I ever want to go through it again. Mm hmm. Um, so in the end, um, you know, disco up a log, uh, who the fuck cares? It happened and then now new things will happen and let's enjoy the good ones. Don't understand. We have to be the successors. Let's enjoy the good ones and ignore the non the nothings. And, uh, and that's it. I really do. Decades for somebody come up with the successor to planescape torment and it definitely had nothing to do with fucking D&D. It was about drug abuse. I, I really, really hope that somewhere someone comes along and just, you know how we said producers do multiple things. They do. That's true. Right. Sometimes it's the, it's the yapper that does nothing and puts the name on the credits and other times and comes in and goes, Hey, I played a, I played a new game this weekend. I have some ideas. Hmm. In fact, my, my nephew has some ideas based on the phone games they've been playing when you're going to put those in. Um, or there's the, can you, can you turn all this energy? Can you harness it into a direction? Right. And right now we have summer eternal, which is a blazing hot inferno. And we just need someone to contain it and make it a laser. Can we concentrate it into a laser? You know, I hope so. Most important thing a good producer can do is when somebody comes in and goes, I have an, I have an idea for a new feature that I think I can make on my own time. And they go, can you test it and do all the assets for it on your own time also? And they go, no. And then they go, then we're going to be late. So get out of my office. No, you're not putting it in. I mean, I'm a fan of absolutely great idea. I'll get right on that. Absolutely. And then you end up in a situation where a negotiate goes, oops, we need 44 million. Gang of dragon. No, we'll get there. Oh boy. All right. All right. All right. We got a, we got to get a move on though. All right. So I did a slot battle. Hey, woolly versus on Twitch and YouTube. Go ahead. I did a slot battle between the, the slops. I did it between our creators, the ethically dubious AI using video game. That's an X in the extraction genre and marathon, the game that absolutely got caught plagiarizing designs and maybe other and had to settle out of court over it. They are both extraction games. That is scavenger type shooters that have you scrounging up a bunch of materials, possibly shooting NPCs, possibly getting ganked by other players. And if you die, you lose all of your stuff. If I can, if I may, just from the, in my impression, overtly expecting hostility and getting ganked and shot at by other people. Yes. Has been my expectation of what this genre is. That is the expectation of the genre. Okay. Is that other players are dangerous. Yes. Um, especially on extraction, be it however you get out, because when you extract, you make a bunch of noise. And when you're extracting, that means you have tons of shit on your body. That people could use. So I played them, I played one, I played marathon first and I played ArcGrader second. I was given a code for both. I did not buy them. Um, and despite the fact that I have been wildly critical of bungee, I would say I am one of bungee's biggest haters. Like genuinely, I think me trying to portray myself as not one of bungee's biggest haters would be fucking ridiculous. Um, that being said, I, I, I hit a moment and I'm sure you get this moment. I would say that both podcasts that we've been on have been at the, uh, at least in the top 10 of most anti-bungee media that has been produced. Um, sure. I hit a moment where I think you've hit this moment with other games or other movies where you're just like, I gots to know. Just I gotta know. Sometimes I, I, my brain mandates understanding of the appeal. Like I absolutely must know. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. You've watched me do that many a time. So I loaded up marathon and, uh, the audio visual presentation in terms of the style, the splash screen, the, uh, background art loading screen, all that stuff. It's very first 10 minutes of Metal Gear solid four. It's very like the TV channel, like tuning in to like fake future TV. Okay. Kind of thing. Um, it has a pretty cohesive vibe of, of like a Corpo shit future. Uh, I like the color range that they go with. I like the plastic look. It kind of looks like the future of mirrors edge. Oh, you mean anti reels? I guess I do. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Now we can get into the fucking weeds on that, uh, which I have done so on social media, uh, which is like, they didn't lift the whole art style. No, but they lifted cohesive parts of that art style that they then had to make new assets to build around because those were stolen. And now that they have been caught plagiarizing, it is not up to me to decide whether or not to give them the benefit of the debt on any individual piece because I know that some of these pieces are stolen. And I know that because there was a settlement out of court that I assume anti real got a good amount of payment because they are now in the fucking credit of the game. Satisfactory design consultant, which is the ultimate gimme. I got caught. Oh, fuck. Acknowledgement. Yep. The, uh, regardless in my attempt at judging the game on its own merits, I, I made, I said my piece and I put it to the side. Uh, it's got a, it's got a cool unified future aesthetic. Okay. Was any of that part of the, because it had one before in Marathon D'Randal, right? No, it, it, it, it doesn't link to that. No, I know, but I'm just saying marathon existed. And I don't see, so I'm not, I don't know much about the before times marathon. Um, but I don't see any similarity here. Of course not. Of course not. I'm, I, I was merely stating that like this, this choice in naming of the product, um, there was an existing thing, but whatever this is, whatever it is now. Anyway, I loaded in to the tutorial and the first thing that happened is that the game runs like shit. Yeah. Okay. Okay. It runs really bad. Um, and it runs a very specific bad in which I went, I went through every single graphical option on stream, including turning super sampling on at the highest level solution and putting it down to 720p with DLSS at 33% like fucking, um, like a resolution. So I was like running at like 400p. No, I had no dice. Zero difference in performance. How about that? Zero. Okay. Um, only to then find out from somebody in the chat that the game doesn't like OBS. Oh. And you're, and you're, you're, um, same system streaming, right? Yeah. Which is a problem. Okay. So then I brought up task manager and set marathon to high affinity and doubled my frame rate. Okay. So off the bat, the game needs some more work under the hood. It is crazy CPU heavy. I wasn't maxing out my CPU. I wasn't maxing out my graphic card. It has genuine room for, for optimization. Do you tend to benchmark and then tweak from there? Or do you go to ultra and pull it down? Uh, I tend to turn everything on. And if it's stably above 70, I leave it. And if it's not, I turn on DLSS and then I go quality balanced performance. And if that doesn't work, then I start kicking down options. Okay. Usually the DLSS functions is plenty for performance genuinely. Um, so got into it as expected, marathon controls really, really well. It feels fucking awesome to move around in that setting to shoot, to mantle, to run bungee makes games that control and feel really excellent. Like it's, it's like absolutely. The next in the line of halo to destiny to this. Yeah. Okay. Um, it fit like the, the gunfire and the hit effects. They all feel really good. Like no complaints. Looting and using the menus feels really bad because bungee is obsessed with their fake mouse cursor on a controller. Oh, okay. Okay. Obsessed with it. Now when you loot in both games that I played, when you, when you pick up a loot box or a player, you slowly reveal the items in their inventory. Right. So it's, it's like, you'll see the blank inventory and then it'll fade in the item and then it'll fade in the next item and it'll fade in the next item. Right. So the fake mouse cursor isn't the end of the world because you have already moved it to the loot box to do it, but it doesn't like the interface part actually doesn't feel very good at all. Correct me if I'm wrong here. Right. Yes. But, um, whereas we will get shit every time we pick up a controller to play a first person shooter is bungee not also in line with, um, like, is the, are they not like a company where the games they make are usually expected that controller is supposed to work really well here? Because they make console, they make controller games. Okay. Yeah. Like bungee games are played with controller, like to the point where the server slam for marathon had a mouse lag input bug that had gone unfixed. I, I, cause I'm like, if any company is, you know, if you give a shit on a controller for a lot of different types of FPS as I can imagine, but like, I need to remind you, Destiny one many years ago was the one that invented the fake mouse cursor on controller. I see. Okay. That's bungee's child and they will never give that child up and I don't know why it sucks. But I would assume that their game is more than any are like, yeah, made for that. No. Okay. It's, um, after that got into a bunch of matches. Um, is there, is there, is there an early hook that they, uh, they, they, they drop on you? Yeah. The tutorial has some things happen and then you, you know, the, uh, uh, a weird NPC with a video package tells you a bunch of weird ass future shit and then gives you a couple little quests to do. Uh, but the main guts of it is getting into the map and wandering around and scrounging and, um, so thank God they added solo play. They added solo cues. Um, I can't believe those words are things that they fought against the most. Mm hmm. But you can now queue as solo and you will get into matches that is other people playing solo. Thank God for solo queue as a wild sentence, but I understand. Well, here's the thing. I understand the context. If you're, if you're playing solo queue and you're playing in a multiplayer game where people can rob you and everyone else is in a three man stack, you're, you're, you're cooked. Like your options are highly limited. Mm hmm. Uh, there is a character that you can play called Rook, which comes into late matches by themselves that are filled up and they are explicitly a, a sneaky scavenger type. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Which is a cool idea. Mm hmm. But you can play as a solo operator in a solo lobby, which I did and I picked the shell that can turn invisible because of course I fucking did. That is what every single person who plays in the solo lobby picks because there's a character that can turn fucking invisible. Mm hmm. Uh, and I had a pretty good time wandering around very, very interesting futurey weirdo environments, hiding from map NPCs and dangers, seeing other players and trying to kind of fucking see if they were chill or not and usually ignoring them. But what ended up happening is that I wanted to talk to somebody in the solo queue. Um, in marathon, you have a push to talk for proximity chat. That's like global, right? And what happened was is I would see somebody. I would usually see somebody first and I would go, Hey, friendly. And then I would eat a fucking bullet. Is what happened? Yeah. Um, and that happened significantly. And then I ran into one gentleman who was like, Oh, hey, man. And I was like, everyone is really aggro in this game. And he went, yeah, it's nuts. Hey, do you want to go do a quest? And then we wandered off together to, to finish off our objectives, which are per run, right? It's, you know, I'll go extract this or get this item or whatever. And on the way there, we got, uh, uh, snuck up on and killed by another player. Okay. Who was not friendly and did not talk to us. Um, you, I mean, open comms already. You like open. So I, I was like, I would be insane if I wanted to play this game with closed comms, like it is, it's not made for that. Absolutely vital aspect. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I played it for about two and a half hours. Uh, I got a bunch of the quests done. I ran into a nice person. Uh, the game plays well. It has interesting systems that has good reasons to hop in and wander on the map. Uh, it's quite difficult. The enemy, enemy APN PCs are very tough. Um, and the, the community of marathon players is the bungee community and the generalized community of extraction players, which is other players, are de facto dangerous. They are scary. They are probably violent. Yeah. I just, I assume this genre is everyone is hostile and the friendlies are the exception to the rule. They are roaming violent threats and they are more dangerous than the NPCs because they're people, right? They can do anything and they want your stuff. Right. So I came away with it with a fairly positive opinion. Uh, I will definitely go back to it if I see that there is a performance patch and it stops running like shit. Like I, I made it run better by doing the, the CPU affinity thing, but like the game runs bad and it runs inconsistently. I saw, you know, that thing where people have worse computers than you and they go, actually it runs fine for me. I don't understand what's happening. It's one of those things. Okay. This was not the ending to the story I was expecting off of the narrative on, of marathon, the, on this podcast that has been akin to Anthem and Fallout 76. Absolutely adamant that I, I take this game on its own merits and like just because I hate Bungie a lot doesn't mean I can't look at this with like clean eyes, which was, makes it really funny when I have received comments since then about what a grudge I brought into it. When I actually came away from the game positive, it's like, oh, you've got pre mad, you got pre mad at the expectation of my opinion. That's so interesting. You're like a child. Um, but yeah, it needs, it needs better performance. It needs, it needs better performance. And it is very still like pushing towards like three man groups because the NPCs are very difficult and I don't want to play in the three man group. So I probably wouldn't stick around. But like it is, it's solid. It's a lot better than I thought it was going to come out. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I mean, well, the impressions that we were getting, you know, from the, the, the press events and the stuff that was going on beforehand, all were these really weird, rough ones. At the end of the day, the old like, to me, I'm like, Hey, did anti real cash the check? Yes. Okay. All right. Do your thing. I hope they, I hope they got a lot. You know, and, and what I will say is that it's not the same genre, but from doing my, you know, friendly three team, three person discord runs in Apex Legends. I know that like the fun of playing with a squad going through a game like this is yeah, it's, it's baked in, but instead of a circle closing in battle royale style, you just take it from run to run and go. I'm sure that can be super fun if the gameplay is actually tight and you guys are coordinating and so on, you know? Now I am like, and then I, you know, I gave my opinion at the end. I'm like, it's a shame about all that plagiarism stuff that sucks. They shouldn't do that. And I will bring that up every time bungee comes up ever again to which some folks like, well, what do you want them to do? It's like, I would like them to go one year of their company's life without a plagiarism scandal. Well, don't worry. They fired the artist start. They fired the artist responsible now. No, no, no, but I don't know. But they fired the artist responsible for doing that. They always do. They always fire the one artist responsible. The mysterious five times in a row. Like every time that's crazy. They always get the one guy. It's fucking nuts. This mysterious member of the art team just keeps, he keeps getting rehired. And I don't know. So I then loaded up our craters and the arc Raiders thing is two fold one. They paid voice actors to feed their voices into the robot so that the robot can do voice acting forever at essentially no cost. Is this theft? No, I would consider it using scab labor. I think is actually the more appropriate. That's one way to put it. Sure. Sure. Okay. Is it gross? Yes. Is it theft? No. It sucks. Art fulfills like a very strange in between. Also, the machine that they use to make it is the theft machine. And did the voice actors sign up for that on their contracts? They did. Yeah. Which is why I call it scab labor. Hmm. So right off the bat, man, man, did they not need to do that shit at all. The voice acting in the game sucks and also isn't important at all at all. Okay. Now it's it's crazy. Now you're coming into this game, which is unlike marathon, Arc Raiders is the established current king of the genre. That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, also, Arc Raiders, accidentally exploited a security vulnerability in Discord and put everybody's Discord DMs at risk. Whoopsies. Yeah. So ooh, ooh, these extraction games just can't be had without these caveats. So start Arc Raiders and it's in third person. So I already like it better. Fuck. I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I didn't know that. Yes. Starting third person already likes it better. Step two. That's a big deal. Runs great. Okay. It's an Unreal Engine five game and it runs great. So right off the bat, that's two points in its direction. And I'm like, oh, this is already a much better experience. Solid tutorial, like very solid tutorial. The tutorial has you get snuck up on and ganked by fake players to teach you how that works. And then very, very similarly after that tutorial, load you into a map with basically nothing on you. Hey, man, go do this quest, do this quest, do that quest, explore. There's people all over the place. And the arcs in this case are like a lot of drones and a lot of walking robots that are just populating the map. Um, one of the most interesting things is one of the controls is in marathon, you can enable, um, press right on the D pad to talk, but you have to hold it. You might, so they don't want you talking while fighting doing anything else. Yeah. Right. And on top of that, um, one of the things that I thought was really interesting in marathon is that, um, other players are kind of highlighted in red. And the auto aim tracks them super aggressively. So like the game is like pushing you like shoot them. Oh, fucking, fucking shoot him. Okay. Shoot him. Hostile baked in. Uh, when I was playing our craters, I went into the voice settings and one of the first voice settings that I was like, that I got a look at was toggle to talk. Um, with also with the D pad. Okay. So it's not necessarily hold it on. It's like, do you want to have a real voice that you can turn on and just speak into the ether the whole time? Yeah. The whole time. Like, yes. Um, and so I was like, okay, got that ran into a guy within like a minute, like immediately, right the fuck away. And I went, oh, oh, hey, and he went, Hey, bud, what's going on? And then we continued to hang out on voice for the whole fucking map and shoot the shit. Huh. Immediately, no, I'm fine. To find things. And we chit-chatted about the marathon launch. The first person you ran into the very, and then he was like, Hey, man, I'll send you a friend request. And then he sent me a friend request and then he helped me extract and it was very pleasant. And then I started a second match and it happened again. Wow. And a third and a fourth and a six and a seven and a ninth and a 10th and an 11th and a 12th. Wow. Okay. So every single person I ran into for like three and a half hours was a chill, normal, good microphone having human being who was playing it like a co-op MMO. Are you getting queued up with other people who are starting out as well? Or is this just random? So is it just a volume of this being the number one game that is? No. But our creators are interesting. Is aggression based matchmaking. So there's a, there's a story about Ark. Basically, our greater started out with no aggression based matchmaking and you just got put into a lobby and that's what was that. And the way people acted is the way that they, they acted. And then our greater streamers burnt out on all the content and then we're like, we're going to just turn this into a PVP game and became super, super violent and the game's population as a result got super, super, super violent. Okay. And as a result, the devs added aggression based matchmaking. So when you start the game, you are being flooded into lobbies of people that don't shoot people. Interesting. That's your first match is going to be a match with chill guys. Okay. Okay. And if you show that the game you want is a hostile shoot first, ask questions later game, then you get placed with those people. After about three hours, I was like, well, let's see what's, what's, what's going to happen. So I shot some people. I ran into a guy with no mic and he was doing the little hop up and you know, the crouch up and down to show me he was friendly and I blew his head off and I took his stuff and then I ran into another player who was extracting and they were like, hello. And then I blew their head off and took their stuff and then I loaded into another match and saw a guy at a very far distance and I ran up to him and shot him in the back and took his stuff. And then I saw another guy very, very far away shooting arc and then I shot him in the back and took his stuff and I did that five or six or seven times. And then I loaded into a match and you can tell if you're in a shit head match. So you hear it. So you can see it. So when players get downed, they fire a flare straight up into the air. So the flare shooting straight up in the air is a vision of there's fighting over here, but there's also loot over here. Right. Right. So when you load into a match and you see, you know, a thing go up, can you see a drone flying around them? Can you hear a bunch of mechanized infantry far away? Oh, that person died fighting an arc. Right. But do you load into a match and you see flare, flare, flare, flare and all you hear is gunfire. Yeah. You get the fucking vibe. Okay. Of that match. And I ran into people who would shoot first on site. I ran into a guy who was chit chatting with me as I was fighting an arc. I didn't even realize, but chat saw he was trying to kill me with sniper fire in the middle of my gunfight. And I didn't notice because I was busy. Okay. And then he snuck up on me and took me out. So in terms of that was also a pretty fun multiplayer experience. Now if I go back and just chill for a couple of runs, it'll nudge me back down into the chit. Now this is where I'm not, I don't know enough about them to know this, but so battle Royale, you are cornered off into a circle where the whole point is kill each other until there's one left. Right. With extraction shooters, the round is just time based and then it ends up as a! So the way that it works is extra marathon and our creators do it slightly differently, but in marathon, there are points on the, on the map that are extraction points and they have a limited amount of time before they become unavailable. Right. So the longer the match goes on, the less places you can actually leave. Right. Okay. So when, so for example, the, the most recent, one of the few extraction things I did experience was MASH Mach mode in Mecha Break, right? Yeah. And the, even if you were playing a non-hostile person, there's still a limited space for you to get shit out and for you to get out. Therefore, around the extraction places, you're going to fight other people. Exactly. So in, in Destiny, sorry, in marathon. The extraction points make a shit ton of noise and they are in defined spots on the map. Right. Uh, so you will encounter people there for good or for ill. Yeah. When you try to extract, um, for, uh, for our graders, I read, so for marathon, I ran into four ill, including one guy who was scared of me and was invisible next to me waiting to secretly extract and then we extracted. And I was like, there was a guy next to me invisible. Okay. Cool. Now, um, but, but in, in arc similarly, you run into, well, it's a big open room that is an elevator or subway station. You're going to run into a bunch of people when you turn it on, but people can leave simultaneously, but the matches are timed like there, I think they're like 20 or 30 minutes. So in these games where you said you had peaceful encounters with people and it was mostly chill and people were friendly, did those games, did you yadda, yadda, yadda? Eventually we had to shoot at each other to get the fuck out of this extract. No, we, we, we pulled the elevator and we waited for it to open up and then shot any arc that showed back up and then everybody got in and somebody says, is everybody in? And then you pull the lever and you go down and everybody extracted. Okay. So there is, or you could be a fucking psycho and shoot people in the back. The instant the elevator starts up to loot their body in the one time of safety when the doors are closed. Okay. So PVP is 100% voluntary. You can all PVE, get your stuff and extract with no. Yeah. So downside marathon is a very PVP focused game. Like the game wants you to be fighting other players like as a, as the default. I mean, the pitch showed that primarily arc, arc Raiders. Um, there's essentially like two games in there. There's a, everybody's pretty much working together to do a player versus environment style gameplay. And then there is a absolute scum fuck nightmare, like murder hobo scenario. And even though they have, I think they call them caribbean lobbies and killer lobbies. Okay. Even though they have these, what's interesting is that, uh, our craters has a reset kind of thing. It is like, Oh, it's a prestige like in Call of Duty, where you give up all the stuff you've earned, all your money, all your materials, all your blueprints, but you get like a buff that goes on forever. Right. Uh, and it's called an expedition. When the expedition leaves, because all these players that had all their items maxed out are now broke again, the game becomes more violent for a period of weeks because people actually need and want, and they lost their stuff. Okay. Does, uh, and, and, and, and I guess marathon doesn't do any of that aggro server. Marathon has a three month reset. After three months, I believe the all, all the everybody's stuff reset, but it does no aggro server matchmaking. No, it, it, you, so. It has no aggro server matchmaking and it doesn't matter if it did because the people that are playing marathon want to fucking kill you. Okay. And like, there's definitely appeal to that. It's very, did you play pub G? No. No. It had it playing, playing, um, playing marathon and playing arc Raiders on a shit head murder server feels like playing pub G where it's like, it's a big wide open map and you're scrounging around and you are just like listening super, super, super careful because everything around you hates you. So arc is the exception here in the genre arcs. Social component is a wild exception. It is the only one that is like that. And it is, it is a result of their aggression based matchmaking. Okay. Now, at all of this analysis, and there's a key question that you haven't answered, which one do you want? Oh, much that the arc Raiders is a, well, so bluntly at this point in time, arc Raiders is a fundamentally more complete and better game. It has better, it has better graphics. It has better performance. It has better controls. It has more systems that systems are more interesting to me personally. And there are functionally two different games contained within one of which is a co-op shooter against the environment and the other is a scumbag psycho simulator. Okay. Now, Marathon is solid. It is actually really impressive how far they built that game up from the alpha that I played. I am shocked that they put it together from one to the other. But your preference is for the non hostile, more cooperative PVE experience. Yes. Okay. Also, my personal opinion is that in the extraction genre, and this is this opinion comes from ignorance of the extraction genre. I'm of the opinion that not knowing if the guy you are with is cool, is much more interesting than knowing he is not cool. That is more interesting. Right. Like, oh, that is more interesting. Yeah, that's an enemy is less interesting to me than a guy appearing to be chill and discovering that he is not chill. Now, I would have assumed your perspective on this informed by other genres would have been fuck other people. I don't want to deal with that shit at all. So this is all very like, huh, really? Raiders talking to strangers and and really it is the only game I have played since bad company two on the 360 that I have been like, I want to turn the microphone on and talk to these people as a general rule. All the way up to and including the guy extracting with us. And I was like, bro, what is that noise? And he's like, that's my baby crying in the background. Of course it is. Of course it is. And I was like, wow, just like the good old days. And then I think he hit a bong and went, huh, yeah. And it sounds like no slurs. No, no one called me a name. In fact, my stream paints me as a degenerate psychopath because I am the only person who committed 99% of the violence seen in the game down to the point where I was chit chatting with a guy and he said, Hey, man, why are you so nervous? Or some equivalent. I'm like, oh, I shot a bunch of people last round. So I'm worried I got put into a psycho lobby and he said, ah, don't worry about it and turn this back on me. Okay. Okay. He was in the process of literally walking into my character and being like, look at this cool gun I have. I have like the best shotgun and it's the highest rarity. Isn't that cool? And I'm like, yeah. And then he just turned around and walked away. Never mind. I was like, I was like fighting with my heart very strongly. Never mind. Pokopia. This too is a result of the pastures. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Yeah, no, they're both good games. I happen to think that arc is like an excellent game. Okay. Whereas marathon could use some work. Interesting. Twist outcomes for both of these of the slop versus off. Yeah. I really think those games were not ethically compromised in a very significant way. Sure. There's that. Definitely. Yeah. Who am I to talk after I play all those Capcom games? Or Sega games? Sure. It's fucking. Can you or riot or at that bit industry? Yeah. No, we know. Um, overall, though, it's that that is that that is a yeah, I'm like, because again, I there's things about that. I'm like, I didn't I didn't know that that's what was going on there, especially with the like third person shit and stuff. But as as interesting as this all is, I am fundamentally just not at all into what know that I am like, people are like, he's it. I'm like, you couldn't be further. I am so not into it. I did have a really fun moment playing Arc Raiders where I'm like, hey, guys, hold on, hold on, let me hold on. I'm generating a cope. I'm generating a cope thought. And that cope thought is, well, I waited until after it had already sold millions of copies and won tons of awards. I didn't contribute to its enormous popularity in success. Therefore. You done? Just give me a thumbs up if you're done. That is, in fact, actually the totality of it. You're done. Okay, I assume you're done. All right. Yeah, cool. Whatever the fuck the rest of that was. It was it was exactly what you thought it was. It was exactly what you thought it was. Jesus Christ. Um, OK, all right. Um, I gotta take, I gotta take a like a literal 60 second beer. Be beer. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. This week, Castle Super Beast is brought to you by Rocket Money. If you are signing up for a bunch of services and junk that you don't even remember, if you are paying monthly subscriptions to things you don't use, stuff you've forgotten about, stuff that has changed name, changed price, who knows what's going on. 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That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y.com slash SuperBeast. One more time. Shopify.com slash SuperBeast. Thank you, Shopify. Thanks, Shopify. And this week, the podcast is sponsored by Quince. Quince is the comfortable sweater producing company that has been making some great stuff. The sweater I am wearing right now is my favorite sweater. It's cozy as hell. It's it's it's got the dad energy. I stole my sweater. Yeah. Well, time to fix that. I've my dad wardrobe. My dad wardrobe has been has been greatly enhanced by getting some quince sweaters. And it's nice because like baby just loves like nestling up and she loves to feel the fabric. She always reaches out. She grabs my beard and then she kind of grubs around and grabs it. It's like, oh, she can feel this and this is nice and smooth and and it's this is a I mean, look, it's it's quite simple, but the the the fanciness of a Mongolian cashmere sweater. I would have never known about that material and that's what this is. 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So unsurprisingly, after the leadership changes, you know, like one into the other, they're like, hey, let's tease the new console. Probably let's get some good, good PR going. What with everything, you know, that has been the the the AI vacation that everyone is expecting to to come to this brand. I'm just going to say I understand new management. Let's tease something. Fucking weird decision when they're still putting all their their games on other platforms. Well, that's not going to know like, is it a weird? Would I get excited to buy the fucking next box? Well, is it might not be a weird decision when you hear the details of the console and can anticipate to fill in the blanks on what the rest is. All right, what do you got? What do you got for me? I mean, my guess would have been pretty much it. But like, OK, so what we know, 2027. No. What? Straight up. Wait. No, I reject your premise. That's not going to happen. Oh, OK. This ram shit. Just no fucking way. Right. They're going to miss it. Um, the. Yeah, so I think that everyone basically saw that whole shake up and went, OK, this brand is dead and they're like, no, we're not. Here's what we're working on. And so they put out this. You got you got the 2027 is what they're saying. They're already saying stronger than a PSX is what they're aiming for. No fucking shit. It better be. What the price points between a thousand and twelve hundred bucks. And if the rock is coming in at a thousand, then yeah, expect it to be more. And of course, the pricing you're looking at is because is this a console or is it a PC? It doesn't matter. It's it's a helix. You see, it's both coming together. Here's what happens is basically. You're getting a you're getting a Xbox that is going to play steam games that's going to play other company launcher games as well. Thus, the library doesn't have to be an exclusive Xbox related thing. Thus, you're basically you're challenging PlayStation, but you're trying to steam machine by Microsoft. Exactly. The steam machine is also your competitor. There's so much appeal. And me of that. Well, only the helix box is going to have whatever litany of AI features that are going to be proprietary to it. So fucking this. So yes, you can. I didn't hear the price that. The price of these things has to come down. Sony put out their own statements being like, hey, kicking up the price like 10 bucks has hurt sales more than the money we made off of copy sold. The volume for video games, guys. The bubble must grow, you fucking fool. You absolute buffoon. The bubble must grow. We have committed the entire Western. The entire market, the entire US. The the end to everything is standing on AI right now. We have committed to it, right? Missiles are blowing up AI in in across the world. AI centers as like strategic points and targets. It's is how important the market is with this bubble, right? That price is not coming down. This is what we're pushing. And again, what? What about polls that show the average person, the average person hates AI? What about that? We we've built. We have built a system of shorting babies. We're not going back now. We're already here. All right. We're already we've decided to put the whole thing on the quicksand, man. It's too late to question it. It's too late to pull back. We're committing. We're all in. And you know what? You know what? If we sell enough of these fucking three sixties, we can get the money before they red ring, you son of a bitch. If we get the money before they red ring, then everything will be fine. We'll just replace them later and we'll win. It won't matter. It doesn't matter if there's a time limit we sell now. No, but it does because video game consoles make their money off of software sales. Attachment rates. Who cares? Only only only Nintendo makes money off the box. Attach this to your asshole and sit on it. The whole the entire business model of your standard console is lost leading into software sales. So you need software sales because you're because you're you're because of your your platform holder fee is a percentage of software sales. You actually need to make a high volume of software sales. Oh, oh, you're just pretending like I'm a nagging wife. Oh, I'm so. Or my box will have steam on it. So all the games are box will have steam on it. And all the games are already there. But you will come to my Helix box because the co-pilot AI features will not be available anywhere else. Well, did you see the the reviews of the Xbox ROG thing and how like I think La la la la la la la la. Like rain into the fact that everything every part of the Microsoft in for interface was like a completely broken fucking piece of shit and would like break the fucking console at random. Like I mean, at a certain point, it's just literally like la la la. Can't hear you. People have nostalgia for blades is that every single refresh that Xbox has ever done has made it a more objectively. We're shit. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, the funnest thing was booting up that Xbox one and seeing that it looked like Windows 7 and just fucking dying like the Metro style shit that was being pushed or whatever. Like and you know, there's no backing down. I think this is what it is, man. I think you're going to have a PC that will, yes, have Xbox exclusives if anyone wants to bother developing one. Or you can just install Steam or install fucking Epic Game Launcher or GOG or whatever else is available because other games launchers will work here. That's their libraries will work here. And we're just going to push fucking co-pilot and shove it down your fucking throat and you will learn to love it. I'm going to see the Steam Machine release at a similar price point with similar specs, but it's made by Valve and it will be an open platform and it will sell out instantaneously no matter what it costs. And it will become you will see threads that will be the most depressing shit ever, which is like, I can't I can't find a Steam Machine. Should I just get a helix instead? The Microsoft helix box will suck your dick. Hey, Willie, I have a question. I have a really important question. This is genuinely 1200 bucks. This is a vital question to this argument. Are you ready for it? Hit me. I'm going to spend. So we're talking 1200 USD. I'm going to spend $1,600 plus tax. $1,800. Oh, CAD. We do in the CDN convert on this. Yeah, I'm going to spend $81700 on this new Xbox. On this new Xbox and part of the appeal is that it has all the storefronts that you would expect out of a personal computer, right? All right, that's the appeal. Yeah. Well, I'd be able to play Ghost of Yote on it. Well, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Because like if I can play all the games on it, when is when when when Ghost of Yokohama is is coming to the PS6, perhaps you can enjoy a part. You don't even have this story on your docket. Sony's Quitten. Oh, the last oh, no, we did that last week. Oh, no, that was not. No, no, that's the that's part two is that. Yeah, no, Sony's. Part one doing PC part. Part one. Part one is yes, we will have Yote when the the sequel is coming out on the PlayStation anymore either. Oh, if you want to play a Sony game or a Nintendo game, you need to buy a Sony platform or a Nintendo platform. We have Yote at home. Please click. Please click the. Hey, hey, Copilot, find me a samurai game. And then it'll make one for you. Assassin's Creed shadows. It right. That has been prepared. You know, when you search for something on Netflix and it knows what you're looking for, but it's not there, it'll autocomplete it and be like, oh, I know what you want. That makes that sense. Strike the ICs every time. It's like, oh, you're you're looking for this thing that we don't have. That might be the worst interface thing I've ever seen in my life. You are showing me your autocompleting to show me that you don't have it. Genuinely unbelievable. It's like, yeah, I know what you're looking for. But hey, how about this? Copilot has prepared a samurai game for you. Look, please. Runs at four FPS and it's going to get taken down by lawyers in two weeks. But yeah, here it is. It has if it is currently generating it, it has generated a slop. A.I. fucking game for you right now. Please. I can't believe they would spend the money on the Ram to put out an overpriced console. In the situation they have created, they are better off doing nothing until Sony makes a big fucky. So new seat, new person, whatever new direction, new thing in charge. How do we change this thing? Or how do we how do we turn this thing around? How do we turn this thing around, baby? They fill and Sarah left this new person a big old fucking pull bowl of shit to eat. Like I mean, it was they have left that place in a dire fucking state or or it was on the it was on the chopping block. And this is a no weight hold on. How can we I this right? Because, you know, I mean, we've watched this weird like zombie Xbox state, like existence for this generation kind of last and be this like weird thing or like, oh, yeah, they're around. But what are they? What's going on? You know, and this attempt appears to be the we'll save it by turning it to something that it's just not. Right. It's a it's a particularly locked line of PCs. And they'll be and again, they'll be all in on, you know, and I get the Microsoft OS off the device entirely. Go fuck yourself. OK, so you son of a bitch. So why would I write this thing instead of the steam machine? You you will be lucky if booting it up gives you anything besides a logo that talks to you in a voice and a microphone to tell you what you want it to do. Like genuinely, they're they're setting themselves up to compete with an explicitly identically priced, better product. I mean, fucking why? And you know what? Valve games are going to be exclusive to fucking valve. And you know it, you're not going to play deadlock on a fucking Xbox through that bullshit. But you're going to want the fancy steam controller with the with the thumb hat only works on the steam. No, no, no, you see, they can't make it exclusive, but they can give you incentives. Right. And make it better. They can give you incentives to pull you away, which is ultimately and to be real, this is the Microsoft future that they wanted. Right. This is them going on their own into the, hey, guys, consoles don't matter. Let's do the everyone can play anything thing. Right. The question is because it's going to be backwards compatible as well. That's part of the that's part of the thing. Of course. Of course. You know, so it's just like, what is development for the exclusive helix going to look like at all? And is there and is there any reason to actually bother? So here's here's the part that like all this stuff is is super fascinating because Xbox said, hey, man, who cares about exclusives? Let's put everything on everything. And part of that push was that large scare like multiplayer populations could create a scenario in which games functionally only existed on one place. Right. Hey, did you want to play on an anime fighter online back in the day? Right. If you're playing it on Xbox, you're a buffoon because everyone who plays that's going to be on PlayStation. Right. Yes. So, hey, let's do cross play as a big incentive. So the fact that our multiplayer games aren't dead on our own system isn't a problem. Right. Yes. So Sony is also going to do that. Sony, the news coming out of the PC port thing is that Sony live service games that use multiplayer are still going to come to PC because having a gigantic user base for that is more important than getting them as an exclusive light. So something like Helldivers or something like that. Right. OK, so we've done the cross play thing. And they're like, what do games even need to be exclusive anymore? Of course not. And then Sony goes, yeah, they do from you. And Nintendo goes, I'm not listening to you fuckers at all for doing our own thing. Of course, Mario is going to be on a Nintendo until this company burns the fuck down. But if Sony and I wonder if the timing is at all relevant here, because if Sony is going, well, PC is not really our opponent. They're off to the side. It doesn't matter. We only care about there. They're Microsoft port marathon to so that we have more players in the in the lobby. As long as you don't show up on an Xbox, that's all we care about. And Xbox is like, well, how we are a PC. So now what? And then Sony is like, well, I'm out. Fuck you. You know, like, I don't know. Because Microsoft, Microsoft going their own way. Yeah, sort of. But their own way is following in the shadows and sneaking up behind and trying to still be in the same space and picking up the crumb. Podcast or was on my stream, but Microsoft is giving massive like showing up to the key party alone energy. Yeah, we don't have our own exclusives, but right. I if I can, if I can keys to drop in, but can I still pull it? If I can pull it, if I can, how about you get the fuck out of here? You know, if I can enjoy some of yours, you know, I mean, no. Or alternatively, they come back with their keys and everyone's like, don't even drop that in the bowl, man. Just that's just get out of here. That's brutal. That halo infinite. No, thanks. You already gave up your banjo. You already gave up your your master chief. You're letting us you're you're letting us play Indiana Jones over here for free. Why would why would this analogy? Yeah, all right. Now to get off the rails. Let's absolutely. Thank you. So you know what? And then you even take it further. Like, well, is Joanna going to come around? No, no, we canceled. We canceled perfect dark. Darkest, darkest. Well, then you need to get out. Dark as ink. Dark. The only reason we even hung out with you is so we could hang out with Joanna. But you know, you guys aren't even together. Oh, get the fuck out of here. I think honestly, it's you avoid you avoid losing. How can you lose the generation when you sidestep it entirely? Right. Yeah. There you go. That's what you said. Big think. Yeah. Anyway, what is the like of all the the things of all the details that we got or whatever that's being guessed, it's just what's not being said. What's going to be the biggest? Like, watch the push just be everything about this. You boot the thing up and it's a search box and a circle that that you have to talk to. You know, Sony is so confident that this fucking thing has no market threat. They have started testing mother fucking dynamic pricing. Price dynamic pricing store. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How unthreatening this shit is. They are getting ready to fuck us over years in advance and surge pricing on fucking video games. And right now, the dynamic pricing test is how much of a discount you get, right? So, you know what? If that's OK, but surely it's going to stay that way, right? And not be about how much extra you pay. So they have to be really careful because steam has experience with this, right? Have you noticed that a lot of PC games on steam come with 10 percent discounts for the first like couple of weeks? OK. The reason why that is is because we have decades of teaching people not to buy games anywhere near their release date. In fact, games on steam go on sale like six times a year. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. But hey, it's 10 percent off. Now I might as well get it on launch day. If they do dynamic pricing, the longer you are just going to cause the situation of it's not on sale, fuck this. It'll go on sale. If I don't buy games long enough, if you take it, it'll go on sale. Yep. This is what Warframe does this. If you take it so Warframe has daily rewards and sometimes the daily reward for more frame is a 50 percent off coupon on the store or a 75 percent coupon off on the store. And wouldn't you believe it? The longer you've been away from my God, the higher, the likelihood that one of those good coupons will show up. Oh, wow. OK. That's that's. There must be free money. There must be somewhere on this planet. I imagine a country with a law that is really fucking strict about, hey, you walked in and this is the price you pay and you walked in and this is a different price you pay. There's got to be something about that. Probably ours. I was going to say Australia, but I don't know. Canada and the EU are the most likely to actually do that. There must be some fucking like level of are you insane? That's the most anti-consumer shit of all time. That doesn't mean that they can't do dynamic pricing in the regions that it's not against the law. Of course not. And you know what sucks is when I first heard the term, which means region locking will come back. Well, when I first heard the term, I thought they were. I went, oh, good, because I assumed that meant that if you're buying the same game in Brazil or, you know, anywhere around the world in different countries, that the price would be dynamic, according to the currency it's in and that it would be it would be accounted for and not be like you're paying the same amount in exchange rate US dollars. You know what it's going to be. But that's not what it is at all. It's going to be like, hey, Pat stairs at PlayStation Network account. I see here that you own seven God of War games. We will never put the new God of War on sale for you ever because you clearly really like it and you're probably going to get it eventually. And it'll say, hey, you bought six of these the day they came out. Why would we offer you a discount? You fucking bitch. I will say that as soon as this came out, I saw that like because it sounds so fucked up immediately and then there was like, no, no, no, wait, hold on, it's it's discounts. It's not from full price upwards. And it's like, oh, they know how to couch this immediately to try to find some sort of defense on it. But again, this is in test because there's there's surely no way it'll ever be for full price and above, right? You know, you do. This is so I am under the assumption. Sony knows that kicking up the price of games, 10 or $20, depending on region, has hurt sales. What they can do is they can offer lower prices that are actually the old price. Oh my God, if Canadian games become actually Canadian 59, 99. Only the ones they do. Oh, my God, likely to buy. Jesus Christ. Fucking Street Fighter Four. Ever since then. Yeah. OK. All right. Well, moving on, but that's part of it. And and and by the way, watch the fucking PS6 price come in at prices right rules and just clear like it will be nine hundred and ninety nine dollars as long as we're cheaper than they're they're they're cutting off their nose despite their face. They're pricing these things out of the range of like five to ten year olds, which will then ostensibly grow up into freaks like ourselves that spend lots of money on games. And somehow that will be cheaper than the chip that's fucking in it. By the time it hits your house from walking from the store. Anyway, whatever. That's a whole other thing. We touched on it a little bit earlier, but yeah. So Gang of Dragon Rough Times. Apparently the they're they're pulling net eases, pulling funding and Negoti Studio might be shutting down based on the fact that they needed to re up on. They asked for more money for development in order to reach completion. And they asked for an addition seven billion yen at a time when net ease has been shutting down tons of international game development operations. Yeah. So net ease is actually the secret embracing group, the Embracer of China, in which they offered tons of people, cool deals, new studios, infinite funding to make games for them. And then a couple of years ago, they're like, now fuck that, actually, this costs a lot of money. Let's just cancel them. Well, between Screenix and Capcom and and all these different companies, there's always a like a international fund that you're like, let's fuck around with the planet and see what else. Let's get a couple studios around the planet to fuck. And then eventually, like, for example, net ease is the company that closed the visions of Mana during my sponsored visions of Mana stream. Oh, OK. The company that was willing to send out the ad money to pay me, but not the studio. Yeah. Um, no, they, uh, um, and there was like a list of the of the different things that they shut down over the last couple of years as well. They get you play around, you get into the international market and then, you know, when it's like, ah, none of this is working, they pull back from it entirely and then usually, you know, consolidate and focus at home. Visions of Mana 2024, Grasshopper manufacturer as well was yeah, we listed here what bad brain Vancouver based worlds I'm told a whole lot of other games are on this list, but either way, said, yeah, because, uh, um, no matter what they're doing with their new Kiwami three universe or whatever, yeah, it's like, well, if if the competition is fucking dead, here's what's weird, right? This is it's soon, you know, of the not it's soon, a negotiation of the former like a dragon team, right? Made lots of yakuza games. Super weird guy to come out and go, we went massively over over budget. Actually put out like 20 games in a row under budget on time. What? Oh, what happened? They had to start from scratch without any of the existing assets. Oh, it's been decades since I made a genuinely new game. Infrastructure that they had because Yakuza has been running on the same thing for a long time. Alternatively, it's possible that the like a dragon team occasionally received a little alley-oop from some friends of theirs in the community that were personally interested at seeing the like a dragon game succeed. Perhaps friends, old friends of Sega, perhaps it's impossible to know. Perhaps also getting Madong Siak and big actors to do stuff had a cost as well. It's possible that a similar friends in China were not as interested. But yeah, yeah, I'm imagining that a big part of Yakuza's under budget magic has been because they were building the same thing and kept using the engine that they had to switch it up like a KOF game. I got to tell you, man, Gang of Dragon probably was going to be really cool. I could not have been more disappointed to hear, here's the new game from Negoshi. It's the same fucking thing again, like genuinely unbelievable. It's the same fucking thing again, and it's the same fucking location. I can't believe it. The depths of his soul are screaming spite, anger, and also I'm never going back to Monkey Ball. You fuckers, you can't make me. I don't know if that's true. You can't make me. I'm tanned up here when he was working on Monkey Ball. He did. He did. He did before he before he turned into quote this weird tan Yakuza baby and pre crisis, man. Pre crisis, Negoshi. All right, moving on. There is there is something kind of insane. And yeah, maybe we'll I'm sure we'll be trying. We'll be getting into this in the future a bit more. But when a world when Pal world can pal world Pokemon, who pal worlds the pal world? Oh, this this fucking thing, right? Who watches the watchman? This fucking thing kicks so much ass. If if the courts can decide that pal worlding a Pokemon is OK, then who's to stop you from pal worlding a pal world in comes pick mon this fucking somehow like, you know, when fucking thing you watch the you watch that the pal world bit and you're like, this is insane. This is blatant and it's kind of hilarious because look at them fucking putting guns in their hands and having the slave shops and all that that that wild commentary, etc. Well, this is all of that. But without any of the little extra bit and just the full on, oh, we legally can steal your assets. What are you going to do? That is a mammarest. That is a mammarest. You can't stop us, right? I think the craziest one is that the big crystal on the logo is like a one to one lifted copy of the limbs of Lomensa, Aetherite and FF 14. Like it is. It's great. Above it to the side is a chowrazar with a little bit of fur on its chest. I just touched it a little bit with link with a gun on it. Right. Now, now the insane thing here is that pick mon as this game is called. It's the developing company. So the fucking name, dude. Oh, my God, it's called pick mon, which I remember when I know when Miyamoto announced Pickman and I was like, word, bro, really, really? Pickman. All right. Anyway, pick mon and the company's coming on. It's actually wait. The fucking developers name is pocket game. Holy shit. Pocket game, not pocket pair, not game freak pocket game. The absolute lack of fucks to give. And this is inevitable. This is inevitable because the pathway, right? Once you legally open the door, it's done. It's it's done. There's no reason to give a shit, right? And here's the thing. Fuck you can almost you can almost wonder about like the social experiment that is like what is to stop me from ripping off the ripoff? Right. What what reason is there to give a fuck? Here's how little like there's the integrity is couldn't be any further in the basement. There is a fucking. Uh, uh, link. There's like, yeah, there is a one of the Pokemon on on that box art that you see in the trailer is not even being stolen from Pokemon or from Powell World. It's being stolen from fan art of Pokemon. Right. So, uh, you're seeing this. Let's just read Rayquaza. Um, oh man. What was it called? Mega, Meganium, a grass fairy type concept Pokemon that was just stolen from fan art. And it's the exact like exact fan art. They're going and they're grabbing concept Pokemon that people have posted online and putting them into the fucking game. Just like and steal it apps like zero fucking scruples, no fucks given, no integrity whatsoever. That's the most blatant model from overwatch. Literally road. That's his model theft. Maxing is like this is I'm shaking my ass at you and I'm wearing a checker jumpsuit. I dare you to arrest me copper. I dare you. What are you going to do? Pig? It's crazy. Like they're baiting jail with this. I've never seen it like this. They're touched. They are touched out, touched down dancing end zone with the football going in the jail, out the jail with Pikmon here. It's never been like this. This is the is oh man. And honestly, honestly, between that and the the the actual stealing of fan art, lock them up, arrest these assholes, shut it down next to Bungie. This is crazy. Lock them the fuck up, man. What are we doing here? It's it's there's just like the asset flip is yeah, but picking the target that's currently under lawsuit as well is just wild. All right, I got to get out of here. Yeah, I got to go to a stream with Peach saliva over at twitch.tv slash Pets stairs at YouTube. We got a beat shout out of the Colossus and blindly in the blind in half an hour because everyone in the house is getting sick. And if we leave it a couple of days, we won't be able to do it. Awesome. We'll get to the rest of it next time. Take care, everybody.