CSB366: Bourgeois-Z: I Take Off Homestuck Makeup Next To My Undertale Cosplay To Wear My Pomni Outfit

Alright, welcome to Castle Night Beasts. It's fucking dark outside. It's not in both corners. Dark outside here even. That's crazy. In both corners of the nation. Yeah, on both coasts. That's kinda, that's no good. As you said, this timing is doodaw. Oh, this time is doodaw. You know what else is doodaw? What's doodaw? These guts, bro. Oh no, your guts is doodaw. My brain, my body, all of that, all doodaw. Still recovered enough now that I'm feeling okay. Still do? Still do. You know, the Daws. Maybe not so much on the Daws. The Daws mostly gone, but not a good feeling. Yeah, no. And I'm not just me, I think Reggie was kinda going through it too as well a little bit there and we're just... Did you eat poison? Might have gotten poisoned. Might have had a purple mushroom with the frowny face on it and that's no good. Suspected because you never quite fully know, but yeah. I feel like food poisoning is always a crap shoot. You're always wondering, hey, was it that thing that didn't seem weird? But once you add multiple people and a timeline of events into the mix, you can narrow that right before you do that. You can just... exactly. So that's a fucking bummer. But anyway, appreciate the schedule shift here. We do what we gotta do. Unfortunately, this means we have to lie like crazy today. We just have to lie. Well, listen, we've got sponsors and that means we got a podcast to record this week. That's right. You fucking sit in that chair and we do it. But I guess my state of being aside, the other thing to open up with here is, hi, you might be tuning into this newly on Spotify or on YouTube. Oh my god, it's like a video even. Some people are literally typing, I haven't watched their faces in like six years. What the fuck is that? What they look like now? That's weird. That's crazy. I see my own face every day. So and I'm sorry. It's right there. But yeah, no. So basically, hey, let me ask you seriously though, you ever see an old picture yourself like from you're like 20 and you're like, ugh. Yeah. Yeah, I see some old screenshots of this podcast that I go. Yeah. And you're like, how long was that? And people are like, it was only 18 months ago. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, there's some there's some bad ones. Mm hmm. And then there's the ones that just live in infamy, like, you know, me doing certain faces. Yeah. So, you know, infamy is right. Mm hmm. You got to take the screenshot with the mouth wide open like, oh, yeah, you got to get that one right there. And I got to make sure to let everybody know how much I don't like it. It's like those times where they'd get the Kretzier, you know, in the newspapers to just like where it's like it's as fucking maximum disrespect to just like, oh, yeah, he's. You remember the fucking conservative attack ad that ran for one spot like 20 years ago? It was like, is this the face you want to leader? And it was him in like maximum stroke face. Like you fucking pieces of shit. How are you doing? You absolute trash garbage fuckers. Yes. And it, yeah. I'm sure glad the discourse has improved since then. Yeah. Oh, yeah, the discourse is better. It has elevated. They should have done a sequel to that fucking ad, but with with Justin and his fucking make. They should have been like the exact same fucking script. Is this the face? Oh, man. Oh, man. Dude, how come we didn't get that? That would have been like a full TV ad of the fucking prime minister in blackface. OK, because that's for like 20 people. But boy, would that have been hilarious. My dad would laugh his fucking ass off. Yeah, because I mean, I want to say like, you know, that that got exported, but nothing exported as hard as Doug Ford, you know. So like when it comes to Canadian politics, it's like that was pretty much the beginning and end of it. Yeah. And then there that one. Is he the dead one? Um, yes. The one that's about crack is dead. Doug. Yes. Yes. And is yeah. And his brother's brother's running things. That's right. Right. Correct. Rob's the dead one. Oh, it's the alive one. Completely fucked it up. The complete opposite. They look like the same guy. Yeah. They got that sibling thing going on where they look like the same person and they act like the same person. So they might as well be the same Rob. Spoke to crack and spoke patois. He was mayor of the Toronto. His brother's the premier. Yes. And he's the one that had more than enough to eat at home. Anyway, what was I even fucking saying? Yeah, hey, you can go to go to YouTube. You see us. You see go to Castle Super Beast Archive and the videos there. Or if you go to Spotify, you can actually click. That's crazy. You can click on it and watch it and you can see the video there too, because apparently our dicks are big enough now. And Spotify is like, yeah, OK, you can get some. I was like, hey, what's up? We were like, can we cop a feel? And we're like, OK, go for it. You know, only on the left. See where the night takes us. I don't know. Whatever, man. So, yeah, the deal is that if you haven't done so, go over to the channel and click subscribe and do that. I'll do all that stuff. The. Yeah. And I've the word archive is in the title because it's whatever you can't really. It's not. It is from all the older episodes, but you can't really do anything about that at this point. So. Anyways. We have a couple things. We have a wonderful show for you guys this week. Boy, do we ever. And once again, layoffs. Yeah, I mean, all kinds of things. Should we even bother? You know, well, more, more important than than all those layoffs. I have personal grievances that happened to me right before we went live. Oh, yeah. Yes. I have. OK, personal grievances. Way more like to hear your personal way more important than those layoffs. Pat, today is April 1st. That's right. And no, this is not about me getting fooled on April Fool's Day. No, it's I'm too old for this. This is simply me. Being the fool well before this, because you might remember a couple months ago when I reported live here on Castle Superbeast that Tepin was shutting down and I remember that and that there was going to be an offline edition made available and you could transfer all your data over so that you'd be able to preserve it in the offline edition forever afterwards. Yeah, but you had to have the data, which was like the fucking weird part. You had to log in between December. You fucking. Oh, you dumb asshole. You had to log in between December and March 31st at midnight. That's crazy. That's great. You had plenty of time. I had. I could have swore. I put a calendar reminder in my fucking phone. That's crazy, dude. And I booted. I saw a thing where someone's like I logged in and didn't get my shit. And I was like, oh, fuck. And I logged in and too late. I'm so vexed because it's like. Oh, that's gone gone. That's gone, gone, gone. Right. That was like a gimme for its death. Yep. That's it. That's it. That's over. That's gone. There goes my shit. And I'm just like, OK. That's you now. You know what it's like to have played a dead. I. Yes, I am the fool. I am. But but here is the bit, though. More than that, I take that. But more than that, I have a renewed burning hatred for this new video games economy and dead things and dead online games. And the system. Do you mean end of service? All of it. All of it. I fucking hate this. And I do appreciate that here's one that had an end of service that tried to do something that you could like, you know, keep going after the fact, whereas most of them just hit you with a title screen that goes nowhere forever. But fuck me. This sucks. I hate it so much. I know that reminds me of never used to be like this, man. So we talked about at length about how the final fantasy release schedule is doodaw. And that's why the kids aren't in the final fantasy last week. There is a fantastic, fantastic article whose author I can't remember, nor can I remember the title. Someone, please, post it in the chat as I describe it. The basically went into a long rant and series of details. Kids are poor. Kids are poor. The kids don't have money. It was the kids are poor. It's like TLDR. I've ranted about that in separate threads. Yeah. Yeah. About like, how are people supposed to get into video games when they are broke? I, you know, I had the I had this discussion many a time about walking into that basement, seeing my nephew and all his friends playing brawl, holla, getting in there and basically I'm like, oh, y'all don't play smash. And they're like, we can't fucking afford smash. No one has a switch. What are you talking about? I was like, oh, yeah. So you know, it's more. And here's the thing. It's more than the kids are poor. First of all, everybody's poor. The economy has sucked our entire lives. I'm turning 40 this month. The economy has literally never been good once in my entire life. It had it. It was good for like 10 minutes after I was born. It had a set like while you were growing up, it had a semblance of looking like the thing that your parents like moved into. And by the time you graduated, that ship was fucking hit the horizon to get allowance. That ship was gone. The economy was already in shambles. Like that was fucking bullshit. But the lag, but the lag was that you're still getting advice to go put on your suit and walk down to the local shop and shake hands, you know. Yeah, if I was three years old, I bet that would have played, honestly. But more than that, more than the fact that people have little money. Is that the avenues for little money are gone. Rentals gone. That was huge. Gone. That was huge. Games in general, costing fucking nothing like 30, 40 bucks. Gone. Like everyone goes back and points it like that. That fucking super turbo cartridge being a hundred dollars or whatever. That was like wildly out of the norm. So absolutely trivial cartridge based piracy. Gone. Eventually, eventually that happened later, but that was there. And I got that I always I was just trying to remember it. I forgot. But in in in LaValle, there was that one video rental store that actually rented PC games out and didn't give a fuck if you copied them. It was crazy. That and like nowhere else to rent PC games for that exact reason. Right. But no, the the but realistically, the ability to rent games was how me and everyone I knew grew up played and experienced them like the whole also. Dragging out value out of GameStop and E.B. Games is poorly worded return policies. You you I didn't react. Yeah, I noodles of value. OK, so I never played that game of like the return trade in shit because of my my micro play story. Right. Ever since I walked into the micro play, gave them a copy of Star Fox and they handed me three dollars. I said, fuck this forever. That's that. That wasn't the gimmick. Oh, here was the gimmick. You buy Zola the Ender's to full price. Right. Costs ninety two dollars back in two thousand and five two thousand. No, two thousand was whatever. Two thousand four. Right. OK, that's a lot, but that's tax. You then beat it in a weekend because that game's like 40 minutes long. You then returns on the enders to for full value in credit. Right. Right. Then they disallow that. But now you have ninety two dollars in credit. Now you buy a used game three days after it comes out and used games can still be returned for credit within 14 days. OK. OK. So what do you do? You fucking beat 26 games in a fucking year is what you do. Again, I know that so you I know you I know Schmupgott, Pat and I know Liam used to go hard on all the all the deals right with the with the keeping up with trade and returns and stuff. I'm thinking of like well before that was established, just like childhood days. It was it was rentals to experience everything. And then eventually when emulation became something feasible and we got a computer that could there was, you know, run SNES 9X and you know. And I think for the year 2002, I played like nothing but Super Nintendo games that I had missed. It was crazy. It was crazy. Right. And like nothing. And so it's like between that and like booting up Neo Rage X and like taking it took like half an hour to load Samurai showdown for up. But fuck me, it ran, you know. It was like that was pretty instrumental in like going and going and getting into and experiencing more and more games to the point where like, oh, you know, about a bunch about these things now, right. And yeah, that type of childhood, admittedly, was one where you could play a lot of different games, spending very little and rarely, if ever, buying a full copied thing, you know. And as I got older, like full copies of things started to happen a bit more. But it was it was again, it was like in the Super Nintendo and to the N64 days, it was exceedingly rare. We would just rent Star Fox multiple times, get that Rubble Pack and fucking do it till we beat it, you know. You'd also run the thing that I mean, you can still technically do, but it's a little more awkward, which is, hey, you, you and you. We're going to buy. Resident Evil four. OK, I'm going to put up 30. I'm going to put up 40 percent of the price. So I'm going to play it until I beat it. And then I'm going to give it to you. And then you're going to give it to them. And then and so on and so forth. And you're just going to rotate the one copy throughout. But now physical meat, like the digital storefront wants to destroy that. And again, there was an era where like humble bundle stuff used to drop off and it would be like, hey, there's a lot of games that you can get for very cheap. And that's that's cool. But yeah, that overall place is gone now. And it's not that you can't buy. There's a lot of games you can play now for very cheap. But the main line franchises, the stuff that of yesteryear that we care about the big name IPs and all that triple A stuff is, yeah, that is still locked in on the the $70 or $80. Well, price price train. And so that that's a part of the discussion that was absolutely worth bringing up. That that article talked about that we didn't get into last week is just like. Yeah, fucking cost, man. You know what else that article brought up? I wish I could remember where it was, which was, hey, Final Fantasy games used to come out like one a year. That's crazy. You know what the kids are into now? If they're in RPGs, fucking Honkai, Star Rail, a new one of those comes out every six fucking weeks. Square will never be able to fucking compete with that shit on the timeline basins. Yeah, fucking never. And that's and this that's that's that's the same articulated discussion about the Fortnite train. That was like, hey, you're a bunch of people are playing. But you and your friends are all playing Fortnite and it's dropping content regularly. Every once in a while, something else has to distract you from it temporarily. And then you come back to this because there's going to be new shit in here. You know, one. The article also goes into detail that of something extraordinarily depressing, which is basically a bunch of Christmas gifts for console games. Went out only for the kids to be like, I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. You don't get anything by playing. And what they meant by that was like daily log in. The bonuses. Oh, yeah. Yeah. because the first games they were ever given were free to play games on their hand-me-down phones. And this is where we can invert the conversation to, hey, guess what? Bad parents are ruining video games. Parents that go, here you go, Jimmy, you're five years old, here's my old iPhone, do whatever, are ruining video games because they're allowing their kids unattended infinite time on a smartphone with fucking slot machine games. I mean, to be fair, those parents are also getting their credit cards blown up when they don't seal off the card, and then they end up getting a bunch of microtransactions that they didn't protect against by leaving the card plugged into the game. But that's insane. But regardless... Yeah, I think, sure, that's a part of it, but realistically, it's just like, every game, every one of these companies, realizing that you could pick at the exact spot in the brain to activate the FOMO sensors that we've gotten used to and desensitized to, it's all created this horseshit environment, we love it. So, you know, it's no surprise that even if you were releasing games that were long, good, whatever, all that shit, and they were somehow affordable, it's like, yeah, but if they don't have the dailies and if they're not an ongoing, not a live service, but just a reason to check back once per month, if you're not keeping up with that sort of schedule, then who cares, right? I mean... You know... There's millions of bad people There's millions of bad parents out there who have ruined video games for you and for me and for the people who've listened to this podcast. So what do they do? Oh, okay, we gotta either go mobile or go big. How big can we go, Woolly? Hundreds of millions of dollars big, seven years big, four engines big, we gotta go bigger. But then no one ruins video games, like whoever the fuck is steering the ship over at fucking Eidos Montreal and is just setting fire to like two, 300 million fucking dollars and taking a shit on the ashes. I mean, to be fair, it's like... Shit was rough for a while now. Everything post-embracer has been like, like just skeleton. And yeah, I don't know... It's certainly, it's not a company that I recognize anymore. I don't know how many people I still know over there, if anything, but at this point, it's like, I did recognize the name, a name of the dude that's leaving, David Alfonci, who took over after Stéphane Dastu, who was there when I was there, or right before, actually. Yeah, that's... What's the number? 124 employees getting fired out there. And alongside that, you know, no surprise, a lot of people that get cut leads to loose lips, and loose lips have revealed that a seven plus year development on a game that cost hundreds of millions of dollars was canceled. And they canceled the Deus Ex game to work on. This game was called Wildlands. Now, it was an original new IP, third person shooter, or third person open world action adventure game. And a lot of people were very excited by the promise of it, but it's kind of nuts because between this and some of the other rumors of massive projects that were worked on and then canceled at the studio, it's like, this is not even the first time something like this has happened. We are in a really strange spot in the games business, where we now have very public Concord and... Oh my God, I can't remember the name. High Guard. It died like two weeks ago. High Guard. Oh man, High Guard. And we are seeing these cataclysmic bet failures, just like 100% total loss. And I feel like some of these mega projects, people are going like, all right, just cut it now before it even comes out. So it seems like the story with this one is that it was almost done, and it passed a bunch of milestones, and internally everyone thought it seemed pretty good. But so it's just a matter of it did not survive the crash and the burning and the fires. It did not survive the race to the finish to get it out there before they fucking started cooking everything around it. I don't know if we have anything to say on what kind of reception it would have had or what it would have looked like. Don't know anything about that. There's some details on it. The main character's name was River. Part of a group of teenagers called Spirit Bounds. You'd ride mythical creatures, you'd use magical staffs. There's a whole breakdown of what it was. There's footage that is not being displayed because it's under NDA and so on. But this could have been a good game. It's gonna be a great game, who knows? Or. No idea. But I don't know that it was necessarily about that. I don't think, based on, again, I don't know that quality had anything to do with that. I think it was just the, it couldn't make it to that finish line of, fuck this, cut 124 people, everybody leave, go. And, again, seeing the studio had leave alongside that, it's kind of eerily familiar to how when Stefan Dastou left, he left because he said that the studio had had no courage and they canceled another giant original project that was being worked on and they put a lot of time and work into it that the studio believed in. So, I mean, I don't know if the circumstances are identical here, but him departing alongside the cancellation and firing of all these people certainly does mirror the exact same thing that happened just a couple years ago. I'm sure anybody who's out there that's still working there could fucking just nod your head, with your eyes closed on that one, if that's the case or not, but fuck, man. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, dude. There's a time limit on all this shit. You know, I'm thinking about Elden Ring. And I'm thinking about our perception of what Dev Hell is, like the term development hell, which is a game trapped in development for too long. Oh man, it might not release, it might get canceled, it might be fucked up. And I remember Elden Ring was the last game that was, like, took a really, really long time after announcement and then came out and was uniformly excellent. And then everything started to take that length of time. Like, everything, like, we went from two years, what are you kidding me? To like, I hope this comes out before my son, like, goes to high school. Yeah, I think three, I think we kind of talked about this before, like three to four is more or less expected a normal, like, a big thing, you know? Yeah, Skong was obviously the fucking punchline before this. But yeah, like Death Stranding was like three to four, right? The takeaway I'm getting, because I mean Elden Ring, it's also one of those things where it's like you get to be, like, Frumsoft is a SOTY darling, it's like you are fucking, you're getting the royal treatment for being one of the most important studios that is, you know, releasing games to this platform. But my takeaway from this type of story is actually that, like, we were talking about games where, yeah, like Concord and the High Guards of the World and whatever like shit where it's like, original thing just wasn't interesting enough and flopped and didn't work. There could be, and then we talked about, of course, the Hi-Fi rushes where it's like, you could be successful and great and do all the good things and it still doesn't matter, right? So my takeaway here is there's games that could be in development right now that if they had a chance to come out, would be successful, but they're not gonna get that chance to simply because the implosion is happening too fast. And it's not that your brushstroke wasn't perfect, it's that the fire behind you roasted your hand and cooked the entire canvas before you could put the finishing touch on it. Like, you know, I feel like Crash and Economics or not, genuinely, that the long dev cycles are more, as more responsible for this than anything. Because like the two things that spell doom for your long in development game is new guy coming in, new executive producer, new CEO, new whatever. I gotta shake things up, I gotta make things mine. I didn't approve that project, that fucking guy. Or a bad quarter, right? Like a bad, oh, we gotta cut, we got a really bad quarter. But it used to be that your game only had to survive like six quarters, and then it'd be out. Now a game has to survive like 18 to 24 quarters. Well, okay, it had to do that, but then also, lest we forget, let's not forget what the most insidious shit at the time was. It had to survive and also hit that Metacritic 85. Of course it did. You have to hit that Metacritic. Sweet spot. You have to hit that sweet spot, you have to hit that number. That's a good game. Otherwise you don't get your bonus, and by that I mean you don't get paid. Basically, yeah. So there was that that started being a factor as well. Okay, well look, I mean, that's all happening. But did you have a week? I did have a week, Willie. I did. Okay, because I'm sure we'll get back to that stuff. You know what I did with my week? What'd you do with your week? I played fucking Kingdom Hearts. You played some Kingdom Hearts, didn't you? Did you know? No. The Kingdom Hearts audience is really intense. Yes. They're excitable. However, are there a lot of them? There are a surprising amount of them. There are a surprising amount. I see. Yeah, there's more than six, seven, yes, Willie. So I beat Kingdom Hearts one. And I beat Sephiroth, and I beat Unknown, and I beat Kurdzeesa. I took out every super boss on the hardest difficulty in Kingdom Hearts one. I fully completed that shit in about eight days. That game's great. It was great when it came out. It's great now. Every one of Kingdom Hearts one's flaws is overstated with the re-release that has the newer camera. The re-release that has the newer camera? That was like the big pain point. Do you have memories of the original release? Yeah, the original release had a anti-player camera. Okay. The original release had you turning the camera with L2 and R2. That was the only time the camera moved. So you were running with the analog stick, attacking with the buttons on your thumb, using the right analog stick to move your command list around and hitting L2 and R2 to turn the fucking cap. It was a lot. It was a lot. Yes, sir. I have another issue to take up here. You lied to me? I lied to you? By omission. Okay. You told me the character's name was Diz. However, you did not reveal that that was an acronym and that that acronym was for darkness in zero. Whoa. That's for unifying animals. Are you fucking kidding me, bro? I'm not kidding you. I'm not kidding you even a little bit. That is absolute, but it's also spoilers. So, shh, for a game that came out in 2000. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't realize. You know what's great about Kingdom Hearts I? Like genuinely awesome. It's a fully contained story with no branches. It has a beginning and a middle and an end and everything you need inside Kingdom Hearts is inside Kingdom Hearts. As long as you play all of them. No, no, no, no. I said Kingdom Hearts I. Everything in Kingdom Heart that you need in Kingdom Hearts I is in Kingdom Hearts I. Oh, it closes off and wraps up and calls it a day. Absolutely. Interesting. Absolutely. Interesting. It has a defined beginning, middle and end. It has a little bit of a cliffhanger ending, but you could cliffhanger that ending with and then the adventures continued onwards. It was only later with the secret movie and the new super boss that's like, okay, well, there's a sequel coming out. Maybe you should play that little sequel because it's pretty good. And that's super good game and excellent action game. But your journey didn't end there, did it? I did not. But before we leave that, I had a great moment playing Kingdom Hearts I and where I was fighting Sephiroth, which is definitely the hardest boss in that game. He's the secret Colosseum match. It's just like, hey, do you want to fucking one-on-one Sephiroth with this little child? Do it. Super, super fucking difficult fight. And I'm older, I'm wiser. I have a whole chat of people telling me pro tips and keyblade combinations and spell shit or whatever. And I'm like, yeah, I beat him up with the Metal Chocobo keyblade, even though it wasn't the best, it's Clouds Keyblade. So I was like, I'm gonna do it because I'm like 16. I'm gonna beat Sephiroth up with Clouds Keyblade. I'm gonna do it. And I was having trouble using quote unquote better ones. And I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna go back to the one I used like 20 years ago because for all time's sake, maybe that's, oh, it's way better. Oh, okay. And I discovered, hey, guess what? I made the right decision then to. You were, I was smart. But this is also proud mode with the XB scaling thing going on, right? It's not so much an XB scaling thing, it's the thing that everything has twice as much health and does twice as much damage. So proud mode is a mode that did not exist in original Kingdom Hearts 1 release. It only came with the later re-release. So I was also playing it on essentially double difficulty. So that dude was a motherfucker. That took me a while. And yeah, no, wrapped up Kingdom Hearts 1. Tutsuit takes no time at all. All you gotta do is stream 45 to 52 hours in a single week on just the one game. That's all you gotta do. Light work. And not get stuck on any bosses and nowhere to go the whole time. Light. That's all you gotta do. And then I hopped on to, fuck, I've been calling it Recome. Kingdom Hearts Re-Chain of Memories. Yeah. Now why'd you do that? I don't know. I was like cool, cause I was like, maybe I'll play another one. Okay, I was not expecting that. Maybe I'll play another one. I was not expecting, I don't know, but yeah, all right. No, so what was happening is like, so I talked about this last week when I started, which was, every time you start Halo one, you know, Xenoblade one, you know, whatever, the first comment is, are you gonna do the DLC for the fifth one? And you're like, okay, can we just back off a second? It has never been more intense in my entire time on this internet. Yeah, and their Kingdom Hearts. And therefore the correct answer to why'd you do that is, because look at those fucking numbers, bro. No. No. What? Dude. What? That's not why. It's cause Persona EX gave me $2,000 to play through the series. And I was like, Buh. Fuckin' bet. Oh my God. Oh my God. Are you serious? Yeah. What the heck? I showed up in the chat and was like, hey, how much would, if I gave you two grand, would you play through them? And I said, oh, if you donated two grand, I'd be like, ha ha, maybe. And I do a really sarcastic little shithead thing. And then maybe, I don't know. And then he's like, oh, my bank finally let the transaction go through. And I'm like, and then I had, then you get to that, then you get that moment on stream where you're like, Jesus Christ. Okay, I'm really, I'm in it now. Wow. I'm in it now. Okay, and then you do, then what you do is you go, okay, hold on. I have the power to go into PayPal and get your PayPal email address and just send that shit the fuck back. If that was a mistake, a gag, a joke, a non-disposable income discussion, whatever. And then they're like, oh no, actually, I will used to watch your show a lot when things were bad, but now I'm rich. And I'm like, okay. That's the greatest Kingdom Hearts game. Let's roll. Hey yo, mecha. Let's fucking go. Yo, mecha break, the price is going up. Hey Sega, fucking call me, bro. Damn, all right, sick. But in all honesty, I actually, I never played Chain of Memories. So, and Chain of Memories is, Chain of Memories is what I would describe as the start of every problem that has ever happened to Kingdom Hearts. So Chain of Memories was a Game Boy Advance game that was later ported slash remade on PS2, which is weird as shit already, because that's a big hop from like sprites and like single screen things to a fully 3D realized action adventure game. And people say that it's worse on PS2, but PS2 has more stuff and it all says voice acting cutscenes. So whatever. That's the one that I'm gonna show on the TV show. So I'm playing the PlayStation 2 version called ReChain of Memories, which is one of the, it is genuinely like one of the weirdest games I've ever played in my life. Everything about it is strange. So first up, Kingdom Hearts comes out in 2002, 2003, Kingdom Hearts 2 comes out, I think 2004, 2005. The re-release of Chain of Memories comes out in like 2009. So way after, like significantly afterwards. And originally the GBA version was in between the two of them and it was an interstitial game, right? So right off the bat, this is a story that is the connecting link between Kingdom Hearts 1 and Kingdom Hearts 2. This was an act of plot violence on PS2 owners back in the day. So are you familiar with what the fucking deal is with the Chain of Memories narrative? All I know is that it's mandatory. So step one, mandatory. Absolutely unreally mandatory. I went and Chain of Memories is like more mandatory than like a Metal Gear game from one to the next. It's fucking ridiculous. On top of that, the one of the plot details at the end of Chain of Memories is some characters lose their memory and other characters remember the events of that game. Meaning you're rolling into Kingdom Hearts 2 and characters are describing events that they know happened to people that forgot them. Man. And if you didn't play that game, you are fucking confused. You are confused as shit. And the idea was supposed to be like, well, the characters are also confused as shit. So it's fine. And it's like, no, no, it's actually really hard to understand. So back in that time, there was, I would say a decent chance that people owned a Game Boy Advance and a PlayStation 2. Absolutely. That was not out of the ordinary. No. That was a type of gamer. Yeah. Not me, but hey. So on top of the fact that Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories is fucking weird in its placement, the PS2 re-release itself is extra fucking goofy. So what year did the sixth sense come out? The sixth sense came out in 1999, featuring a young child actor known as Hailey Joel Osment. The movie, the sixth sense. Jesus Christ. I thought, I'm like, is there something Kingdom Hearts related called the sixth sense that I've never heard of? Because I'm like, Bruce Wallace was there. Okay, god damn it. All right. So Hailey, that's where that was. Hailey Joel Osment's big break. And as a result, Hailey Joel Osment got tapped to play Sora in Kingdom Hearts 1. And I'm going to guess his English voice acting was recorded in like 2001. So he's a child, right? In Kingdom Hearts 2, he has gone through a little bit of puberty, right? And thus they age Sora up and he's a little older. Well, by 2009, Hailey Joel Osment is a man. So Sora is going from Kingdom Hearts 1 and then five minutes later, he walks into Castle of Libyan with a man's voice. And it's fucking crazy. I'm like 10 and a half hours into it. It's still nuts every time he talks. It's the adventure time problem. Yeah, but it's the worst version of that problem ever. Cause it is literally like one scene and then they walk through a door and his balls just hit the floor. They just drop. The voice becomes dead. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know. No one else's voice has changed because they're Disney characters or adults already. And I don't think that, you know, they didn't want to recast understandably, right? No, you can't recast. No, no. So that's what we get. And so you walk in and it's a fairly interesting setup. They're looking for, you know, they're looking for their gang in Castle of Libyan and there's some Nair duels there. And there's a memory loss situation going on. But hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, do you like cards? I mean, I'm pretty indifferent. Okay, so what if we took this action adventure game and turned it into a real time card battler that still has in the GBA 2D movement and the PS2 version slash current version 3D movement? I booted up the GBA one for two seconds just to see what it would look like and to see that intro because I wanted to see like anything technically, like he said, yeah, see what was technically possible. And yeah, it was like 2D side scrolling, like I'll beat them up angle, I remember. Yeah, and so I, there's something really enjoyable about certain audience members not keeping up with what's up because I was playing this 3D action adventure card game turn based, not active time, whatever. And I was getting a little fucking frustrated. I was getting a little frustrated because there's a lot to juggle. You're building a deck to do regular attacks. You can't just do your regular attacks like you can in Kingdom Hearts, you build your fucking deck to do your regular attacks. Basic attacks. But then you're combining, you're combining sets of three attacks into a hand called a slight, but when you use the slight, the first card in that slight disappears, pulls right out of your deck. And every time you reload the cards, it takes longer. So are you building for slights, but the slights all, and it's, and so, but you're also 3D action gaming with your cards. So you got to look down and see, oh, do I have attacks or magic on? Oh, so if I got Blizzard on, so I got to go jump and do the Blizzard. And this is not what you signed up for. And I saw, I saw it scroll by going, man, if Pat's this frustrated about this, he would really fucking hate the world ends with you. Yeah. And, and that comment made me understand why I was getting so pissed off. And it was because the game is demanding that I split my attention every single second. It wants me to do this, then it wants me to do that. Okay. It wants me to do this, and it wants me to do that. I forget it where you stood, whatever I brought up past the puck. I forget if you were on my side or whether you stood against me. I am your strongest advocate. Okay. I am your, I am your strongest warrior. Fuck me, man. On the world ends with you. Everything else was so sick. I just couldn't get past that one aspect. I, I, okay. I, I picked that game up as a real DS cart and played it for like 10 minutes and was like, just though worse. And I was like, the music and the character and the art and the fucking vibe. And then it was like, you take you out your stylus and I'm like, how about I put a knife in my neck? I actually brought up this exact thing because of something I played this week as well. That made me think of, basically, I was playing the Pragmata demo and that's a great example of playing a game while another game is happening. Yes. But it does it so well. It does, it's so smart. You know what's so good about Pragmata? It doesn't ask you to split your attention. It's great, man. It overlays the new game on top of the other game. Fuck it, just preach, preach, bro. Like I'm telling you, because it made me think of exactly that as I'm doing the puzzle and I'm shooting, I'm like, this is a super, this is the ideal version of what a game like Twiwi was going for, but you're synchronized. It's synchronized. Both games are harmonious in what they're asking you to do. Your attention is singular. And when it starts to overlap and stuff, you're feeling the pressure of it, but the goal of the thing is not a completely separate identity reality over here that you're supposed to look between two places. It's actually the same thing together. It's great, man. You know what? I feel so vindicated about my Twiwi opinions because the Wii U gamepad and all the games that did, look at the screen, now look at your gamepad, now look at the screen, now look at the gamepad. Those were all also miserable. And that fucking core conceit of that whole platform sucked. And I remember even like reading an article where I think guys from platinum were talking about Star Fox zero and about how, yeah, looking up and down at the screen is actually like really frustrating for lots of people. I'm like, I'm looking, thinking about it, and I'm just like, the Pragmata design shows me that it is possible to ask the player to do two things and to use that tension to make it difficult. Just keep the vision focused. And make it feel like a Hong Kong action scene. Don't flood, don't flick the camera everywhere. Focus on the action. And make it feel like the things that are focused to those two, make it feel like what they're doing is like not just affecting each other, but like it, because passing the puck, you'd go up here, you'd weaken the thing, and then you'd have an effect down here, but like it just, it's not a complete thought, but it just, it didn't feel as harmonious and as in sync as the way Pragmata does it. I fucking love that example of it. And I was like, oh, this totally does work if you design the game well enough. So, yeah, you're playing, you're playing a Re-Chain of Memories and you're loading up cards for attacks. You're loading up cards for spells. You're loading up cards for summons. You're loading up cards for items. Item cards are used and they were, so use like a potion and it'll restock all your attack cards, but then the potion gets used up, because it's an item, right? And so you, the game wants you to use lights, which are those three card combos, to, you know, do attacks or do special attacks. So here's where the game gets kind of super messy. Cards are labeled one to nine. If an enemy is attacking with a card that's number three and you try and attack it with a card that's number two, your card will bounce right the fuck off of their card and be nullified. So you have to attack them with a higher card than their card, right? Unless it's a zero, because zero breaks anything. Okay. However, now you get bosses that also use lights and lights combine all the numbers on the card. So even 999 slight, it becomes a level 27 slight and nothing's fucking breaking that shit, right? But by doing that, you just burned a level nine card. And the tutorial explains the slight system as like the second mechanic in the game, when you have like 12 fucking cards total, and so you go to use it and you run out of fucking cards in like a random battle and you're like, what the fuck is this thing sucks? So then you stop using it and just flood your deck with high value cards. I'm true. You're fighting random battles that are trivially easy and bosses that are very difficult and every boss, I had to completely rebuild my deck to beat. Right? Oh, this boss goes for sixes. Okay, so I'm gonna flood my thing with sevens and just reload, right? And so on and so forth. And so the beginning of the game is quite difficult because it's demanding that I learn how to build a deck, do action game combat while running my deck. Oh, is the boss using a nine and I don't have a nine? That means I need to slight it, but I have to make sure to slight the weakest card first because that's the one that'll get eaten up. And it's a huge amount of split attention and it's very difficult. And then you unlock Blitz and Sonic Blade that are slights that are so strong that the game turns itself off. There are card combinations that are so busted that I have literally just filled in my deck with the combo for Sonic Blade five times in a row and potions at the end. And I fought a boss and went through like four health bars in 45 seconds and the boss couldn't even move from their starting location because I just hit them with Sonic Blade 40 times in a row. And apparently that's not even the good one. Okay. The game is wildly, poorly balanced. It's absolutely nuts. My question was going to be on a scale from Triple Triad to Tetra Master. Where are we landing here? It starts as Tetra Master and then you unlock the good moves and it becomes Triple Triad if you have all the end game cards. Okay. Like the game just becomes unloosable. Okay. And I think one of the funniest things is as I was playing this, people were, I kept using, I was trying to use the slight system and it kept like just being garbage. And the number one piece of advice was just wait until you get Sonic Blade and Sonic Blade will just beat the game. I'm like, okay. And I get Sonic Blade and hey, guess what, Sonic Blade is going to beat the game. It's like 100%. I mean, that doesn't sound great. As I was describing, the world ends with you and we were complaining about Pass the Puck. I saw a motherfucker just go, dude, you just need good pins. Once you get good pins, Pass the Puck gets super good. And it's the same. Start me with the good things then. How about you start the game? Oh God. With a version that is fun to play. I forgot about the pins. Yeah, different areas, different fashion, different pins for different zones. You wear this in this area for this. Oh no. Yeah. Like I saw some folks while we were talking there going like, you know, you're remembering it being way too hard that it actually was. And I'm like, it's not about hard. It's that it was unfun. It's that it was not fun to do. That was my problem. The core gameplay conceit is unenjoyable. If it was hard but fun, I would have stuck with it, you know? And so now I like my opinion on Chain of Memories is fucking even stranger. Cause now I've built out a deck that's so strong that I'm literally just reading chat and mashing triangle for like the entirety of Voss fights. Oh my God, okay. Like it's becoming like, hey, it's becoming a chill stream. Well, that's awful too. Because I mean, that is all so awful. I've heard so much good about how sick Kingdom Hearts II's combat system is. And like this is what you're describing. So Chain of Memories is not made by the same people who did wanted to. Right, okay. Chain of Memories was made by the people that started to do some of the weirder handhelds, spin-off things. So, Kingdom Hearts I has excellent gameplay. Basically, once you unlock Guard, once you unlock the ability like dodge roll and block, you can start to get into like a bunch of parrying stuff and a bunch of cool acrobatic shit. Is it anything like Lost Kingdoms for the GameCube? That one's, that swings right over my head. The FromSoft card game, adventure game right over the top of my head. I will tell you that Kingdom Hearts II is a real ass action game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is a excellent fucking action game. To the point where they, that's where they started the concept of critical mode, critical mode, which is, here's your standard game, then there's your proud difficulty, which is harder. And then there's critical. And critical is, okay, it's hard. It's really hard. In fact, it's the hardest version. But what we're gonna do is give you a huge amount of points to equip abilities. And you're gonna start the game with every like core action game ability that the game has. Yeah, you mentioned last week. So you're gonna start with Ukemi, block, dodge roll, parry, et cetera. And you're gonna just play this like a fucking Dillman cry game. And that was also final mix only? Yeah, it was also final mix only. Sick. Okay. So this series is not just absolutely obsessively, intrinsically attached to every platform in the world. It's also wildly inconsistent in quality. Wildly inconsistent in quality. But hey, do you wanna play a game where you get tons and tons of characterization of Riku as a playable character? Guess you're stuck playing chain of memories. Cause that's pretty much the only one. But is it not also emblematic of the era that these games are all released in? A little bit. The product of their time, you know? Yeah, no. This series runs all the way from a four out of 10 to a 10 out of 10. And it's not like a sliding scale upwards. It's just fucking all over the place. Even me not knowing anything about what's going on, I see Kingdom Hearts III and I see characters that are in real life Japanese apartments and stuff. And I'm like, oh yeah, this is the square that's got Noctis in the city and is going through that sort of design phase that Kingdom Hearts also looks like it's from that era. Yeah. Fucking super weird. Kingdom Hearts, Reaching of Memories is one of the strangest. Like I came over to the office about half hour early. And I banged out, I went back over and banged out like four levels just to get cards and shit like that in 28 minutes that I was sitting here waiting. Because I wasn't playing the game. I was actually watching a YouTube video in this monitor and just mashing triangle as I let the enemies walk into me and auto attack me until I could get into a random battle. Like it is the worst difficulty curve of any game since the Witcher 2. Now I know you didn't play the Witcher 2. But you've told me. Witcher 2's hardest fight is the first tutorial battle. Legitimately the most difficult fight in the entire game. And the second hardest fight in Witcher 2 is the second tutorial battle. Man, yeah. Witcher 2 is the only game I can think of that has a genuine true inverted difficulty curve. It is a straight line in the wrong direction. It's just, it's such a, and again, you just go look at that it's soon dev talk on the power fantasy and scaling upwards as the game goes along. And you can see the way to do it. It's real clear. You wanna have the player feel like they're reaching peak power all the way up to the end of the game. But also you want a challenge that rises up to that newfound power, you know? If you're basically able to, if you're the first fights you have are brutal because you can't do shit. And then from then on out, you just get more and more and more things. But the challenge is just the same. And so thus you steamroll over the things. Then it's like, yeah, that was poorly designed, you know? I went from fighting Ursula in Re-Chain of Memories and having to rebuild my deck twice to figure out how to beat her to having a rematch against Riku, the rival character, and he didn't even get to swing once. That those were back to back based off of one ability. There is a weird idea from some of the Kingdom Hearts games where they wanna have like a huge amount of customization, like tons and tons and tons and tons of different moves. But the ones that do that always have moves that are so fucked up that they completely break the game. Was this meta that was discovered like after the fact later on, or was this something where it's like huge through the course of natural? This meta would have been discovered instantaneously on day one. Okay, okay. Cause it's just like through the course. Sonic Blade is a move that you unlock via leveling. It's not a move that you unlock via a secret or you go to a fucking chest or whatever. You just unlock via leveling and then you go and try it out and you go, oh my God, nothing in the game can deal with this. Okay. There's a move in Kingdom Hearts I Final Mix called Strike Raid that is unbelievably good. And it's the first like of the triangle attack commands that you unlock. And it's the only one to use for the whole rest of the game because it's way, way, way better than any of the ones you'll ever unlock after that. That name is ringing a bell. I don't remember what it does, but I do remember. Strike Raid is when Sora throws the Keyblade five times and the move takes like, I think it's 12 to 15 seconds and he's 100% invincible the entire time. Okay. So you're like, I don't know what to do. Ah, ah, ah, and you have like a quarter or a minute to just sit there and go like, I wonder what I'm gonna do. Like I used it to get through Sephiroth's Omni Slash. Should I learn how to dodge or block this? Nah, fuck it, I'll just invincible through it. Damn, okay. Wow. Chain of Memories' story is also, um, that game is a tale of extremes. Everything in it is either fantastic or garbage. Like Chain of Memories is like, hey, Sora went into a memory palace so he's gonna remember Kingdom Hearts I. You know what that means? You're redoing every level from Kingdom Hearts I, almost the same. Hey, you're gonna go to Alice in Wonderland, guess what you're gonna do in Alice in Wonderland? You're gonna run into Alice and the Queen's gonna be like, oh, I hate Alice, I'm gonna kill her and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Almost exactly the fucking same. It's boring as tears. But then in the interstitial bits between, really interesting shit happens. There's an interstitial white hallway in between each zone where the cool story happens. But the Disney shit is boring me to tears. Because you're just doing. That game is so hot cold. Also, that's a wasted opportunity because Disney has so many things you can go into. So to redo the same ones, it's like. Well, you gotta save them for Kingdom Hearts II. Right, okay. And then, hey, guess what? There's a game called Kingdom Hearts Recon, which was one of the last ones. That is also a complete do-over of Kingdom Hearts I. Like almost exactly. Fuck. What a weird franchise. It is a strangest franchise. I promise I'll find out someday, but who knows? One day. Yeah. Well, after I finished the whole series. Yeah, I mean, at this point you're. Hold on, hold on. After I finished the whole series by the end of June. Okay. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta. You gotta feel free to hop on for the summer. You gotta distance through. Okay, I'll grab the, we'll grab the baton pass after that. Let me tell you what, it was really easy to sit there and do like an 11 and a half hour fucking stream of Kingdom Hearts I, because that's a game that fucking feels great. Like great action, great platforming, like excellent voice acting, like, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Chain of Memories is. Is a hard game to stream for a long time. Cause I'm getting either so frustrated that chat is being like, man, do you think you should take a break? Or like, or like actively like mumbling under my mouth. Just fucking this game. Okay. Oh, I ran, oh, I lost my, I lost whatever. What? Yeah. Okay. Great. Great. Like just petty, like, like pissy. Word of you hollowing out did like escape. And on top of that, you're marathoning these things. So it's. Or it's board to tears. Like just, which is, which is horrible for LP purposes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. But it's part of the, it's part of the run. What's going on in Kingdom Hearts too? It's part of the run. Which is, which is the one, I think it sucks that the Kingdom Hearts franchise has a bell curve for quality. I think that sucks. Really? Two, it never gets better than two. All the best shits in the middle. It never gets better than two. So I don't think you remember this, but every time Kingdom Hearts would come up on this podcast, I would, I would say, hey chat, is it better than Kingdom Hearts too? And I would look over and it would be a C of no. Okay. So people would ask me, hey Pat, how come you didn't play Dream Drop Distance or recoded or, or Kingdom Hearts three or whatever. And I go, well, is it better than Kingdom Hearts two? And the response is usually like a chuckle followed by a no. See, this is, this is, this is this is crazy unfair shit though, because now you're just like every, like you're, you're time traveling all the listeners back to their teenage years. And they're all going, oh no, wait, hold on. You know, like people are getting ripped back to fucking grade eight right now. It's like, this is, the Kingdom Hearts is like, you can't objectively fucking. No, you know what it is. You know what Kingdom Hearts one and two feel like? It feels like Mass Effect one and two. Okay. Okay. Where Kingdom Hearts two is like, it's that it's this fucking action game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The areas are huge. And you're going through big zones and you're fucking fighting dudes. Yeah. And Sora's cooler and he's got a less lame outfit and you can do a wheeled and you know, all this shit. And then people who like Kingdom Hearts one better, they're like, I miss platforming in like the jungle area or doing the upside down like environmental traversal during the Alice in Wonderland shit. You know, like the weird like Disney stuff. And I'm like, I just want to turn Sora into drive mode where he turns red and do wheels cause goofy turns into a fucking keyblade and go, ah, and parry a bunch of dragoons. Yeah. No, the moment you boot up Mass Effect two and you do the fucking super tackle or whatever. And it's like, oh shit, this is okay, we're cooking. Things have changed. There's a huge difference there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. So yeah, Kingdom Hearts, very cool. Not an evenly paced series. Not evenly paced at all. Also, here's a fun one. You know how I said, I mentioned critical mode which is like the action gamer difficulty where it like substantially rebalances the game. Birth by Sleep, which is KH zero also has that. And Kingdom Hearts three also has that. What happens with Kingdom Hearts three is that proud is too easy. And then critical came as DLC and they're like, oh, you guys want it hard and made the hardest game in the series by an order of magnitude. So if I play Kingdom Hearts three, the options are too easy, insane nightmare shit. Yeah, okay. Those are the two difficulty levels. Balanced for teenagers. Yeah, so Kingdom Hearts is so weird because like it was balanced for teenagers but then they just appeal to those same teenagers who are now adults. You know what I mean? Like part of the problem with like the choices of worlds is that Kingdom Hearts' age range is assumed to be like 10 to 15 or 10 to 18. And it's like, no, it's actually the same people who've been playing since Kingdom Hearts one. So the people who are marking out because Simba and Captain Hook were there, the only reason they'd give a shit about Frozen is if their kids are watching Frozen. Like I don't know anybody playing Kingdom Hearts going, oh yeah, big hero six, fuck yeah. No, you grew up with the fucking Sora Rikus and so on. Okay, okay. Well, at least we've telegraphed where we're going for a while now. So, oh shit, sorry. Yeah, well, I'll probably play a Kingdom Hearts game for a little bit. I don't know if I'm gonna continue to two after Chain of Memories. I might take a break, which is what I said about Chain of Memories before I continued onto it before even changing the stream title. I mean, it's literally in the same booted up fucking thing. Yeah. You just back. Oh, you know what's super fun? There's two games on that collection that are movies. Oh. They're just straight up films. They, is it the Birth by Sleep 342? No, Birth by Sleep is a real ass game. Dream Talk just as 358 over two days. That's it, the fraction. Re-coded. Okay, okay. Don't even play them, just watch it. Okay. And then what you gotta do is you gotta, so that's the collection, right? And then after the collection, you gotta go check out Dream Drop Distance. Yes, DDD. And Kingdom Hearts 2.8, a fragmentary passage. And then you gotta check out Cux. That's Kingdom Hearts Unite X. Never heard of that one. It's a phone game. Oh. Oh, I forgot about Final Chapter Prologue. I see, I see. This is- I forgot about Final Chapter Prologue, my mistake. We're hitting up. And you also have to play Melody of Memories, the rhythm game that is the only game you play as Kyrie in it. We're loading up before crisis, are we? Do you know what my favorite moment of one of these streams was? Is I look over and chat and somebody goes, "'Man, it sucks that Melody of Memories is a Switch exclusive. That's so annoying that it's trapped on the Switch." And I go, "'What? You don't have to play it's not on it? You can't play it on the Switch too? To which someone fact checks it and goes, yeah, no, you can play it on the Switch too." I go, that's useful. To which someone else fact checks that. No, it's on PS5 also. What am I? How? What do you- What do you- Die hard fans of the franchise are just not sure. Damn. Okay. All right. I don't think I'd be able to play Melody of Memories on stream. The game series that you have to mute, simple and clean when you play the game, else your shit is dead. Boo. Hey, well, you know what? I'm gonna show you a screenshot. Let me go into my Video Producer dashboard. Let's see. Is this? Yeah. So here is me playing Chain of Memories for an hour with no cutscenes. Just the environmental music. 60% muted on Twitch. Oh my God. Oh yeah, no, here it is. Here's a picture of the muted bar for the seven hour stream I did the other day. Oh my God, dude. 90% of the music is muted. And whatever you're doing on Twitch is gonna be extra aggressive on YouTube. The detection is way worse. Fucking bullshit on that. So I briefly spoke with Chat and I was like, okay, simple and clean. Is that gonna get me ID'd or stricken? And the response I got was turn it off. Turn it off. So yeah, I had to sing fucking simple and clean over the ending, which was awkward. Jesus. Because I suck. Uttara Hikaru hits some high notes that I cannot hit. So I had to like drop a bunch of octaves. It's rough. So what the? It's rough out here. So what the fuck does everybody else do? Like LP'ing this series? Just not? Just not? Just rely on direct donations over advertising? Okay, okay. That's the answer. Or genuinely play it 14 fucking years ago. On their channels that aren't monetized at all because who gives a shit? What are you making money on YouTube? Right? Gotcha. So yeah, that's Kingdom Hearts. Okay. You know what's a really fun thing when you play like the first or second game in like a very old series that has lots of entries? Where you get to see people say things that are so hilariously incorrect, but they're not incorrect when they said it. So there's a moment in chain of memories where they're like, handsome, but we took out that guy. He's done for. And I'm like, I cannot possibly laugh at this harder. That might be the funniest fucking thing that's ever been said in Kingdom Hearts. I, sure. Don't at all follow, but. I'm talking, okay. You know what? I'm gonna, Mega Man walks into a room and goes, thank God we finally got rid of that door and signal. We took care of it. Yeah, got you. Yeah, okay. All right. Is that why Lee? But we got rid of that guy. Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Got it. Just absolutely fucking ridiculous. Okay. And yeah, that, that, I'll be honest, that was pretty much what I was up to this week. Okay. Did my boy do anything particularly amazing? He did a lot of amazing things, but nothing that would be. All of it. Funny for this show. All of it. Oh, you know what he did? Mm-hmm. I took him to the park the other day and we were walking home and he went, hey dad, good job taking me to the park today. And he gave me a thumbs up. And he said he was proud of me. That's fucking awesome. It was fucking great, dude. It was, oh man, it kicked ass. Good job, good job. Yeah. And then he told the same thing to Paige, not about going to the park, but I forget what she was doing. But he was like, good job, mommy, you're doing a good job. And gave her like a big thumbs up. And it was like, oh man. Like I was thinking, this fucking kicks ass. I was actually thinking the other day about how I'm like, first words, often people go for like mamas or dadas and stuff. And I'm like, we don't use those words ever. What we do use pretty often is good job. And I'm like, shit, that's more likely to come out first than anything. Oh, you know what? You know what? I'm gonna warn you right now, you're going to lose your name in about six months to a year. Your name, Wally, gone from your own household. Cause we, Paige and I were like, hey, Pat, hey Paige. And then what started to filter in was, Pat, can I have some milk? And we're like, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's disturbing. Right. So then you just become dadadama or whatever. And it's like, no, no, no, your name gets stripped cause that shit's fucking disturbing. That's very bad. You gotta steer that. I mean, I do remember growing up with kids who did have that going on, but those were the, let's be real, the fucking- To me, that's a stepdad thing. That's like, hey, Steve. Yeah. No, for me, that was just like, that was the white kids that talked back. You know, it was the Gavin's. I knew a white kid to talk back to and called her Debbie. And I remember being at his house and just be like, mm, don't like this. It was, you know. Oh my, where did that parent go wrong? Shut up, mom. I know, man, I know exactly where Debbie went, the fuck wrong. Oh, man. Oh, man, you look, okay, you're a parent now. You look back at some of your friends, parents, and you go, what the fuck was their problem? But now you know enough that you actually do know what the fuck their problem is and the problem was that they were assholes. Oh yeah, no, no, no, no, no. How was it? Oh yeah, no, no, no, make no mistake. Like there's a lot of running down the list of just like, okay, all these situations, what was going on? They did the best they could with what they knew at the time. Not this one. Sometimes. Sometimes. Not this one. Fuck this one. Absolutely. This one, you're just a piece of shit. Oh, dude. You're just garbage. Oh, it's- And you know what, you know which one that was? You'll understand when you're older and you have kids and you see how hard it is. Yeah, yeah. All right. Bullshit. Hey, if you wanna see me playin' more Kingdom Hearts stuff and also backlog stuff this week, go down to twitch.tv slash pathstairs at and youtube.com slash pathstairs at. Okay. We get to roll through? We are. All right, on my side, yeah, a number of things. So I've mentioned that Tepin has grumped me. Played some Pragmata, went through that demo. I really liked what was going on with it. The setup is like so far, it's like, not much to say on it, like clean moon-based robots, exactly, you know, vanquished style, design armor, and you're shooting stuff, whatever, all good, dodging, loading, reloading, et cetera. That's all fine. I'm sure we'll get more details as we get a chance at the full thing. But I really enjoyed the fusion of like solving the puzzle while aiming and as the room get crowded and as things are walking towards you and you're like, oh shit, I gotta get out of this corner, jump dodge, get away from the situation. That was a pretty fun flow of events. I did like what was going on there. And I also liked imagining how complex that would get as like those puzzles got really, really tricky. I'm sure like a version of that where either the puzzle gets really complex or the things come towards you super fast and you've gotta be like, ah, fuck, you know. I think that boss fights a pretty good example of like where it's gonna go. I was also, I saw multi-hack and it, you know, my brain thought too much of what that turned out to be because it ends up being the thing where you hack one thing and then multiple enemies take damage from it. Sick. But what I thought it was gonna do was have multiple puzzles pop up at the same time. You're fucking crazy. That's literally what we're just playing. Yeah, no, like there's a way to go about that. That would be sick but crazy where you've just gotta release the limiters and, you know, let it be up. If you could fucking new type your way through that situation, then you could reap the rewards. There's something to that I'm down for. But either way, yeah, just really quick. And it's interesting too because like, because the game has that premise, the demo is really short. It's like 15 minutes and that's, most demos these days feel like they give you more than that, right? It's a surprisingly short amount of gameplay but it's just to have com demos are really short in the last couple of years. Cause they had those like Resident Evil demos that were like, like eight rooms and they had the Resident Evil 2 demo that was like the one shot demo. Okay, you get one. Yeah, yeah, okay. The thing is, it's just, it's enough to get the premise across which is all they really needed. You know, so I felt like it was a... And you can replay the demo and things do change a little bit. Yeah, you unlock new weapons, you unlock a couple new, you unlock a new costume as well that she's doodling and then you get different ones based on how fast you beat it and stuff. So that's all fine. But no, in terms of just like getting the premise of like, yeah, this is how the, this is a third person shooter but here's the unique thing about it. All you needed was one area, one boss and you're like, okay, cool, sold. You got me, I'm down for that. So no, I'm gonna be grabbing that. I'm looking forward to it. The other things I did this week. So I played Retro Rewind which was a video store simulator. I thought for sure that was gonna be like a horror game. Yeah, you'd think, no, it's just... When I saw the thing on it, I couldn't believe it. You just build a VHS store, rental store as we were discussing, put the tapes on the walls, organize them by category, people walk in and you pay your basic game of beer tap, like handle all the busy customers while rewinding the tapes, while getting dealing with the returns, while buying new stuff and you just starts to be a lot of tasks that you're managing and everything. It was fine. I feel like it's... I thought there would be more... I mean, I played for just a little bit but it didn't seem like there was... It seemed like it was more, I guess kind of like a cozy sort of vibe kind of game, less of a like, here's challenges and here's like things going on or any kind of narrative per se. But you do go to a dude in the back alley and get some x-rated adult tapes and things like that. You choose how you wanna set those up as well. But I did have to eventually stop because I'm like, it did give me motion sickness. I started to feel some of that. Yeah, I started feeling it. What about it? It was just... Because you're not like running, right? No, but just the FOV of turning constantly to like take the cash, deal with the cash register, deal with the rewinding of the tapes over here, back to people and in and out. I just started to feel it and I was like, yeah, this is giving me a headache and it wasn't. It just, yeah, I had to stop. But it seemed all right, kind of goofy. If anything, the funniest part was just like, all the videos themselves are randomly... It's basically like, it takes like a, like, MS Paint, not MS Paint, MS Word clip art over a larger clip art thing and it just sticks them together and then the two words to make up a fake movie title. That shit was kinda, you know, it was funny and stupid. But yeah, motion sickness had to stop. Hasn't happened to me in a minute, but either way, pulling out the FOV and stuff didn't really save it there. And again, I was fine in Soul Reaver where Reggie wasn't actually, so yeah. Really? I forget that Reggie also has the most. He has it and he has it worse than I do. Yeah. Damn. Yeah. No, I remember I was the only one amongst you guys back in the day that felt any of that. And you guys were like, I don't know what your problem is. You know, I'm like, I don't want to tell you, but then like here we got it. And I just remember it was never more like clearly on display than playing Doom Eternal where you go into the old Doom levels and all of a sudden it comes back. You know what? That transition moment is actually a little bit like, oh. Oh. Because you still have your highly like advanced like 3D model gun on the old things, but they have like a filter on the textures to make them look flatter. Yeah, I get what you mean. That exact transition and then you're walking around in that environment and you just, you feel it viscerally in that exact game going from one into the other. Was it 2016 that did it or Eternal? Whichever. I think it was, I thought it was Eternal, but whatever. It might have been 2016. Whichever the Doom game is where you walk into the retro Doom levels. I think it's 2016. Okay. I think about it. Yeah, so there's that. Got some more Gorotair in as the premier Gorotair streamer on the internet. You are the premier Gorotair. So I have a duty and a responsibility and I've loved it at my Gorotair tech. And I did promise that Gorotair would return and I continue to promise that Gorotair will return. You know, as the world's most premier Kingdom Hearts streamer, it is a pleasure to meet you, the now long running world's greatest Gorotair streamer. These are two industry titans coming together. It's a meeting of the minds truly. You know, I just, I hope that, you know, the views will catch up for Kingdom Hearts because, you know, Gorotair, we're out here and we're fucking blazing a trail right now, man. There's this. In any case, so the weekend was a lot of fun. We got to go to Somad and we had a little up. We had get into locals. So that's basically the in-person walking around the venue at a local fighting game event and spring overture Montreal Air Dashers 2026 was the event we were at. I'm gonna hold up my hand for a second. They ran a poll about Kingdom Hearts in this chat right now. When'd you get into Kingdom Hearts? 80% got into it in the aughts, in the 2000s. That's exactly what I said. It has to be that, yeah, no, absolutely. Well, how are you, the only other time you could have gotten into Kingdom Hearts was like a couple years ago when all those collections came out. That trailer that I was talking about earlier, so everyone say that that was actually for four and I was like, okay, so I, yeah, my timeline is confused as to what's what, but anyway. Don't worry, the games are confused as to what's what. Great. Don't feel bad. Yeah, it was a great local. We had a good time. There was, you know, ran some Street Fighter, ran some 2xKO, all that good stuff, but the game of the show and what's worth noting is, oh, and I saw someone walking around with an arcod in the flesh. There was a dude that was rocking the controller that I was showing off last time and he was like, oh yeah, I've been playing this for a couple months, it's great. So I was like, let's go, validation. You've heard about Tekken and you've heard about the state of Tekken and the feelings that have been going hot in the Tekken community. I haven't gotten anything very specific. In fact, I asked for something specific and all I got was just like, like the wailing and gnashing of teeth. What I'm only getting like an emotion. Okay. So. And the emotion is agony and despair. So basically what my understanding of the situation is, is that the, well, from previous patches as well up until now, it's simply that the game has gone so far from what Tekken originally was with like, you know, things that you appreciate about Virtua Fighter, clean footsies, you know, spacing, sidestepping, and, you know. Playing an honest match. And basically, yeah, relying on fundamentals and, you know, and a move set that has the kit to handle, you know, your opponent making daring high-risk callouts, right? But by taking the heat system into account and leaning heavily into it and into Rage and into a lot of the other newer systems, as well as making a lot of things forced into stances that are 50-50s, you basically make forced RPS, the way the game is played. And you forced like, you know, coin flips. And people are like, I don't wanna be forced into a coin flip. I want to have the freedom to do all these things and call my opponent out when they choose to do one of the many options they have, you know, and locking it into this way is a, like, it's a casualization of sorts to the way things are playing. And it dumbs down the complexity into a new, into a current vision that is like, no, you just armor through that. You heat dash through that. You use the new systems to blow shit up and, you know, bells and whistles. But people are like, I just wanna fucking Doria, you know? Okay, so, yeah, people are really upset with the way interactions feel in the game and so on. And all this to say that there was a fan project that someone started making that basically saw that patch note where the patch said, we're going back to basics, we hear you guys. And, you know, this is after Harada left. They basically heard a lot of the complaints and said, we're gonna, you know, address some of the complaints people have, because a lot of the new things people don't like need to be adjusted. And so the patch dropped and it actually just kind of doubled down on a lot of this stuff. And it didn't go back to basics at all. And people got new moves that reinforced the heat systems and reinforced these 50-50 interactions, right? So people went, fuck this, right? Fell for it again, fell for it again, fell for it again, again, again, again, again, again, award type stuff. And not, and nothing is admittedly talking to the second player is not out, not every second player feels this way, but a large amount of them are just like, what the fuck am I doing here, right? All right, so I'm watching clips that people are posting a chat about this nonsense. This looks like shit. This looks like shit. I know some people that are like, you know, that are ultimately not that down on it, but there's an overwhelming majority of like, there's a, there's a, there's a, because there's two subreddits for Tekken. There's the Tekken subreddit, which is like on fire all the time. And then there's a branch called low sodium Tekken where people went to just be like, I just want to talk about the game in my matches and not get into this whole fucking shit, right? And understandable, because it's like, yeah. Yeah, I got it, I got it, I got it. When things get nuts, you kind of just want to be like, let's just focus on what we care about and what we want to play here. And I remember noticing that even over at low sodium Tekken, people were like, okay guys, we try to keep it low sodium, but what the fuck, man? You know, and they're like, yeah. This is like a tragedy because like, I see folks in the chat saying that there are people going back to Tekken six. There is, there is, yeah, those, those have been the jokes for a while. And then people, yeah. But like, yeah, you can, you can go back to play seven, right? You can do that. Like that's an option. But I think the problem is that like, I really enjoyed Tekken eight at launch, right? I fell off of it. But like, if I played this and was like, yo, this is trash, I'd be like, you know what I actually want to play? Tekken eight from two seasons ago. The one that no longer exists. Like it's essentially end of service tepid because the version that you want to play and have fun with doesn't, doesn't exist anymore. Well, so modern started doing these things where people saw like video of the game with like all the systems removed and it was just characters doing their moves and people like crying, going, oh God, please give us this reality or whatever. None of this matters. This is all preamble. Listen, Sega, Sega, Sega, do you want, you got to, you got to get that virtual fighter out to fucking tootsweet or need to do an old style petty ass shit fuck ad of like sick of a bunch of stupid bullshit in your fighting games. Why don't you try it pure from the source? The originator of 3D fighting. Or enter a brand new game called Rush. Rush, huh? R U S H rival ultimate steel hand. Cause where there's an iron fist, there must also be a steel hand. And Rush is, it is a bunch of floating polygons on a grid stage right now. And it is one, Bro, that's just ticking. It is one person going, fuck this bullshit. I've had enough. I'll do it myself. Bro, that's just ticking. Yeah. I can tell that in one second. And you jump into Rush and it boots up and you press the button and then it goes. And then you're like, here's a polygons fighting man. And he's got four buttons and he can dash and he can sidestep and he can even fucking electric. If you do the input or back dash and it feels good. And one of those buttons is a jab and you can jab, jab, jab, or you can do a big swinging overhead. You can do a low or a big roundhouse if they sidestep. And the whole thing is like, do you, you can do these slow risky things or these fast things. And when you block the overhead, you can punish with a sweep. And when you block the sweep, you can punish with a, you know, like your own. Or if you block the jab, you can do, everything's just got a little, you do this, you stop that, you got this. And it's just a little tight little circle. And fuck me if that shit wasn't hype as hell. And so we just got into it. And it was a great time with the very actual back to basics tech and experience on this game. And between that and like, you know, the creator basically going like, yo, I'm, we want to make this a really good rollback online experience as well. This is going to be a real game they're developing out. And just this one character, four or five moves thing feels real fun. And we had a great time with it. It really is like, if you're a tech and player and you want back to basics, you can't get any more back to basics than this. I, this is such a shitty situation, man. If I was a tech and player, like a dedicated tech and player, I would be like beside myself. Cause if they say we're going back to basics and then just double down on all the problems, insane, then there's no hope for the game at all. It's the, ever that the like saying the one thing that people want to hear and then doing the exact opposite is batshit. It makes it. Oh, you fundamentally don't understand what the basics actually makes it so much worse. Anyway, so we had a really good time with that. And shout outs to Kyle who was on the board as well for getting to zoom in as I was popping off in Reggie's face and getting all in there. Shit was dope. Game looks really cool. And the creator used to watch our shit. So that's, that's dope as hell. Very cool. Looking forward to it. Shout outs to rival ultimate steel hand. That's a great name. And other bits that we got up to. So I mentioned it last week and indeed the death stranding live and concert show happened. And that was awesome as hell because yeah, you know, brought the crew out, got a nice little booth and watched as an orchestra filled the stage up and. Some good music in there. Yeah, no, you know, not bad. And as this orchestra comes out and is playing and everyone they have just the conductor and everything. And this goober with his colorful jacket slides out on stage with his, you know, with a mask and fucking leaking Troy Baker makeup and just and Ludwig Forsel himself is like, ah, what's up? And it's like he just brings like the perfect like energy alongside, you know, this this amazing epic soundtrack of like real serious shit and like emotional moments with child. And he's just like, yeah, video games. Let's just play everybody. Let's go. And he's like, and he's just yucking it up. It was a great time. And he crushed it. And it was awesome. I was informed that you saw a little bit of Death Stranding to during that presentation, which included. A identical takeaway, which is Sam is not putting that baby in that carrier safely. A million percent, bro. That actually fucked up the first like 40 minutes of my Death Stranding to play through because I refused to go down the obvious tutorial steep slope because I was like, oh, you couldn't possibly walk down a slope that steep with your baby in a front facing carriage like that. It's like walking around. Yeah, like that. It's so different, especially when you have those little moments of like, oh, like she's reaching up and touching the face and stuff. And I'm like, oh, yeah, like, you know, Punch Kid does that too and everything. And you're just like the danger feeling here in your guts is so real. It's visceral, man. Yeah, that had different for sure. But no, Ludwig fucking killed it. And it was amazing to we got a nice opportunity because you didn't get a chance to perform with like all the vocalists and with everybody throughout, you know, multiple legs of the tour, but this is a place where they all were able to do so. And yeah, it was it was just awesome to catch that. And then, of course, like, even though I haven't played too yet, you know, like looking there and I'm like, OK, I don't have context for most of what I'm looking at, so it's fine. But the things that I am looking at, I'm like, fucking knew it. Right. It's fucking. I gotta tell you, there's actually like not a whole lot of support. Yeah, I'm like, I'm like, oh, I called that shit. You you you I think you you and I called like 80 90 percent of that game story from like our first discussion of its like second trailer insanity insanity like incredibly obvious. But yeah, you know, it was it was a really fucking awesome show. And it was super cool as well. It's super funny. You have heard more of Ludwig's music. And I have because you skip past that shit because I broke encounters. Yeah, I heard. Yeah, I heard. God damn. Oh, did he tell you that? Oh, no, I mean, I remember what had happened when you brought it up. But then, yeah, and we talked about it afterwards as well. Exactly. No, so, you know, caught him afterwards for a bit. And, you know, as he's going to the meet and greet, and I kind of I went up and I was like, hey, wood kid, right? And he's like, ah, yeah. Yeah. But no, he's a sweetie. And basically, we managed to get some dinner when he's coming back from the other the last leg of the tour. And yeah, it was just it was great. Just catching up and Reggie and Foxcate came through. We had a good time. Yeah, that is it's it's dope as hell because, like, again, it's just what it's like. I feel that, like, so since distant worlds has, like, kind of picked up and become more of a thing, you know, like we've seen these gaming concerts happening more and stuff and, you know, the near one just happened. And like an undertale one that's upcoming and stuff. And it's like, OK, like, oh, man. Got the tickets to that fucking thing within seconds. Yep. Copped. Copped. Copped immediately, immediately copped. But no, it's just super sick that, like, one game concerts are becoming more of a thing. And in particular, Montreal is a place where, like, you know, we're going to get those because we have the Plastix R set up and stuff. But I mean, dude, there's only three places music goes to in this country. You and I live in two of them. And then there's Toronto and then there's Tio. Yeah. So no, that that that's dope as hell. And furthermore, it's like, you don't always like, you know, folks that are composing for games as well. Don't get often to like perform fucking live and shred on a guitar and shit like that in front of the audience is my god damn E 33 concert. I'm telling you what what the fuck. So if I'm not mistaken, that is happening in Europe. Fuck Europe. If you can get there. Yes, that is happening in France. In France, of course, it's in France. So but we talked about that. That is actually going down in France, if you fucking make it over to France. But yeah, yeah, no, catching Lorraine doing this thing would be amazing, man. And look, I honestly like, you know, fucking fingers crossed in a year or two time, like someone will set something up because there's these companies. There's a company I think so. So Ho Productions is like, they're the ones that are like behind a number of these gaming concerts and putting them on and doing the tour with them and stuff. So I feel like that's an obvious slam dunk, you know, they just need to set up the tour and get everything. And it makes sense too, because the way that the logistics of these concerts work is they talk to the local orchestras in each city and they practice the pieces long in advance and then you just kind of tour with the composer, the conductors, the, you know, a few people. But like the actual symphony orchestra is from the people that are from the city and such. So it makes it much more reasonable to tour with that way. So that was awesome. Shout out to Ludwig and and and and yeah, the the death stranding to like from just the bits that I saw there that were just like, OK, hard calling that that's that's right on point. Then there's the stuff that I did not call, but it's kind of hilarious to see, which is just everything involving Higgs. It's just like, oh my God, this is. Yeah, it is. I could I could I have words. Yeah, I'm just like, I wonder if that's Kojima or if that's Troy just being given free reign almost, you know, like I can't tell. I've never seen a character get so much screen time and be a massive waste. He's Jonklin all over those that he's legitimately the John. It's out of control. But but that was that was a great time. Yeah, so that's that's pretty much it. The only other thing. So this week, everything had to get pushed a bit forward. So tomorrow, the finale of Claire obscure. Oh, and yeah, not going to have a Saturday decision time. Huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'll run that. Kane will be back next week. Legit legacy. How was that fucking silent cathedral, huh? Legacy of puzzles. Block River will return that next week. That was a long time ago for me. But my memory of the silent cathedral block puzzles is like you put your fucking big boy brain on because it's it's a lot. I can't believe how like how much of it they push you into. You you can you can your guts like can feel the connecting tissue between that and old Tomb Raider games. Yes, a million percent. And the music that's playing while you're pushing the blocks around. There's one block puzzle in the cathedral that like you're halfway through it and then like four more blocks drop down in the middle of the room. Just like come on, guys. And then you solve it and it zooms out to reveal four handles that are being like slowly opened up. And you're like, is this another puzzle? Are you solving a puzzle to reveal a puzzle? You know, like, holy shit, man, it's great, though. But I'm like, wow, this is this game is about block pushing more than anything else right now. That's that that section is is is block heaven. The rest of the game, they're kind of like, OK, we went a little nuts with the fucking blocks. Also, if you take too long on the blocks, then the enemies respond and fuck you up, you know. So but that will return next week as well. So. Yeah, that's going on. And announcement as well. May 22nd to 24th, going to be a guest at Anime North. Oh, cool. Yeah. So got got an invite going to be down there. Reggie's coming along. Going to be down there doing and John's going to be there as well. We're going to be doing versus wolf stuff going to do a woolly versus panel with Reggie. And come hang out if you're in the area. I have not been to Toronto, Anime North in many a year. That is the first anime con I've ever been to in 2003. That was when I practiced your Konichi. Was it Konichi? Well, Waguwan, go men, the slaves. Yeah. That you print that's something to that effect. Waguwan Kroski, I believe that guy's Tiktok is like a violent Psyop. It's so intense. Slimes. I mean, he really commits to the fucking bit. And like, because he starts every video like like dry wash in his hands, like skulking into the frame. But it wouldn't be Toronto if it didn't feel slimy. Right. It's that's that's necessary. But yes, that's that's the first place I cosplayed to. I did Xavier Woods, you know, from Guitar Hero and all that. So I'm returning to the scene of the crime. And that's also the con where there's always a 16 year old in cosplay, having their first alcoholic night barfing and an ambulance is pulling up to get him some fucking water and electrolytes. Because, you know, it's one of those types of stitch. You know, it's really interesting being like 40 instead of like 19. Because the context has been like, oh, check it out. Oh, he's going to go for it. Has now turned into who let this baby in here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And before it used to be a light Yagami barfing. And then that turned into a Sora. And now it's going to be an amazing digital circus character barfing. Oh, you. But but I take off my home stock makeup to put it next to my undertale cosplay to get my POM. The outfit on, bro. What the fuck is that? Oh, that's the it's the only difference. I'm telling you, man. God damn it. Yeah. While an umamoo may like patch them on the back and rubs and and rubs them. Yeah. Anyway, that's May 22 to 24th. So if you're in the the six X, if you're in the T dot. I still remember one of the first people I ran into on the street in B.C. They're like, hey, but you guide my neighborhood. You know, see us moving in. Right. I go, hey, hey, bud. Pleasure to meet you. Welcome to the other kind of thing. And shake his hand and make a small talk. He's like, hey, so I could tell you're from your accent. You're not from around here. You from the states or, you know, what I'm like, no, no, I'm from out east. And I could see his whole body language just like. Tilt a little. Just I am from Montreal originally. He goes, oh, thank God. Yeah. Fuck. I mean, look, man, the city is still a little bit of a crater, you know, ever since the aerial strikes, but it is what it is. They soldier on somehow. And, you know, and I mean, while we're on that topic, you know, Jay Z came out the other day and said, like, I don't know if this beef had to happen, you know, people now are going to hate each other forever. And if you're a fan of him, your fan of Kendrick means you're going to hate Drake forever. If you're a fan of Drake, you're going to hate Kendrick forever. And he's like, I don't know if hip hop needs that. I'm like, get fucking done, Jay. It's the best thing ever. Fuck that dude to death. Fuck Drake to death. I'm going to walk in here and say, I'm not the biggest hip hop fan. My knowledge is low. Even I know that's fucking dead ass. This is exactly what hip hop means. And also as a father, I think we should hate Drake. That's that's that's fine. That's fair game. I am protecting for protecting the children protecting my child that. Hey, yeah, absolutely. You know, can't go wrong with that. So yeah. Nah, man. You know, if it's not on a what it did to the music level, that it's on a simple like I'm a dad now and both of those are good reasons. So now I just saw somebody say that Jay Z is the bourgeoisie and I'm like, is that true? I think that might be true. I mean, it's not like it's not like his his his, you know, later rhymes don't reflect that he's always talking about, you know, yeah, black billionaires and all that stuff. And it's like, cool. So a billionaire then. Yeah. Yes, yes, 99 problems, but rent is not one Jay. But. Anyways, man, I mean, look, when the. It's like, whatever he's saying or doing or stuff, it's like the the bar is like Kanye, so we can just like, are you are you still kind of are you within our realm? Are you still on this plate of existence? OK, cool. You know, you know, there's a part of me that actually feels bad for Kanye. Yeah, genuinely. Yeah, there is wealth has insulated himself from care. No, no, the part that feels bad is the part where legitimately because he's sick and has no people around him to genuinely make it through. And because ever since his mom passed away, that has been gone. To me, that's the type of story that almost always ends in the worst possible way. And yeah, like the public car crash is ongoing. Like there's a guy who's wealthy enough to just like power through the fact that he's been actively, manically bipolar for like a decade now. And it's like most people their life would fall apart to the point where they would have to do something about being that bipolar. But you've got so much money that you can stay caught. You just make all the problems go away. Yeah, no, a million percent. It's it's it's a wild case study almost like. You know, I'm reminded of being rich doesn't just make you crazy. It keeps you crazy. Well, I'm reminded of like those stories of like the the super rich dudes from like the eighteen hundreds, the one the guy that built that mansion full of traps or whatever, you know, Spencer. Was that who it was? I don't know. Whatever. Bad bad bad bad. No, the the the no, the actual mansion of traps that was designed by some super rich dude that went crazy or the there's there's a couple of examples of this of just like, you know, all the wealth in the world to insulate from, you know, getting help. But where was I going? Oh, yeah, anime north May 22 to 24th. Yeah, that's where you're going. Come come come come hang out. Say what's up? All right. Oh, you know, before we move on, I do have two other things I wanted to talk about that I remembered as we as you were discussing. So Crimson Desert's got a bunch of patches since I talked about it. Yes, yes. And I had the experience, I'm sure you've seen it, where you see just the smart, snarkiest fucking know it all comment on something that's just so and so is so stupid. Oh, my God. And it's it's like it's like really like, like genuinely, like pointedly, like, excellently put together to be the maximum level of condescension. Right. And I was like, I can't believe every single thing Pat's complaining about this podcast. It's already been fixed by the patches. He looks so stupid. And I'm like. I have to know because if because my biggest problem was the controls. And no one ever fixes their fucking controls ever. So I need to go so that I can adequately respond to this dipshit comment. They did improve the controls. They did very significantly improve basic movement. You can actually do the spinny little thing by spinning the stick now. It's not perfect, but it is like it is. It is a dramatic improvement to controls from one week to the next, which is really strange because it makes the game feel super unfinished. Like there are some games that get patches that are like expansion level quality of life things and you're like, you busted this shit out in a two week span or this game is it done? Yeah, this game had to release. It means that it shipped, but the people on it already knew and were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that shit sucks. We're we're they're on that in a sense. Yeah. So in a year or so, yeah, I'll go back to Crimson Desert and play what is likely a dramatically better game. I mean, the type of dipshit comment you're describing is pointed to this one moment in time with this one game. I particularly enjoy the constant that is fighting games, snooze dipshit that pops up pretty much every week. I mean, they're right. Oh, I also watch Steel Ball Run. Oh, you got. So, hey, by the way, I somebody recently noticed that I have two hour glass. You have the smaller one. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And and they had forgotten what these are for. Yes. See, the small hourglass is talking about fighting games. The big hourglass is talking about fighting games that I also play. OK, and this one is the Mortal Kombat hourglass is for talking about Final Fantasy 14. Yeah. Haven't gotten to use that one for a while. No. I saw a comment that was like, you know, the real ongoing FF release that the kids would stay into is FF 14. But y'all ain't ready for that conversation. That's not for the kids. That's for old people. They're for old people. So I want Steel Ball Run. Wow. What a great episode. What a great episode. That's awesome. And also, Steel Ball Run is fantastic. Hell, yeah. How much I don't know why I thought this. Because all I remember hearing is that it was an extra long episode that covered the first leg of the race. OK. I thought that meant it was going to be a 90 minute Oh, program. Oh, and not two episodes. No, no, it was 45. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. This is bullshit. Like this release schedule is bullshit. I the whole time we were talking about it and I've seen people talking about it and like, oh, man, who knows when it's going to come. I thought they released like a full full length OVA. OK. And episode one and episode two with a commercial break in between. I mean, the fact that we saw a the fact that we saw a just now episode two's teaser was earlier this week as well, shows you that like, hey, it's there, you know, they done done it. So what what's up? Is it Netflix or I heard some someone else was saying that like potentially what it was, who else got involved? I forgot now, but there was besides Netflix, another another company got involved that might be a part of this here. But either way, it's like it's not you can see they're going, hey, here's the teaser for episode two. It'll be out at some point and you're like, well, clearly, again, David production has done this for six seasons prior to this and knows how to run a fucking schedule. So Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers, yes. Yeah, no, I'm not hearing we don't know when we will finish making it. What I'm hearing is we don't know when we will be done making it. And then Netflix will slot it into a convenient time in the release schedule. It's it's clearly just not up to them. And it's like, like, why are we committed to that? Yeah. Like before we sat down and watched it, Paige was like, I kind of don't know if we should watch it at all. Because because she doesn't want to wait to wait too long. OK. And I also don't want to wait for it. Sidebar, but how much do you know? Do you have? I know some big points. OK. But the overall guts of it. No. OK. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it looks like and from the teaser for the second episode is called stage two. So it looks like, yeah, they're going to be doing that to completion as well. They can't do that. Can they, though? Aren't some legs of the race way longer than others? Absolutely. Yeah. So like, that's not actually viable at all. No, no, what? Well, no, it won't. It won't be one stage per episode, but it'll be it can definitely be a arc or a thing, you know, a challenge per episode is certainly doable. Sayin' Shota says, didn't Pat say way back that he wicked most of JoJo? That's true. That was like 15 years ago. People have been watching our show or our shows or the old show for a long enough period of time who remember bits and pieces. Forget how far away much of that shit is. I forgot all that shit. Yeah, I'm thinking of some legs, some parts of this that are like. Almost like the entirety of Phantom Blood in one like. In one part, you know, like some in one leg. Fuck, it's going to get dance anyway. Cool. All right, let's just again, if we can roll through for time. Take a quick word from our sponsors. Let's do it. All right. Oh, you know what? Can we can we take a break? I got to feed this. Yeah. OK. All right. Sure. Sure. Sure. All right. B.R.B. All right. You know what? Here, two things just as we were just discussing. Two things. One, talking about Kanye just now, right? And the fact that folks were pointing out that like he put out his an apology letter the other day and. Yeah, yeah. Well, he did. And, you know, and for everything that he's done and stuff. And the only thing for that is just. I don't know if people have noticed. I don't think they have, but it's something I have certainly noticed is that every time in the past you've ever heard from him, you also noticed that alongside one of the crazy stories is an album about to drop. Yeah, it makes sense. Every single time you hear any of the craziest things he's doing or saying, it's right before a rollout of an album. Now, you could argue that the creative process and the stress of releasing an album could trigger an episode. Perhaps if you want to. You could argue. Sure. Right. Most charitable interpretation possible. But that's how it went for years now. And it's always predictable because it's within a couple of months time. He wrote that apology in January. When did his last album come out? This month, he just released a new one. Yes. So it's just if you're going to take that with any credibility, perhaps it would have to be not part of a rollout for me to put maximum charitability at that. Yeah, maybe the fact that you've assigned a profitability index on your literal insanity slash apologies for insanity has hurt your honesty cache. Yeah, or you know that you have a certain angle in the news. And the times that people talk about you is when you do these things and thus you can maximize your marketing, you know? And I feel like if you can I feel like if you are discussing him but not paying attention to like those moments of or whatever's happening or what's getting dropped, then you might not put two and two together on it. But I've noticed it like at least three or four albums ago. And I was like, oh, yeah, it's it's every single time like clockwork, you know? So yeah. That's one and two. Yeah, that's one. And two. If OK, so I've been getting asked a bunch about the bringing up the have you heard of Afro Man? I have heard of ever. Have you heard of the recent shenanigans in court with the with the cops? So it's hilarious. Yeah, Storm in his house and then the he's just writing like and all those bits and writing all this stuff and all this. Yeah. And so yeah. And so I've been I've been getting asked about like, yo, when are you going to you can talk about that and stuff? And if you see in the all the bits and write that, OK, so I hear is it can I am I going to have to be the bummer? Am I going to have to be the one that that ruins the fun for everybody that's enjoying it? Well, I'm going to stop you right there. I don't think there's anything you could say that would ruin the fun. OK. Of making fun of people who broke into your house. OK, that's certainly is that is true. And that is clear and winning that court case and everything about it was hilarious. Follow it up with. Yeah, no, no, it is hilarious. No, the events that still fucking funny. The events that occurred are funniest shit and are hilarious and everything surrounding how that cop has to be called like fucking pound cake or whatever. Great, great bits, great bits. It's just the the simple thing is that the because I got high afro man, dude. When's the last time you heard about him? Not many of folks here probably can think of one. The bet. Not. But it was when he was on stage punching a woman in the face who got on stage and there's a video of it and it's fucked up and it's super not. Yeah. So it's just like, yeah, after a man is not a hero, he's not an American fucking. Yeah, look at him. You know, he won against the cops type of thing. It's like, nah, that's fucked up. And it's like it's a story that no one really I guess hears about or knows about. So I know what you're talking about. See, what you're talking about is when people see this highly specific thing and then extrapolate a huge proportion of values from this highly specific thing that aren't necessarily related. There was a there was a God, what the fuck was I playing? I was playing something a couple days ago and I said, this isn't here. I think it was Resident Evil Requiem. I go, this item or this enemy is not here. And someone in chat said, oh, that means it's at the other place. And I said, no, you don't know that. That doesn't mean that there are two options. And if the thing is this or not, that means it's over here or not. It's not mutually exclusive because something is doesn't mean all these other proximate causes. Yes, yes. Correct. If it would make sense from a thematic or narrative perspective. Right. It's in the real world. Yes, it's just like, especially with some of the way that that's it's been covered. And even on fucking last week tonight and shit, it's kind of like, look at this, this is a hilarious story. And that's this is America right here. And he's wearing the suit and everyone's like, well, have you seen it? Afro man rules, all that stuff. And I'm like, this case is hilarious. Afro man does not rule. Like these are these are separate pits, you know, this sequence of events and the ensuing court hilarity absolutely rules. Yes. But you can't necessarily put that on anybody because you don't know them. There you go. So for the for the many that might I know you, I know you're cool. Because I know you. Well, I've known you forever. Right. OK. But if I didn't know you, maybe you weren't cool. I don't know. Maybe. Because I don't know you. You seem cool. Yes. So but just to to because I've been I've been it's been multiple weeks of being asked about that story in particular. Yeah, I got a couple. And I was like, yeah, it's funny. That's it. That's it. That's all. All right. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. Whom we love and whom are very cool. You want to know how fucking cool? How cool? You want to know how fucking cool? How cool? This week, the podcast is sponsored by Hero Forge. Oh, they're pretty goddamn cool. And Hero Forge is pretty cool because that lets you print out your miniatures fully customizable for your tabletop needs, as I've talked about in the past. But check this out. Check this out. You remember what I was showing off the sick shit that Prawn Zone printed out or made the models? Look at this. How I get big camera on this. Oh, sick. That's the stuff. This is the Prawn Zone miniature. I printed out me and Pat doing the rule the the the fucking UFO moment 37. I almost said rule 34. No, no, no. Not that one. No, what? No. And it came out. It came out amazingly. And look how fucking cool that is. There we go. Oh, there you go. Now you got the focus. There we go. That's awesome. Yeah. No, this shit is dope as hell. And putting it to the test. Right. Here's another one. Here's Reggie and let me get the focus right there. Sick. Yeah. Here's Reggie and me right there. These miniatures made possible by Hero Forge. So it is it is a dope as hell site. You should go check out. If you have miniatures that you want to make for your games, it's the best place you can go because it's basically like a character creator right there on the website. And you've got tons and tons of options and customization you can do to build your characters out or any monsters or enemies or whatever you're designing. You can choose between tons of materials, color, plastic, acrylic. If you want not a 3D printed thing, you can go for a standee or bronze as well. And again, you're doing this all within your browser. If you just want the 3D file, you can get the downloadable model. So you can have your if you want a 3D printed home, if you've got that ability too, you've got that option. So yeah, you can get custom printed dice. If you want to print out your own d20s, I mean just tons of great stuff. And in addition to like all the options there, you can get a pro subscription, which allows you to do kit bashing, photo booth, community library and more with kit bashing in particular. You can add pieces together to add like up to 20 different parts and accessories and models all overlapping to create these custom scenes. Like the one with me with the sword and the kick and pat that I just showed you and stuff, you know, made possible by just, yeah, using the full power of the the pros subscriptions. So yeah, check out Hero Forge. They've got new items that drop weekly and there's new armor, weapons, mounts, familiars and more coming out all the time. So you want to use code Castle to get 5% off on all orders of physical miniatures, not combinable with other sales or promotions. That's heroforge.com to start designing your own custom miniature and dice today. And check back often. 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Uh, it feels like a million years ago, but I suppose it did also happen this week that, uh, I was vindicated through one post, uh, from a street fighter's Nakayama son, who basically said, Hey, we are patching the Alex story. We apologize for any confusion that it might have caught. I hate this fucking post. Confusion. I fucking hate it so much. So here's what the, no one was confused about shit. But, but, but, but here's what you're hearing. Here's what you're hearing. Right. You're hearing. This is how it was received, but I don't want to throw my writers under the bus and insult them to their face brutally with this public facing post. So I'm going to speak in a way that says it wasn't about anything being received awfully. It was confusion. And that way the writers can take that hit and have their ego somewhat intact as opposed to taking the raw brunt force level three. Because look, man, you know, this is, this is one of those bits too, where you're like, it's not like anime has not hit this territory before. It's not like we haven't seen this in other places. It's a troll. Hearts meme about this. Kingdom Hearts too. Okay. It's a clear. Like there, there's a fucking meme of a big story moment in Kingdom Hearts where somebody gets absolutely blasted with light. It's like, oh, look, I found a non-Syscon, Aero Gay novel. I love you as my sister. Oh no, but I love you as a woman even more. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. That one. Yeah. I saw that meme. I also saw, um, I don't know what it is, but Alex was getting fucking dragged because he was getting compared to some dude who was like holding a sword and a baby going, stay away from my woman. Yeah. Whatever the fuck that is. I saw people saying that Alex's new throw is called Usagi Drop. So, um, yeah, it, all of that, the word confusion, you have to, you have to understand where that comes from. It is to not have someone in the office explode into a ball of flames. Um, and what it seems like. How'd they fix it? Well, they released a short story. They basically said, uh, we apologize for any confusion regarding Alex's story. Uh, and we haven't changed the back stories, but after an internal review by the development team, we're going to revise certain text passages that may have been misleading in the near future. Here's also a supplementary episode, um, to provide further insight. So, uh, basically it looks like there's a short story that has, um, Tom in a bar celebrating the marriage. And what it kind of goes through is the efforts to more or less state that, um, Alex and Patricia were not raised together. Like they were, he met his kids and there was that moment when he was young. And that's the last time they saw each other until they were almost adults. But then Alex, as soon as he was old enough to leave the house, he left and stuck out on his own. And then Patricia started falling in with a bad crowd. And then one day Alex came back and he's, and he helped rescue her. Uh, and he did what Tom couldn't do. Uh, but they all otherwise did not grow up together. And it's, I gotta tell you, I think it's legitimately disgusting that in order to save face for cousin fucker here, they're like, you know what, Patricia? Kind of trashy. She's kind of a trashy teenager. The, um, and then the other bit was it seems like the trend, the second cousin's line is probably going to get changed or just removed entirely. Right. So there will be no blood relation and there also will not have grown up together. And what about the line of dialogue that is him marrying her and going, this is the same smile she has a baby. What about that? I don't know about that line. If that's going to get changed, I assume it probably might. It probably might. I imagine playing it safe on, on all accounts. Um, the thing is the weirdest part about it is that like, this is basically exactly what I was saying before is just like fucking patch it, right? Just change the shit. However, it seems that like, I guess the end state of where the character is, is a higher priority than the prior games. So for years now, the relationship has been, um, very clear. It's been, yeah, it's been very much like brother and sister in vibe. And I think like, and, and there's even, um, again, tweets from, uh, um, a Neo G who was like, Oh, so that's how it turned out, huh? So you're kind of like, this was established in a way and everyone kind of thought that was the case, but to make it work here and to keep the end state the same, they're changing the past. Instead of just changing the new thing that was written and created now. And it's like, you, you just had to like, you could have changed the end result. Nothing was wrong with the past. Everything was wrong with the new stuff. But now there's no reason for him to say that they were cousins. No, no, no reason to add that. Um, but I think that I think that's, that's the, that's the weird thing is like, I guess, because the outline of where they want this story or timeline or characters to be is for a fucking fighting game character. Story that will have no more story after this. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, right? Why so desperate to protect the cousin fucking? I don't get it. Yeah. Or no, it's not about protecting the cousin fucking. It's about protecting the state, the fact that Alex is married and has a kid on the way, right? Whatever. That's the state that they want to preserve. And so they have to throw out the previous games and this weird new thing for that. It's nonsense and solves nothing. And you can just make it so that that's not Alex's future. It's, it's, it would have been fine to actually step back to everything new that you wrote, you know, um, you know, but here you go. I hope I said it on the podcast when we were talking about it. I think I did when you were like, I think they're going to change it. I think they're going to patch it. And I was like, the way that this feels, if they do patch it, it's going to feel in universe like Alex and Tom are trying to like do damage. That's right. In street. No, no, no, that's not what I meant. We're going to fucking forget this shit. I thought Alex two days ago and their fucking username was don't do your cousin. Bro, like any rage quit on me when he's doing those pushups, they're calling them cousin crackers, man. People are out here using people are people are out here using, um, what was it? It was all about like, like using the, the, uh, one of these, the titles on the, your, your user profile, like Alex is the character. And then it's like, I think it was like an Eleanor one or something that was just like, like in the family, pride of the family, pride of the family. Pride of the family. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You know, it's cooked. It's done. It's over, right? Oh, but all this, this is like, I'm like, take the L and patch it and they are doing that, but you, but you're, you're don't, you should be patching the future, not the, not the past, you know, um, hilarious. I also, I also appreciate the reception I saw where as soon as that came out to just going to look at the people in the comments and the feedback where everyone is like, nah, fuck that. Double down. Alex has been buffed from second to first cousins. People are like, talking about standing your ground on that shit now. They went as far as they possibly could within the bounds of like legal behavior of a street fighter character to like, CISCon shit. Like, like the absolute, like dancing on the law review book. Like, like, like scrolling through the family tree. Yeah, I just looks like a fucking tangled batch of mangroves. Now, Alex, like it's, it's weird, but I guess the narrative team just looked and went like, we want Alex to have this journey that mirrors Ryu where he goes, you know, I'm going to step out on my own to figure things out and see fight Ryu to see of this, this, the life I should have led as a street fighter protagonist, man. And then instead he goes home and realizes no way to have a future and a family to look forward to. I have everything I need. I have everything. And it's like, OK, you, you, you, we see that you wrote that, but like, it might take some time, but you just, it's OK to throw that out. It's not that big a deal. It's not going to linger that much longer, man. None of this is. What you're saying is that if Ryu had any living family, we'd be having this conversation way back in the day. I mean, they threw it on Alex, but whoever was down with this pretty easily could have thrown it on someone else much earlier. You know. Um, yeah, I don't think this type of relationship existed in Street Fire, Fighter Prior now. So. Why? Why? Well, because you see it now I'm seeing like people are like a fucking we need to protect 12 and Effie, you know, and a Necro and Effie rather, excuse me. Yeah. Um, yeah. Anyway, whatever. But the patch is coming. And with that, Alex will drop down a tier. It is absolutely nuts that in a genre in which we have King Kai marrying a four year old and fucking, fucking Frederick over here beating his wife. Full gorilla style. Like both of them. No, it's, it's unclear. And all this fucking nonsense that Alex somehow gets it the worst because it takes place in the real world. I mean, to be fair, if your wife starts the crusades, she did start the crusade. You might have to faff near her once or twice. And the important thing is the wife fight back. And then you think about it. She fought the fuck back though. She was she fought back some broad fucking centuries past. Um, all right. So yeah, apologies for any confusion about Alex's story. Well, there's only one response I would have respected and it was sorry, guys. There's someone on the team thinks it's super hot. We didn't check what they wrote before we shipped it. Well, now it's time to turn to the, to the, um, the bungee like playbook and go. Yeah, there was a huge scissor on the team, but they're fired now actually. Yeah, they've been fired into, into being promoted. You know, who, what was their name? It's like, oh, we don't know. That's a matter of their name. All I know is they're on the board of directors. A giant, a humongous scissor used to work here, but they're gone now. And that's all you need to do. They're all gone. Everyone here thinks that's gross. And they, they will not return except for when they do in the fucking final fight. Next. Um, keep an eye out for the story of Monster Hunter and tell me. You know, Mike Haggard's just Cody's uncle, right? It's true. You, you keep an eye on the resident evil franchise and the monster hunter franchise. I'll keep an eye on Street Fighter. Evil franchise doesn't have shit going on in it. Nothing ain't nobody doing fucking nothing in that franchise. That shit is safe. Except for the except for the obvious, actual, except for the ones that are actually kissing brother because, because sex has been deleted. They're written to be evil. Yeah. I mean, Street Fighter didn't, wasn't really a universe with that much sex in it to begin with either, though. Like, you know, like fact, most the person who has the most technical children never had sex at all. He just cloned them in a vat and then inhabited their bodies. Yeah. No, that's, that's true. Um, I mean, Ken has confirmed, you know, he's at least done it once, um, confirmed. Yeah. But, um, with Giles sister. Yeah. But, and then you have to, and then whatever the fuck that Bison Kami relationship is, you know, but whatever. Um, I, I, in my head cannon, genuinely, is that like, M Bison is like canonically trans. Cause like, okay. Okay. Uh, follow me. Cook. Follow me here. Cook, cook, cook, cook. Here, this is all my best podcast is a space where you can, where you can put that on the, on the girl. Here's my backup bodies. Okay. Yes. They are disproportionately blonde young women, despite the fact that I'm obviously not a blonde young woman. Okay. Here's, here's a backup body. Mm-hmm. That they themselves transitioned into a different backup body of a d- of an opposite gender. Okay. On top of that, when he was thinking about able the first time he thought about able, he's like, what if able was a little girl also a young blonde. Oh, the count on the concept art comes in here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, it's simple enough to say that you have the bison and rose bit. And then eventually bison's like, that's it. I'm out of this body. Fuck this. I get to pick the next one. I want that one. Cammy. Yeah. You have a type. All right. I'm a type to, to, to switch over. And over and over. Of all, of all the dolls, you know, that's, uh, yeah. Okay. Okay. You know what? Not unconfirmed. Like your backups, like your clones are transitioning on their own away from you with no input from you. And yeah, I mean, look, like, yeah, not a bad choice. Can be fucking rules. Yeah. So, um, anyways, anyways, uh, we'll keep an eye on this story. I'll keep a fucking, you know, magnifying glass out. And if any, any patches happen and we see some, like, like, if you see some shit where like this is, this is, um, this is Lily, me and Alex's mom knew each other from childhood and we were so close that our parents used to joke that we were cousins, but we weren't cousins really. In fact, we're not related at all. Lily is, is de-confirmed as T. Hawks daughter, right? Um, okay. Well here now Lily and T. Hawker now in a relationship. No, so that's too far. Can't do it. That, that, that's the whole cousin, but we were raised together loophole. It's, it's, it's on that same level of fuckery. Cause it's like, oh, you thought it was his son. No, no, no, no, he thought it was his daughter. No, it's not. It's not actually, they're not related. Okay. Here's a picture of Lily on his shoulders, but yeah, don't worry about it. That's fine. You mean they're not related. They're just in a relationship. Yeah. I don't know. Sorry. We thought, okay. Early. Yeah. You made that much worse sounding than you met. We thought in the beginning that Lily was T. Hawks daughter, right? And there was artwork of little Lily on T. Hawks shoulders with Julia next to them. And then it was like, oh, it's not Lily Hawk. It's not his daughter. They're not related. They're from the same tribe, but that's it. And, uh, he knew her as a little girl, but she's not actually her dad and I was like, oh, that sucks. It would have been so much cooler if she was, but okay. And then this is the fucking crazy. The writing is like, and then what if it's like, oh, that's de-confirmed. Well, now they're in a relationship and you're like, anyway, least we don't have to play that tech and patch. So I was asking people on the on that the tournament, I'm like, which is worse, right? You're a patch dropping like this or your character lore fucking you up. And it was like, genuinely 50, 50. It just, oh, if you're not an Alex main, it's just hilarious. But if you are an Alex main, it feels bad. Here's, it'll get about like the, um, the patch stuff. Like Alex's new story is that he's a massive heel. Just make it be an angle. Just make it be an angle. Well, the, the, the, the full context of the story is that he's going heel, but truthfully at home, he's figured it out and he's got a bright future ahead. And that's why he's the, it's the whole thing. It's just, yeah. But it would have been, yes, they, they clear anyway, whatever. We've, we've beaten the horse. Um. Unfortunately. Um. Yeah. The, not as hard as we should have beaten Tom. Uh, what else is going on? It sucks so bad. It's crazy. Um, I'll tell you what doesn't, I'll tell you what doesn't suck. What's that? Uh, that Akali trailer. Yeah, it looks great. Holy shit. She looks fucking sick. And you know what fucking actually sucks about that Akali trailer? Seeing social media posts of people posting the trailer go, what? I thought this game, I thought this game got canceled. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then the discussion being like they, and then people going, they shouldn't have made that post talking about how, you know, when people got let go and things are sales were down and it's like, no, you have to address when people get like, oh, that's insane. Don't tell people don't address that. That's fucking nuts. Right. But yeah, I did see that of like, oh, I thought you should have said that. You should have said is by the way, we're going to work to, to maintain the game for many years to come or something like that that was conspicuously absent from that post also. And, and, and what you should have done was put Akali before Caitlyn. You should have put Akali in the fucking base roster. Akali should have replaced Ari. She looks really good. And she's also a million times more popular than a little bunch of the other ones. So I can looking at it, I'm seeing. So I'm like looking at her kit, seeing the stuff setting up and like, OK, she's a teleport ninja. She's got Kunai, a bookie type things. And then you start seeing these insane mixes, teleports and then the smoke. And I'm like, oh, fuck, it's a Marlin Pie character. It is a Marlin Pie character. And hey, guys, we're finally nerfing as well. Guess what? Marlin Pie is back. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think her animations look like some of the best in the game. And her level three is probably the sickest in the game as well. Hey, like, you know what, dude? I agree with you. And I think 2XK might have a minor issue. Every character looks a little bit better visually than the last character. Yeah. That's not the only game that does that, though. I mean, no, but like, I can really see it into XK. Very much so. Street Fighter V had that problem massively. Everyone at the beginning of that game looks so much stiffer and less animated compared to each subsequent sequence season. You know, go look at the way Blanka or Cody move. And then later on, you know, Akira and in stuff. And it's like they look way better than the base roster. But you know what, Kim doesn't have that problem? A virtual fighter. Because it's not alive. Oh. Akali. She fucking has the smoke gimmick, which is, I guess, faithful to her kit and how do you make that work in a fighting game? I couldn't imagine because turning invisible feels like, oh, yeah, no, cooked, wasted, got him. All of that, all of that. Sooth it in. The I couldn't imagine how turning invisible would work decently in a fighting game because any time it does show up, it always sucks or is too strong. It sucks or it's too good. It's no in between. It's either like fucking what's her name, cyberpunk, a guilty gear or Lucy, where you're just like you can still see them and it's pointless or it's mortal combat where they turn completely invisible and it's completely insane. Right. Alternatively, there is Timo and it's it's got its uses. And it's not super practical to get into most of the time, you know, but it's there. But yeah, so here instead, what they do is they go, yeah, the smoke doesn't do that. Instead, it just obscures the ground and it makes it so that anything she does in the smoke is insane, including she can run past you. She can like teleport in multiple times like it's Marlin Pi Madness basically, she can like, yeah, wall hop until like Kunai stuff. And she's looking fucking awesome. I got to say, great first showing for the character. Find balance in death is a fucking bar. And yeah, the only thing I can say looking at that is like the moment they drop that KDA outfit or her original look with the baggy pants. Holy shit. Cash Money Millionaires. She's going to get the baggy pants. They talked about the animation thing for it, but people are really asking for it. And we saw made things that I remember them talking about like the animation. Yeah, it was also like Darius's cape was like, I know, I know, I know. And we even saw the model that the modeler on the team did of that. You're right. But I bet I would be very I would be surprised if they weren't trying to do something to solve that problem because it's a main complaint I'm seeing. I'm seeing they should do. I'm just seeing that and KDA please all day. They should tell us every character. They're playing in the next five years. OK, yeah. Right now. And in fact, as soon as they walk out of a meeting room and they think about the idea, they should immediately tweet it. Yep. Yes. Yep. You could show us workshops of the characters in in in progress, actually, just show us the whole thing. I was like, yeah, that would actually be really cool. No, I mean, all kidding aside, like in order to build back up after the the the bum out news, you do have to garter hype. And like, I don't think a traditional release schedule is enough. I think you got to start doing more, you know? Yeah, but now you're doing more with less. Right. That's tough. Yeah. And I mean, again, the even the whatever the people when people are talking about the like, I thought this game was canceled stuff. Other people talk about how the that that thing should have been framed and talking about it like downsizing to a to a live service team versus releasing your staff or whatever the fuck the case is. If the intent is to still release, you know, a X number of characters or across X number of, you know, years or whatever the case is. If there is if there is a feeling that we have another five or 10 before we look and see how this game is doing and decide whether to keep it open or not, keep it going or not. Then, yeah, more transparency on that front would not hurt at all, I would say, for sure. I think all joking aside, I think we should probably actually get the the characters of the rest of the season. Like we were going to call him, we know we're getting set up and we got Kate, but there's two more after that. I think they should. It would be nice to have faith in this whole season existing. Hmm. You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't think and I think like knowing knowing for a long time that like Ingrid is on the way, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't reduce hype or anything. Like you kind of just you still check it out when it comes and you're like, holy shit, like when Alex trailer dropped and everything, people like, holy fuck, like it's still very cool, you know, the I think this the leaks in Street Fighter kind of showed that like having a full season out there doesn't necessarily kill hype, you know, it it it can totally go hand in hand. It's still exciting when the cat, when the content starts dropping. Yeah. So beyond that, tell you what, though, one of the things that does work me a little bit. So it's a it's a riot game, so we don't have numbers, right? Don't have it can't steam DB the shit at all. The only thing I can possibly look at is like twitch numbers. And they are like, it's basically zero. And that that reflects my my experience when I streamed it. Hmm. It yeah, it's honest. It seems like it's basically like one of those games that if there's an event going on, then you spend there's a lot more action going on. If there's a tournament that weekend or something happening, you know, then things pick up. But then in the idle hours, they they do a little bit more. So yeah, for sure. I mean, hey, here's here's here's another way to go about it. Avatar Legends, the fighting game. It's got Ang, Korra, Zuko, Katara, Toff, Saka, Azula, Zaheer, Ozai, Avatar, Kyoshi and what looks to be Avatar Korra and Avatar Ang. And it's 30 bucks. And that's a great roster. Yep. And it's a great roster. And that's a great roster. Yep. And it's 30 bucks. And if you pre-order, you can vote on who you want the DLC to be. And really? Yep. So that's great, actually. Vote for your DLC character. So if you want Uncle Iroh, then you got to go vote for him. Also, that tells you that they're going to make the character after the voting concludes and that it's not something in the waiting. And it's got crossplay and rollback. And if you the $50 edition comes with the five extra characters of the year one DLC. So there you go. Thirty dollar fighting game. Legitimately great roster. And yeah, Avatar Kyoshi, I think that's that's that's the weirdest pick by far. But she had books, right? She had a whole series of books. So it's like she's another main character that got followed in a storyline. It makes sense given that she has developed story and stuff, you know, if you're going to pick another one, I feel like that would be the one. And then after that, you'd go maybe Avatar one. Right. I'm also a little surprised to hear Mandarin out of all the the Korra villains. Yeah. So there's not a lot of Korra. I'm surprised Amon didn't get in, for example. So there's not a lot of Korra representation. And like, yeah, there's there's a lot left on the table. And so folks are going like, OK, the votes are going. Are you going to come down to like, yeah, Iro, Amon, Asami, Jet, Tsukimi, Jinora, did jet die? I mean, I didn't see. I only saw Korra seasons like one or two. So I can't. I really. Yeah, I didn't see three and four. You watched the first two and then stopped. I was watching them with Punch Bomb. That's why I go. Yes, it is difficult. I say not having watched the second episode of One Piece. It is difficult to sync up coordinated watching sometimes. I understand it's not about how good season three is or not. It's about when the wife and I can watch together. But I know I just put on the the Coco Mullen for the baby and fry her brain a little bit. No, no, we're saving the brain frying for maybe never. So. But you don't you don't need to scream at me about I'm I know I know. But yes. Anyway. And I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that. And what should we call it? There's a whole bunch of cool characters that could that could show up there. So yeah, that's it. And I think I just I think price point is huge. I think that's a big deal. And for a solid looking 2D small scale game, 30 bucks sounds good. Honest price. Good shit. We were just talking about this at the top of the story. So. All right. Beyond that, do you know what the fuck is going on with Ram? Yeah, there's some crazy shit happening because I'm seeing simultaneous stories where it's like, OK, open AI failed to fulfill its commitment to purchase 40 percent of the world's supply and it did happen and it terminated a seventy one billion dollar contract. Thus causing Ram prices to plummet. That's correct. And that leads to best by having a price war and dropping prices on Kingston DDR five to keep up with Micro Center and they're all racing to the bottom on their price war. But then I'm so the market is rapidly. Reacclimating itself to non insanity. But then I'm also simultaneously seeing a story going. Costco is removing RAM from its display PCs because people are walking up to them and ripping them out. That's right, because those people have just those people are working under the assumption of the RAM nonsense of a couple weeks ago. They found out that the Rams in Costco PCs are the new catalytic converter. And scumbag bureaucracy prevention has not caught up to the market. But the latest on the market is that it's falling because of that open AI deal. Yeah, see scams and hustles, they take a bit to solidify. And then bureaucratic responses to scams and hustles take much longer to solidify. All right, that's why you got to get copper. Everybody always needs copper. It's everywhere. You can find it. No problem. Good old reliable copper. Bubbles, is that you? That's a lot. Oh, man. Dude, one fucking company, one AI company, each shit. And actually the problem starts to heal itself immediately. Well, because the problem was the idea that like, you know, selling in bulk is better than anything else. Right. Oh, you got a confirmed purchase order for the fucking five straight years of product. Let's fucking go. And the news is telling me that this is like the most highly valued shit ever. So, you know, they're good for it. And so all that has to happen is you find out, oh, wait, they're not good for it. Oh, then we got to be careful sending out these massive multi-year purchase orders to people who don't pay us up front. The whole economy is based off confidence and vibes. Once the vibes are off, all of a sudden, oh, shit, we have to go back to actually doing business. You can do business with rats and vibes. You shouldn't. You shouldn't. You probably shouldn't. But you can. Okay. Well, but that's that's what's up is the vibes is off. So the economy is correcting. And then the catalytic converter logic is applying. Now, granted, Sony just jacked up the fucking price of a PlayStation by like a hundred, hundred and fifty fucking bucks because of all this ram bullshit. And that's not coming back down ever. Ever. Because they want to set up the PlayStation six costing a thousand fucking dollars. And so you look at the PS4, well, the PS4 costs nine fifty and the PlayStation six costs a thousand. Why would I just get the PlayStation six? Oh, right. Because I'm broke. I don't have a thousand dollars to spend on a PlayStation six because games cost one hundred and twenty fucking dollars. I'm going to go play me. Ho-yo games on my phone. Well, you could always get a steam box. No, wait, hold on. That's also a fucking fucking thousand dollar price range. There is a guy at Valve looking at like a of the fucking graph of the stock market at the steam at the steam machine fucking desk, just going, I don't know what to do. Like as soon as they announce a price, CPUs, four thousand dollars. You know, like, oh, man. Yeah. I was about to say that these are those moments that, you know, Nintendo feels like they can exist for. But then I see the latest story saying X Nintendo sales lead says prices will go up. It's inevitable. They might be able to go down. It's inevitable. They may be able to put off for raising hardware prices for a moment, but a price hike is coming. Yeah. Don't wait to buy a switch to here's why, etc., etc., etc. I'm to switch to the day they came out because all the tariff shit went off. I didn't even think about the ram shit because that didn't even exist at the time. Well, I mean, I bought one because I might need it for work, but I also need an object to collect dust on my table. Oh, that's good. I tell you what, dude, you got a baby. It's prime switch hours. Sorry. No, you have an infant. It's not prime switch hours when you have a toddler. Now that's prime switch hours. I mean, I have noticed that, like, like with a little bit of limited screen that she's been exposed to, like when she strapped on, if there are no people or faces, like she's really tuned the fuck out. Like if it's just like windows and clicking on files and folders and dragging shit around or like editing, she's like, don't get me the fuck out of here. This sucks, dude. Yeah. It's got to be. It's got to be something. Yeah. Like I'll put up thumbnails and, you know, edit playlists on the TV for dad show. And he's like, I'm going to fuck about this. I won't put my blocks. My blocks is way better than this stupid dad show stuff because dad show is do da. Yes. All right. I mean, besides that, there's a bunch of April Fool's shit that I just didn't mark down. Oh, it gives a fuck. Warhammer musical is by far the best looking one. They should do that. I mean, I'm down with caked up Omni-Man a little bit, but, you know, that's neither her nor their. Yeah. Oh, and they did show off Conquest. That's that's cool. I hope he does the speech. Anyway. Uh, there used to be a time when there would be one April Fool's announcement that the joke was that it wasn't an April Fool's announcement. It was real used to be. And I don't I didn't see anything like that this year. Oh, what's that? Not Starcraft game. The game that it's Storm something. Is it Stormgate? Oh, Jesus, don't do this to me. It's too late for this man. I can't play the game now. Don gate, storm. It's Stormgate. I have a new story for you. It's the shittiest one so far. Stormgate, which was a Kickstarter game, which is basically not Starcraft. Right. It's going to it's a free to play RTS game. It is losing its multiplayer because the service provider that runs their multiplayer servers has been bought by an AI company and been retasked to other business. So that game is dead. Oh my God. Well, I thought it already was to be fair. Like if you were if you were to ask me prior to saying the story, I would have been like, oh, I'm sure that's that that thing that died. But OK. Wow, to find out it's living only to find out it's dying for the dumbest reasons. Yeah. You. It's like you find out about somebody who you thought died a long time ago and you're like, how are they doing? And the answer is bad. And you're like, well, I shouldn't have even entered into this conversation. All right. It's late. Let's take a letter or two and get out of here. All right. If you want to send in a letter, send it to castle superbeastmail.com. That's castle superbeastmail.com. All right. Let's take one over here. Hey, Nostradamus Madden and Duda Boivé. Oh, man. A week or so, Pat mentioned how the gaming industry at large, which normally tries to copy big trends is wisely not doing so with GTA and is trying to get out of its way because no game wants to launch alongside a cultural behemoth that is GTA six. Sidebar. Yes, this has been the case for pretty much all of them now, right? In light of recent events, the thought is crept up that initially I would dismiss, but in the realities of the current state of the industry, I can't up and wonder, would this hypothetical scenario would you'd weigh in on? What if it comes out in November? It's a 10 on 10 reviews are glowing. Perfect launch. And let's say the devs don't even go through a hell march and everything's positive. It's the game of the generation sells at a reasonable price, but it doesn't meet the same expectations of the market. It doesn't move the millions of new consoles. It doesn't make all of the money like take two or Sony or Microsoft. And it's the biggest release of the year, but the market's expectations are too unrealistic and divorced from reality. Are we in a reality where GTA six could flop? No, but there is a reality in which it takes like multiple years for them to make their money back. I have a suspicion that that game is going to have to like clear 25 million to break even. I. So what I would say is, yeah, like based on the last game's tale, I'm sure that like they're factoring in not just that initial point, but the online suite and everything afterwards, which which turns that expectation into a ridiculous like Goliath monster. And as we're discussing in a world where people don't have fucking money, you know, that that's that's going to be rough, certainly. But it's also like. I don't know, man, it's the thing that people who don't play video games gets to be the game that gets to do crazy shit with the price because people will be like, well, the only game I'm going to play ever. Yeah, people gamer people who. And well, oh yeah, well, games you play, Grand Theft Auto. Yeah, people who don't play video games will come back and buy that. Right. So it's yeah. I don't think I remember being at Magfest like five or six years ago, and we got an Uber and it was like a 60 year old black grandma that picked us up. And when she asked what we were going to, we were like, Magfest, it's like a video game and music convention. She started going on and on and on about how her grandkids got her into Grand Theft Auto five online and she plays it all the time. And I'm like, you can't fucking wish on a genie for that kind of mad fucking market penetration. Yeah. Like that, like. She that that grandma, there was two paths, one of them was Candy Crush and this was the other. Yeah, that was it. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Like, like that's that's you. You can't even buy that level of cultural attachment. But but as always, it's effect on the industry around it, or should I say it's effect on the minds of the C-suite execs around it is the real detriment that we have to look forward to every time. And I can't wait for that game to come out and just have to deal with thousands of people yelling at me because I'm like, I don't care about it. Like there. Wait. There will be there will be investors and there will be executives that will point their hands at Grand Theft Auto and the moment they do those hands should be cut off like who just like like clean like just lightsaber style immediately cotterized. But you know they're going to do it. You know it's going to happen. There's they're going to start comparing whatever the fuck they're looking at or working on to GTA and going, but why can't we? But if so, then we can because. Yeah, anyway, I think that's I think that's pretty much what's going to happen there. Flop. I don't think it'll flop, but I think I think they're going to like break even like on launch, but just barely after selling like 25 to 40 million copies. And how utterly unsustainable that is. It is going to be the game that like I can see whatever the fuck Nvidia does. I can see it get this thing getting the most yassified of all releases. Yeah, they hate that. Coming. Yeah, they absolutely hate that shit. I over it because they're they're obsessive perfectionists. With the look and everything. Yeah, it's that's an anti rock star technology. OK. And there's another one that's here and I'll just summarize it. It's it's a bit long and I saw it come in more than once. But basically. Dear double lariat and drive parry. It basically this person has summarized that there has been a rising thunder lore Bible that dropped. And if you ever wanted to find out more about the lore of rising thunder, you can. And one of the things in particular. So the robots are not just robots. There's pilots in the in the cockpits of each of those robots. And there's artwork of what the pilots look like. In in in each of the robots, if you wanted to see what their designs were, go go check that out. And I mean, you know, I think I did think rising thunder is cool. I like robots. I remember the problem being that people are like we like humans, not robots. And that's that appeal wise. You're not going to get anybody. But yeah, you can go check out the cool fucking punch girl inside a Dauntless or the dog that's piloting. Um, what should we call it? The Russian robot. Yeah, if you want to. I don't know if I want them to be piloted coming in from David. I kind of just wanted them to be anthropomorphized robots like a transformer. No, but the game like the one the little story blurb prior graph with each character did tell you that they were piloted by people. It said it said that right off the bat. So we did know this, but now there's sketch images of each character and they look pretty cool. You could not be any less interested. That's right. Hey, do you want to read the fighting game lore about this dead game? I don't know, man. I it's like I can promise you there's no incest in it. Yeah, you can't. When you're not sure now, now I'm definitely not interested. Now we go.