 Hi guys, it's me, you know, the Pokemon guy. Uh, I'll be honest, I kinda wanted to review Death Stranding next, but I'm not sure if I'm ready to talk about such a controversial topic so soon after the last one. So instead, how about I talk about something that pretty much everyone is definitely on the same page about? Google Stadia. So as a lot of you may know, back when this was announced, I livestreamed the event, I reacted to it, and I wasn't totally against the idea of Google releasing whatever the heck this was. I'm very much the kind of guy who is willing to wait and see how something turns out before I completely give up on the idea. And streaming games makes a lot of sense to me on paper. In the future, right now, just doesn't seem like the best idea. I'm not ready for it right now, but I was willing to check out Google Stadia and see if they managed to pull it off successfully. And it has been one heck of a terrible ride, let me tell you. So if you're not one of the ten people that opted in to buying the Founders Pack, which cost $130 for pretty much just the controller, it also came with the little Chromecast dongle thing to plug into your TV. And if you still kinda don't know what this is or what it's supposed to be, it's essentially Netflix for video games. And I mean that literally, you can play anywhere, anyhow, any when. From your TV, to your computer, to your tablet, to your mobile phone, you can at any point just launch up Destiny 2 in 4K and start to play in. At least, that's the idea behind it. So this is how Google set up the pre-orders, and it is so stupid and I don't understand it. You throw $130 of your hard-earned cash into this Founders Pack, they send you a controller and a dongle somewhere between the 19th to the 21st. However, you don't get your invitation code right away. The invitation code being the thing you need to activate your service and actually use any of this. They just said, oh, we'll send out that activation code at some point during the launch render. So a lot of people have actually been shipped their controller and they're set up already, but they can't do anything with it. Literally nothing, because they don't have their code to activate their service that they paid for. Luckily, and I say luckily very loosely, I was actually sent my code on the 19th and this arrived yesterday on the 20th. However, I redeemed my code with the same email account I used to buy this thing by the way, and every time I hit the final page, pretty much the confirmation page, it would say, oh, we're sorry, we can't find the item you're trying to purchase, that item being my three month trial. It couldn't find my three month trial. I had no idea what was going on. Every time I opened the app, it would automatically take me back to this page. I wasn't able to back out of this page or I could do as hit next and see that error again. That was the entirety of yesterday. Google support is getting absolutely slammed right now, and every time I put myself into a waiting queue to chat with someone at Google Help, it would have me at something like 500 or 600 in queue. It would go down about 100 people every hour. I literally sat in this queue for three hours while I was playing Jedi on an actual system that works by Xbox One X. I essentially wasn't getting an answer from Google. I even tweeted Google multiple times and my tweet got a lot of likes, a lot of retweets, enough for Google to see it. If I, if I couldn't get help, someone with a following that had people sharing it and liking it, if I can't get help with this, then I can imagine what everyone else is dealing with. I mean, I can. The same thing as me. So no one was getting help. I found threads on Reddit of people trying to get help, and then finally I found my way into the Discord for Google Stadia. And the people in the community help section in the official Stadia Discord were very helpful. I'm not sure if the mods that were helping me had anything to do with Google or Stadia themselves, but everyone in there, from the users to the mods, were trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with my code. I was finally able to download this thing 24 hours later. I was able to accept my three month trial and log in to the friggin app. So for anyone out there who doesn't have a code yet, or their code doesn't work right away, or they're having issues with their code, they're completely screwed and they have to figure it out on themselves. Google is not helping anyone on this. It is an absolute train wreck right now. Anyway, if you're lucky enough, and I say that again very loosely to have your code work right away, I can't believe I spent 24 hours with this stupid controller and dongle that I had paid $130 for and I just couldn't, they were just useless. I couldn't do anything with it. Anyway, I finally got in and I recorded a bunch of footage of Destiny and then some footage of Samurai Showdown. Oh boy, okay. Let me say this actually, the controller for those wondering, it actually does feel very nice. It feels very quality and I would compare it to a 360 controller. The buttons all feel very good. The toggles are great. The sticks are great. It is a quality controller and I do like it a lot and I have no issues with this. I also like the color scheme a lot. I just, I think it's nice. I did a good job here. I'll give you that one Google stadium. Then I started using it to play the game. But here it is and I have played this on my PlayStation Pro and it does look better on my PlayStation Pro. Of course, we are streaming here. I mean, I think it looks honestly, considering this is streaming pretty good. I mean, I have no complaints here. Oh, and I should have mentioned that I get 500 down in my house, which is well above their recommended 35 down to get 4K streaming. So this should be no problem for me. I've played it for like two hours today and while I just, I'm sorry, I don't like Destiny 2. But as far as how the game was actually running and playing on Stadia, I can't laugh at it. I mean, I didn't notice any lag. I didn't notice much or any input lag between the controller to the game. I honestly think the game looks pretty good. I mean, we're not talking about Pro Xbox One X, but maybe base models. I think it looks fine. Good. I mean, I think it looks good and it was running really well. I mean, it felt like it was at a steady 60 frames. I had no connection issues. The loading screens were really quick. The only issue I really ran into was there wasn't many people playing, so I was queuing up for matches and then I wasn't finding anyone to help out on my fire team or my team, whatever it's called. And that could just be an issue of being this early on the system and most people not even being able to activate the friggin' codes to play. But right now, Destiny 2, as much as I don't, find the game very fun, was working perfectly fine. However, Samurai Showdown was not. Playing offline against the CPU, there was noticeable input lag between the controller and the game. It was also very laggy. The streaming was not good at all, even offline. And then online is unplayable. It took me a while to even find someone that was playing online. And then the first time I tried to match against them, we had a connection drop. We finally found ourselves in a game and it just wasn't playable. It was really laggy. It was like a mix between the input lag from the controller to the game and then just the game itself had massive frame rate drops. Yeah, that, I want nothing to do with this. I just, I cannot play it. It is insufferable. The game itself seems pretty fun. Again, I'm not like huge on fighters either. So these two options for me between Destiny and then Samurai, not a very exciting two game lineup. These are the ones you get for free. And then you have to use the mobile app to download any other games. You can actually press a button on the controller and bring up a menu on your TV and pick another game. You literally have to bring your phone back out and buy a game on the phone and then it will let you play it on your TV, which is really weird. Another thing that's really cumbersome is playing it on the computer right now. You have to plug it in via the USB. It won't recognize it wirelessly on the computer, even though it does it wirelessly to the TV and the Chromecast, which I find weird. It says that the wireless is coming later. The thing that really sucks about that is the cord they give you is only this long, which, I mean, it's not a short cord, but when you're talking about plugging into the computer and my monitor is here, I could only get my hands to about here. So I had to add on this extra connector, which we're talking about a system that's moving towards the future and we're 4K streaming on mobile phones. Well, not my phone actually. I'll get to that, but our TVs and our computers. And yet I'm having a hobble cobble together or a big old wire. And then, yeah, about the mobile phone. So I was at least excited to see how Destiny 2 and games like that played on my phone because technically it's supposed to be no different to anywhere else because it's streaming. But it doesn't work on my phone. It only works on Google Pixel phones right now. Favoritism, if you ask me. I'm sure that's coming later on down the line. So right now my choices are playing on my TV or playing on my computer with this thing and my choices of games. By the way, I spent 130 on this service. My choices of games are a very laggy samurai showdown and then Destiny 2. I can of course use my phone to buy other games like Red Dead Redemption and so on and so forth. But unfortunately there's nothing new, nothing exclusive, nothing I haven't played before. Even if I wanted to replay one of the games I've already played like Red Dead Redemption, I would love to see how that runs. But it's full price $60. Though discounts of any kind on that being a pro member. So I'd have to re-buy the game for $60. Which is a big commitment. I mean usually I don't mind so much re-buying a game especially if I love it. But I know that I'm not playing Throne Stadia and I'm also not sure how it's gonna run. Like there's a gamble there. Is it gonna run like Destiny which would be great? Or is it gonna run like Samurai Showdown? Am I gonna drop $60 and then not be able to play it because it's unplayable? I don't feel like this is a great launch. When one of your two games doesn't work all that well it doesn't build a lot of faith especially for people who can't even get in in the first place. We all paid $103. I mean I keep referencing that but I'm trying to figure out what it is I paid for here. I mean Destiny 2 was a $5 game. GameStop right now. Samurai doesn't work. So essentially I paid for the pleasure of dealing with Google customer care for 24 hours of the lack of dealing with I suppose. And then this controller which needs a big old cord to even work on the computer. It's kind of a mess. That's just my early impressions although let's see what Google Stadia does moving forward. It's been mismanaged. It's a complete train wreck but it's not a great start to the future of gaming.