 Marvel's bad, buh buh buh, but you all know it's actually really good. Marvel is pretty good. We have to sit here and spin this narrative. It's incredibly difficult to spin this narrative. We have so little to work with. No. So many ways. We just don't have a chance to show the people the greatness that they can't see. Hmm. This is pretty peak fire. For real. Really, it's the peakest fire as it's been. But people aren't giving it a try. That's accurate. What exactly is that title of the stream? I don't know. It's the title of the stream. Ask me again once we've seen all three of the video essays and then I will try my best to explain why. How do I always end up in these three triple threat scenarios or double duos and just like kill me at the end? Kill me, baby, one more time. I don't think it's long. I like that. That could be something that you don't. You have to be like a vampire or a zombie. Yeah. Yeah. It could work. Or like Raish Al Ghul ending up in the Lazarus pit. Isn't that right? I'm going to say Raish. Whoa. Raish. No. No. Raish Al Ghul, boy, isn't he's not in the Lazarus pit. Wait, is this the one being guarded by the Confederate general? Sure. You don't know your DC shows. Yes, I do. That's the Lazarus pit was guarded by the Confederate general. We watched this on Infinite Earth. That's the only one where they pronounce it. Raish. I can't remember. Why do you always have to talk about Raish? Brax is talking about. Oh, it's the book. Right. You'll talk about. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm pretty sure it's Jonah Hex in that shitty thing, I think. I'm not sure. He's the Confederate general, yeah. Is Jonah Hex a warlock? I don't know. Let's see. With the last name like that. Warlock question mark. See what Google's got for us. Yeah. When did he get his degree? Is Jonah Hex a time traveler? Actually, he has time traveled a couple of times. All right, that answers my question. Basically a warlock. Basically a warlock, yeah. You're a warlock. Does Jonah Hex ever wear a Confederate uniform? It's the only uniform he'll fit in. What? That's as long as he doesn't have a Confederate self-dispensary. Yeah. Do they mean like you can only fit into it in a personal way? I don't want to wear nothing else. Okay. Well, I only want to wear this. He wants to be ready for when the South rises again. Yes. I learned a lot about Jonah Hex this stream. I think we could wrap there, I think. Pretty solid exploration of DC comics. But we got some other stuff we could do if you're interested. Like, well, you know, there's some videos, which to be fair, I want to shout out to the good old people in the audience. They're the ones that these three have been selected from. And then we'll post asking people for what they would like to see us cover. And I scanned through a couple of them and these caught my eye. And then of the ones that caught my eye, I gave a little look. I was like, ooh, these could cause some very interesting conversations. One of them is just for memes, though. Well, we have to talk about one thing. I looked at the EFAP Discord before we started and someone posted that. And I thought that was the thumbnail and I was wondering, okay, we got Kratos, Master Chief. Why don't we just have Iron Man's hand? That was really weird for you to make the thumbnail of that. And then I was like, oh, this isn't EFAP number two. So it just wasn't pasting the full thumbnail. EFAP number two, you're not, it is. And also I'm not here. Yes. Well, all of it will make sense, the fear that we go through. And there's no reason for us not to start straight away, unless this is something you guys want to bring up. You guys are going to complain about something again. I would like to bring up something that I thought would be okay. This, shut up. Listen. So mother and father, right? Mother starts with M and father starts with F, right? I can't wait for this is going. We're analyzing the words. I'm following, I'm getting it. No. Then there's, I actually forgot when this was going. Yeah, that was where it was going. Yeah. Male and female, right? Male starts with M, but mother starts with M. Female starts with F, but father starts with F. And that just was a thought that occurred to me randomly. Yeah. It's just a little quirk of linguistics. They did. They made the father version. That was really good. Did you guys see the mother? Remember that movie with Jennifer Lawrence? I saw I am mother and that was really good. There was one called mother, as far as I remember. I haven't seen it. I just know that it's a Gooba film with, it's like artsy and crazy. That's all I know. What about Mamma Mia? Oh, classic. Get to hear P.S. Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård singing it. Isn't that what you want? Isn't that just the one thing you want? Oh, I was, really? I was referring to the, yeah, that's pretty good. I love movies. I didn't think you were talking about the song. I love it. It's really good. Abba's good. Yeah. How is P.S. Brosnan singing voice? I don't remember. Is he any good? Chat, was it any good singing? I remember people making fun of P.S. Brosnan singing, I think. I can't remember. Did you do it? Yeah. Pierce was considerably the worst. They should have P.S. Brosnan singing. Imagine I was like, surprise guest, P.S. Brosnan today. He saw it on our podcast. He was the only character we liked in Black Adams. So we got him on the podcast. Yay. He just comes in like, I don't think I was that bad. Hawke was all right. Hawke was all right. Falcon, is that what you think his name is? Falcon. Hawkman? Yes. Get it right. Falconman. Falconman. Falconman. He's the Mr. Siga to our Mr. Clean. Professor Disinfectant. Of course, we're just welcome in general. It's been a while to CJ. How you doing, buddy? Hello. I would do this with everybody, but we see these other fuckers all the time. So it doesn't really matter. Yeah. You know how to make a man feel special and important today. Exactly. You're in the perfect episode, I would say, because we're covering things that you know about, like Iron Man. You know about Kratos and Master Chief and Iron Man's Hand. Iron Man's Hand is quite a big character in the Iron Man movies. It's people with his little pulsies. But I provided. I'll think about it. Is that Chris Redfield? It is. Oh my God. I was for a second there, I was like, who could that be? It could be 78 different people. And it's like, oh my God, it's Chris Redfield from Resident Evil 8. It's actually only one person. That's the message. The amazing video game. That's very good. Is everyone in the watch together? I see six. I don't see seven. Yeah. I'm ready to watch Big Buck Bunny. Well, I guess someone is missing. They show the still for Big Buck Bunny is him about to be murdered. Yeah. Yeah, but that's funny. So it's okay. Seconds before the disaster. This is, if they did the furry version of what's the Brendan Frazier Fat Man movie. Oh, well, well, well, then this would, he would be the guy playing it. He looks whelish for a rabbit. Normally quite lithe and small, but this rabbit is like gargantuan. I mean, maybe that's why they call him Big Buck Bunny. That's probably a bug. There we go. We have seven. All right. Well, there's no reason not to get going. This video is called when the filmmakers get stuck with an unlikable character and it's focused. I thought you're going to say when filmmakers get stuck. Stuck man eyes pray it doesn't happen to you. Yeah. No, the reason this would trigger people I think in general is because Tony Stark is the focus of it. And it's like unlikeable. But that might just be a form of just, you know, who knows what the video is about. It's well received. It could be a lie. It could be a twist of words. You know what I mean? This would not be unprecedented for EFAP for the title to just be a fucking lie. That's true. But it could also just be a hot take. Who knows really? You could be. Yeah. You know what? We're going to find out. Why is his title all low case? I don't know. Lower case. Why do you stop fucking doing that? Have some goddamn respect. Maybe that's his style. Are you jealous that he can get away with it? You can. Whoa. Postmodern. Well, you know what? Maybe it's a bit of time we have some postmodern because everyone's using too many capital letters and it's ruined it. And I don't even care if any of you people fucking do it either in your videos. I'll own it. Oh, wait. I've got the cover on. I'll carry on. One second. There you go. Chat getting spanked. No offense. There we go. All right now. Warning for critical damage. Warning for critical damage. Whoa. Status. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Which game is that? He's fallen. I assume it's a game. It was going to be an animation. Whoa. Who's doing that? Oh, my goodness, Grace. Oh, someone's doing something. Someone is skipping through the video. And whoever did that, you banned officially. Oh, no. It's unfortunate. It's unfortunate. Mr. Talk is right. I didn't know it would also control the video. It's skipping us through the whole video. You can't just skip to the ad. Okay. We're going to get through this. They're cheating. Yeah. Warning. Critical damage. Mark closing critical damage to the effect. Oh, my goodness. It's unfortunate. Mr. Talk is right. I didn't know it would also control the video. It's skipping us through the whole video. Mark. You can't just skip to the ad. Okay, Mark. It's not how it works. Ruin it again. Oil the video through this. They're cheating. Yeah. Warning. Critical damage. Mark closing critical damage to the effect. Oh, my goodness. This is a 2007 Iron Man advertorial video created by then future Deadpool director Tim Miller. It was one of three promotional shorts designed to introduce the character of Tony Stark and Iron Man to a generation of kids and mainstream moviegoers, many of whom at the time really didn't know who Iron Man was. Catch a beat in the background. Do you know where I learned about Iron Man? Where did you learn about Iron Man? I learned about Iron Man at the Mecca of Childhood, which was, of course, Chuck E. Cheese. Because there was an Iron Man arcade game. It was a Marvel Avengers arcade game way before the Disney stuff. It was when I was a wee lad. And that's when I learned that there was this character called Iron Man. And he looked really cool. He had the classic outfit. He shot laser beams. He had rockets and stuff. I was like, wow, this Iron Man guy's really, really cool. Before that, that's how I learned about Iron Man's existence. Never knew about him before then because I wasn't like a comic guy. So I wonder how everyone learns about these sort of obscure-ish kind of heroes. The big blast of Marvel information I got was from watching episodes of the animated shows and the top Trumps and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Those are like the big sources where I was like, oh, I know stuff now. I know this guy. I bought a set of trading cards called Marvel Universe Series 3 in the early 90s. And it had, I think, like 350 cards in it. And every one of them had a pretty decent picture of the character. And then a big list of their attributes, how fast they are, how strong they are, a brief summary of their origin. And that's kind of how I learned everything I know about Marvel heroes. And when I was eight, nine, something like that. I wish I could remember what the name of that game was called. If I scrolled around and found it, I know it wasn't like a fighting game. It was one of those games. There was one for the Simpsons. And there was one for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles where you'd go from left to right. And all of you would beat up the bad guys and fight a boss together. And you could go up and down and stuff. But it wasn't like a 1v1 fighting game. You mean it made him up? Like it made him up? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Simpsons one is fun. It is, yeah. That was one of my very few and possibly first exposure to the Simpsons when I was very young because my parents wouldn't let me watch the Simpsons. It was too brutal. My parents didn't let me watch it either, but fuck them. I would not fuck my parents. I'll fuck your parents, but I won't fuck mine. I think that Simpsons and that X-Men game were probably my first exposure to multiplayer gaming having more than two players at one time. I think there was two players. I think there was an X-Men one as well. Yeah, there is an X-Men one. It plays really similarly. I think it's made by the same people. Yeah, I like those styles of games. I played Castle Crashers with a friend. That was really fun. I like those styles. Those are fun kinds of games. It's a neat style. When was the last time that you played Beat'em Up? I think it was last year. It was late last year. Pride round. No, not late. August or September when I went to a friend's house and he had Castle Crashers on his Xbox 360. We were playing Halo Reach and stuff together on the Xbox 360. It was fun. Just doing some nostalgia. We played Four Swords on the GameCube Slash Game Boy with the connection, the little cable that would link your Game Boy Advance to your GameCube. Yeah, he actually has all the components. He has the Game Boys, the Four Sword Games, and all the cables, and a GameCube. We put it on a little CRTV and we played... We had some fun nostalgia games. In Pokemon Sapphire when they had the GameCube there and they talked about the system link cable thing and I was like, wait a minute, can I play my Game Boy on my GameCube? Holy shit. That's exciting. Well, it says we're already on a deep, deep tangent. Do you remember, speaking of Pokemon and crossovers, do you remember the E-Reader Pokemon cards? Does anyone here remember those? I know of them, but I've never used them. Let me post a picture and you might remember. But the E-Reader Pokemon cards were these fucking abominations where they'd have a Pokemon card but it would have these little E-Reader thingies on the left and the bottom and you would slide it into a... Here, I can get a picture here. You basically slide it into something that looks like a credit card reader that you would attach to the top of your Game Boy Advance. You could even get the original Zelda as well as the original Metroid for E-Reader as well, like little cards that just had those full games on them. And I remember how everyone... We all had Pokemon cards when we were in grade school and stuff. And then these fuckers, these fucking E-Reader cards, they somehow... It's like a virus. I don't remember anyone ever buying them, but somehow we all just ended up getting them. We all had some of these in our collections somehow. I don't know where they came from and no one had an E-Reader, but these cards just sort of popped up and they came and went. I feel like I skipped this somehow. I don't know. I think it lasted very long. I think it was one of those attempts at making this. How do we get... We have got the Pokemon cards, we got the games, we got the Game Boys, and they did all of those things where they want to... They want to get accessories in the early days of handheld stuff, like linking two Game Boy advances together to play multiplayer games by a physical cable. They had the E-Reader stuff. All the little knickknacks and doodads that they tried. I think they bundle these with the regular card packs. I can't remember. Not the E-Reader specifically. And they were specifically for E-Readers, but you could get like mixed packs of them, like that looks like a deck, a little package writing cards, like a three-pack. I think what happened a lot of the time was that young kids would go and buy a pack of Pokemon cards because remember gambling used to be fun and then they wouldn't realize that, oh, E-Reader means it has these things on the left and the bottom and it has that E-Logo. I guess this is for some weird gadget that I just don't have, but at least I have Pokemon cards, so, you know, whatever. A similar thing they did with PlayStation Vita was these little almost QR code things that would make AR games that you could interact with the touchscreen and the back camera. It looked like you were playing the game in your living room. Back when that was kind of an obsession with games for a little bit, a couple of years. Nintendo even had that lab-o thing that looks like a VR headset that you can make out of cardboard as well. The cardboard thing. Weird accessories. I bet Nintendo has a... They've got a host of both successful and failed gadgets, knick-knacks, doodads, add-ons, all sorts of stuff from especially... Remember Amiibos? Yeah. Oh, I thought so. There's a little plastic mini figures, right? I've got pretty much all the Zelda and Metroid Amiibos. They're cute. Kind of a waste of money, but I like them. They put them on the thing and they don't lock something in the game, right? Like a skin or whatever. Are they not still actively making those? I think they are. They would just continue while I was working at the toy store, as far as I remember. I'm pretty sure that's not true. I think they're still making them. I remember that there was like a new one for the new Zelda. Yeah, I have the Tears of the Kingdom, Zelda, and Link. Yeah. I think they kind of didn't care. I was like, that's fine. It's very possible that maybe they... Yeah. Maybe they only slot in certain countries. Remember, there are the things that were happening at that time, like Disney Infinity and stuff. Yeah, that's the one that they totally canceled. Oh, it might have been. They might be mixing them up, yeah. I don't even know about Disney Infinity. God, keep in track of all that. The toy store was a fucking nightmare. There were so many characters that I didn't even know which they belonged to. It wasn't the beginning of it. What was the Spyro or a spin-off thing? What was that called? What were the Landers? Yeah, there was that. Yeah, I remember that as well. We have full sections for all of them. The Infinity logo looks familiar. It was funny because the fully stocked one was clearly the unsuccessful one, you know what I mean? I have Disney Infinity 2 with an Anakin and Obi-Wan thing for it because Ninja Theory, the people who did Hellblade and that Devil May Cry reboot and Heavenly Sword, they actually did the jet run-off when they added Star Wars to Disney Infinity, so I was like, oh, I might actually fire that up. It was okay, but it kind of just played like a Lego game with slightly better combat. I'm assuming Amiibo came first out of those Skylanders. Skylanders was first. Oh, interesting, okay. And then everybody wanted to do it. A lot of people had a Star Fox crossover, I think. It was called Star Link or Star Command or something like that. Yeah, that was the game on, I think it was on Switch. Yeah, the Ubisoft made that. A lot of people who are really young... Wait, what's this? Holy shit. Maz. $500, my dude. Thank you so much. I don't know if you'll point them out, but like, jeez, thank you so much. A red boy. Dang. That's a sad one. Let's see. After Halloween 2019, my wife sent... Well, I'll just read it right. Why half read it? After Halloween 2019, my wife sent Mola pictures of our pumpkins carved as Mola Rags and Wolf. I don't want to meme fab, I think. It was one month after she was diagnosed with cancer and given a year to live. Yesterday, she finally lost the battle. And if you toxic drinkers tonight, please toast to Corrine, I assume, pronounced Corrine. Oh, Corrine. She was 33. Well, sorry to hear that, man. That sucks, man. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, that's... But she... So they told her that she only had a year and she managed to get another four years. Looks like it, yeah. So... Okay. At least... I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah. Yeah, obligatory fuck cancer, of course. Yeah, cancer's messed up. We've lost so many good people in cancer. But at least you got more time than you thought that you were going to get. Yeah, and I mean, you know, thanks for the carvings. We thought they were awesome, but... They were very awesome. We certainly remember them. 33. Way too soon. The tragedy. That sucks. Especially when, like, that's basically my age. I can't, you know, imagine being that age and have it cut short. It's a terrible thing. No, it is a crazy amount of people that we lose to all kinds of insane shit like that. Cancer's one of those ones that just... I've said before, it feels like a... But it literally is a glitch, right? Like, in terms of how it would be categorized or explained to, like, a child, how it works. Yeah. You know, some people just get cancer and then, you know, can kill them or give them this really long, terrible battle they have to fight. And it just ain't right. You know, the sooner we get rid of it, the better. Hopefully every year we get closer to stamping it out for good. But yeah, absolutely. I appreciate all of that. And we will do our best to keep your mind in a more entertainment-focused place, perhaps. A bit of escapism tonight, because we got these three videos. There's some wacky opinions in here, especially we want to, you know, end up talking about Pokemon e-cards. You know, it's just something that comes up. So, hopefully that's all right to you. But yes. Sorry for your loss. And thank you very much. Mm-hmm. Right. So, one thing I was going to actually ask is, because I didn't know if you were free to give it ads, but what... Because I don't think I've ever heard you ask this question. What was your introduction to Marvel? Like, knowing stuff about it. Was it comics or...? My introduction to Marvel in general. Yeah. I don't know. Probably would have been like X-Men, like one of the animation movies. Oh, X-Men movie. No. Would have been, yeah. Would have been like X-Men or X-Men 2. It was so funny for me, because I just had like random, deeper, specific knowledge, but then a general lack of knowledge on Marvel. Like, I knew that Apocalypse's name was... It's like N Sabanur or something like that. Like, I just knew that. It was like, why? I was like, I don't know. I just saw the top trumps. Like, that's where the description at. It's just information that's in my head now. And then, of course, the Ultimate Alliance game, like, filling in lots of really cool shit. In the same way, the Batman Arkham games will have all this kind of crazy law from the comics. It's almost like direct references or adaptations of, like, works from similar writers that are part of the projects, but that it introduces a whole new set of people in a really cool way. We're not really at that point right now. Any new audiences that Marvel's pulling in aren't exactly going to encourage people to search further into their stories. No. Anyway, let us see where this video is heading. Because most people never heard of Iron Man. Most of the population. I guess it helped because a year later, John Favreau's linchpin blockbuster would go into gross over half a billion at the box office, launching the most successful film franchise of all time. At a time, Zay. Man, look back. He looks so young and full of life and in the sand and in the sand, full of life. And now the MCU is just it really takes you back to the beginning. Absolutely. Push out! But while Iron Man's international appeal would rejuvenate the comic book movie industry and Robert Downey Jr. and the MCU would solidify the character as one of Marvel's most likeable comic book heroes, Iron Man didn't exactly start out that way. Back in 2008 under the impending shadow of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Marvel I'm more kidding. It's a maybe. But you could definitely have killed them by doing that. You could have killed them and also how what are you could you your legs are broke. I was gonna say he's got some big old booties. I think I'm not sure exactly. Well it has to it still has to transmit all that force and to land like that and to not be fazed by it. He's got that. The Dark Knight is a very, very good movie. It's great. It's amazing. The Dark Knight is really good guys. I don't know what we were thinking. I don't know what we were thinking. Someone sounds passive aggressive there coming after the movie. Okay, fine. I just I I've never actually thought about the safety of his knees at this moment. He has bat knees. Marvel was staking their future as an independent movie studio on a character who is literally designed to be oppositional. Let's face it. This is not the worst thing you've got me doing. Oppositional is an interesting way to use both. We'll see what he says about it. See where he's going. I'm creating Iron Man. Stanley once said I think I gave myself a dare. It was the height of the Cold War. If there was one thing the young readers hated it was war. It was the military. I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree a weapons manufacturer. An industrialist. I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character nobody would like and make them like him. It's exactly what makes Tony Stark so unlike conventional superheroes that ended up paving the way for one of the most compelling and successful narrative through lines in mainstream cinema because more than any other character in the MCU. The thing is so far this is all still kind of He's setting up. Establishment stuff. I don't disagree yet. We're on like a shaky ground. Tony Stark's characterization and his true character So characterization and true character not a distinguishing set of categories that I would use but I'm always up for people to give me what they mean by that I guess. I would assume it would be who he acts or how he acts versus what he truly is privately or on the inside but The problem with that I guess is the true character in that instance would still come under characterization and a lot so if you're going to put him to two things like how he acts typically and then what he does in private whatever you say it'd be like well both of those still characterization though there's a movie you know Yeah the fact that he is even if he's pretending to be something in front of people that is who he is that's him acting a certain way him exhibiting elements of his character whether it's because he's whether he's very full of himself or egotistical or he's always comparing himself to everyone he's overly competitive, insecure there would be a number of reasons for it but that would be an element of his true character Yeah the most at odds with each other I'm just not the hero type clearly. In his seminal book story Robert McKee writes characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being all aspects of humanity we can know by taking notes on someone day in and day out Now this on the other hand is agent Romanoff's assessment of you. Now if you've watched through the MCU then you know how Tony Stark is characterized genius billionaire playboy philanthropist um that's actually not so the problem is that clip is already past IMM1 and 2 which have way more than those categories right like he's a very layered detailed character but one of the points in that scene is that you know it's like Steve says right after that um you know I guys with none of that worth 10 of you because the actual more important thing that's being driven at that Tony Stark has is like heart you know if he's talking about how many in the world see him versus who he is that's one thing but he's characterized as characterization which I'd be like well yeah that's what I don't understand there's a lot to summarize every characteristic Tony presents in IMM1, 2 and Avengers would take a bit you know a lot of stuff and what do you say to your other nickname the merchant of death yeah apparently I'm volatile self obsessed and play well with others textbook narcissism agreed that's good stuff but also yes most of those are more so how people see him than who he is it's quite the laundry list of flaws to sell to a mass audience but director John Favreau and his team on the first Iron Man movie did something clever I mean aside from the obvious they pitted their fundamentally flawed protagonist against a similarly characterized antagonist Tony Stark and Obadiah Stain share a profession, wealth power, hubris a dictator's need for control I mean Stanley's cursory description of Iron Man could have just as easily been used to describe Iron Munger a dictator's need for control in Tony Stark I don't agree why wouldn't we have just put it as a desire for control which is much more of a human nature thing to be honest with you I mean that's why people are nervous when they get into airplanes even though it's the safest way to travel it's that lack of control that makes you worried we want to have more control if he's about to highlight like Tony doesn't come across anyone near as likable without Obadiah Stain as a foil I don't know that I agree with that no I mean the first scene you see him is super charismatic and likable immediately Obadiah is not revealed as a villain like as a much more antagonistic role until far later in the film at that point I'm pretty sure everyone's on Tony's side because of what you see him go through yeah absolutely like when we see him trying to be better which is already super invigorating in a sense of like yeah I want this kind of win because at that point he already said stop producing weapons all together gonna shut down everything yeah and Obadiah panicking on that note I don't even call that like a you know like a desire for it he's just like a businessman at that point be like whoa you were just in terrorist captivity for three months now you have a torpedo out company please don't have a conversation but then later on it becomes clear that he's gonna stop him no matter what right right if he's trying to look at Tony Sark's character as a whole over the entire series the dictators need for control thing really doesn't make sense because of civil war he was the one trying to give away control I would go as far as I'm fine with him desiring some form of control he wants to control the situation to prevent suffering right that's what Tony would probably say you could even say that's a Captain America to a degree yeah I think to an extent you could argue that all superheroes are agents of putting their control on the world in some way should perform but usually in the form of trying to protect people yeah it's also interesting by him saying that we need Obadiah staying as a foil to get us to like Tony Sark is interesting considering that while he was playing all of those clips of Tony Sark that were sans Obadiah we were all going huh oh boy I sure do like Tony Sark I mean what people usually talk about is like why do we like Tony well you see him go through something horrible and then he sees that it's a result of his own potential like manufacturing sees what happens to so many people as a result of it and then starts to want to change it himself personally it designs himself a weapon to go against the weapons of his that have been sold to the people that are hurting people you know what I mean it's like that's a story in and of itself it's so interesting it's like what about Obadiah I was like no no sure Obadiah I don't even think he's the main factor for having Tony become so likable so quickly oh man especially because he's only in the first movie there's no like all the other ones add and add and add and add and those are without Obadiah staying I think he's talking about in the context of just the first movie but I'd still say it's fair to say that most people seem to like Tony the most out of all characters in the MCU by the end of his story even so as with thinking about how did that happen especially if Obadiah is not in most of it like the vast majority of it but probably probably also worth noting that the sort of general character archetype and personality that you get in Tony Stark is probably similar to a few other sort of character types that we see done more poorly than well like Harley Quinn comes to mind you have Jinx in Arcane is a good example of that sort of kind of character done really well and written really well manic pixie dream girl Alice in Batwoman that's a good example of it done well oh yeah she's great she's really really good absolutely but yeah with Tony Stark you have that kind of personality in a character if it's written poorly or even so so a lot of people will come across as you know really not liking him at all you can almost see like maybe almost like a first half of that is accepting as best I can along with that like how this point could be defended that Obadiah is important as a mirror to Tony but as some people in chat have highlighted and I was just thinking about yeah when these movies were coming out do you remember one of the many primary complaints about the state of the MCU in phase one and sort of every single villain is the inverse of the hero yeah in a bad way like oh look I'm you but bigger or I'm you but I have a gun okay okay and you but he's serum did not work on me yeah I'm iron man it was done to get a bit it was just like oh he fights another iron man you know when he says Invis I assume he means like Marley like they're the same but they oh okay I got I got a red skull who was referring to there did he got power from the serum taking the inverse effect it did to to yeah then you have Abomination who's like I'm the Hulk but gross and it's like okay yeah sure and then Thor you end up having him fight which was probably the most interesting in terms of a dynamic because that's the one they ended up banking on several times he's back in Thor 2 and he's back in Avengers but yeah that was a good one iron manga no one really misses Iron Monger they're like oh man I wish Iron Monger comes back you know they don't want to create characters that were the problems we had with the MCU better times mate because one of the criticisms many people have of Iron Man's third act is Obadiah goes for being an interesting kind of antagonistic force to go straight up super villain fucking crazy yeah which is so I I'm gonna rip it out of Tony Stark and let him die it's like oh that's a bad idea feel like this video has presented something that sounds true but fundamentally isn't both when the film came out and in retrospect Obadiah Stan was not really an important factor to making everyone like Tony Stark I would argue the most important factor was Robbie Downey Jr. I think so he is incredibly charismatic and he plays that role perfectly well you're casting him yeah I would say that the bad version of Tony Stark like Tony Stark but done shittily with a lot of parallels would be Galadriel from rings of power I think there's a lot of parallels you could draw except she's a really shitty character and how she's written Tony is well written in that same thing but at some point things change their arcs diverge revealing a separation between what a character seems to be on the surface and who they truly are so you didn't need that bubble there it's been a bit different or you're giving me you want me to listen to you talk but you also want me to read something that I can sort of hear but not really hear well just play the clip without just play the short little clip it's like two seconds just play the clip instead of you know it seems like he's made it clear now so he's saying how they present on the surface versus who they are underneath but I feel like that whole characterization is you know that's just all characterization it's almost like a character reveal in universe perspective or something um but I don't even that's just strange to me I don't know why it wouldn't just be categorized as characterization it's just all encompassed in describing who they are to some extent and I wouldn't even argue if he was selfish about the entire movie but then he does a selfless act at the end it's not even like that like Iron Man has his character seen I say that as though I'm being critical of him not when he's talking to Pepper right and she basically says you're gonna have to die if you're doing this and then he explains his fundamental motivation which is entirely like something that leads you into seeing his selfless act it's not common I would have an instance of what this video would describe as true character not being seen by other people in the same way that the characterization is seen by the other people which is why I find it I guess a bit of a strange distinction to make yeah because kind of everything you do how you carry yourself in front of others that's a part of who you are that is your nature we don't nobody behaves in public the exact same way that they behave in private they're just fundamentally different things you're just not going to do the same things in front of other people that you do alone we can that's like everybody we obviously know there are many people out there who would claim to be like some of the most moral and selfless people ever but if push came to shove they would just like immediately run away serious and serious and vice versa might be a lot of people who are like I don't care about anything and then they see a kid in trouble and they're like I gotta help him I think the term characterization is a function of like what the audience is seeing what they're observing and learning like I could see like you could have a character that has a true nature that is unseen in a movie but all the stuff that's in the movie is the characterization of them and so like potentially you could have an audience perception of a character that's way different than what they actually are I don't know why you would make a movie like that I'm just saying for the sake of example but I think the way people normally split this up is how the character is seen how we see them how they see themselves and then who they are fundamentally you can make those categories not characterization versus true character I feel like these are confusing well because part of what would make it confusing is what happens when we're dealing with a character who what if they're static you know what if they are a static character who doesn't change and so their characterization and true character would be one and the same because there is nothing that they're concealing or hiding you know or they're super secure about themselves so they behave virtually identically between how they are in front of others and how they are alone which is a very rare thing very very rare thing well I mean the interesting thing would be if you applied it to villains there are plenty of villains where the characterization and true character distinction is not useful where what you know especially if you're talking about some of the what's the name of the one in Thor the dark world what is that guy's name Malekith yeah what's the difference between his where is the characterization and true character line drawn for him in his motives you know you're asking me to remember Thor the dark world so I don't know I can't help you I was half tempted to make his name up and see how many people knew like Malados or something well it started with MAL so I'll buy it whatever it's fine Malavolas Malavolas played by Orlando Bloom why not but uh yeah so just pointed out like I'm not too psyched by his categories but let's see how he uses them maybe uh so it makes some sense and it's here that we begin to lean into Miki's next point which is that characterization is not the same as true character true character Miki says is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure the revelation of true character in contrast or contradiction to characterization is fundamental to all divine storytelling so I want to hear that again I'm finding these definitions a bit watching Iron Man save that guy I would happily argue is characterization instead of that's what I learned it is characterizing it is a choice that he made that tells us who he is and it's a true character as a distinction I don't even know if that makes sense and he said that it was true character was the decisions they make under pressure I'm not sure why the under pressure part why wouldn't we just be saying that any decision that a character makes contributes to their characterization I just don't like that I don't like the idea that what you do under pressure is who you really are I think it's kind of the opposite I think that when you're under pressure you often do things that are out of panic you don't think about them it can go both ways I can understand both so there's this idea of maybe it's like the old saying don't judge too harshly people who've made decisions under pressure in high stakes scenarios when you're in a place of safety and comfort I don't like the idea of who you really are is when you're under pressure I don't think that's necessarily true at all I agree because there are times where it totally reveals something about a person when they hope to keep it secret or just he saves that guy and opens his parachute at that time I don't believe that I wouldn't think that Tony Stark wouldn't do that because he'd never try to not save anyone the whole point he's here is to get rid of all these terrorists here to save all these civilians I think you are because what you're probably inching out there is that that's a moment in which it's going to cost him time he could spend escaping against people who are actively trying to hurt him and that's why we don't have a pressure antagonistic toward him however are absolutely not like heroes but they're innocent people they're just doing their job so yeah it makes sense to us with everything that we know that Tony would absolutely try and save them so we don't go in that scene we don't see him do that and go ah see that's who he truly is we're just like no that's in line and it's like a good moment because it backs up a lot of what we thought true character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure and the revelation of true character in contrast or contradiction to characterization is fundamental to all find the story yeah see I find the distinction strange when you could simply say that any contrast or even potential contradiction to other aspects of their characterization is what makes for an interesting story rather than trying to separate it into like completely distinct categories cause like at what point do you say that the choice was made under a sufficient amount of pressure that it rises to the category of true character rather than saying it is characterization all of it is there's an equal there's a good argument to be made that your character can come through when there are no stakes or cost for you at all and at the same time who you really are is also when the stakes are really really high it depends on the person in the scenario if you have nothing to lose and nothing to gain and it doesn't impact you at all and you still decide to make a particular choice well maybe that says something about you but is that to say that guy like Steve Rogers who is genuinely pretty good and characterizes being an all around good dude all the time is he not a hero because he's just never pushed beyond his limit in that respect no I think we get that in the sort of the first act I guess you could say of the first Captain America movie when he is I imagine this guy would absolutely agree that there are plenty of he would say that there are plenty of instances where you see Cap's true character which is hyper selfless hero man establish that before he becomes a superhero if I watch the scene of him jumping on the grenade to save everybody I wouldn't view that as that's his true character that's his characterization that's him that's who he is I just find the categories strange because they kind of seem they feed into each other very blurry and that it only makes things more confusing than just saying it's all characterization I'm not necessarily going to say this is like fallacious or anything but there is an element of me that kind of wants him to explain why this gentleman he's quoting should really be taken super seriously and why this is the definition that's being used and he's going to explain why he's right yeah I guess so it's just like this is basically to me it's some guy remember the the glass onion one or was it I know brown table did it once but the famous one is this reminds me of Karl Marx he's like why the fuck do you care about what Karl Marx is absolutely a video essay playbook thing of just quote someone quote somebody that's where the bilbo beam partially comes from a lot of other things it's just a thing they have to do it makes you seem more well read or more considered when like I said I feel like he needs to address the fact that these could easily be the same thing and there's nothing stopping them from the same thing and the line between them is incredibly blurry like Fring mentioned but for reference everybody this is cold when filmmakers get stuck with an unlikable character and we are halfway through exactly and also I don't think it was ever established that he was an unlikable character I don't remember him ever being unlikable he has a lot of traits that are like difficult to make someone like them when they when labeling all those traits right like narcissistic or self-centered whatever well weapons manufacturer and stuff like that I think that's what he mentioned as well yeah it's just I guess that's already well that's kind of the built in baggage you're bringing with that is that if you make weapons you're a bad person well even though in the test for the Jericho missiles he shows like a very high degree of charm like charisma and showmanship so like the regular but he's definitely charming as I mentioned the performance from Robert Downey Jr gave him so much likeability it was insane I'm not going to deny the writing of course too absolutely but to imply as was mentioned earlier that Obadiah Stain as a foil is partly like or significantly however he sort of put it I just don't think it has much to do with Obadiah at all and then secondly we come to like Tony with like before the first act even over you know a lot of it is just being a human try to get out of a horrible horrible situation then we kind of on his side and then we start to you know build him back up but when he's when he's home so yeah this not working so far but we'll see we're not doing a good enough job we can do better we're going to do something else like one this relationship is in some ways the inverse of what we see in say Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 intelligence is not a privilege it's a gift and you use it for the good of mankind two characteristically good men of similar some would you say intelligence is a privilege well he wouldn't say it he said it's a gift that you need to use for the good of mankind are you saying that like other things that calling it a privilege is incorrect yeah I don't know I guess in a way it is I don't know it's thinking oh wait he's like mind controlled you know from his tentacles we had to say he was using it for evil I guess you could say that right bad men where one is driven to use a common power for good sorry did we just categorize Tony was just a bad man go back go back yeah I need to hear this again here we have two characteristically bad men where one is driven to use a common power I don't think I agree with that I don't agree Obadiar I'll agree on right once we find out that he's willing to just kill people to make as much money as he can selling to whatever markets for possible Tony the fact that he sees that he himself is blown up by his own missile isn't necessarily the thing that makes him so that he doesn't want to sell them anymore it's the nature of how his missiles are being sold to people he doesn't want them to be sold to yeah because remember this is little known fact is that after that he makes this suit with all of these weapons systems in them and it could fly and go around and blow things up and we were literally watching him on the screen blowing something up as he walks away very cool like so he's still making weapons yeah he's taking more of a fucking interest in exactly where they go and how they're used because it was a big part of what he's been why he was still doing all the things well except just taking it from his dad basically when he passed he wants to protect America basically and the US military and provide weapons for them and so they like the US is protected because he's like that's like a thing yeah and his role and the responsibility he takes in that I don't think any of his before he becomes Iron Man it's meant to be malicious in any kind well the reason this is all funky is because he's trying to create like a mirror with Spider-Man 2 two good men one of them uses their power for evil two bad men one of them uses their power for good it's like no neither of those really works like that's thematically that's really cute but unfortunately it's not accurate well that's one of those square peg round hole because like I said I feel like it's a bit of a gap there with Octavius not even being in control certainly not fully yeah it's a bit it's a bit malformed on both sides as lovely and poetic a thought as it is it is unfortunately not correct I figured he was going to get to an unlikable character like later in the video and he was just using Tony Stark as like a positive example but it's all Tony what the fuck I think it was kind of just that a bit ago but like was there ever a time in the film where we were like that Tony Stark I so fucking lame and annoying not really yeah even if he was a womanizer or a bit selfish or a showboater like narcissistic do you remember his opening scene he's being chill with like the military people right there's soldiers in the Humvee yeah he's super charismatic it just starts with like rock music playing and he's just like oh what's up I think I'm going to be executed soon because nobody's saying anything and then just kind of just loosens up the mood and it's like super charismatic it's like I love that intro to this Tony Stark this video should be about stuff like that that's all the weird I remember even in that scene this was back in the day when heroes would actually like either try or express some sentiment relating to trying to save people it was 2008 is a different time for heroes back then we had them and then on top of that he's going to be going on an arc in the film when you're going into these films you're generally having some expectation of that so even if you look at a character with flaws who still have flaws by the end of the story anyway that you know you know that they're going to be heading in a certain trajectory so it would be very strange if somebody was like wow this guy is just like worthless and then they were stunned by the end of the film like oh my god at first I thought I was going to hate him forever but then it turned out that he's a good guy after all just be a bit weird yeah it feels like a rewrite of what actually happens in the film to fit like a point that wants to be made about characterization about the idea of the filmmaker being stuck with an unlikable character yeah maybe a maybe sort of a 2020 I guess four mindset whenever this movie was a modern mindset that's being applied to maybe how that character would be looked at from 2008 landscape I'm guessing that whatever the book is that he's referencing is probably old would be my guess but again it almost probably fits by the original Iron Man creator right oh no no no I mean the book where the characterization and true character distinctions come from he said it was from like a writing book oh yeah the um I forget I feel like I feel like with a quote like that you'd want to give it a bit of and here's why it's correct and here's why you should take this quote seriously or this quote is a guideline to some idea that I'm going to present to you as being you know a truthful one but um I think he just sort of said the quote and then we went with it now granted the true nature of Sam Raimi's talk about Octavius is substantially more complex than Iron Mongers and a topic I've covered before but this is all complex to the point of it doesn't work as an analogy well that but I was also going to say like he's more complex than Iron Mongers like Iron Mongers like known to be a bit of a laughable villain why we even there's no shock to say a protagonist should surprise us the greater the dichotomy between true character and perceived characterization the more captivating our hero becomes I don't I don't know about that there's something there's something to be said about a character who is just so self assured confident stalwart and secure that they will act very similarly outwards as they are inwards I mean there's a lot of characters who really kind of imbue that and just saying that the difference is what makes them interesting I mean to paint it as like sort of a broad rule I agree that it can be really cool when a character surprises you with the choices that they make absolutely I don't think that it's the kind of general rule that could be applied to all characters that you should be increasing the distance between the way that they present themselves to the world and who they actually are because that that just doesn't encompass the every kind of character that you could write that people would agree are great what about I mean of course I presume this is only being applied to protagonists would be my guess because with villains if you did this this also locks off like a whole bunch of different types of villains that you can have in your story I mean some of the most famous villains are going to be absolutely static they ain't going to surprise you with the decisions they're going to be ruthless like that's you know a big ol but if someone was to say well no it doesn't apply to antagonists I'd be like okay obviously Superman but like someone just mentioned in channel I was like oh yeah cool it's Luffy he's not going to surprise you with a sudden like villainous turn or at least he doesn't in the first season the live action adaptation which is what I've seen part of what's so interesting about him is his unrelenting positivity and support of people he loves like that's pretty cool in terms of like despite all odds he'll always try and remain positive and supportive it's like oh look at that that's nice especially when you're surrounded by more nihilistic characters in other pieces of culture perhaps sometimes he's just surrounded by all the evidence being stacked against him being positive yeah and if someone wanted to say that I find that boring it's like that's fine anyone can find it boring or interesting but to say a character's true character versus characterization being more and more at odds is more and more interesting I'd just be like careful encouraging that shicks you're going to end up with a assassinating character probably and with a lot of characters who don't make sense and I don't even potentially yeah I still don't agree this is what's happened to Tony I don't agree like we're practically saying like that moment where he saved that guy is like is it somehow at odds with how he's characterized no it's not yeah if anything you could make arguments for why him saving that guy just plays into his narcissism and how he wants to be perceived if you want to there's plenty of stories that you know where the hero is going to be doing it just because of their perception I did literally who I was thinking of yes Homelander so I mean even you know Spider-Man to a degree is kind of like that where he goes on his arc oh I mean you mean Billy McGuire Tom Holland oh oh yeah yeah yeah homecoming so there's a lot of uh yeah I don't know I feel like this is really something that deserves a bit more exploration because right now it's more declaration than well we got three minutes left well that's true percentage wise that's a big chunk of video so yeah that's true see the real trouble for the screenwriter doesn't come in crafting this contradiction it comes in maintaining it over the course of multiple films don't push it I'll give you a war you won't believe McKee notably cites Rambo as an example of how a failure to maintain this dichotomy can have a detrimental effect on franchise sequels gonna say up front don't remember much of Rambo so oh first blood's great I remember one in the three pretty well um and then the newest one was funny about Rambo two is the second best one the first blood's the absolute like none of them touch first blood like it actually is the best movie but two is fun although at the same time they all kind of exist in separate universes in some way like they are continuous but you can definitely imagine that never in the history of the Rambo franchise was the next film considered while they were writing the one they were working on I just find it amusing as well to just sort of be like do we have time to bring in Rambo we're kind of funny because I was looking away for like two seconds just looking at something as like all of a sudden I look back to my other screens like why is there Rambo all of a sudden I was talking to an Iron Man what was going on I mean Metal we are doing a first blood forge at some point if you've done things sure in first blood Rambo sequels are action-slot but like the first one I felt like I had actually something to say about PTSD war veterans in first blood Sylvester Stallone's Rambo begins a burned out war veteran traveling on foot in search of peace and solitude but when he's unceremoniously provoked by a local sheriff a ruthless killer is uncaged it's a gripping contradiction but by the time the sequels rolled around it's not a contradiction it's not a contradiction just because if I was happy five minutes ago and then this video makes me sad that's not a contradiction in character Rambo is not only driven by circumstances he's very driven by how he is treated by the people in the town that he ends up in because the thing with contradiction is it kind of bakes in an idea of irreconcilability but like it's not as in like it's there's something that's wrong in a sense there's a clash a dysfunction but I don't know if you would describe it as just well when certain events happen to a character it changes the way that they react to the world and move I don't yeah contradiction just I don't know that's not the right word yeah people behave people are capable of expressing opposite emotions and actions in different contexts you would analyze a character having contradictions by them behaving in wildly different ways and essentially two of the same scenario what to say and what to actually do like you know people saying contrast or dichotomy these feel like better terms than than contradiction but I find Rambo Rambo in particular though is so consistent that during the entire film he's still who he was in Vietnam well it seems like he's almost halfway there it's like that person is being drawn back out of him through circumstances that he's expecting to absolutely not do that like committing to action X and then experiencing something heavy and then doing action Y that's seen as contradictory in the most like bland and mundane and clinical sense in terms of at X and Y are different it's like yeah but we have cause and effect for it so I'm not sure why you're calling it a contradiction and I just you know in reference to Iron Man as well it's still like hard to follow what exactly he thinks he's saying with this so he's saying that in the future films they're not as effective because there's no revelation that there is that man that lives underneath the one that we saw at the beginning of Rambo you know cause that reveal happens in the first one and so the rest of the films are just that character that we saw revealed in Rambo so much for slow reveals of how characters change over time or how they have some character flaw that that bubbles to the surface as the context changes in their life the circumstances in Rambo 2 and 3 and the rest of them I forget how many there are now he's 5 in fucking warfare essentially like the idea that we'll never see that man again back from war and just wants to settle down and so we don't see that contradiction it's like well those are different stories they could have told those maybe they would have been better maybe worse it's like you can take it's weird because this mindset leads you to a point of thinking that there's only one place you're supposed to take a character or supposed to do with a character if they are a particular way it's like how many different directions think for example if someone said Luke Skywalker's got to make the new Jedi Order and refuse to help the Republic in their war he sees it as a contradiction of power or something give that to 70,000 directors and you'll get 70,000 different stories they're not going to be the same just because they've got like a base even if you know because I said that but compare it to like no guideline the implication here is that Rambo 1 has a format that the rest of them failed to do but the thing is like Rambo has every right to go any direction it wants he's a human being you can direct him in many different ways feels weird to say like that's a failure on Rambo's part as a franchise I guess the term true characters feel so static like you can apply it to certain characters I think like Captain America for instance where it's just like you kind of want him to just be same old cap all the time but could you say Walter White is a what's Walter White's true character you know what I mean yeah some people change far more than others I mean we all change all of us we're not the same person we were 10, 15, 20 years ago if someone especially a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're all pretty young and when we first meet how old are you? 40 I just turned 40 last week that's not old but when we first meet Tony for instance he's already like well into his adulthood and most of his experiences are behind him in that sense so it it just seems different to me I don't know if people change Cap has a very very firm and foundational sort of underlying principle that would take a a lot of work to change to where it might not even be possible so he wouldn't expect him to change I could see this video being like Cap is in favor of helping people and yet in civil war he's punching Iron Man contradiction like and you know that shows us true characters like what are you talking about? all these things happen for very specific reasons that relate to fundamental principles why are we pretending otherwise? true character is characterization still annoying to hear but hey we're coming back to Iron Man so let's see what we got all right oh well producer Kevin Fleike managed to avoid this trap by not resolving the discrepancy between Iron Man's character and characterization too early in the final scene of the first Iron Man now he's calling, he's not even calling true character character and characterization character and characterization that shit's confusing yeah it gets you lost again video essayist used to do because this one is eight minutes so so short but they used to do the thing of like how he is like how he is seen by the people in the world versus who he is but even then that wouldn't because it's about this video is about how we see him are they like is he trying to separate into like ego super ego stuff? like this is how he acts but these are the things he values um if he wanted to do ego, super ego and edge then he should have said those things like instead of character versus true character I don't even know what his thesis is is he seems to be unlikable? my guess here especially with the title is that when you have a character that is definitively like unlikable at the baseline being traits that are bad let's say cowardice let's say self-centeredness selfishness furious just nice things happening he's just a big old goblin what you need to do is have those things presented and then show a truly good man in the times that matter and continue that formula throughout the films where you show him to be like a mild managed chill veteran who then is really angry and then in the future films show him being angry still like you know what I mean this feels very borked at the point of view the movie Tony Stark is instructed by agent Coulson to share with the press a story that would effectively cover up his involvement in the events of the film and maintain his secret identity after all that's why superheroes wear the mask but for Stark to do that would be to resolve his hubris to undermine his need to control the narrative and to align the true character partially unveiled to us in this film with the conventional characterization of a superhero which is why in a twist ending and a famously improvised line by Robert Downey Jr. Stark openly admits to the world I am Iron Man in one line were reminded that this character is still interesting in one line still interesting if he chose to remain well it's weird to be like oh if he chose to remain hidden he wouldn't be interesting yeah that's just obviously not true I almost want to play that section again because I I'm really not following what he's trying to say yeah I was about to say the same thing I'm just a little lost here at what point is Tony not an interesting character during the first Iron Man film because that scene happens at the end of the first film like right at the end of the movie it's like oh you know what this character is actually interesting were you not compelled for the other two hours I'm gonna give it another go see if I can follow this time in the first Iron Man movie Tony Stark is instructed by agent Coulson to share with the press a story that would effectively cover up his involvement in the events of the film and maintain his secret identity all that's why superheroes wear the mask but for Stark to do that would be to resolve his hubris to undermine his need to control the narrative it would resolve his hubris and undermine his need to control the narrative I think those two things are potentially completely different I'm not even sure if I agree with either about him as a character under mind controlling the narrative it's not the right yeah also hubris and pride are not interchangeable a lot of people act as if they are and they're not he wants the spotlight he wants people to know the Iron Man he wants the celebration of him pride is how you feel you are hubris is what you think you can do hubris is it's typically in stories if someone has hubris it's specifically the pride at least to their downfall it was his hubris that killed him because a lot of people have pride but hubris is that taken to a degree that it becomes self-destruct to the point that your pride leads you to take an action which becomes your undo right okay well Iron Man 2 would give us near the beginning that he's happy to announce himself as Iron Man because he wants to be the face of the sense that don't fuck with us and I will also be the person to stop just me I have the power I am Iron Man to go immediately negative with that and be like it's a narcissism thing there's certainly elements that work with it but simultaneously it's an interest in trying to be like why hide it instead of actually have a show of strength and be like yeah the whole point of me engaging in this is to try and prevent bad things from happening so I'll be here I'll be back is trying to develop shit and he's like laughing at the fact that they can't catch up to him but he owns the market on this kind of power which you know the desire for control but it's not what did he say? Dictators desire for control that was earlier yeah which I assume is still relevant he's also dying of blood poisoning at the start of the second one right so that's like I imagine that's influencing his decision making quite a bit from there he's like way more reckless yeah I think that's already happening when we start the film up yeah and to align the true character partially unveiled to us in this film with the conventional characterization of a superhero which is why in a twist ending and a famously improvised line by Robert Downey Jr Stark openly admits to the world I am Iron Man okay so he so with that party was saying that it's created the contrast again because typically superheroes don't do this is I guess I just feel like this is like are we going with comparing him to maybe like one or two there's like a thousand different types of superhero I guess he'd probably be appealing to the sort of the general idea that a lot of superheroes have a secret identity yeah we can say most it just doesn't matter though compared to there's so many that don't yeah no I I'm just saying I think that's his observation I just don't I don't see what that assists well it plays into the idea of if you know contrasting him with I guess what the expected norm is might be sort of parallel to him saying that the only thing that we need Obadiah staying to contrast with Tony to make him like a ball maybe it's sort of a similar kind of line of reasoning I mean I think a lot of it comes across like an interestingly different thing but like at the same time is why would this be the only interesting outcome or the one that makes him interesting yeah what if the film decided at the end that maybe he's learned to be a bit more humble and secretive and something like that at the end he decided to become a dictator and just said yeah I am Iron Man and now you all bow to me and then just he said I must control the narrative dictator man because I think that he's arguing like this is a promise of that that lineup of the narcissism and all those flaws and stuff is still present despite the heroic acts we've seen him do which like I said I feel like that's being treated weirdly as a contradiction as opposed to that is the character in one line we're reminded that this character is still interesting in one line seeds your conflict are planted for a decade of films to follow I really feel like I am Iron Man stuff like this is all to do with his parents there's a whole different dimension to his character if he was very humble I think that this fight would still yeah there's no anyone could end up where he is here as a result of seeing that video that's not to do with being a narcissist or wanting control necessarily or like announcing I am Iron Man like not caring about a secret identity a friendly scene that fight again recently it's just so good really good your struggle to reconcile who he is when was the last fight in the MCU that you thought was really good I don't want to think about it Echo and Daredevil oh yeah it's a classic it's really really good does that include fighting CGI monsters yeah it's just a fight just an MCU fight that you thought was actually like good I didn't mind I suppose I didn't mind the fight with Chiwetel, Edge of Four and Doctor Strange and Multiverse of Madness it was shot kind of nice but I didn't care about the fight no I didn't like that one there was Shang Chi maybe on the bus there was some stuff yeah yeah oh wait everyone's jumping out of their seat Spider-Man and Goblin yeah I love the fucking vicious fight on that that was cool that's true yeah that might be the one actually I like the winter soldier fight on the highway I thought that was cool with Cap and Winter Soldier Cap and Winter Soldier this character's struggle to reconcile who he is with what he is that is after all the question that drives the whole thing who he is with what he is I'm so lost again I feel like we shouldn't be introducing that this late yeah that's weird and also I just I feel like who he is and things and what he is is like a male homo sapien Slash and Bone yeah like I said too late to introduce that because now I'm wondering if the whole thing was supposed to be about that the reason we as an audience have even been able to trace Iron Man's arc through the MCU is because the conflicts in each film were built up and up from the incongruity between Tony Stark's true character as a superhero and his characterization as an abundantly flawed protagonist those aren't contradictions abundantly flawed those are both the same person I'm sorry the delivery of that sentence just makes me angry it took him so long to say he's a flawed person and a superhero contradiction like no I wanted to yell so badly just now wait till he learns about a lot of famous people in history and you learn about oh yeah maybe people are complicated especially when you go back in history it's just a different world in terms of you know morality and expectations and attitudes about things like boy this will blow your mind people can be very complicated thank you all the heroes we're very familiar with with maybe some exceptions have like significant flaws in their personality usually helps drive storylines I don't know why we're pretending you might even consider their strength to also be like a flaw that's how traits often work is that they have like a trait that you have can be it could also be you know a negative someone's greatest strength can be their greatest weakness especially if it's something along the lines of like being trusting or seeing the good in people things of that nature here it's a character in a show who when he's walking past a homeless man who says if you got any change he says get a job you lazy piece of shit or something like that who then, seven episodes later dies to save everybody if someone was to say that's a contradiction because he clearly shows care enough to sacrifice his life but he doesn't care enough to I don't know give a coin to a homeless person you should be like you're a very strange person like in terms of how you analyze media just saying protagonist as long as Stark had flaws as long as he had ego and arrogance and hubris he had conflict conflict for his true nature and for the franchise he keeps repeating it over and over again he's got an ego but he'll also give his life to save people curious this video should have been it should have been there should be more in it because for 8 minutes we can't be repeating ourselves this much but also maybe this needs to be an exploration as to how characters can have a multitude of traits and yet maybe how a character might seem complicated something like that an exploration into why people are the way they are they don't care about something else but it just seems like a misplaced sort of topic quite poetically Iron Man self perpetuated his own arc gradually working through that laundry list of defects along the way until finally his characterization and true character well why why? in Iron Man he did this in Avengers he did this this is not a revelation he's done this before this is Tony being consistent you showed the scene where he flies the rocket into space you dumbass exactly you showed the thing where he was like the thing is one might argue there's a line in Avengers where he says save the rest for the trip back Jay like as in fuel and stuff so he knew he would survive he almost fucking died absolutely he knew there was a good chance he'd die he was the one he believed he was gonna die when they activate the arc she literally says but you'll die and he says push it so this is bullshit this has already happened and I'm at one I think what I found weird was well in the observation he was saying the contradiction means that they can self perpetuate the arc throughout the whole series when I'd say it's pretty apparent that he's going on different arcs like the story lines he's going through a white civil war through after Avengers that they really fumbled for a while of him dealing with them sort of fumbling with the PTSD until they actually decided to try and work with the trauma that he had and then leading up to the relationship that he started to build with Peter as well these are different arcs they're not arcs they're downstream from the arcs that happened earlier in his story but it's not like they are the product of it would be weird to say that they were the strict product of this contradiction between his true character and characterization it's more so that different things happened that made him go on a different journey genuinely speaking if we did a breakdown of his arc specifically we would be going over very specific lines and choices of action and how they almost bungled it several times in different ways but that recontextualized certain things to fix it back up all the work that's done by Iron Man is not look he said I am Iron Man what a narcissist and then he did the snap and killed himself to save people I guess he's not a narcissist that's an incredible character it's like no no it's done in all the tiny scenes between everything connecting you all up making you like him all the relationships he develops and the several arcs has been pointing out that he's not just this one about whether or not he's selfish like it is there's so much more to him and I just feel like this video has not helped explain it at all because at this point you'd be like so I've got to characterize them as X but when it comes down to it they do Y okay and then you know if they misunderstand this video enough you end up with a Palpatine who fucking saves people randomly but he could not save himself no he could not well I guess he did right because he was on X to call oh yeah that's right he's right resurrection is my true character yes I feel like this doesn't capture almost anything to do with why Tony Stark works yeah this is a story could end yeah that was pretty bad what even was that video it's so short too he mostly repeated himself it was like a it was like a minute and then the same minute the same minute the same minute yeah this was it was a lot of repetition it was short it wasn't a proper exploration of the topic as it presented itself it breached into things that didn't make sense it made incorrect statements it arguably was all based off of a appealing to an authority that I didn't necessarily that I just I don't think I do agree with no attempt was made to make that I guess the thesis quotations like convince us that those are correct correct yeah I really don't think it had I mean and of course we had you know like golden rule of EFAP we had our visuals that contradicted the statements being made yeah I'd love to know how he contextualizes all the other times that Tony did what he did in endgame and how they don't play into this I have no idea because he said like once he'd done the one in endgame his story could end it was like could it not end at the end of the endges could it not end at the end of im1 how does your system work because the thing is like I assume we all agree if Iron Man had survived the snap there's more stories to tell with him yeah oh yeah 100% easily I mean you couldn't speculate on right it's like it would have killed anyone else but that the Iron Man suit protected him enough and it's now like through the snap it's gone into his bloodstream and his flash to the point when he's like serious surgery and that he's like all of the like half of him is machine now not to fucking vader him but you know what I mean like there's plenty we can do in terms of repercussions but simultaneously moving him on if you really want to he's more iron now than man he's more iron now than man noise well bad video better like next time I think it's just too much of a short man okay short man bad it is too short yeah I mean it needs to be longer and better funny thing is yeah it's like for eight minutes you could have done way better so I don't know you can pack a lot of info into eight minutes you really can he said a little something there about like true character and characterization being one in the same but he framed it in such a way that if it's ever out of alignment then like the story is not being well told or something that was the impression I got but like I think in the ideal screenwriting situation you want to like in the characterization you want to contradict I'm not saying this applies in every case but you want to contradict the true character in the beginning and like the arc maybe is the character becomes less selfish over time due to certain plot things and then around like the end of act two or the third act fight then it's like oh that's his true character I get it this is the character we all know and love like I kind of get that but I'm not sure that was his point you also mentioned at one point that the more they contradict the characterization true character the more interesting which is just strange this feels like getting tangled up in these weird writing concepts that just kind of distract from more fundamental universally applicable principles that you can apply to storytelling this whole getting tangled up in what is characterization versus true character just seems counterproductive rather than it's all characterization just think about who your characters are in ways that you can challenge them and test them or change them instead of well make sure that the contradiction between true character and characterization is sufficiently large that they're interesting weird it's a weird definition but true character is simply character when things are high pressure yeah we gotta explore when you say stuff like that there's gotta be that voice in your head that says like man you need to like explore that that's a bold thing to say sounds like a thing that we could have a very long debate and discussion over that you just sort of say casually and then carry on with I'm surprised too if he's if he's mostly trying to highlight a difference between Tony Stark's personality and what his true character is it seems like Iron Man 2 was sort of when he was at his lowest point right like where they sort of the demon in the bottle story um yeah because he thought he was going to die and that he didn't know what his legacy would be at that point and what to do with his weaponry and stuff low point it's a little bit complicated you could argue his low point would be the beginning of endgame oh really when Thanos has snapped the whole world they can't stop you know that's probably a low point that's pretty low yeah well I don't know but I'm sure he probably felt pretty good about everything he'd done up to that point because it seemed like Iron Man 2 I mean character wise he was in a pretty dark place there and I don't think he'd ever gotten that dark after that I mean thinking like I'm in a desperate situation I'm going to die is like let's face it something that happens quite a lot I would say that he definitely was at his lowest point in endgame of having lost and presumably going to starve to death on the stretch in the middle of space like there's no way a character like him wouldn't have thought man if only I had done that move or this move to Thanos you know yeah that's true I get why you would point it out though it's definitely a low point next up we're moving to the realm of video games I like those I'm not as controversial as the lady says but I'm a big fan of video games I sure do like them this is something that a couple of people have suggested to cover and by God from the title alone I was like yes this sounds like it's called how God of War ruined resident evil village hang on say that again how God of War ruined resident evil village well I seem to recall I'm already lost episode on resident evil village God of War never came up in our discussion on why that came sucked balls one vice versa right do we have a reference village in our God of War I don't think so but anyway have a little look see who knows what we're in for like the two games had a fight one day it's like what I'm sure it'll make sense oh it's so weird it's no I just I saw that I saw that footage of Ethan Winters in the castle on the balcony I was like man all that makes me think of is how stupid the gameplay elements of that are like oh I'm a bad guy I gotta kill you I gotta get you oh you went downstairs well I couldn't I couldn't possibly go down there to get you I'll go to the bottom of the stairs but I won't actually go into that room to get you I'm just gonna go back up here so if you need me I'll be back up here the invisible line I just remember a metal breaking Demetresk's AI and slapping her ass that was nice that was really funny misogyny of course of course but really good stuff it's it's kind of interesting because I think I played through the through that game like four times and I barely remember anything about it I did one full play through and then I started a second where I just specifically tried to fuck around and see how easy it broke and I was shocked at how much the game needed you to stay on those yeah on that very narrow roller yeah I think it was bizarre I think I didn't want to go back to later I played it once and just found it oddly railroaded like absolutely lackless open because they're saying hey you've got all these four people to go fight go off and find them and oh but you have to find them in this specific order yeah I was like why did they do that I was like he could have made that a go in any order kind of deal and I think it would have made the game feel a lot more flexible and interesting it's a game with very obvious very clear examples of very very bad video game design think of this like one of those special weapons unlock I think I did a full play for a while we're doing the e-fap on that I think one of the points I made could just lead run for the game pretty easily I never played village but I did play seven and I just found the main character really insufferable and idiotic he doesn't get better yet because he is he gets anything he gets worse it's dark well they at least in village they do make an effort to try to explain how the hell you survives half the stuff he did in seven whatever it was no but that doesn't work because the explanation they give means he couldn't have ever died who cares no one likes Ethan Winters it's like oh thank goodness he explained why he's still alive also true he's just one of those moron idiot loser nerds it's Ethan Winters in seven too right yes it's the same in both yeah and the BLC of village is third person and you play as Ethan's daughter and it's probably the worst thing I've played in the entire resident evil series I don't think I've ever played I think he tried it I wasn't compelled at all I think James explained to me what happens in that I forgot what it had something to do with he's mold now or something I don't know well yeah he's mold because it doesn't even crumble apart at the end of the game sure yeah it turns out he was mold all along and he can only die from some special bullshit which makes you wonder how was there ever a game over in seven and eight up to this point I don't know how about we don't think they're gonna do because they show him enough okay I would say though we can if you if CJ if you haven't played the resident evil for remake I would highly suggest it yeah not the remake you have you played the death I have I have yes I did like it I did like it yeah I think the death remake is the better remake what we loved it it is I did really like it I love them both but yeah I was skeptical about them having his character actually speak as opposed to just being a silent protagonist the whole way but I think it worked yeah no I don't think it like ruined anything they also fixed that fucking stupid turret section true there's certainly games where it's better that they don't talk but that was an example where I think it actually works better the other way kind of rights performance was really good too that helps yeah yeah Tonya Clark everyone else yeah all right come over that we got to talk about how God of War root in evil village let's do it one of the points I made in my resident evil village video was that it reminded me a lot of God of War 2018 originally I planned to expand on that more that's a good idea because I'm already confused look I haven't played God of War but I have played resident evil village and boy village has some of the most mediocre dull bare bones combat I've seen in a video game it is so is such a boring slog of a game to play the enemies don't react to shots the way they do and even the original resident evil four who was yeah it's just like we spent so long this game is with the yeah this game is put the reticle on the enemy's head and click eight times now do that for the whole fucking game it is so boring so dull just the bare necessity of what you need in combat it's awful I hate it there's there's virtually no interactivity with enemies awful expand on that more and there was a large section I eventually decided to cut because it felt weird to just go off on a tangent about God of War 30 minutes into my village video but I definitely wanted to address that point basically what do I mean when I say village reminds me of God of War 2018 the aesthetic comparison isn't that important though I would say it's insignificant both games have they both have snow they're so well come on you didn't even let him complete the point before disagreeing you gotta let him say what he said he means I would say I does God of War only do 30 FPS um no no no on our base ps4 yes on even a ps4 pro though you could unlock the frame rate and it usually kicked around 40 to 52 never really hit a queen 60 though okay because because the footage on the right looks like his own capture because it looks good and it's running at least 60 and the one on the left is is from gamers little playground yeah it's clearly not the best version of the game it's obviously running at least half the frame rate and you can see yeah well that could be pulled off youtube or whatever and encoded in in such a way I want to you would just be 60 FPS footage off youtube right I want to know if it's snow if it's because they're in snow let us find out important though I wouldn't say it's insignificant both games have you spending lots of time in environments that look and feel the same but it's not really the main issue the okay man that was bad I think it's safe to say that I think it's safe to say that it's because there's snow I don't even know you don't want to make a point like that so quickly and show that as your evidence that's bad well yeah I wouldn't say it's about time like I don't even know what to begin into think about all of the places that you go to that don't have snow I don't know man, yeah I want to stop the opposite of snow I'm struggling I'm struggling to find something that links them because I'm inclined to say they're actually quite polar opposite I certainly would like the polar opposite I mean look alright it's got to be snow because the architecture and the environments aren't even the same one of them is set like Norway and with all of this like Norse architecture and old buildings and the other one is set in a village in like not Transylvania yeah and I don't even think as for as shitty of a video game as village is like there's decent variety in the places that you go yeah I'd say well yeah I mean you aren't exploring any like opulent sort of mansions in God of War you're not going through any of these crazy interiors of like the level design is reflecting the gameplay of both games though as was mentioned earlier like Resident Evil Village you can take full advantage of the enemy I a lot of the time well God of War good luck most of the time because you know pick the difficulty you can fucking beat them at well typically it's set up and it's the arena that it puts you in doesn't really give a huge amount of room for you to be able to exploit that you know the right I have the enemies so yeah it's like you're not going to be able to walk out of it then you exactly yeah you make the play area such that you can't do that sort of thing yeah he's going to go he's saying it's beyond the aesthetic so we'll feel the same but it's not really the main issue the issue is one of design philosophy and the kind of game they want to create for people if you've seen my video on why God of War with ruined not a fan of God of War the new one I guess was ruined you'll be familiar with these points and I'll be repeating them here only this time showing the same trends let's take a look at the old God of War games and the old Resident Evil games as well as newer titles now this is perfect because not only a mean metal I want to say Mark and John maybe but we're experts in all God of War games and Fringy recently was playing God of War 3 yeah yeah we're ready yeah I saw Mahler play God of War Ragnarok loser it's also a great game it's controversial apparently I beat one to three but I haven't played the new ones or no I played the new ones but I are not Ragnarok I haven't beat either of them you'd like Ragnarok you're almost done the new first God of War almost play Valhalla after Ragnarok as well the DLC is very much work on you I heard it's dope yeah the old Resident Evil games as well as newer titles like RE7 and RE2 remake that try to remain faithful to the classics and we're going to look at how these games are designed in terms of their systems and player accountability old God of War games had three starting difficulties and an unlockable extreme difficulty you could go for easy and just mash your way through or you could go for hard and actually have to fight smart and learn to defend and work to get enough XP for upgrades you absolutely have to do that just like the new games well hey he hasn't said that's not the case yet but that is absolutely the case in the new games too higher difficulties didn't mean you just died easier they also meant you got less resources back from health and magic stations so you're making smarter decisions about when to use I mean one could argue that that is you know like those are all like meters you can move up and down right make the enemy have more health make you have less damage make yeah it's not clever no it's not it doesn't make the game more difficult but it's it's not very clever I mean both very fun both in 2018 have like the give me god of war difficulty adds mechanics to the combat it is not just sliders it is also I want to say in an attack of the design in 2018 in Ragnarok that difficulty is they warn you before going in it's insane like you'll get killed in two hits when you start sort of thing but at the same time those who are very good at the game getting hit twice by the enemies is rare you know what I mean like you're like that's how good you would be at that point so it's like a it's a 50-50 thing in terms of I wouldn't look to god of war both old and new as a great example of how to crank difficulty I see them as normal you know I think my only major complaint between like the thing I do think that the original god of war series does better than the new ones is one very simple thing I think the camera perspective works better and I think that God of War Ragnarok in 2018 gameplay would work with that camera and you would have less issues with enemy awareness that's the most common discussion that's had with the new format for the fighting god of war I think it's worse but I think it works like I think people over exaggerate like crazy how much is a broken system I never would have called it broken I still got through it on both of them on the hardest difficulty so I mean there's like a 0.5% chance of all times I take damage where I'll go I feel like I couldn't do anything about that like the something hits me from behind with a really shit warning that doesn't make sense from my head at the time whoever it may be I think a lot of problems would be solved if you just were able to move the camera back just a tad just a little bit that would help a lot I am inclined to agree even just dark souls angle I think would work a lot better than the last of us or I mean hey Resident Evil 4 camera that you could argue that that's kind of the game that started the behind over the shoulder slash mid back close up yeah I think it's uh I think was a good move and um someone says uh someone in chat said rags thinking he knows about Resident Evil is funny considering he hasn't played half of the entire series no one has there's a shitload of Resident Evil just just just for instance this is kind of funny Fringy would you consider yourself a Simpsons expert yeah you haven't seen probably half of it at this point yeah that might that might be I might not have seen a third of it yes at this point it's probable I was going to concede that's probably true I don't really care though it's not what rags will be referencing is what he can reference you know I mean he's not going to be like I'm going to reference this game I've never played for why this this that you know yeah I'll only reference the things I have knowledge on for instance I've only played one Metal Gear solid game and that was uh five so I could speak to that but I couldn't tell you couldn't tell you anything about one, two, three or fours or the the whether a PSP one would you say hold as a person who loves the Metal Gear solid games I think they are far too anime for rags to enjoy I you all hate them listen I've seen people talk in gameplay and stuff and I'm glad that people really like it but I just don't think it would be my thing and that's all I think I can agree I'm not a fan of the the Resident Evil you know the originals it's just not my thing I don't like them I know a lot about Resident Evil but I simultaneously know very little about Resident Evil it depends on what we're talking about right I think there's something as well you need to keep in mind and that's that I've been playing video games for 30 years damn nice what's interesting is I can't yet claim that about God of War I need another what 10 years or so someone like that so it'll 12 maybe but yeah as soon as we get that I will be claiming it because thanks to a visit from Metal as well I have played all of the God of Wars everywhere even the handheld ones we streamed them there is one that probably none of us have played and it was a javascript game that was only on some Sony phones it has a unique story too it takes place between God of War 1 and 2 you are not a true God of War fan until you press circle to abandon daughter that's when you are thematically though it's as difficult for him to abandon his daughter as it is to rip the head off of God though his daughter to save her soul from utter destruction it makes sense and even I know that the thing that really ruined that for me when I played it through with Metal was the achievement unlocked deadbeat dad I seriously think that trophy is the reason people read that scene incorrectly what do you mean what will be the correct read well that he's doing it to save her soul in all of existence I feel like everyone knows that I'd be dad by letting her go the trophy names are a bit tongue in cheek deliberately right it could just be a funny meme it's a great time event to abandon it that's funny in and of itself listen press circle to abandon your daughter crawled so that press have to pay your respects I was about to say I've 100% been on a podcast where someone was bringing up that scene as a reason why Kratos was never a good dad before and I lost my shit on the guy I would bring it up as the writer's not taking it as seriously the fact that they would put that achievement on there and the fact that they would make it a quick time event they fucked up but it's so funny I don't know why they wouldn't have thought that would be funny the fact that they mention that in new games as well and make it meaningful it's just insane I kind of wonder if they're in a good way what's the connection though between the people who write the names of the trophies and the people who write the game do you think they all have any say really my impression was that it was just a different team that thinks up cool names for the trophies whether the trophy was written by Santa Monica well I think it was ready at dawn actually but whether it was them or someone else it doesn't change the fact that a quick time event to abandon your daughter is really combined with the trophy sound a deadbeat dad on the screen like what that's funny how much gamer score do I get for abandoning my daughter so you're making a bronze trophy I believe that one is a bronze if you told me it was a silver I wouldn't be surprised that's the platinum trophy that's the one that just gives you all the rest of them yeah so you're making smarter decisions about when to use magic and you're taking extra care of your health bar if you played I want to plant the seed that all of what he said is applicable to 2018 and Ragnarok yeah on easy or even normal you didn't have to worry about that stuff but there were still things in the game when you just killed a civilian yeah classic listen guys the first three go to war games they were really funny they were funny they were much edgier game that asked you to use your head and demanded coordination that's where we get into puzzle solving and most importantly platforming if you can't time your jumps to make it across a hazard area it doesn't matter if you're on easy or hard this section with the archers shooting arrows while you're this actually you do your thing well this is kind of fun because this was something I talked about in the Crash Bandicoot video an interesting thought about the nature of difficulty in video games the idea I think it was spurred in that by the conversation relating to the idea that games should have difficulty settings that that's something that they should do that there's something wrong with the game when it chooses there's only one level of difficulty sorry but I mean in a certain sense it could be said that like all platform like a platform or as a game at the end of the day you got to be able to make the jump and there's not really anything the game can do to help you with that you even see it in Mario where they started adding the um invincibility Tanuki suit it doesn't matter if you're invincible if you can't make the jump you just need to have sufficient dexterity to make the jump they can't fix that for you that's not like a bridge that is like the baseline level of difficulty in a platformer is can you make the jump it's kind of weird as well in God of War specifically because if you fail enough times the game is like do you want to switch to easy mode it's like that doesn't help me yeah which is kind of why it's interesting to bring it up here because this is a game that has difficulty because it makes sense to implement that as a feature because of the well or rather it's something you can actually do in a game like this because you know you've got health and the enemies have health so you can buff the player's health or increase the amount of damage dealt but I mean yeah platforming sections in a game like this I mean yeah I guess it is just a matter of if you can't make the jumps too bad well where he's going with it platforming is an interesting sort of phenomenon in a set of mechanics and video games when it relates to difficulty sliders because you have to make sure when you're developing a game and you have platforming sections that you don't accidentally softlock players from being able to complete that section if you take Guild Wars 2 as an example is an MMO with a lot of platforming in it a lot of jumping puzzles and things of that nature however Guild Wars 2 is also being an RPG in MMO is again where you can give yourself a lot of buffs and boons like swiftness and super speed to make your character move faster however if you don't have access to those boons which you might not depending on your class and the weapons that you have at the moment you have to make these jumping puzzles so that even a player who doesn't have those upgrades can still complete the puzzle so in games where you get to a section where you can't get back you can't make puzzles that rely on the player making upgrades if it has to relate to like double jumping or jump distance or their speed because you'll lock the player out of progress so you have to find different ways of making different jumping puzzles more difficult so in Guild Wars 2 it might be that the distances are longer so you have to be better timed there might be traps and hazards and you might be on a time limit things of that nature even though the actual individual jumps aren't changed that's a pretty cool way to do it adding because for example this box puzzle you can just make it stronger on higher lower difficulties right there's ways you can give people less options I suppose what's interesting in this is the question of because he's made it as an observation which is true that in platforming there's only so much that you can do but you can do a lot well like this timing the jumps thing it's like lower difficulty make the platforms bigger make the soul blades lower and disappear sorry I mean that's uh yeah I mean I guess you could do that well this is every Mario game yeah with the secret blocks the switches yeah even in Mario wonder I was just thinking about the progression of the game starting the first level is really easy and the last level what I meant is that there's only so much that you can do before there is no platforming anymore there's only so much that you can do before it ceases to be like a video game where like you can't get rid of the actual jumps there's gotta be jumps and you gotta be able to make the jumps that's like the the floor on the difficulty in a platformer because if you when failing the jump it just pushes you back out back to where your platform you know like you go whoa and jump back out of the hole back to where you were with no penalty yeah no no no sure but the idea would be that there's a possibility saying it's soft lock doesn't even sound right because it's just like well you can't beat it sorry but that like um if they if you failed and it said that's okay buddy and it just teleported you to the other side it's like oh so well yeah sure that applies to all that applies to combat as well right like if you're hitting p if someone goes I just oh yeah if you're missing them you know but uh do you remember how Cuphead gated its difficulty level uh getting past the tutorial if you can get past the yeah so Cuphead did something he pissed off a lot of game journalists too so half of the back few missions of Cuphead are totally locked on easy mode so you can't definitely play right so the only way that you can see the end of the game is if you use easy mode to practice get a sense of the mechanics and then try it on the standard difficulty I'm cool with that I mean even the game even well Mahler you'll be actually a lot of us will be Helldivers too actually does this to a degree where super samples are only available at difficulty 7, 8 and 9 so there are literally going to be shit module upgrades that are locked behind fucking get good you gotta get good enough to play at least level 7 or you can have your friends carry you through missions true um so wow that kind of that helps justify the existence of the Helldivers cash store a bit too especially considering that you can earn everything on its own the idea that it's like well if you don't want to get good I guess you could buy the stuff but also you can't buy that don't you get different things on every isn't it like every 18 hours or something just to be clear super credits and super samples are different yeah super samples are the pink samples you need to unlock some of the ship modules and you can only get those at level 7, 8, 9 they don't spawn at 6 and below you you don't get ship levels in the cash store ever because you get almost everything no you use no you get you you when you extract with samples you use the samples to upgrade your ship modules requisition points are used to unlock stratagems and super credits are used to purchase cosmetics all of which unlock war bonds can be found well which can be earned in game yeah yes everything ever seems good everybody so what's crazy is how much conversations are spawned because the first thing I wanted to say is I haven't said yet and I'm going to go ahead and say it now I want to know from Metal and everyone else who's played these games preferably more than once because that's kind of the way that I'm contextualizing this but when in God of War 1, 2 and 3 or any of the ones of the older format I walk into an arena and it spawns like 10 dudes and one ogre I'm like okie dokie so I already know I can deal with this and with my magics full I'm like yeah let's go baby however when I come across a moment like he's presented on screen I go and it's like why and it's like because these sections suck yeah the bad doesn't even the worst one we obviously why do they suck and I'd say it's like playing guitar hero songs where playing one of your favorite songs ever and you just gotta hit 80% of the notes and you'll make it through versus playing old mcdonald had a farm and it's only one note and if you miss any single note you die ok I like that a lot actually and if someone's like yeah but it's a good challenge and it's like I guess I mean yeah what constitutes a good challenge and not as always you know subject of a great deal of discussion sure many things are technically difficult but there's a difference between having things be difficult in a good way and difficult in a very annoying frustrating mind-numbing kind of way yeah I mean you gotta be careful when you demand perfection from players that's a very that is a legitimate very high bar I mean these jumping sections I mean we have the famous one in god of war one is it right the whole fleshy rotating bit underworld the underworld which is like Jesus Christ well if that gets brought up we will talk about that too I just like old Macdald had a duck wait no one is no joke my least favorite part of the entire series it's I think possibly everyone's is definitely one of the lowest rate it's like famous for being horrible and it always was like even when god of war 2 was coming out people would be like fuck stupid fucking level with the stew is like yeah yeah and then they send you Hades at the end of the intro mission of two yeah but it's not a cringe yeah most important isn't it also the case in these old god of war games like whenever you're walking on these narrow beams it does almost like a Tony hawks proskater thing where you're on like a limb and you're maintaining balance left to right yeah it's not like Dark Souls where you can just like run across you know if you're precise enough without worry you know yeah you can fuck up super easily and then you just have to do it over and over again it's just so annoying I hate it so much yeah if you can't time your jumps to make it across a hazard area it doesn't matter if you're on easy or hard this section with the archers shooting arrows while you're trying to move a box forward that box is gonna break on easy or hard if you can't watch that's not necessarily a good thing interesting part of the conversation is you know these are observations but is it good or bad when the difficulty is that way yeah he's got it in here this is the fucking nightmare realm that no one likes playing oh yeah there it is do you know what's really bad at it is the checkpoints can like be triggered when you shouldn't hurt so I'll do that my best to explain this but let's say you need to go to A then B then C let's say A is a button B is a button C is the door so you head to C and you do it first because you don't know the map yet so you go to C go past all the goober nonsense and you trigger a checkpoint and then you go oh I need I need to press the buttons okay I'll go back so you go back then you go to A and then you press the button then you die and you're like right my checkpoint is at A good and then you go to B press the button and you're like cool my checkpoints at B and then you go to C and you're getting through that horrible pathway again maybe get to the end die then your checkpoints triggered back at B instead of giving you that checkpoint at C because you triggered it earlier when you were just looking around and so you're like so I if you do it wrong which you wouldn't know you're doing it wrong you can fuck yourself over completely with having to do way more than you needed to do and it's just painful it's just a series of these little these bar while the blades are spinning at you lowering it to easy isn't going to help you out if you can't time and space your jumps you're not going to make it across this section the easy difficulty was just there to help you survive the combat there were still other at show that example earlier did he do that one twice I think so I think he's just saying I don't know yet fundamentally you're not going to make it across this section I don't I don't agree with this saying easy moans only there to help you with a combat I think that the issue here is that the whole game is about the combat and not enough either attention effort or they weren't capable or how much platforming is there in like God of War one quite a bit it's a bit it's almost not 50 50 it's like 70 30 70 30 I'd say puzzles and platforming versus combat the thing is if you knock out if you distinctive between walking around and discovering things takes a lot as well like the actual platforming I'm not sure if that's that could be like 10% maybe 15 I'm not sure yeah that's like a couple of sections like this one he's showing right now like that that would like a platforming section walking around and you have to do this one twice as well so but a lot of the sequences where you walk around and just explore and find chests and stuff like that there's usually enemy encounters that just kind of bring up those not invisible walls but literal walls that only drop when you've completed the combat encounter yeah typically in games the difficulty is not going to apply to platforming sections it'll just be the same no matter what it does take that bit of a it shouldn't be really because platforming is part of the game and the difficulty should reflect that but yeah a lot of the time it's just the only thing that's going to be more difficult in a game is essentially the combat sections the only thing that comes to mind where you could set different difficulties for different things is like Silent Hill you had like a puzzle difficulty oh yeah I think the more other than like modern day accessibility settings yeah I think the last one lost us too this can actually inadvertently create a great deal of tension in games like I'll use Dead Space 2 as an example where if you're trying to go through the game without dying or dying as little as possible which is going to be necessary for you to do if you're going to play the hardcore mode is that there are segments that are going to be sort of like cinematic and cutsceney and you will have to do things that will if you get touched once you're dead whereas obviously in combat you got a lot more stuff to work with a lot more mechanics and then you get to these sections where oh I got to come down the you know the solar array and back into the sprawl and I have to fly through space and not hit any of the debris or else I'm dead and one hit or whatever how many people die on a hardcore run at Dead Space 2 at the eye needle puzzle hmm I feel sorry for those guys I've never failed it I don't actually oh really? oh my god no I'm really good at Dead Space but I've never actually failed that part I think there was I remember in my Dead Space 2 playthrough when I did beat hardcore mode and I was planning out because I played it a whole bunch I love that game I was planning out where my saves would be my first save was always when you go back to the unitology church and it's all fucked up after the marker you know it starts doing all its spookiness because there's a segment there where there's just a lot of enemies in the main atrium and that's a fairly difficult part and so that would be like my first save would be right before that fight because I knew you know you could die here they come in from multiple angles you have all the enemies so it was very easy to die suddenly just with the slightest mistake good stuff though it was very rewarding to finish that game and do that challenge it was I don't think the first Dead Space had a similar challenge I think it just had impossible mode which was just really difficult I can't remember if it did or not I got all the achievements for it on the Xbox 360 but I can't remember if it had a similar like don't die or only 2 checkpoint, 3 checkpoint systems I can't remember and you know someone said he's saying they designed easy mode with only combat in mind not that they should do it and yeah that's what we've addressed so far we haven't said that he said that they should do it he was talking about the nature of it and I think I would take issue with unless you have a quote or a source that it was intentional like we didn't want to change the puzzle combat of course we only wanted to change the combat combat but you know what I mean encounters I find that there's multiple explanations for that one of them could be that they found it easier to set a mode for the game of boosting all enemy health by 75% to create a difficulty but to change platforming requires a bit more yeah you gotta do a little more yeah and every puzzle is going to require a different difficulty and amount of numbers or combinations or clues and things of that nature I guess it might depend on how you code the game too because if there's just one sort of setting in the code for platform speed then you can just turn that all down to 50 across the board boost your health, reduce your health all your damage there's lots of ways you can do it quickly what I was gonna highlight was that when you take this moment for example and you're like alright I want you to extend all the platforms by two times and remove the sword blades that's time you're spending that could be spent on coding the game you know as is and it's like fuck it we'll just leave the puzzles as they are like I'm more inclined to believe that's the case than to believe they thought you know when switching it from easy to hard we will keep the puzzle difficulty the same there is an element of like do we really want to make the platforming more difficult for people or more easy like they probably when they designed at the time thought this was reasonable and they were like we'll just keep it this way a lot of the time having it was not reasonable one of the biggest issues I have with difficulty selection in games though is that it's not often clear which mode is the intended experience because now normal mode is this kind of code for like normie people mode like the casual audience mode and not not the easy one so it ends up being way easier than you're sort of expecting it to be but then there's plenty of games where if you pick the hard mode it's like oh yeah this is the sweaty get good mode that yeah only you'll only be able to even have a chance of getting through this if you know the game like the back of your hand and also yeah I don't know I'd like to just know what what's the the actual normal I know you mean I think me and Mel are the same on that where if it's easy normal hard expert will be like probably hard but maybe hard yeah maybe because I think it's like a couple of years ago when I started playing a game it's like oh you know what I'll do normal because that's probably the way they intend to play the game but the more it's usually what I do yeah because I really want to know you know but but firstly now most of the times just go be hard immediately because normal it's just like super easy too easy a lot of time but you know there are some games like Rogue City where everyone was like play expert play expert expert because hard's too easy oh yeah yeah fair enough yeah because I you told me to play that on the hardest available and I did and it was good it's good was I think I mentioned this on a previous episode but I always thought of hard mode is like sort of the developers normal and then they'll yeah for like that's sort of where I'm at to that could be Halo's influence on you they were being clear yeah maybe well yeah heroic like canon difficulty just gets interesting as well when you heroic is the intended experience that's what I mean more games should do that things like new game plus as well where it's like oh can I change my difficulty up after new game plus there's this games where they definitely intend you to do normal things and get like the loot you can get here and then you can go to high difficulty because otherwise you're just going to get thrashed as ARPG style yeah difficulty tiers difficulty is a just expert mode and the more you play it it would lock the lower difficulties like what you have to suffer a dive before we'll allow you to play lower difficulties it's like grinding experience points difficulty is a fun topic it's not as easy as this thing it's lots of factors and values you have to consider and I mean for instance that thing that was mentioned earlier about a universal slider for a game one that even affects the platforms it's like well that might not even work if you have platforms that are set at certain speeds to create certain openings in windows and by changing platform speed it might literally make the puzzle impossible so even in that element there is a each puzzle, each platforming section it requires its own particular look and it's why I appreciate a lot of the time when games and when developers go through a bit of extra effort to make sure that when I say I want the game harder generally will apply to everything and not just bump up numbers without any context Helldivers again you get different enemies on high difficulties all of a sudden those parts start shooting artillery at you like excuse me all of a sudden they have imperial walker sized bugs there's our ATRTs right what about the the ones that the automatons have they're like the ones from the clone wars those are yes T those are AT you mean AT's what are you talking about the clones yeah the clones small walkers I think you're right ATRTs because then you got ATRTs it's the walker of the gorilla walkers in one TLJ are they called ATAT ATARTs I think as well there's so many of them at this point I don't know they're just ATAT's no you see ATAT's in the scene but you see the new and improved better bigger visions and I think they're called ATAT ATARTs or something like that someone in Chatsburg are going to know wow that's a mouthful I was playing at ADHD which is what he explains why I could remember I was talking about the bile titans though the first time I saw one of those I was like okay so these are a thing I'm going to have to be fighting now oh fun fact if you didn't know if you take out the little green sacs underneath them they can no longer spit acid that's usually what I'm aiming for but I don't know if I have the weapons to take them down usually I usually bring a machine gun in and it seems like you really need one of the big booms for taking fighting them really do you guys hear about that like under the hood dynamic difficulty adjustment that I think Sony patented where like it'll adjust the game without you even knowing which I think is a fucking atrocious idea evil it's actually evil I think there are versions of that that we're all okay with though it's dependent on how it's implemented because Left of Duds has that Evil 4 is a famous user of that Resident 4 does not tell you that this system doesn't tell you that this is a thing that exists in the game and it doesn't tell you that this the professional mode of RE4 is just the hardest that the game can be all the time regardless of how well you're doing so what's I think it's in the execution well yeah and I think in the case of Left for Dead they at least advertised it like that was one of the selling points I remember was that it had an AI director he was watching you play and he's judging you yeah like I don't want any games like having that secretly you know where like I find out later it's like what the game did that really like fuck yeah I think it's fine I think that professional mode knowing that that's just the highest version of Resident Evil 4's experience all the time that makes me feel a lot better about it however it doesn't it doesn't tell you that Resident Evil 4 does not tell you that how that on normal mode it's it's got the difficulty adjustment and it doesn't tell you that professional is just it always on the highest tier of difficulty all the time so these are things that you you have to learn out of the game I'm happy I know that now yes alright anyway there's a video we're watching yeah we got to talk about this game the easy difficulty was just there to help you survive the combat there were still other aspects of the game that remained challenging for you no matter what difficulty you chose picking easy in God of War doesn't mean you can just coast through every part of the game now let's look at Resident Evil those there's no there's no what's attached to that so we just have to leave it as a statement it's like very well because what he said there's also the inverse element of it where the puzzles the platformings things like that it might be as hard as ever it might be as easy as ever and that could be completely independent from whatever difficulty you select because I mean Resident Evil 4 right doesn't matter if you're playing on easier professional you basically muscle memory all of the really really complex puzzles yeah it's I find the statement interesting because you can smell a prescription in there but there's none you're like what are we what are you implying something like the God of War original changes difficulty on combat but not on anything else doesn't allow you to just coast through like dot dot dot what are you those games traditionally only offered starting difficulties up to normal on your first playthrough and while I would love to see a higher difficulty option unlocked right away like they do for the modern games the reason I don't think it's nearly as big a deal as say an action game like devil may cry not offering a hard difficulty is that the challenge of Resident Evil doesn't come from combat the challenge of a resident is largely about is some of it does some of it does yeah well and resource management is combat and that's extremely important in the original Resident Evil game you know what is the challenge the challenge of Resident Evil if it's not the combat what is that to say what to say probably the puzzles puzzles also resource management like knowing whether it's worth it to kill an enemy or not yeah whether you're gonna where am I gonna you gotta picture battles in that game yeah I'm gonna use the fire and oil to get rid of the zombie permanently but the observation is it's not simply a matter of dexterity you gotta use your big old brain navigate the old yeah well the the whole crimson head system in this game really mixes things up which is one of my favorite aspects it makes it the scariest game in the whole series I think oh yeah like there could be presence of the crimson heads is the that's the deciding factor for me I'm like those are scary zombies man right in game like devil may cry not offering a hard difficulty is that the challenge of Resident Evil doesn't come from combat the challenge of a Resident Evil game is largely about exploring and understanding the map managing tight resources backtracking that's weird it's weird to say that and also have the visual of shooting and say it's not to do with combat like that's so weird because I feel like managing resources and combat are pretty fucking heavily linked yeah three types of resource management in the game are ammo ink ribbons for saving your game and healing and using your bullets in the right place at the right time it's like surely that's combat not just a management surely all of it is downstream from all of the observations of you need to understand how to navigate the map and you need to understand how to use your resources is else the combat will kill you right yeah that's right let's start falling out of a long stream the difficulty is all like it all leads to or else you'll die in combat or like miss a bullet and it's bad yeah nothing but the knife which is not very good in this game and then you have to set aside one or two more inventory spaces for one or more keys like you know in some cases there's like one door that you need to put two things into that you need to have on you so like no tight resources backtracking to solve puzzles with important items dealing with limited inventory space yeah you're going to get bit by zombies but the difficulty isn't just from the damage you take it's that you may not have enough space to carry a first aid spray because you're carrying those puzzle pieces you need and if you're not yeah it's always that it's kind of like a whole you know my game is difficult because I made the enemies have more health it's like oh I was clever I made it so that the weapons do less damage and then another guy goes well I was clever because I just reduced the overall health of the player and it's like in a way you're all doing the same thing oh the third guy is like looking at the first two going oh those are like basically the same thing yes well what I was trying to argue was it's all in a sense like mistake management you're trying to avoid you get through it as best you can like you know just to say this to want to go this broad but not the further step you know I mean to be like see it's actually about this like well it's really about like the broad thing of managing everything I suppose allegedly planning your route you're probably ill prepared and not being efficient if you play Resident Evil on the easiest difficulty you still have to play Resident Evil turning the zombies into wimps still leaves you with a game that demands you engage in the other systems in the survival horror genre okay like God of War right well but again we haven't gotten to his prescription yet so I can't I'm finding because I feel like I know exactly what point he's making but he hasn't made it yet you know the whole this is you find yourself in the snow situation huh we never found out if he was talking about snow we're clearly going to find out what he's talking about here then as we're in the inventory there specifically save you from one hitting combat a zombie can grab you and then you can use one of them you stab them in the head and then that knife's gone and that's when you've got a lot of spendable items but they were absolutely tied to combat well so I understand the observations so might this is what I presume is he's ramping up to us do you understand how the old God of War games and how the old Resident Evil games regardless of the difficulty there were certain things that couldn't be changed then things that required aspects of the difficulty that couldn't be changed one of them was platforming There is a certain amount of dexterity you need to do the platforming. And then in Resident Evil's case, it's there is a certain amount of using your big old brain that you have to do, no matter how easy or difficult you make the game. Yes. And the God of War fails to provide something. The new God of War games fail to provide some of those lines that they are. Yeah, same for the resident village. Hmm, let's see. I can't hand the controller to my dad and pick easy and say, here you go. Just play through the game so you can see the locations and enjoy the story. I just want to be clear that that's presented as a bad thing, right? I'm not saying he's saying that, but it sounds like he's saying that's a bad like a sorry, a good thing. He's saying he's saying this is a good thing. I just said, can't just be. Yeah, is he? Yeah, yeah. He's saying that's what I said. He didn't say it, but it's presented as though I can't like, you know, guitar hero is difficult because I'm going to fucking toss it to someone they could just do it. That's why the challenge is there. It's like, there's a conversation to be had about the value of challenge. I understand that, but there isn't the whole point of a difficulty selector to reduce or increase challenge. Well, and also there's a conversation to be had about whether or not games ought to be somebody's first game that somebody could. I mean, you feel like that that philosophy is represented a lot of Nintendo games that they are made with the awareness that it could be someone's first video game. Mario Kart could be someone's first video game. The like, you know, New Super Mario Brothers Wonder could be somebody's first video game. They are designed in such a way that you could give it to basically anybody and they would pick it up fairly quickly. And of course, it would get more challenging as time went on. And maybe there'd be certain things that a totally new player couldn't do or that it would take them way longer to do than the average person. But I don't know if you could say that it's necessarily a good thing or a bad thing when somebody, you know, that a that a game could be somebody's first video game or that somebody would design a game so that it could be somebody's first video game. Also, I thought I said something that was like impossible to disagree with, but someone said, no, it's not when I said is a difficulty selector not the decision to increase or reduce challenge. Does anyone disagree with that? I mean, you know, that's like a pretty disagreeable point there, like I'm genuinely curious. How does one disagree with that statement? I don't even know. I thought it was kind of the just basically define the difficulty. Yeah, like obviously it branches out into more interesting conversations about the nature of puzzle challenge, which is what we've been getting at. But that surely everyone agrees, choosing higher and lower difficulties is indicative of more or less challenge. Well, I guess something that would be interesting to throw into the conversation, because I presume that the argument be that the design philosophy of newer games has been ruined by the essentially this over reliance on difficulty slider and, you know, the rather than building challenges that can't be changed with a slider. But I mean, you could have something in Resident Evil, right? Where on easy difficulty, you just press a button that says, this is the route you should take. Like there are a number of items that you have right now. This is the route that you should take. This is where you should go. This is the item that is the least valuable to you right now. Yeah, like what he seems to be highlighting is going to be able to go so much further than what he seems to be highlighted. And as in, like, it's nice that they kept the challenges so challenging, no matter the difficulty. And it's like, well, why not make them, you know, say, for example, a jumble of letters, and you've got to make the words a word out of it. Several words. This is the part of the game and the higher the difficulty, the less letters there are. It's that simple. Or, you know, or that if you're on an easier difficulty, you get additional inventory slots. Yeah. The, you know, the challenge is still there. It's just easier. I guess the more interesting is the idea that your design philosophy can remain, can potentially remain exactly the same while still incorporating these aspects of difficulty into it. Potentially. Anyway, actually made me think of the bunker, amnesia, the bunker. Remember Mel, the customization for difficulty in that? It was arguably intense. I mean, you told me about it when I played it, that I don't think it was implemented that way. You can set enemy, like, speed, frequency, and aggression, and then you can set, like, frequency of oil, where you can find it, and how big it will be when you find it, like, capacity of your oil lamp. Literally, everything you can imagine, you can fucking customize. Inventory slots, they let you customize. It's make your own. It's all try and beat our presets, you know, like we have. One of my one of my very favorite games, Rimworld, has this as well with its difficulty. You can set the presets or you can make a custom difficulty. And it even lets you make custom difficulties based off of the preset. So you can go to, you know, losing is fun difficulty. And then you could go to custom and then you'll see all the stats and sliders for what losing is fun is as a difficulty. And then you can tweak it. So if you're like, you know what, I want to play this difficulty, but I still want to keep the same amount of this. And I still want to keep keep child soldiers of course. And obviously let's lower that slider and let's make that slider a bit bigger. And so you have the ability to really tailor an experience just to what you find most fun and challenging for you personally. I'm a huge fan of like big custom difficulty slider options. I love them. The I maybe my eyes were too big for my stomach on Rimworld's difficulty because I tried playing it once and I got messed up very quickly. Part of the game dying part of the fun. Keep playing. Yeah. You can play however you want. Difficulty adjustments only going to take you so far. I mean, like with the case of Resident Evil, if you were to give like hand over the controller to a totally novice video game player and ask them to play Resident Evil, they would probably struggle with the idea of fixed perspective and. Yeah, literally, yes, absolutely. Yes, if you give it's it's sort of something that we take for granted being, you know, lead gamers that we are. But if you gave someone who's never played a video game, like whether it could be at a keyboard or with a controller and say, yes, so that that one on the left that that moves you around in the right one there, that that that's the direction that you're looking in. And then having to navigate three dimensional spaces with moving and looking around, it's actually a skill that has to be learned. It's not like naturally intuitive to the human condition. So it's it takes time to learn. And I think sometimes we got to remember a lot of people just don't have that skill. They just haven't done it yet. Yeah. Yeah. mentioned in chat, there are games where sliders increase enemy count and therefore resource gains and snowball acquisitions and power in a edge case. But it does happen. The thing about that, though, is that it's still typically like more enemies is harder than less enemies. You know, so it's like, yeah, but you get more XP and thus you're able to buy more things and make you more powerful or whatever at the same time. It's still the initial. Yeah. And I assume they're called hard, right? The difficulty or hard and experience that the implication being this is going to be more challenging. I don't know of a difficulty setting that doesn't relate to how difficult it's going to be. That sounds stupid. But what I'm getting out is like, are there any challenge systems that say like this is going to be adjacent rather than higher or lower? Well, it's not that they wouldn't exist. It's not that they couldn't exist. I just I'm not familiar with that many at all. Have you guys played the system shot? Remake? I have not. I wish to. It's really hard to recommend it. That has custom difficulties. So for a bunch of different factors like enemy number, how they are and so on. But one of the difficulty sliders, if you said it to the hardest, it actually sets a time limit. So you have to get to a certain point at the end of the game within, I think it's eight hours. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. Even even if you haven't changed any of the difficulty setting, getting there within eight hours is pretty. It's pretty hard. I hear the system shock. I've spent a lot of time wandering around the ship trying to figure out where the next place I can possibly go with that sounds about right under a timeline. It's beautiful, though. And it's coming out on consoles too, even physically. Oh, oh, let's go. Yeah. Someone in chat said, take controls or balls no matter the game. Never liked them. Well, let me pause it to you that I like tank controls, particularly when I'm driving a tank, something that should not be understated. I love tank controls when I'm driving a tank. So whether it's Battlefield 5 or whatever and I'm in a tank, it's actually like, oh, I'm tank controls. I'm in a tank. I have to factor that into how I move around. I'm curious. So when we crack full control like VR, plug in things into our heads, whatever the fuck it however many years and we got full easy control that smooth for a game. It's all realized. And I had like, I could see people being like, oh, playing a game on analog sticks to run around. Okay. Yeah, that's a bit crazy. Yeah. Can you believe people play shooters on those things where they have to aim at stuff? You believe that? Yeah, it's so funny because back in the day, I didn't have like a big gaming PC. So I always had a PlayStation and I played shooters shooters on there. And I thought it was pretty decent when I go back to controller and start shooting and aiming at things like my first idea is like, how did I do this back then? Like I can't aim this. This is balls. But I feel like I unlearned that skill on controller. When I got my first. Yeah. Have you ever played Metroid Prime? I actually have not. I've played Metroid Prime 2, but I never actually played the first one. Yeah. Oh, did you play it on a GameCube or on PC like later on? Well, I mean, you could play it on Wii, right? I played it on the GameCube. Well, actually on PC, the way to do it is to play the Wii version with this mod called Prime Hack and it just integrates perfect most keyboard controls into it. And it's just great. That sounds like it's really neat, but I played Metroid Prime 2 on the GameCube. Yeah. The original one though, the Switch version has kind of modern first version shooter controls and it feels pretty good. But I was just kind of wondering if you preferred the 10 controls in that game. But if you haven't played it in a while, then maybe I assume it's identical to Metroid Prime 2 in terms of the controls. Basically, yeah, yeah. Then I have an essence play that yes, it was fine for me. Of course, I was much, much younger and I had much less frame of reference when you don't have, when the only console you really play on is going to often be like a GameCube, your sense of first person shooters is a bit skewed. Oh, yeah, especially. So, however, Star Fox Assault on GameCube, you use that little C-Stick as your aiming thing. So they could do it. It was possible. Namco game. We had the technology. Yeah, because he'll get lost. And that's the point. These games had things in them that were universal across all difficulties. So what happened to God of War when it came back? Oh, I mean, well, here's the thing. You could, I mean, before we even get started, God of War has the universal spatial navigation thing of you need to know where to go. I know this is going to sound stupid, but seriously that like someone actually knows which places they're meant to go to or how to like maneuver through the world. That's something that will never be able to be changed no matter what difficulty you're playing on. Maybe he's going to know how to get to the location. Even, even in a game that's hyper linear, someone can get stuck or lost or know where they're going. I guess I'm assuming though he's probably going to reference the removal of the jump mechanic and all platforming. My guess would be, well, he could go in a few directions, I guess. There's still possible. Well, even with games that are relatively easier to control, like I remember I wanted my mom to play GoldenEye multiplayer with me. I'm like, here you go. Let's we'll play on faculty to player death match and she just could not get the hang of it. She was running into corners. She just couldn't figure out how to like look around. And it was so simple to me. It's just like, no, you just hold R and then you can aim around, but like she just couldn't grasp it. And I remember thinking like, fuck, I wish there was just a mode that I could set where it was just easy for her to grasp it. And you know, we could have fun, but it was just like a frustrating experience for her. And then I probably wouldn't. If it was legitimately someone's very first game, I don't think I'd give him a first person shooter. No, probably that's fair. I give them a pretty platform or I give him Mario Kart. Just a game where you don't have Mario Party. Well, I think giving her a twin stick shooter would have been even just would have added to the product. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, that's what I mean is it might be kind of a Tetris. Basically, I think I don't sound silly, but genuinely spatial awareness, like in a 3D space and navigating a 3D space, like that can just cause problems as like a first starting point of navigating a video game world compared to playing Super Mario Brothers. Yeah. Yeah. I think fighting games are granted as a gamer. A lot of people can get behind playing a fighting game pretty easily. It's like, especially if it's a 2D plain one, where up is jumped down as duck, you go back with back, forward with forward, two punch buttons, two kick buttons or three and three. And you know, you do stuff. You're not going to be good, but you you can develop develop an affinity for video games through fighting games. Yeah, I mean, it happened with a lot of people. I remember that happened multiple times. Just when I was in my room playing my PlayStation and my dad comes in and is like, Yeah, what are you playing? Yeah, this thing is like, Oh, that would be way too quick for me. And I was like, is that quick? I don't know. It looks like normal to me. It's like, oh, I'm just used to it. Just yeah. Yeah, I don't remember the transition to 3D being a hurdle. Like I remember when I first got my N64 and Super Mario 64, like I pretty much just immediately clicked. Well, you're already at that point, you're probably already used to the idea of when you press a button on this controller, things happen on the screen and you have to navigate the thing on the screen to do things and avoid things based off of the inputs on this controller. Yeah. It's like it's it's kind of like it's kind of like driving a car in a way and people are and many, many people are used to that. So it's sort of like a translation of those abilities into a different format. Well, and they were transitionary games between 2D and 3D, right? Like 2D games that simulate 3D that you probably played. I think I'm being a pretty important one. Yeah, I feel I guess interesting ones are like the transition between games that have like full 3D like 360 degree movement versus the games that had like eight directional stuff. Like a lot of because OG PlayStation didn't have the twin sticks initially. I think I added later. So like, you know, original Crash Bandicoot is eight directions where Super Mario 64 is full 360 degree movement. And even even that, you know, that's like a notable difference as well as as well as navigating with, you know, fixed camera versus a camera that you have a lot of control over. Sure. And then to Mahler's point, I think, you know, you also in the 16 bit era, you had games that were sort of priming you for 3D exploration like the pseudo 3D stuff. Like, yeah, F zero. Like Crash Bandicoot. Crash Bandicoot as a whole too. Like as Fringy was mentioning, the levels in that are very linear in the camera. You have no control over. So yeah, at times it becomes a 2D platformer. So it's a good bridge. Mario 64 is a full 3D. This is like, yeah, this is what the promise of 3D games. I think the key is like it's like a lot of things, whether it's video games, whether I've seen this myself in firearm shooting where if you're trying to get someone who has never done it before into it, there's a place that you want to start them from mostly because it takes an amount of skill to get in, you know, to the middle or difficult stuff that you need to build up to. But also you want to avoid discouragement. If you give someone who's never shot a gun before a little pistol and say, hit that target 25 yards away, it's going to be fucking miserable. You're asking them to do something that's really, really difficult. Whereas if you say, here's this little bitty rifle, 22LR, Ruger 10-22 or whatever, and I want you to shoot at this that can and you put it 10 yards away, they'll be able to do it. And that'll be like, oh, it'll be encouraging. I can do this. This is something that I can actually do. 22 Long Rifle is 22 Long Rifle is really great for beginners. Yes it is. And so video games are pretty much the same principle. You don't want to hand someone, you know, here's modern warfare. Go and shoot all the soldiers and they're like, Oh God, all these buttons and I don't know what they do and you need to it'll discourage them. It'll be like they'll say it's way too much for me. When really, it's just a matter of just building it up. Start them on something super simple. Well then, right, let us continue. Well, let's, let's, let's, as you can tell, we love talking video games. Okay. Yeah, let's be good. All difficulties. So what happened to God of War when it came back in 2018? Well, dad would be very happy because now you really can just pick easy and enjoy the locations and story. Platform is removed, which means that hazard-based puzzles and coordination-based puzzles were also removed. What about progress? So again, I do want to emphasize you fundamentally still have to navigate the world no matter how much you describe it as like, well, it's really linear. So it's easy to know exactly where to go. I'm talking like an even more fundamental base. Like, you just know how to get from like point A to point B. That's something that can't be removed no matter what. Like, I don't know what it means for a video game to to be a video game and for it to, like, for it to remove any possibility that you can't fail. But I don't even know what that looks like. It's also a game where it's impossible to fail. I mean, I'm not even against easy modes doing that. Like, if it's a cage about that, I'm afraid. God! There are coordination based puzzles in this game. There's a lot of them. I don't know why he's implied that there are not. I guess he said for platforming, but like, we can't ignore the, you know, you have to like free every time you have to throw your axe. Yeah. Or like rooms where you have to God, English so shit, like, like spin the big wood thing and then you have to freeze it so that you can go underneath a big ceiling, like a bunch of spikes are going to smash down. But then when you get in, bunch of enemies come in. So you have to fight them with your fists. If you pull back your Leviathan axe, then it's going to drop the ceiling on you, right? That's like a combination of puzzle and combat. But then you have the basic puzzles like all the times you have to get the, I want to say the what are the chests that have the apple of like, they give you health bonuses, but you have to get them by when you have to find the little statues. Yeah, you have to not only find them, but hit them all within a certain amount of time, which requires accuracy. All of them are pretty fucking tight as well. Like these things are still in the game. Puzzles that got a lot of mollar. Mollar remember that we watched in our God of War Ragnarok. Oh, we watched our our dear friend or our dear, dear friend, our very intelligent dear friend, synthetic man try his artist at some of those very simple puzzles that are present in easy mode. By the way, God bless him. He eventually got it, but watching him struggle through those was is very amusing. Yes. See because I would just say those chess puzzles are easy. It's like, yeah, well, some gamer gods have trouble on them. So Atreus or Freya say, this is what you need to do. You still got to do it. You know, you got to do it. Actually, I actually remember there's actually one puzzle and I think it was in Ragnarok. Yeah, it was Ragnarok where you have to freeze a thing and I didn't even know there was a thing I was allowed to do. I know if you remember which one I mean, you have to freeze a certain place. So it stops the water or something. I think you got stuck in there in a couple of minutes as well. Swaddle time, right? I think so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And like the car is like, look up there. It's like, where there's nothing is like, oh, I can freeze this like wherever I want. Okay, that's good to know. A lot of people keep highlight like the puzzles are easy. Arguably, the fucking platforming puzzles in God will one are easy. They're just frustrating because one mistake means you start from beginning again. Yeah, concept. They're easy, but find. I know finding a thing and hitting it with a with another thing is easy, but you have stuff to find them. And in the end, if you get stuck by falling down a thing or get stuck by running around and finding a thing. Is it that much of a difference and difficulty in the end? Well, I mean, probably not, right? Once you deal with an inaccurate statement on the actual state of the game, you then get to the question of why is this a problem? Right. Yeah, I would say that there are you go ahead. You go ahead. The progress blocking aspect of the you CJ, who was talking? No, no, no. All I was basically just agreeing with more. I wonder what his point actually is here. Like, is is it a bad thing that the platforming has been removed? If the intention of the devs was to create a different kind of game experience. Well, in many games, fucking get that platforming out of this fucking game. So I'm just saying some games have platforming at them. No, I'm not just off many games. Many games have platforming segments in them and I want them to die and go away and no one like them. There is an argument to be made about whether it's a good idea to invest any amount of development time into something that could be considered like a tertiary or secondary aspect that doesn't or rather rather than rather than focusing all and then making something that's kind of subpar because I imagine I imagine you can't compare the God of War platforming to a platforming video game. No, you know, like a like a flat one. Yeah. It might be a better idea to invest all of that time into the core of whatever experience it is that you're creating in this case an election game. Oh, and Chad, I don't I don't I don't hate platforms. It's just a lot of the times platforming platforms are great. I like platforms, but platforming I often hate because it's just like Fringy was just saying it's a secondary or tertiary or almost like filler element that's added to a game. Yeah, we'll talk to them get to the platforming segment. You're like, oh, got to do the fucking this busy chore that I hate so that I can get back to the actual game. It can come across as though that the developers are like, we invented jump and we invented gaps. We did it. There we go. Probably a really good example of first person platforming done well for what I can remember being the first time. That's because the platforming in Metroid Prime is way more integrated as like an important rather than just, oh, this is the platforming section. Platforming is just a part of that game. It's inherent to the game plan. Yeah, it's like playing like the old Tomb Raiders, you know, it's like platforming is integral to the you do platforming before you do combat in Tomb Raider 2, for instance. That's right. It's it's just something that is right from the beginning. You know, this is a this is a platforming slash puzzle game that has combat in it. So. Yeah, so you're never not doing platforming in Metroid. Platforming in a non platforming game is filler then it's like it can be. Depends on how they can be, it's not necessarily again. I don't know if I would if you ask me what is Metroid Prime? I would describe it as many things before a platforming game, but the platforming is filler. It's integrated into the core framework of the Metroidvania you know, adventure game that it is. Yeah, I was thinking more of Super Metroid, but yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, Super Metroid. I forgot we're talking about Metroid Prime. Yeah, Metroid is well. I mean, yeah, Super Metroid's got a shit ton of platforming in it. Yes, Metroid Prime, though, the way it worked so much better is because they had Samus sort of tilt down as you were in the air so you could see where you were going to land. It's really simple that it made a huge difference. First person shooters is awful. Generally, it's really annoying. Yeah. And I'd also like to say that because I feel like he might be heading in this direction. He's kind of hinted at it, but I don't want to necessarily create a very, very conspicuous and bold line between puzzle and combat, because a lot of combat systems exist that have that very much have puzzling elements to them in terms of the amount of in terms of the amount of things that you could do at any given point, knowing what you're working towards doing the tools you have at your disposal. Well, even down to something as simple as this weapon works better on the enemy that is this color, you know, like if it's if it's red, then you've got to use the blue one or you've got to use the red one. You know, like even that, that is a kind of man. I know saying it's like a puzzle sounds so stupid. Well, you're just the fundamentals. Yeah. Combat is often like an action puzzle in a lot of ways where you have to do this against that. I mean, you know, it definitely has that level of like, you know, it's a fire out of me. Get your ice axe. Oh, no, an ice out of me. Get your fire blades. Like, yeah, simple. But, you know, it also has it get complicated with the spear and then the interactions between each of them and the combos between supercharging any of them. Right. And then, you know, you take a fiery enemy and hit them with ice, it'll like freeze burn or whatever the fuck the bonus is called. It's like, oh, sweet, always different. I mean, those are all aspects of the combats puzzles in a way. That lack of that lack of a sandbox was the reason. I think Final Fantasy 16 has bad combat because it's you just do damage. It doesn't matter what you can. You know, I think it's I think it's very simplistic and doesn't really have any depth to it. Oh my God. Well, it's really that it is a problem. I think it is not nearly as complex as a lot of other, you know, action games. I enjoyed it. But yeah, you know what the, you know what? I think the problem is with I enjoyed it too. I didn't say it was like terrible and like not fun to play, but I just think that it was really simple. No, I said it was really simplistically. I think it was poorly designed. Okay. I guess I'll clarify my point. The reason I think that is because well, because look, there wasn't any need to have elemental damage correspond to the type of enemy that you're fighting. There were no status anomalies at all. There was no integration of a party in any way. Like it was it was essentially a one man show final fantasy game, which I think Final Fantasy game combat tends to be better when you've got an interesting party to combine your skills within creative ways and yeah, I don't know. That that phenomenon sort of becomes an issue in a lot of games. We see it in many, many RPGs that aren't really super well designed where there's no point in doing anything except for damage killing the enemy is the is the ultimate goal and there's no reason why should I drain their magic or why should I drain their stamina? Why should I slow them? Why should I do anything else when I could just do as much damage as possible and kill them in doing damage is always the correct answer. It's well. I suppose an interesting question when it comes to that is if you want to talk about combat that is well designed or poorly designed, how much of the conversation relates to is there one strategy that will work all the time basically in all cases I can use every time or does force me to check. I'm inclined to lean in that direction. I've talked about it before, but as far as I'm concerned, one of the big problems with the combat in the Insomniac Spider-Man games is it's very easy to stay in the air where you are fundamentally less vulnerable to enemies because there are only a few enemies that can attack you in the air when all enemies can attack you on the ground and pretty much every single one of your attacks keeps you in the air if you're already. Yeah, you can always hold your whole triangle, yank the enemy up into the air, web him up, sling him into the ground, hold triangle to yank the next enemy up, web him up, throw him into the ground. You can do that and it's going to suck. It's not going to be fun at all, but you can do that and they're just basically like win every single encounter and if that's, you know, I don't know that it's reflective of good design when one strategy is going to work all the time in all cases. Yeah, I don't know how much of that is due to how many options you have as in like when you're presented with all these different combat things and then only one of them works well versus you only have one and the one works well. Makes you like focus on maybe the game is like the level design or the enemy variety. If you only have one form of attacking things versus I think that we have several. You have several different types of combat. You have several types of what are called. Are they icons in that game? Or am I thinking of the 14 one anyways? There's summons basically that give you different attacks and abilities, including in your standard weapons, how fast you move, everything like that. The thing is you kind of just pick your three favorite ones or maybe it was four. I might have been four, but and then you can you can swap to them at any time and it doesn't really matter which one you're using at which time. It's just what ones do you find the most comfortable to use. So it's almost like the different weapons as opposed to things that tools in your tool set that you need to constantly be aware of and refer to something that I think that you can. Theo made a video talking about the the score system, the stone meter and Devil May Cry. Seriously, like one of the easiest ways to make your game instantly better is to just put it a style meter. Some kind of scoring system that rewards you for mixing up what you do and then, you know, like the stuff like that is a huge incentive to not just rely on the same strategy because you want to see, you know, if you're playing the game and then you started to see drop from like B to C to D like, oh, fuck, that's lame. Like I want to get, you know, I want to get like triple S rank that like providing incentives to play differently rather than relying on one strategy over and over and over again. It's a really easy way to encourage people to essentially have the fun with the game. You know, Melee kills get you ammo and whatever have you like different things that falls into your armor. Yeah. It's funny you mentioned the style system for me because I remember having a moment like this with Devil May Cry 5 when you're playing specifically as V like this magical spell guy. He like summons enemies. If you just move around and alternate between pressing triangle, square and circle and just do that over and over again and just run everywhere. You won't take damage. You'll eliminate all the enemies and you'll get like the max skill rating or at least a really high one. You know, so it's just like, wow, I broke this game. I can't believe this. Sorry, go ahead. I was just saying the V combat is really interesting. You're right. Well, it's a shame it can be reduced to just that simple button combination. Not only can you clear all the enemies out, but you're also rewarded with a high style grade. Well, what I would argue there, at least for the ways V styles ratings are done is that's the moment where you're not even interacting with combat except for the executions is V that you understand how to properly use them because essentially you're trying to be a puppeteer there and square is your panther and triangle is your, oh wait, maybe I said it the other way around. Sorry, triangle's the panther, squares the raven and then circles your big monster dude, right? Yeah, right. No, no, no, wait, that's your execution. Sorry, I might have switched out the controls. You had the right stick to bring the monster. It is an important distinction because he is meant to be a character who's sort of frail, non-combative and just like summons things that actually do the fighting for him. So yeah, the same strategy wouldn't apply to Dante or the other one, I can't remember. Nero, hey, I think Nero's got the most kind of balance style, the easier one to learn. Whereas Dante, you've got the most flexibility and so getting style ratings high with Dante is I think the most satisfying, but Theo made a great video on this everybody on Theo's channel. Also, I want to highlight, someone in chat said, Mayo is a fan of classic survival horror. You guys are not so shut up. You don't know shit about survival horror. I just want to say. Damn, true. Anybody who is a fan of me and watches people live cover my videos, please don't be this cringe. Like just, just like ask him interesting questions. Don't be like, you don't know nothing about Stuart war. Mule or dead. This is the video called how God of War ruined Resident Evil Village. Also, we love survival horror. Yeah, we do. I wasn't even going to bring that up. I don't know what to tell you, man. I don't know what's talking about, man. Like Resident Evil 4 is one of like my super formative video games. So yeah, I don't know. It's it's bizarre. You know, that's why we'll horror rags and classic. Oh, it's only like what 2000? So it's only 20 years old. Yeah. It's only 20 years ago. It's not the real classics. Okay, but don't don't say classic rock if it ain't fucking Beethoven. Okay. Oh my God. Is that hazard based puzzles and coordination based puzzles were also removed climbing. Yeah, that's the two coordination. It's not the case. And it's not really about it. Yeah. Yeah, it was changed to be automatic. So there's no more combat or oh boy. I love those parts. You got to those are automatic. All you do is fucking spam square. Yeah. Well, neither of them are automatic. Technically, they aren't. You got to move. I just the game won't do it for you. I don't like like this, this the smell here. Like I don't I don't it's the thing as someone who's played through so many times. Like, I don't fucking like it when I'm climbing up these mountains and they go, oh, there's here comes bad guys, a great square, square, square, square, square, square, cool. I can move again. How does that make it better? Now, if you someone said like, yeah, but it's more boring to just travel is like, is it? I don't know. This feels like busy now, man. Yeah, I've played plenty of games where I just walk around and look at things and it's been like, oh, oh, wow. Look at that. Interesting. Well, I guess the impression I get with stuff like this is that ultimately what's happening in both games is the same. But one of them said, all right, throw enemies at him while they're doing that. Is that really a good thing to know? If you can climb and enemies also can climb and you can take damage while climbing, I'm glad there's at least something you can do to like get rid of them. But it is annoying just like mashing square until they go away and then you just keep climbing or jumping just at the right time. I guess what's interesting is what's the difference between that and like, I don't know when you're climbing and uncharted and then something goes wrong in a cinematic place at night like falling down for ages. One of them is when you go press the square button at least delays and climbing, aren't they? Well, in many cases, the words action based puzzle can just be substituted for combat. They really can. Your health bar refills to a hundred percent when you die in a new area, your magic recharges automatically and there's no by the way, magic recharging automatically is a shit ton of games to where that's basically the standard. Well, sure. Generation rates is in manna. That's that's a super standard thing. Recharging manner based on collectibles or over time is just down to how the game was designed. Yep. One hundred percent. Yeah, you have to take it within the totality of the design, you know, how does how does it recharging support whatever systems or contradict whatever systems are present in this game compared to the odd ones? Yeah, sometimes you want to maintain a gameplay flow and you know, you don't want it to be like Zelda or you're running around for a fucking manna pot. You know, which one of these bushes has a thing just so I can do this spell for Christ's sake. You know. It's P gain difference between mashing like an idiot and performing a long flashy combo and having good defense. There's nothing demanded of you and God of War apart from surviving singular combat rooms and the patients wait, that's what you do in the other God of Wars. So that's something because well, because you have to fight people while climbing walls, apparently the original God of Wars had way more than the new ones do. Yeah, but if it's about just surviving a combat and go ahead, that's all you do in God of War, basically, you go into the arena, beat all the guys up. Hope you don't take too much damage. Also, I'll go for the Mel. It's the part that everyone likes. Yeah. Is your complaint though that you don't get more XP for creative combat? No, I think I think the complaint is that broadly that that now it's just combat rather than combat plus puzzles plus platforming, but they're still puzzles. There still is puzzles. Yeah. Well, but the puzzles we referenced the ones that you can actually skip in God of War 2018, but Oh, can you? Well, you know, stuff like the chests anyway, you know, the ones in like Svartalfime, you can't skip in Ragnarok. I'm trying to I haven't played 2018 and a bit of time now. Well, there's plenty of time in 2018 where you're having to push a cart to a place that you can then jump on it and then get to the other side of an area and why what is that? If not platforming, you just don't have a jump button. The thing is, it depends on, you know, you can describe any game very reductively. You could just say, well, all first person shooters, you're just centering the screen on the thing you want to kill. You can do that. But then you lose basically all of the elements that you just that's not a very meaningful observation to make. Yeah, I could hand him. I could say here, apex legends. All you have to do is be the last squad alive. See, it's simple, right? And you get your ass kicked. All you do in the old God of Wars, you press the square button like you could do that. But that's not fair. That's just not fair to to those games. There was that combined with well, yeah, because the broad point just seems to be the they made it easier. Everything is way easier on the easiest difficulty than the easiest difficulty on the previous games. I think a really odd way to compare games is which which easy mode is easiest. I think he's gone further than that and what so that they've removed the things that couldn't be affected by a difficulty slider. They could, but they once. Yeah, so that that's a whole conversation in and of itself, right? The idea that if God of War had puzzles in it in 2018 that were very difficult and they wouldn't have changed for lower difficulties isn't even true, but it doesn't have those puzzles anyway. You know what I mean? Like the box puzzle where it's going to get destroyed. If you don't, you know, avoid the arches in God of War One, not a puzzle I think is particularly good by the way, but the if it were present in 2018, they may have made it easier on easy. And that wouldn't be wrong. That would be fine. Wait, well, even that sequence is easier if you don't die as quickly because you don't have to worry as much about getting hit by the arrows yourself. I don't have any issue with puzzles being made easier along with combat because as Rags point, I think a couple of us in a sense, combat is a puzzle. And so when you lower combat difficulty, you're lowering the chances for you to fail the puzzle being this time, like, oh, look, he's doing the big yellow charge up move. You can't stand right in front of him got to move back. But then once he does that, he's got an opening on his back got to go behind. You got to make sure you charge your big blue laser, just stuff, you know, all the basic understanding of systems and then taking advantage of your time slots to do the things. Well, it's the soft implication that the puzzles in the game are less worthy of being affected by difficulty than the combat is. But the puzzles are a part of the game, right? Devs, you made it a part of the game. You built all this. You made assets. You programmed it and coded it. It's part of the game. Why are you ignoring this? And when I change the difficulty, how come these parts aren't affected? What is that telling me? Well, and why are we killers or what? Why are we OK with making the combat a breeze, but we're not OK with them not having puzzles that are always hard? Do you understand what I'm saying? He's saying like, yeah, you have Resident Evil's combat gets way easier, but at least they still had the puzzles. And it's like, are we saying that it would be better on easy if the combat weren't easier as well? Like, what is the point of difficulty if not that? Using easy mode as a benchmark is strange, anyways. Well, he's trying to use it to explain a philosophy, which is that they've lost the interest in making things harder in the in between portions of like the main pull of the game. Yeah. When instead, it seems like they just focused all their time and attention on not just the story and the characters and everything, but also in the combat itself. I'd much rather play a game that was super focused on delivering a combat experience instead of one that had subpar segments in between them where I could get annoyed at the platforming they threw in. I'm going to tie this into Resident Evil Village, by the way. I just wanted to remind everybody that. Oh, man. Yeah, I forgot. It's going to be the same thing that like Resident Evil used to have. I mean, it's kind of gone over it, right? It's more prevalent with Resident Evil because there used to be a lot more item management and challenge in relation to backtracking this that and the other. It'll be the broad observation that modern game design philosophy has ruined everything. I presume that's the yeah, but like there's loads of holes in this already in terms of shoulds. Mashing like an idiot and performing a long flashy combo and having good defense, there's nothing demanded of you and God of War apart from surviving singular combat rooms and the patients needed to deal with atreus screaming at you every seven seconds with nothing left in the game. I mean, there's the thing progress blocking puzzles, though. Like that's the thing. It's why couldn't someone sell God of War One as an awesome action game that is plagued with nonsense, boring ass puzzles that take you nowhere make you think for about one second, mostly delaying you. The whole point of God of War is killing things and this isn't killing things. So that's pretty why the fuck am I the God of War trying to play chess with a fucking frog or something. Like running around on this this little beam that's spinning. This ain't this ain't what I was promised. Yeah. And that it's it's someone could just say it's incongru with the fucking design of the game. The philosophy is silly. They're just trying to delay us. Where you know the canoe and when is also sort of up to you and this one. And that was never a thing in the original games. Also, I don't remember. We talked about Resident Evil 4, you know, a bit and like the puzzles and that are barely puzzles. They like the game. I don't think the game would be worse if they just just didn't have them. They're so simplistic. There's a small amount of flavor. He just like, oh, look, I'm doing this. Yeah, it's just a. Yeah, it's basically just a little bit of flavor, a very tiny moment, you know, momentary pause before you get back to sort of play in the game. And then your next playthrough, I mean, there are puzzles. I just know muscle memory, whether it's, you know, Batoris Mendez's door, whether it's the seven sacrifices in the castle. It's just like, I know these puzzles. I just they're not even puzzle. I just boop, boop, boop. Yep, it's done. One, two, three is a combination and the boom door opens. I know what you mean. Yeah, it's like, why even bother at that point if there's like three spaces and two of them are occupied by skulls and there's one empty one and then there's a skull back there. Oh yeah, if I just pick that up and put the skull there, the door will open. Why even bother? Like the wall climbing stuff. He's like, in this game, you just wall climb. But in this game, you wall climb and the enemies come at you and you go, oh, you got to kill him and you go, oh, he's like, why you it's boring. Like what he's so simple. There's no combat to it. Beyond you can press triangle. I think if you want to square is the quick broad sweep and then triangles like a heavy. You just do either grab them. You couldn't you can grab. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you press you can press any one of those buttons and it'll just do the kill and then move on. Yeah, which is precisely what he seems to have issue with in terms of button mashing gameplay combat at its lowest difficulties, which I still don't understand why that's okay when you switch difficulties, but puzzles being either reduced or gone isn't okay. Game to challenge players outside of combat. The game is now playable for any old Joe off the street. He can pick easy and no, no, no, this this wouldn't be somebody's first video game. I don't maybe maybe someone is a deal. Like definitely not on average. I don't my dad could be got all 20 minutes. He'd be very confused by it. That seems really elitist. Kind of. Yeah. I think I think I agree. The idea of if someone can just pick up this game set it to the easiest difficulty, which is literally called like story mode. And then they can beat it is like, yeah, that's why it's called this the story mode. I'm sorry that there aren't unnecessarily bizarrely difficult or out of place puzzles for them to have to solve. I just want to experience the story characters because I don't think God of War was designed to be this super hard game. That's supposed to be like an incredible crazy challenge for everybody because there's a big thing of storytelling happening. Well, he's already highlighted playing God of War and easy the original is pretty fucking easy. Yeah. It's like, yeah, but there's puzzles that get in your way. Yeah, okay. They get in your way on hard. I said like that's not a good thing. This is like, yeah, it's too pronged. One, is there something wrong with the game being designed such that it's easier to get into? Is that necessarily a bad thing? It's like, you know, depends. And also this is not somebody's first video game compared to something like Mario. What do you make the same claim for Mario that the new ones offer you an invincibility thing when you die enough times? Is that ruin Mario's design? Well, maybe he would, but then but I guess he'd say that that's way less intrusive, which I mean, and it's optional. Well, but there's so is this. I was going to say, what do you mean? If somebody wants to play these games and just experience the story and they and they just said it's easy, like, man, go for it. I'm glad you're experiencing the story characters. The broader observation is that the experience for everybody gets dragged down because it's designed at a fundamental level to be more accessible. That would be that. I assume that's his main point. Maybe he'd have to show that like he'd have to give mechanical examples because I think you would say I did. I've shown you that this game has now stripped it to where only combat is the only obstacle and combat is scalable, whereas in the other games, there were obstacles that weren't scalable no matter what, like the platforming or the inventory management or something like that. Obvious, though, that just creates a separate issue, which is inconsistency. If you have really hard platforming that on easy mode, it's super out of place. If you have very easy platforming that on hard difficulty, it's also super out of place. You would say that it's the requisite level of difficulty and that's good and the new God of War game is has fucked it up. Well, if he doesn't say that by the end, then he's pretty it's pretty awful if he doesn't actually say that if that's what he means because we're having to infer all of this. Does he know though that the scaling of the easy mode is the reason the platforming was taking out it because that that seems like a fairly large assumption. Well, I just be fucking boring and most people don't want it. And maybe the developers just don't consider that a vision that they have for God of War. Maybe him jumping around on platforms and climb and shit. They're just like, you know, let's just not. We don't have to have that. Well, I mean, something that they had and they reduced dramatically was QTE's. People didn't like them in the original games. Yeah. And so there's a lot less of them now. Like hardly any talking. I wonder if he would make a I wonder if he'd make the argument of, you know, being able to complete the QTE's are is the baseline prerequisite level of experience you need to have to beat the game. Well, the thing is, there is fundamental baseline prerequisites outside of combat. I know it sounds silly, but like actually getting from one place to the other, regardless of how linear the game is requires somebody to do something they have to actually push the joist, you know, the joystick in a certain direction to get there. It doesn't play itself. Even maybe those things of navigating the world or moving the camera. I can see a lot of people getting overwhelmed with the wealth of options. You have as far as places to go in the newer God of War games because the other ones are very linear. It's yeah. That's interesting. The next one is that there are just big open like hub areas. Yeah, it's like, OK, where do I go now? Lots of or Banneheim mid, you know, hub area or the Svartelheim hub area with optional objectives that you can do that are that are going to influence the experience you have because of, you know, getting more or less experience and then, of course, just making choices about what kind of upgrades that you're going to get as well. That's not something the game is not going to tell you which ones you're supposed to get because the game can't tell you which ones you would prefer. That's still a decision that you have to make, which potentially creates new challenges. Well, I can give you an example would be it's sort of a place to God of War, but I'll use an example from a game I've played because Gears 5 has two or three segments where the game is no longer linear and it opens up. You have a little vehicle and you have this area you can explore and you could go around and do a bunch of side objectives, grab some upgrades, do a little extra story character stuff. And if that was a and I thought it was pretty neat. I liked it. It didn't seem super intrusive. I could skip it if I wanted to. It didn't overstay its welcome. So if it showed up in Gears 6, I'd be like, yeah, good. But if those segments were like boring and dull and super easy and pointless and just a waste of time, then I'd say, you know, I just don't put them and maybe you don't have to put them in Gears 6 or you have to work, you know, better at making it actually good. The way that we engage with something in one game is probably going to affect our expectations for it in the next game. I got distracted by someone saying more is being defensive. He acts in aggression rather than result dominance. Dominance. I guess more is that this is your this you are. No, you can't stop there. They compliment me. You don't stop being there. That's what's happened. This is your you need to defend their honor and it's making you irrational and angry. He says Rags is using 40 chests to converse to push back on Mahler's style. But this could all be in my head. I am using 40 chests to push back because Mahler has a pathetic soyjack defensive style. Oh, no. This is the Virgin Mola versus the Chad Rags. But I had the chat for the aggression dog. Well, it's just it's just so funny because I'm like, which what? What are our teams? Mahler versus everyone. OK, on the defensive. You're outnumbered. Oh, damn. OK. So I'm able for any old Joe off the street, he can pick easy and stroll through the entire game to admire. There is a level of some like kind of kind of seeping from that particular statement. Isn't that any old Joe off the street? He can play it. Any old Joe, not like us hardcore. Going to play my video games. Those look like I'm a why I like the idea that a lot of these games have an easy mode that is clearly labeled as easy mode that allows people who aren't good at games, but want to experience them to some degree. The ability to be a part of, you know, this experience. Yeah, it's labeled as what it is. No one beats story mode in goes, I am such a cool fucking gamer. They go, oh, I really, you know, that was fun. I liked these characters and I like the story because I specifically chose to play on story mode. And, you know, I really enjoyed the game and I feel like I'm better at it now than I was when I started. Maybe I could, you know, play it at a different, harder difficulty and maybe that could get them to kind of ease them into the door of playing games at higher difficulties because that's where we all start. We all started somewhere. I would imagine that everybody here and I would imagine this guy would agree that it's lame and annoying when you see those articles that say like from soft games should have an easy mode or that branch must have an easy mode. Yeah, the idea that it describes that the developer kind of has like an obligation to provide multiple ways that the player can experience it rather than saying, well, no, a developer can make a decision of, no, there is a level. This is the game that we want to make. We don't want to invest the time into creating difficulty sliders. We want this to be a certain experience for that to be a certain matter around the game. Everybody would agree. Yeah, that's chill. But surely there would also be the same way around if a developer says, well, what we want to do is we want to create a game where there is scalable difficulty so that if you want to go into it for this crazy combat experience or if you want to go into it for the story, those options are available but that would similarly be a case. Okay, okay. I mean, it wouldn't flip it. They wouldn't, if there was a game that came out that was designed specifically by the developers to be super easy, I wouldn't, I don't expect games journalists to be, you know, in an uproar saying, this needs to have a hardcore mode. This game must have a difficult mode for the real gamers. It's like the mandating of a difficulty adjustment, right? It's just like, if they want to fashion a game that is just one difficulty and that's it, they should be able to do that. Yeah, I think so. It's, I would appeal to artistic freedom and creative license that like it's an artistic vision to have your game be difficult and people would be like, well, that's absurd. It's like, no, it's not. Difficulty and challenge and interactivity. On the e-fab about this. If you turn your survival... There's a Mark Brown video we covered about Dark Souls difficulty and I'm pretty sure our conclusion was don't force them to make every difficulty you want. However, I'm fine with the devs choose whatever difficulties they want in terms of design. Fundamentally, if you are designing a game with the knowledge that you're going to have multiple difficulties, that can be built up with it. But if you take a game that is complete and then you go, I'm going to mod it so that all the enemies are half health, you might have very unintended consequences in terms of damaging the game. Yeah, you might have ruined it. Might have the experience that I was trying to create. Well, like, you know, Somos easy mode of removing all zombies, monsters. I remember thinking like, man, that really hurts a lot of what that game is about removing them. It's like, yeah, don't you want people to be able to complete it? And it's like, of course, there are ways to do it that aren't that. That's not the, I don't think that's the way easy mode can ruin like it can have narrative impacts. If you're creating an experience that's supposed to be about the struggle of mankind and a post-apocalyptic wasteland and how people have to scrounge together to make it through and life is tough and uncaring. But it becomes a power fantasy because of how easy the game is. Then it's like, well, you're kind of shooting yourself in your foot narratively, aren't you? And also the whole game journalist, this game has to have this difficulty. They would have had an easy win that was totally agreeable if they just said, you know what, games in general, there should be easy games. There should be easy things in games so that people can get into the hobby without feeling discouraged and overwhelmed because we were all there at one point with our first game and we sucked balls and we were terrible. But we, you know, we got encouragement. We played it with friends. We were able to get some positive feedback and then look at us now. I think his argument would actually work better if he was trying to make that this should only have one difficulty argument. But the focus on easy modes is, it seems like every point he's making is very weak because it's like, why? Why do you care? Well, he showed the menu of the difficulty select of it, this is just for doing the story and then he's bitching about it's too easy. It's for people who just want to get the story. He's like, yeah, that's why that mode specifically is there. It just seems like trying to hide what it is. Was that CJ? Go ahead, CJ. Just saying it seems like unnecessary gatekeeping. Like, why is this a bad thing? Well, yeah, this is where it's fine. There's definitely that, but I think the overall picture he's painting is the that interest, which I don't even buy, by the way. Like I said, I'd love to have a source from the original God of War slash Resident Evil developers at the time. Like, my goodness, we are going to make the combat easier on easy, but we will not be changing those puzzles because we want people to be able to have to work somewhat through the game. I don't believe that they actually had that thought as we've been over, but he believes now with modern philosophies with the interest of getting everyone through the game on easy, that means you have to remove aspects that simply can't be in the game because they would be hard on easy. But that's not true. You can make puzzles easy on easy. They just don't have those same puzzles you were looking for. When you don't have enemy encounters on the walls you're climbing in 2018, it's not because we have to remove this, otherwise people on easy will never be able to do it. It's like, they could just remove them on easy. So they're obviously not in for other reasons. It's not for saving the people on easy mode. That is an insane conspiracy. Yeah. Like I said, get me a citation of the original developers saying we will never change puzzle difficulty on difficulty options because that would make it too easy for easy players. No way. I don't buy it. I think they just didn't change the puzzle difficulty. Yeah, I think yeah, almost certainly. Yeah. You're storytelling and I know this because like I've pointed out in my other two videos on God of War, easy mode is literally called Give Me a Story. So they are games that have given me a story that what you would typically describe as ultra gamey games. We approve this well. Well, this is part of the narrative. This is part of the story, which is that look, they're so interested in telling their story that they're not interested in making a video game. Well, there are games with story mode and easy mode. Sometimes it's specifically very much designated to be the very, very, very easy one. Sometimes not. I just don't have a problem. No, this is telling. All right. This is telling the fact that they would have given me a story. It's telling of their priorities. Oh, no. Even though they have all this that's given me God of War, which isn't telling of their priorities. Yeah, it's like especially because even in the names of what the difficulty is called, the player is like, this is this is basically the player saying, choose your dialogue. Well, I suppose what I find funny. I knew this was the case as well. Deus Ex, the new Deus Ex games because obviously the old one just has like easy, medium, hard. But the new ones have give me a story as one of the like difficulty settings. But then I also have give me Deus Ex. It's like, dude, those are gamey games. All right. So I don't even know why you would bring this up as a point because it says tell me a story or give me a story. It means that they're not interested in making a game that's like mechanically robust. I just don't get like if you're booting it up next to let's say Dean Takahashi and he's like, oh, give me a story sweet. And then you're like, give me a story. Like it doesn't fucking matter. Whatever he's going to play through it and you're going to play through it on whatever you want. Well, the difference will be that Dean Takahashi will Dean Takahashi will play the game on super easy and then he'll write a review for it because he's a fucking game. Yeah, but that's that's the whole game journalism industry problem. That's not that's go away. Yeah, it would be funny if they had a mode that just said give me game. Journalism. Before the embargo, you know how like for the difficulties it's like an in-doom where they have a different expression or like, yeah, yeah, where his face is all busted up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Journalism is just giving him a pat on the head. Just like, yeah, yeah. I was just thinking that I think on the easiest one, it puts your character in a like a baby outfit. And it's called something like don't hurt me or something. Well, couldn't one argue give me the story is arguably like a tongue-in-cheek sort of the devs being like, yeah, you'll be fine or about it. You could have you could but I would probably lean more towards it. It's just like, oh, yeah, you're only here for the story. You're not interested in the video game part of this video game. Well, they specifically have it contrasted with the other three names. Do you want a story, a balanced experience, a challenge or God of War? Well, and let's not forget if they're not it might not be they're not interested. It might be they are that shit at video games, which by the way, some people are registered already. Watch Gary play the Witcher. If he was to play God of War, you do not want him on anything other than give me a story. He's going to have trouble. Yes, that's okay. That's okay. I'm not saying it's not okay. It's okay. Like this people out there are going to video games. That's fine. Well, yeah. So it's the thing though. Isn't it? Do you think do you think that having put like B.J. in the in the just like looking like a clown I think it's funny. You're solid. Yeah, that's just the chicken hat. Well, I heard of it. I didn't I think it's a great game. Having like the easy difficulty be putting him like with a pacifier and like a little bit. Yeah. Deliberately patronizing. I kind of wish they'd bring that back. It discourages you from jumping right to that one. Let's not forget. Maybe try the standard difficulty. Was it quake? I can't remember what game it was. If you quit out, it says like, are you actually like going to be a coward? Are you running away? Like that sort of thing? Yeah. I want to go to sleep and it's like coward. I'm tired. I remember it was something that was fun and Crash Bandicoot was whenever you got a game over Cortex would be like, oh, give it up. Huh? Yeah. And then we're like, oh, yeah, is that you? Were you done? You got to run away. You got to cry a little goblin junior. It's funny. It is great and funny and fine with me. Yeah, I do wish we had more of that in games. James send it to me. There it is. Yeah. That's good. Oh, can I play daddy? Oh, don't hurt me, daddy. Damn it. Maybe that's the original Wolfenstein. I don't know. Maybe my memories fucked. Yeah. Wolfenstein, I think. Yeah, that was a new order. Did that as well? Good memes. Right. Yeah, I like it. They're making the design of their game. Yeah, that game looks not good based on that. I know. It looks very lame Wolfenstein. It's not like I like I totally understand the frustration too. I mean, like I'm a bit I have a deep appreciation of the souls games. I fucking suck at those games. But like the only reason I know dark souls from start to finish is because like I watched my friends play who are really good at it. They'll play like randomizers and shit. And but I still wouldn't make an argument for like, give me an easy mode because I understand what it's trying to do. It's like you're fashioning an intimidating experience and atmosphere. I understand that you're not. A lot of dark souls players would tell you there is an easy mode built in. It's the there are mechanics you can take advantage of or farming or leveling the battle changes how difficult the game is. You know what I mean? They would tell you to avoid these things. If you want to put like, you know, so level ones like the heart or one of the hardest things you can do while a lot of people will be like, I just want to play the game dude. And it's like, yeah, but I like that as as a conversation, you know, the idea of soft difficulty because again, that Crash Bandicoot video I made the the crates, you know, going for getting all of the crates is essentially what I mean. You can do that if you want, but this will be harder. It's like a way of introducing soft difficulty or a difficulty setting without you thinking of it that way. It's just optional challenges, options that you can pursue to make your experience harder or easier, which can be interesting in terms of, you know, game design, sort of philosophy and yeah. Yeah, it's definitely something to discuss. There's I mean the infamous example that's in my head right now is Apex Legend is actually a game. The only one I know of where you get a pretty substantial advantage by playing on a controller because of that game's extremely generous aim assist and recoil station. Oh yeah, like all the pros and everything use a controller. Oh man, I've only ever played it on a mouse and keyboard. Yeah, it's it's legitimately like crazy how strong the controller is. I've never seen it like that in any other game, but that's why it comes to my mind as an example. So actually, I played it on PS4. Never mind. That was a lie. I don't remember being that forgiving though, unless they've changed it. It's it's it's very, very strong. Oh, it is. I mean those things that you can do in the Souls games. I mean, I appreciate that, but it probably still wouldn't help me. I suck that bad. Like, I mean, my friend is telling me, like, you know, if you pick this character and you have this build, you can probably make it a lot easier on yourself. But for me, I suck so bad that they're for your so marginal. It's just like it doesn't even matter. Like I'm just well, Elden Ring. I don't know how it is now, but the fucking Tia clone mimic. Yeah, I was like, I was like summoning another player to just do the game for you. Minuteer is pretty great in the game, but you can get you can get carried by summons in Elden Ring pretty hard. Well, yeah, that's the one thing that saved a lot of soul games. That let me play through Elden Ring and enjoy it was the ability to like summon people to help you with the boss and no, you know, no offense in play in any way, shape or form. But like me and Mattel when playing a Souls or Souls like it was the first time is like summons are off limits. You're not allowed. Yeah, right. It's a completely different game at that point, which is fine. It makes it way easier, but like I need that personally. Yeah. That's kind of what I'm getting out of like the aversion to having an easy mode for Dark Souls because it would like ruin it or ever. It's like a lot of it's funny how a lot of Dark Souls experts would tell you is like, we've already got it. It's in there. You can find it if you really want it. Mm hmm. Right. Lee called give me a story. So they designed their game in a way to ask nothing of the player to present no consequences to anything so that anyone can play it and also you can have a game that has very deep narrative consequences. Joel, or doesn't matter. Oh, okay. Doesn't matter enough. The effect of that is that on higher difficulties, there's no other challenging aspect of the game. Apart from the combat, there's nothing hard for the combat. That's like the game. You're most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. That is like nothing challenging about it except for the combat. What a statement, which is that's like a that's like a mean thing that people say is a joke. It's like, yeah, apart from the combat, it's pretty, you know, apart from the combat, it's pretty easy. But that's like Halo 2 on legendary lasso, also, you know, legendary all skulls on. That's pretty, you know, as long as you don't talk about the combat. Well, the World of War adventure, the only difficult thing is the combat apart from the shooting, Call of Duty is a breeze. Yeah, I'm telling you, definitely a game where the only challenges combat and seafood really because it's just a straight up eat them up from beginning to end. But God of War is not that there's tons of puzzles and stuff in exploration. You have to find things to progress. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what he showed us of what is missing was the fucking underworld segment, which everyone hates and then platforming in a game that was not built for platforming. Okay, we lose those. What else do we have? Just so I know. And he's like, oh, you know, on the walls when you're climbing there's random enemies that you get rid of by spouting square. It's like, I don't see how this makes the game significantly better. I don't understand. What else is there? Like, oh, well, there's puzzles like there's still puzzles in God of War 2018 that you can more than take advantage of. Secondly, isn't it Moosbleheim? You get like challenges like you've got to knock all the enemies off the arena as opposed to kill them. Yeah. Yeah. How is that? That's the whole optional challenge area which people were quite happy with if I remember. I know I was but like, I can't remember how people thought about it. Fun stuff. And then you have gets up from it. Is it Nifelheim? The the part where you have to do the echoes and stuff. What am I talking about? In God of War 2018, it's the you have to it's like a challenge series of rooms. You have to get unlocks and stuff and you get better armors, more resistances. Do you want to talk about someone in chat can help me out? Oh, yeah, Nifelheim and it was the air toxic. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, OK. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like an arcade sort of thing. It's hard to get the the armors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got you. Moosbleheim and Nifelheim essentially combined to be Valhalla in the way who designed different. Yeah. And it's like, hey, here's someone challenged. If he said to us like, yeah, combat, like, well, yeah. Of course, what do you mean? Why do you say it like that? Like they were all the challenges. Yeah. Yeah, this art gallery would be just a room without all these paintings everywhere. Yeah, like you're describing something that's the core fundamental real part of the experience a lot of like, yeah, it's almost tautological. Age with or think about they watered down the entire experience for the general audience and then offered up a bullshit extreme difficulty to satisfy the he couldn't be an extreme difficulty. That's true. There it is. It's the ugly truth. There it is. Don't put that in the video. But this this feels like when the actual point comes out, you think the hardest difficulty in God of War 2018 is bullshit. Okay. All right. And you're blaming people who play on easy for it. What? Well, so the I mean, the funny thing about it is like, you know, we talked about it a little bit earlier, but we can go through all of the nuances of all the levels and layers of combat in God of War that make you much more effective depending on how you spend all of your resources. It's all there and it gets harder and harder. The higher the difficulty is that works. Give me the God of War to primarily is based around you understanding the mechanics that are specifically in that mode. And then once you understand them, it becomes significantly easier. That should be the kind of thing he respects about a difficulty mode. Well, so there are games that you go ahead and just gonna say that he said it was bullshit. So we're going to find out why soon enough. I'm sure I guess, but like, yeah, this is pretty bad. There are games that I've got. So I 1,080 hours in Vermintide 2 and I only play on cataclysm, the hardest difficulty that they had to add post launch. That's the only difficulty to play. I play because of you because you're so good at the game. Yeah, it is. I'm so fucking good at this game. The only way I could feel like I'm being challenged is playing a cataclysm. And I know that if someone who wasn't as good played that mode, they'd say, this is bullshit. It's like, well, a lot of us just you have to practice a lot. You got to practice that game. You probably need a good team. Well, you have to know the mechanics. How to use your tools, how to use your tools, how to use your weapons, how to, you know, can fuck you up. Oh, absolutely. And can fuck you up. It's one of those. Yeah. It's like many games like God of War probably is I couldn't play it on the hardest mode until I practiced, until I learned the mechanics and I learned the things and what all the buttons do and everything like that is like, don't be upset that you couldn't beat this one game and it's highest difficulty instead, call it bullshit. I was I have a feeling that I like the Valkyries as examples of how because like you would have they all border on like rhythm game stuff or I like I always compare the guitar hero. My favorite probably in both games was Ragnarok with the the king of the what are they called like the champion dudes, the zombie champions. Yeah, I know what you mean. Berserker, that's it. Berserker, that's all right. I think the last one I did on that I had quite a few tries and like the absolute feeling of fucking relief and achievement of beating it at the end because you you know, you learn everything you learn where his weaknesses and openings are where you would need to avoid how to each each attack you have to figure out how to avoid and then you know, just all the stuff of like which rage do you want to use and when and you can counterbalance like impacts of damage by activating rage. Obviously all the armor sets all of the relics all of the the different spirit powers you have the company you have being a Treyas and Freya and all the moves they have in upgrades different shields like it's when you play it all and I think me and Mal did that on the one below hardest difficulty, right? I think so. Yeah, give me a challenge. I think so. Knowing that like it's like, yeah, this could be harder. I could in the obvious ways I'm allowed to make less mistakes every time. Yes, just like I can make 150 then 25 and then the hardest difficulty is like you can make 10 you know, like four going to get real hard to nail it but once you do it's going to feel amazing and ultimately a lot of difficulty difficulty management is about that and I just like if he's going to say it's bullshit just because it's you know, there's a difference between enemy sponges and learning how to play the game. Yeah. Yeah. And those those extra boss fights they're mostly pretty well made. I think there's a couple of attacks was like, oh, that's kind of hard to actually make out because of the camera most of the time. There's definitely complications with that. Yeah, because they go behind you and you can't go around that quickly the way they attack or something. I wouldn't need to replay it to specifically tell you what but yeah, those are good boss fights. Like they're really good. Well, I was going to say they're really satisfying to be as you already said. They replace the Valkyries because you've done the Valkyries in 2018. So like what do we do now? And the Berserkers once you discover that's what they are. It's like they're fucking fun. They're very very straightforward sort of and so the Valkyries to an extent like the first Valkyrie kill feels pretty good and then they just keep getting harder and harder and harder and then you're going to fight. It's a secret right at the end of 2018. Yes, yep. She's fucking very hard. They never know if the laser so as long as you have that you can mess around. I was so I was so I was so so sad when I got the laser right around. Yeah, practically practically useless. Hardcore. I like that she has a romance with Mamiir. Yeah. That was good stuff. They gave her a whole bunch of time too. Because some people don't care about any other aspect of gameplay as long as there's a super hard combat option. It doesn't matter if there's nothing else to think about. All that matters is that they get their asses beat. Oh, he's he's upset. He's salty. He's off the rails now. Like this isn't he's salty. Big mad. He's very mad about is getting your ass beat. If all you do is get beat and killed. That's all the higher difficult things are. I like sure things, Rob. I don't even know what to say. I'm not even sure what he's arguing here. Like the lack of any he's not he's whining. He's whining. This is the whining segment. He's saying like, yeah, you're going to tell me. Oh, it's fine because you can choose harder difficulties. So it doesn't matter if there's an easy one. Yeah. Well, your your hard difficulty is bullshit. And you only like it because you get killed a lot. But there's two difficulties between that. You get you. What about those? Give me challenges. A good, good run as veteran players. Me and Mel had trouble on it, you know? Yeah, especially when you just learned the game. Do I remember when I went into Valhalla and forgot all the mechanics? Oh, my God. If you watch those streams, I'm like actually like an old man trying to press with buttons. I but then by the time you get to the end of my runs, I'm doing everything perfectly. Yes, I'm back in it. But oh, I know which ones which attacks are good. No, it's good. Yeah, I just seems like a pretty pretty extreme like we go through. Oh, easy is just too easy. Like they just just go through it every scrub. And then but the last one that's bullshit. So yeah, I mean, that kind of difficulty to give me God war difficulty. I always would refer to that as a bragging rights difficulty. You know, like it's it's not the one you needed to finish. It was the one that if you really wanted to challenge yourself and be able to tell your friends, yo, buddy, I be this on give me God of war, whatever it is, then that's the one you play. Give me God of war though. I think is actually pretty reasonable as far as difficulty goes. And once you learn the mechanics, it's it's quite good. And it actually kind of improves the experience of of combat in the game, the the combat sandbox of this game, the idea of the combat puzzle. And I don't know. I think I think being pissed that you can't beat the bragging rights difficulty is not something you should ever do because it's like well, it's part of part of maturing as a gamer and as a parallel maturing of the person is as you get older realizing, you know what? I don't have to be excellent at every game. I don't have to be the best at every game. Maybe there are some games when I don't do well. Yeah, maybe I don't have to blame. Maybe I don't have to make these these cringe cope videos about like easy modes because I didn't have what it took or I didn't care enough or I wasn't skilled enough to beat God of war on the hard mode or whatever, because this is a huge self report and I don't know you part of maturing is being able to say, you know what? I'm not going to be great at everything. I think we all have our skills and talents and I'm not going to be good at every game because I'm I'm I think I'm really damn good at video games, but there's some games I'm shit at and I know it like just the way it is. And I feel like he could have done this so much better like advice for future. Don't start out with your thesis of like fuck your hard difficulty. You're a bitch who loves being killed. You're like don't you can make maybe at the end of the video. Don't don't start that section like that. That's the you're going to put off loads of people who are like, oh, because you could obviously target like the thing I expect him to go for would be the the spongy enemies. Something like that. Yeah, you can go for that. I would most hard difficulties. You can target that in almost all of games because that's probably going to be there. It's just a matter of what strategies are there to counter that. And he can give me God of War. The most obvious one is your gear level because in more so than in any other difficulty and give me God of War mode because the enemies have such high levels themselves, you're really incentivized to engage with the gear system and not ignore it. We're in the other games. You can kind of say, oh, I like Kratos looking like he did in the old game. So I'm just going to put him in this. Yeah, one single strap armor and then be done with it. And you don't really have to care all that much. But give me God of War. It's like, you know, if they have a purple health bar, it's a real problem. Yeah, this this bizarre 40 chat. Ironically, this mental platforming he's doing to blame the lack of platforming in God of War 2018 for why he couldn't beat the hard mode. It's like it's pretty insane. Inquishable from parody. Yeah, I didn't say this is a this is a huge is a massive gold plated L to all of the the Mayo defenders in chat from early on. Also, I'm boy soldiers highlight Reverend synthetic man was like, this is too hard that he realized he had XP that he could spend and that he was like, this is too easy. It's a synthetic man is a real true gamer. True game with money. Yeah, he's yeah, he's a he's a real game. Yeah, I'm curious if he's going to mention the the, you know, all the other difficulties you can choose. We'll see. I'm not that hard. Well, I wonder if his frustration would be alleviated at all at all. If the most extreme mode wasn't called God of War. Maybe and or and just called like impossible or extreme mode or something worse. Just like if you're playing this, this is like the fucking crazy mode. Like if you want to really have a give yourself a tough time difficulty. But if if you call it God of War, it just feels like, well, I guess all the other ones are like the pussy version. Even like the second to hardest one. You know what if they switch those? What if they switch the two top ones? What if it was? Give me God of War was the one above normal and give me a challenge was the the hardest difficulty. I think that might have actually alleviated that. Well, so that's down to interpretation, right? Because when I see give me God of War, it's like you are the God of War. You can't be fucking beaten. That's that's why you choose this difficulty, right? You're that good. You know, every enemy back to front, you know how to beat them. If you loaded up Halo and the difficulty was called give me Halo, then I'm like, so this is the way it's supposed to be played. I get that. Serious mode. Right. So anything but it isn't the true Halo experience or in this case, God of War, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, it's funny to say this, but literally just how they listed, right? You give me a story and then the other end is giving me God of War. People are like, Oh, that's the hardest one. Like I mean, yeah, especially with the description. Yeah. And they have they have literal. Yeah, descriptions. Yeah, that that helps a bit. I think John got it though. I think it's just he's give me God of War as a taunt. Little bit. This is just and this is him coping and being bad at video games, which is fine. But it doesn't matter if there's nothing else to think about. All that matters is that they get their asses beat. It's shifting over to Resident Evil Village. This design philosophy started becoming apparent to me around the time of the castle stage. I stated that the castle is the worst map in the entire Resident Evil series. I mean, I don't know. I think I would disagree. I mean, it's got some pretty fucking awful design flaws in it. I don't remember not liking it. It's one of them. Yeah, it's got some pretty awful design elements. He might be correct. I mean, I'd have to really stop and think. There's definitely areas from four and five that I would maybe not for there's so many. There's so many Resident Evil spinoffs, like gun survivor and Operation Raccoon City, umbrella core and like I'm just like, are you really saying it's worse than any of those like straightforward shooter levels? Or is it just a numbered game? It's because I assume he might mean like mainline Resident Evil games. Well, even those have three very distinct styles. The only other one that's like this is Resident Evil 7. Maybe. I mean, he might be just referring I when I when he said that I think he was probably referring to just mainline entries, but maybe not either way. It doesn't it doesn't really make a difference to say that it's the worst level in all of Resident Evil, whether it's all of the mainline or those plus the extras and outliers is worse than the on rails. It is strong five, but it's a strong thing either way. But maybe I mean, maybe I think you could probably make an argument for it, even with my limited knowledge. Not fair. I think if you think the castles well-designed, I don't know. I don't know if I go that far. I just most of what I would hit are being worst Resident Evil area ever. I think that's going a bit too harsh on it. I just like big castle area mansiony place. That's probably all I remember in the positive. The negative I'm pretty sure I remember weird pathways and doors that were difficult to remember. And so you can get like awkward places on the minimap in like, no, you can't get through that way. You're like, oh, I fucking got to go around. Well, I like the wine cellar. I mean, he's next to the he's next to the safe house where Dimitres. Oh, yeah, that was that was like that's such an insane blunder of game design. Yeah, I don't know if I can think of one that's like worse in terms of like a story and immersion breaking elements in a video game. She's literally reincarnation villain in the whole series. Well, I was just going to say is the issue here less about the level design and more about the AI boundaries and the fact that it's so easily circumvented. There's a yeah throughout the entire game. It's very apparent in the castle because of just the play area is very it's a human made interior. It's often very rigid and structured. So when enemies will just refuse to cross an invisible line to come and get you and they just saunter back to where they were. Yeah, it's like, man, but to make it very clear is shit. You can drag her up to the door of the safe room. I'm pretty sure like her AI gets that confused and Bob's all the time. Yeah, it's part of what I'm trying to say is like they didn't really sort it. They didn't make it so that the second you're in this general area that she fucks off and stays fucked off for at least a minute right so that you can you can't fuck with it like that. But they didn't. They were like fuck it, whatever. Yeah, they were like you have to come up with some reason why Dimitres will not follow you into that door, even though she wants to kill you more than anything else. But no, you're in the safe room and that's good that you just can't. She just won't go in there and get you. Mr. X and Resident Evil 2 does the same thing with the save rooms, right? Yeah, I like that. Follow you in. Yeah. But I guess people just accept like, okay, this is a save room. I get that enemies just well, I think if that was the only thing that was happening in the castle, it'd be fine. But there's a lot and that's one of the things I remember is just being able to. Yeah, I'd have to I'd have to think looking back at Resident Evil 4 if they had a save room. That was I think there might have been a couple places where if you could, you could lead enemies to the safe room. Well, Mendez is the only stalker in Resident Evil 4. I guess maybe that boss you fight in the hanging shipping container thing too. He stalks you for a bit. Yeah. And there's no safe room in the shipping container or in the underground before you encounter it. Yeah, they designed it so that the safe room you get before you walk in, then the doors closed, then he bangs on it, right? Like, you know, oh God, there's no safe room after that, like, because I feel like that's better. You don't want the safe room in the room with the thing that could chase you. It could work. You can get moments like, oh God, I just made it. Oh, thank goodness. But like, at the same time, it can cause really awkward moments. Well, a lot of the other Resident Evil games would have that first person black background view of the door opening and going through and there was something about that little loading screen that made the idea of that monster just getting lost and forgetting where you went a bit easier to take. But I think now that you can leave the door open and see her. It's it's weird with modern games. It's a good point. Yeah, you just don't have an excuse in modern games, especially when it can be so obvious like Dimitres at the first safe house and the castle. It's so obvious. She will she'll just stand there and stare at you and you could do you could shoot her with bullets at infinite bullets if you've unlocked it and she will not just get you. Um, like no attempt it seems was made on trying to make it good in the whole game is full of this. The entire game front to back is full of these issues where enemies just will not open. I just I can't go there because, you know, I just can't. I'm not allowed to cross that invisible line. They just can't do it. Oh, he ran up the stairs. Well, oh, well, he got away. Oh, well. And I'll clarify what I meant by that. Sure, of course, there are other maps that are technically worse. There's like 25 games, but it's not even debatable that the first map is the most important in a Resident Evil game. The mansion, the police department, El Pueblo, the raccoon city streets, the Baker estate. These starting maps are the most intricate, the most exploration. That is a really interesting thing to say. We are and they are the most intricate. Well, but wait, go even further back tonight. They said they are the most important because they're the most intricate. The most one is like, well, wait, wait, wait. That's just not that's not true. If we have a game is the worst mansion. Well, because he's about to he's almost summarized why I have such issue with Resident Evil 7's like almost continuity of design. You start out in the Baker estate, as he said, which is actually pretty solid. A lot of the design in there. All right. They clearly fucking gave up the further along in the game you go or they ran out of time, which is much more likely easily. And if you say, yeah, but they've got to make sure the first place is the good place. I'd be like, why wouldn't we want all of it good? What are you? What you're essentially saying is these games need to get more and more simple as they go, which think you which seems counterintuitive. Well, but I don't like you said most important over time. Isn't it important to make the whole game good rather than make sure the first encounter place is the good. He's saying the reason why he's picking on the castle in Resident Evil Village so hard. It's not the worst design technically, but it's the first big hub world. And if you fail that, you know, that's that's worse than designing a place is worse. Um, that's obviously there should be. There should be consistent good quality throughout. The only reason that you would have the first area be the best is just like constraints and limitations and having to focus in particular places. It would be. Well, if we only have a pragmatic choice, we should. Yeah, yeah. If we only have limited time and resources and everything, and this has got to be out by a certain time. We want to make sure to have like the first part of the game be really, really good in particular because, you know, we want him to get to the other parts. A lot of people got to the last part and it was like super shit. I wouldn't be like, well, at least the castle was good. So it's fine. Yeah, this kind of one. Yeah, like if if you could only make one of three good, sure, I could understand making the first one good. But why are we strong? Yeah, make them all good though. Just do that. I mean, I would almost argue that in a lot of cases, the ending is probably your better thing to focus on because. People will remember how something is more than if they get that far. The reality, yeah, the reality of video gaming is that a lot of people won't finish the game. Yeah, no. So the amount of people who, you know, play Resident Evil 4's Village versus play Resident Evil 4's Island is going to be there going to be two different numbers. Yeah, that's fair. The Baker Estate. These starting maps are the most intricate, the most exploration and puzzle focused and the most interesting to spend time in. They're when you're learning to manage your inventory space, retracing your steps to solve a puzzle, figuring out how to avoid enemies to save ammo. The, a lot of these are just random things that are thrown in along with stuff like they are the most interesting. I think he's crossing wires on analysis here. This is starting to become a bit nonsensical. The mansion in Resident Evil 8 is bad because like the worst because it's bad at the worst time to be bad. That seems to be the argument. And you're like, okay, develop that. Why is it bad? Is it bad to be bad at that time? It's like, because it's supposed to be good when it's the beginning. Implying of course that it's not supposed to be later on. It's like, this is very strange. It's okay if the end is shit. Like, no, no. The vast majority of the Yakuza games like start pretty slow, but then end very strong. So I mean, like, I don't know. I think it just depends on what your goals are in the story and what people are playing your game for too, right? Because if your game is primarily narrative based, then the ending to your story is probably going to be one of the most important parts of it. Whereas if it's all gameplay based, very flashy and targeting a large audience, having a good opening might hook people in the way that you would want to. But I think you probably have both the ending and the beginning be strong. It's just like he's penalizing it more than anything else because the fact that it was early instead of just strictly talking about the design of it, which I think is way more important. Because he's like, you know, in the early sections, you're learning how to play the game and you're going to be given a lot more puzzles over this or that. And it's like, I'm guessing he's going to say it fails at those things. However, there are places in other resneal games that are worse than it. It's just that those weren't at the beginning, so it's not as bad. It's a very strange. It feels like two different arguments at the same time because I kind of agree with him. You need to make a strong start, but I don't agree that a thing should be considered, you know, like if someone said the first act of this movie is really bad, but the second and third are way worse, but the first act is actually the worst because that's the first thing people see. I feel like that's. I mean, yeah, this is mixing up. Yeah, it feels like a lot of stuff is getting mixed up. I mean, the argument to make here might be the special consideration should be paid to the first segment of a game because it should lean into teaching the players the mechanics or leaning into some of those things. And by the end, it's safe to assume that the player is aware of and has at least some level of mastery over the mechanics. But to say stuff like it's the first bit has to be the most intricate, which is almost counterintuitive. And it's it's the best or something like that. It's bizarre. I got a war broke his brain. I mean, if anything, you want the end to be more intricate because then you serve. Well, yeah, the player can take advantage of their the skills. The challenge goes up. This is the player progress. That is actually you typically find the complexity, you know, because it's like welcome ice enemy, welcome fire enemy and then halfway through the game. Oh, my God, a fire and ice enemy at the same time. And at the end of the game, it's like this guy switches between ice and fire. There's a Nintendo Switch game called Astral Chain that is a really solid final boss fight where you really have to you have to learn essentially use every lesson that you've learned over the course of the game, otherwise you're never going to be able to beat it. And then I found that pretty interesting as well. I mean, good combat. Rest of the game can suck magic. Yeah, the investigation stuff isn't too great and it runs like absolute trash because it's a Switch exclusive Metroid Prime. Right. The first phase of Metroid Prime itself requires all kinds of different all the weapons you've used. And then the second phase requires different visors that you've developed over the game as well. Like that's cool. As opposed to other enemies throughout the game, the first set, you just shoot them, the second set, shoot them, but also with rockets. Third set, you have to like use environmental things and also use other weapons. Yeah, that's just how games usually do it. So this is a strange argument. I'm not sure what else to do with God of War as well. Oh, it's you'd feel bamboozled if you got a resident evil game and the first area was intricate and big and lots of stuff to explore and things to find. And then once you got done with that section and moved to the rest of the sections, it was way more linear. We mean like Resident Evil 7. To find way. The fucking section on the ship where you're just shooting gooey monsters and then the cave. That was like what happened, guys? They phoned that shit so much. They were like, because yeah, I like I remember liking the bigger sale of the demo. I was like, you know what? I'm sold. This game is cool. And then I was like, wow, the first four hours for pretty decent. First time I was in VR, I really did. I love the old cabin. That was great. It felt really creepy. But yeah, the ship at the end was so lame. Such a lame way to end it all. Yeah, the ship wasn't even the end. That's the thing. Yes, it's tough to it's it's tough to oh, yeah. Yeah, see? Yeah, it's all mine. You see, though. Go to Wolfsville. I forgot it leads back to the mansion overall. Yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah, you get dumped there at the end of the cut scene where you shoot a monster and then oh, yeah. Enemies to save ammo. Field shows these first maps make a huge impression. They are not just visually engaging. They are mentally engaging and full of systems that push you into smart play, whether it be the more classic survival horror style or the action shooter style. When you arrive at the castle over an hour after the game, I don't see why that would stop at mid or end, though. Yeah, not increase. It's it's I like to be engaged all through my game. This isn't what his video is about, but those passing comments I'd be like, God, I have so much to say about that. But okay, well, village is also very shootery. Like there's there's tons of combat in village. Well, he's about to I think he's about to say like village field. Fucking mediocre. So yeah, village doesn't stimulate your brain. It's just like God of War, new God of War, where it just takes your ass. Like that's because that's all you want is to get your ass. Well, you want it started and you have very shooty and then you get to like the monster baby part and she's just like, what are we doing now? Don't anything else. In regard to this video, what was even the segue that brought us back to Resident Evil? He just he just started another sentence or a reason. The difficulty in God of War I think he's about to show behind the scenes like dev team thing and they're all working happily on an amazing game and then Kratos comes in and kills him. He's like, you see, don't give me feelings. Make it soy. Make it. Make it soy. After the game has started and hasn't really done anything, this map needed to impress and do its fucking job and it doesn't fall. All right. What is his issue with the cat? I'm curious what his issue of a castle is. It needed to do its fucking job. It was like visually it looks really good. But like everything is there is looks good visually. Generally, is there a moment in a video game that you wouldn't say that's the case? Like, yeah, it's all supposed to do its fucking. What do you mean the castle is supposed to do its fucking job? I don't know what it is. But it's a castle. Castles need to do their fucking job. You just need to be particularly angry about. Yeah, show me on the dollar where the castle touched you. Show me on the soy with the greatest touch. And it doesn't for all the reasons I went into in my village video. Okay. And then beyond the chaos for not watching it. I guess it's not relevant. Give me the read homework. Could you give me the readers digest version here for those of us who are watching this video? I was just saying you just put very big emphasis on this. And I was like, yeah, all the things that I said in the other video. He made it clear. He said it didn't do its fucking job. Okay, I'm sorry. Which is important because it's the castle of the beginning. So it's supposed to do that. But I'm just saying if you emphasize a thing very hard and then you say it's in it. It's in it. He did. Where is the secret of Marius Jump? Damn you. Like give it back. The castle in Resident Evil 4 is in the middle. Yeah, but he's just I don't think it matters that it's a castle as opposed to the opening main hub. I think that's all he's saying. Right. But that's kind of an interesting comparison though, because a lot of people pick between the village and the castle being their favorite area in Resident Evil 4. You know, yeah, like it's not strictly the village. No, not everyone says the village is absolutely the best part of the whole game. Most people agree though that the village or the castle are the better ones compared to the island. Yeah. Yeah. I would. Yeah. And it's mostly for Vibe reasons. It's Vibe and I less prefer dealing with everybody who has guns in that game. But I'm okay with it. Like I like the challenge of the different enemy because the castle plays with it in ways that I really enjoy. His crossbows more than guns. Yeah, but then the castle you have like I'd have to play it again to be more specific because I think the game itself is fucking masterpiece. It's beyond. Yeah, you have there's people in the there's more really it's just crossbows at the island. You have one tough enemy with the minigun. You have some of them have RPGs. I think. Yeah, but they have the big bright lasers on them at least. So and that the end there's those guys and pirates. So yeah, it just for me, it's just the vibe in the aesthetic just feel like they're different. I I always like the castle the most it's got that especially in the remake one of the things I really like about the remake is it leads hard into the evil cult vibe which I really it was fucking cool like the fog and then the different areas for like sacrifices or chanting and cult shit like you said. Yeah, I also will never not love the village as well. It's yeah, I really love the village. It's really I'm inclined to agree though. It is more vibes. Yeah. Well, I think it's just fine. It's just vibes. One of the issues with the island is it substantially less creepy all of a sudden. It's just like, OK, we're just kind of doing action. It was more like an exception of the regenerators. I guess. Yeah, the regenerators where they get into more like sci-fi, sciencey horror lab. But that segment there was really good. But that segment's great. Yeah, it does. I mean, I agree. The village has a really cool eerie vibe. Oh, yes. Well, and you have the aspect of I think that's you you're least powerful almost or at least it feels that way. Right. You've got your pistol and that's it. Yeah, I feel it's like you're most sort of fish out of water. You don't you're in an unfamiliar place and the scenario is unfamiliar. Whereas by the end you you've come to basically understand what's happening. God, hitting those guys on the heart of difficulty. I think moving to the castle moving to the castle from the village sort of doubles up on the creepiness where you have the cult factor into it. But then you get to the village and it's like a step down and it's just okay. Well, I guess I'll just shoot all the guys. The island. Yeah, win the game. Yeah, that's what I mean. The cult enemies in the castle are a nice touch. This was an issue as well in Resident Evil 5 where you had the African village sort of segment. Then you had the actually the African tribal levels, which I thought I think those are my favorite that they're really cool. Like aesthetically very interesting and they play well into the ferocity of you know, the warrior stuff and then you get to the island and it's shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh God, do you remember we were having playing that? It's a fun co-op game until you get to that point and then it's like, OK, like memes are over. This is actually not fun. Yeah, they have like fucking five guys you old machine gunning and it's like you keep falling over when you get tagged by it and it's like it's fun. Yeah, yeah. Once you're yeah, once you get out of the underground temple and then you move into that last act it's like anyway. And then beyond the castle when you get to explore the world of village you see the similarities to the structure of God of War where there's just to be clear. Explore always has massive quotations around it from beginning to end in Resident Evil Village. Let's be very clear. Let's see. I want to know why he thinks God of War is responsible for this. Mm hmm. Well, God of War has legitimate open world segments. Yeah, he needs to explain. Let's see. I want to know why he wants to know. OK, gosh. It's flow like lean on but. Hello. That's a lot of video games. I'm afraid my end of things cut out completely. So I didn't hear any of him say any of that. I'm just glad. I love to hear it. Is everything fine? OK, stream. Oh, yeah. I would love to hear him. Oh, thank goodness. OK, everything's good. Maybe you just had a stroke. It's fine. I'm just hoping that problem I have my internet supposed to be fixed. All right. I'm just hoping everything. OK. And now you've got like yes, do whatever you think. I'm going to make a video about it soon. Then this ridiculous difficulty I'm playing life on. It's absurd. All of that are that fame. She played life on story mode. Yeah, you know, that thousand yards stair painting. Yeah. OK, OK, story path to follow for anyone who just wait. They're not go far back enough. I would go back a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. OK, fuck it. Yeah, and then beyond the castle when you get to explore the world of village, you see the similarities to the structure of God of War where there is one set story path to follow for anyone who just wants to fly through the game. And then there's a bunch of optional exploration that yields treasures and upgrades. I mean, like shit, tons of games just in general. Yeah, like I was shocked. Like massive anybody who wants to fly through the game is like, all right, cool. Nice loaded language there. I don't know. This is not something God of War 2018 invented. This is many games where they have the story path and then the optional objectives. That's pretty not a lot of people and side missions. A lot of people might argue that that's the fucking peak way of designing because it accounts for the two types of players if you would just split them that way. Right. Right. Super Mario Brothers has side quests. Oh, yeah. God of War ruin Super Mario Brothers. Son of a bitch. How could God of War do this? I don't know what to do with this. This is silly. You'll just go to war like the option of things. They also have like tons of story and he's probably high along and he has to qualify this. Right. Yeah. Upgrades both games flow like this. And if the game is going to play this way, it needs other systems to lean on, but they aren't present. I pause it that for the same reason such as what? Yeah. Tell me what these systems are. Yeah. What are these systems? Because I got nothing with this. At least sometimes I can sort of understand where he's coming from, but this one I'm really lost because this is he's describing so many video. We're talking, you know, thousands of video games that are very popular have this style. I don't know what he means. Yeah. I pause it that for the same reasons behind God of War's changes, the creative leads in charge of village. No, he's not going to provide it. I think I think we're just moving on to a different point. What can we do with that? Games are hyper linear. You can't do anything with that. All he's done is describe something many games do, which is that they have a main story path and then optional missions. And then he said, yeah, but you need systems to support it. Anyway, moving on. What the fuck is that? Okay, I guess we'll carry on. I guess so. Of war's changes, the creative leads in charge of village made their changes. The inventory system, which used to be something you had to consider when picking up new items, at least to some degree, has been expanded to such a size that you can play the entire game and never once have to consider what you can carry. How's that go to war's fault? Well, before we get into that, even I'm already taking issue with the notion of like, so this system, what you're presenting here, it has nothing to do with it's literally that to me feels more just like a design balance fail. Like the you can just stack your whole thing up. But you know, like that just seems like bad game design in general, not of any trend of any kind, unless of course they were like, we don't want to make it difficult for anybody at all in any way, shape or form. Like, oh yeah, I guess. Yeah, that would that's just I think a bad choice because it's a form of item management. I just don't see how this plays into the broader points he's making. Yeah, this is just item management balancing. We talked about before that it's like, why didn't you just do the same like in Resident Evil 4 because there was kind of perfect. Yeah, yeah, the way to do it. I feel like even bringing this up is kind of runs contrary to his point because it seemed like his broad point was they have to remove these kinds of features in order to create a game where the only thing you have to deal with this combat, whereas here you pointed out, well, no, there was a system present that is meant to create the challenge of inventory management, but that it didn't work. So this doesn't even bolster the point. Like I wouldn't bring this up as being God of War's fault. If it was God of War's fault, then there wouldn't even be an inventory management system. You would just be able to have all of the stuff that you want. To me, it's just if proven to be true that you can just do whatever the hell you want. Your inventory is never stressed in any way shape or form, which I don't quite remember being that way, but I'll buy it for now. And I would still argue that's just like a development issue on the game design balance, which happens all over the place. Like we could go over all the arguments for like, should the fucking chainsaw guys have as much health as they should in any given difficulty? Maybe, maybe not get into all of it. I just, yeah, I need to see how this connects. And never once... What's his point? I just got back. I'd use the loop. I will roller further back. You can have a look. There are changes. The inventory system, which used to be something you had to consider when picking up new items, at least to some degree, has been expanded to such a size that you can play the entire game and never once have to consider what you can carry. I just can't over... Um, this is a complex and deep point. So I don't think the... One of the reasons why the Attache case... Is it Attache or Attache? Attache. What was Attache? Attache. One of the reasons that the Attache grid system is really neat is because it gives you a level of control and in a way, personalization as well as prioritization of upgrades because you have to go to multiple places. His language specifically only mentioned that the inventory's gotten so big you don't have to worry about where you place things. So technically speaking, there's nothing to do with the Attache case necessarily. I mean, technically right. It could just literally be a carry... It could be a weight limit system. Yeah, he's just saying it's too many spaces. You do have... You have to upgrade it through the game to get that many spaces, though. Of course, but... This is the problem though. I need to know what difficulty he's talking about and I need to know what he's playing this like. Is he playing it as an expert? In which case, you probably won't be able to carry everything because you'll have too much to spend. Part of the point as well is that if you're having a really tough time with the game then it's not going to matter how big your inventory is. Your inventory could literally be limitless and it's everything that you pick up you can keep. If you're expending that at a rate that is not efficient, it doesn't matter. What it matters is how much you have. The size of the kit limits how much you can have at any one given point. And that only is a limitation based on how good you're doing, not how bad you're doing. If anything, it's... The upgrades for your inventory are raising the ceiling for how much you're allowed to essentially reward your own skill by carrying extra stuff. And the grid system from... We can use Resident Evil 5 as an example. One of the interesting elements of the shift from Resident Evil 4's attache case system to Resident Evil 5's much, much more simplistic nine-slot system is that it would change the priority you might want to take for upgrades, like capacity. It might change what kinds of stuff you carry, what kinds of stuff you don't carry. It might impact the guns that you take. If every gun is one slot, and I know that the starter pistol in Resident Evil 5 can be upgraded to hold 100 rounds, which it can, that has serious, like, item implications. You now have essentially freed up a spot because now your gun itself and in that slot can hold, like, what, two slots worth of pistol rounds to where you don't even have to carry around pistol rounds anymore because it's all in the gun. The gun can hold 100. So increasing the capacity becomes probably more important from that logistic sense than it did in the game before. It does come with its own, you know, positives and negatives, even though I far prefer the attache case system. So, yeah, this is a bizarre point that needs a lot of elaboration. I actually think that the nine blocks versus attache, like, you can achieve some of the things you were talking about in both or fail it in both, as in, like, as a designer. If you don't get the balances right, you can make it so that you're never worrying because there's enough exploits in terms of certain capacities for guns or whatever versus you can nail it in both because of the ways that you can take advantage of knowing what things work where and what things to drop and all that sort of stuff. Sure, we could see that here. He's got, he's got three pistols in his inventory system because he has a lot of space. If he didn't have enough room to bring all of this stuff with him, he might have to drop one on the spot. And what that could mean is, you know, incidentally that, oh, before I sell this gun, I might as well use all the ammo in it because this game doesn't have an unload mechanic. So before I sell it, I'm going to go and use it a bit longer, use my 17 shots and the number one slot pistol before I, you know, use my new one because, well, I mean, I've got the room for it. I can't just drop it. I can't unload the gun. So there you go. And that changes the way that you might play the game and cause you to backtrack once you use your shots. And then you go back to the shop owner. I mean, a lot of this stuff, it's like a lot of, yeah. I think you'll agree with this, Rags. What an ugly inventory. Yeah, what the fuck, man? What are you doing? What are you doing? Guns go down the left. And I... Oh my God. What is this? Yeah, you have the... I love how he just throwed you completely off. We were saying that. And also like, yeah, one, two, three. Jesus Christ, the inventory is big. One, two, three, four. You have six guns with you. Fuck me. Well, this is the problem. I haven't played Village in so long. I don't even remember what I thought of the inventory balancing. Yeah, but what you were playing at, did you think, man, this reminds me a lot of God of War 28. Yes, yes. I did that all the time. Oh, man. This is, this is a fucking man. This is his video in like a visual form right now. It's like cleaning your room. The shit's strewn around everywhere. It needs to read 12 rules for life. Yes. Clean your inventory. Chapter two is clean your inventory. All your guns need to be organized based on the left-hand side. So that like in the original Resident Evil 4, if you wanted to swap weapons, you had to do it through opening them in, you know, opening the inventory, scrolling to the one you want, double tapping A. And so you would have all of your guns going down the left-hand side so that you would use the least amount of, you know, button presses to do it. And then it would be quite quick because the menu's quick. But this is like... And then you line up everything so you can easily see how much you have of everything. Yeah, one of his pistols and his magnum and his mines aren't even hotkeyed to a number. So if you wanted to equip them, if you wanted to pull out that magnum, he couldn't just do it with a button press. He'd have to go to his inventory and do it. So he'd have to scroll all the way to the right, and then go down. Also his grenade launcher is unloaded even though he has a grenade launcher around, which is fine. Leave him alone, rags. Leave him alone, my God. He's busted his ass. He's playing games for ages. I don't remember if there's different types of... I can't remember either. My mind is trying to cleanse itself of that game. Overstate how detrimental the removal of inventory management is to a Resident Evil title. Unless you're going to pack your game full of Creative Combat Encounters to make up for it like RE4. Hang on. Hang on. Let's analyze that English there, okay? Because I take issue. Mental, the removal of inventory management is to a Resident Evil title. How detrimental the removal of inventory management is to a Resident Evil game? Unless you're going to pack your game full of Creative Combat Encounters. So Resident Evil 4 is okay, though, because it has good combat encounters. It's okay that it doesn't have item management. But it does. Don't give him that much credit. He said Creative Combat Encounters. That has nothing to do with quality. I'm sorry, is he unaware that Resident Evil 4 is one of the most famously known inventory management games of all time? Yes. Do you know why everyone bitched and moaned rightfully so when a Resident Evil 5 they said, nah, you get nine slots. Take them or leave them. No. What's that? The egg? Yeah, it takes up as much space as a grenade launcher. What's the problem with that? It's a very big egg. Or it's a very small grenade launcher. The part that stresses me out in Resident Evil 4 every time is when I get all the fish. I'm like, oh no. I can't fit it all in the big, big, big case. I have to sell them immediately. No, I don't want to. Would you rather eat one massive egg or a dozen tiny grenade launchers? Like I said, he said Creative Combat Encounters. You can have Creative Combat Encounters that can be terrible. You can have Creative Combat Encounters that are good. You can have Creative Combat Encounters that might in no way impact the inventory. For instance, the railway segment, right? When you're on the rails and you're shooting everybody in both games, or at least I think in the second one, you get unlimited ammo for that. They give you all the pistol rounds that you need. As far as I know, you have unlimited ammo during that segment. So that's a creative encounter that literally doesn't impact your inventory in any way. Why is he showing this section for creative encounter? Because they're walking towards them on a bridge. Oh. Because I know what this segment is. This is the segment that you get right after you kill your first Las Plagas. And it's night time now. This is... Yeah, you got to move the boxes with the water. Yeah, this is after the... Right, and you get through the cave. Yeah, this is after the Del Lago fight, the waterfall, yeah. Little necklace or something, I don't know. Yeah, you need to go... Because there's a river in front of that and you have to unlock it and all the guys come for you. But this is not creative, I would say. Yeah, you have to drop down the crates. Yeah, it's not very creative. It's fine, it plays well. Like I would argue the encounter in this portion is like famously creative. There's so many different things you can do. Yeah, well-designed play area. Yeah. Gonna pack your game full of creative combat encounters to make up for it like RE4. There are also... I can't believe he's just said in his video that there's like... The item management is removed from RE4 but at least there's unique creative content. Like I can't... Wow, you know what? And that's said casually. It's not something that's the focus to explain to us why the item management is non-existent in RE4. Baller, you know the segment in the castle in the original where there's literally a free rocket launcher in that glass case? Yeah. And then if you're really good at the game you get to that point and you're like, fuck, I have no room for this. And then it's... I know why it's there. I know the devs put that in there because they're like, yep, if you're good at the game you got to make a choice. Do you leave behind all of that stuff to get a rocket launcher? Or do you leave the rocket launcher and keep all that stuff? Because those fuckers knew. Well, the rocket launcher is a free boss kill. So if you can, if you can take it to kill Vertigo, which is if I have a grenade launcher, I always use it for Vertigo. It's a choice to make. I guess it depends on how comfortable you feel with everything. I don't think I've ever picked it. I always keep my ammo and stuff, but yeah, no, fair enough. Yeah, it depends on what you have. It's interesting because if you get there and you're making it there by the skin of your teeth, it is a godsend that you get a free rocket launcher, which normally is like 20,000 pesetas. But if you're already doing really well, it's basically the game saying, yeah, well, too bad. You're doing really good. You don't need it, do you? It's a lot less appealing now because your inventory is full. So it's kind of like a weird... It's just interesting how they kind of set that up It's a help for the people who aren't doing good, but not as much of a help to people who are doing really good. No puzzles. To say that the inventory management has been removed in Resident Evil 4 and onward is definitely an overstatement. It's insane. You have to explain that. I can understand it being a lot less painful than the inventory system in, say, like the Resident Evil remake for Gamecubes. I remember sitting in the save room going, Okay, I got six spaces here. That's Chris. What do I take with me? Just sitting there for like 10 minutes. What can I combine? Can I combine three herbs? There's like, oh, shit. It's like, oh, damn it. It's like, or even worse, do you combine those two green herbs to make room knowing that if you find a red herb, you can't combine it with the two greens you did earlier? So fine game. Also, you still need to get your quest items or puzzle items. You need to take those with you as well. And you're like, oh, shit. I'm going to run to this one. I don't actually know which one I need, which one I need next. So do I take both of them? Or do I only get that one? Take a chance and maybe have to walk all the way back and then count them for zombies. Yeah, whereas with like Resident Evil 4, I feel like the worst at guess is just like, okay, well, I just won't pick up this ammo then or I'll throw away one of my flash grenades and then I can fit this thing in and then, okay. Yeah, well, it's worthy to consider. No offense to anybody, but the better you are at the game, the more the inventory management becomes a problem because the more things you have saved, the more things you have ready and like I said, encountering the fish or as he said, the RPG. And then of course, it's just the way that you organize it for the sake of, you know, access and everything. It's a luxury purchase. If you get through, if you get to the castle and you're not doing that good, everything that the game has given you, you are using and you're just like having a tough time, but you're making it through. You're doing it and you have the option to get that attache case upgrade and you're like, I've never come close to filling up my inventory. I don't need to buy this case. Instead, I will use that money on, oh, look, the riot gun has just become available or something like that. And so you spend your money on upgrades of new weapons, which is something you actually need instead of the luxury purchase that is your inventory size. Yeah, yeah. There are also no puzzles that have you thinking about how pieces could be used to solve some puzzle you saw an hour ago and now you have to find your way back there. Okay. I wasn't listening to that. Well, so he's saying that that's not present in, I guess, village or maybe some other ones as well, but the nature of you pick up an item and then you realize it's useful an hour later. Okay. I'm sorry, I mean, I don't know. I need him to say more before I can agree or disengage, just like that is a fact. Yeah, I don't know. Is that supposed to be good or bad or? Does that happen where you pick up an item in a Resident Evil game and then hours later, you're like, oh, this was useful, this thing I've been carrying around this whole time. Like normally it tells you what it does, right? Well, usually you pick up something that's like, oh, this thing looks weird, but it also looks like it fits into something. Yeah. And also if it's a quest item, you cannot drop it. It won't let you. Yeah. So that's so that you just softlock yourself. I don't know if he's trying to appeal to the, I don't know, Metroidvania style aspect of it. Yeah, I'm not sure. There are no tough early game. I don't know, Chris, just what he was talking about, but like it's definitely the case where like you'll pick up a key item and be like, I don't know what this is for. And then like hours later, you'll find a door where it's like, oh, that's what that other thing that I picked up hours ago fits into. But like you probably at that point put it into a storage box. So you have to like go back to the box and get it. This would open up a whole set of new conversations about whether or not that's good. Is it good to have items in games that you go, I have no idea what this is. And then hours later you go, oh, cool, it's for this. I don't know, it's a bit more complicated. Go and now you have to find your way back. There are no tough early game crafting decisions to be made. There's no deciding whether to kill an enemy or leave him because you'll have to come back here later because you never have to return anywhere in village. There's no fear of entering a dangerous situation with no health because your health recharges. Don't you do a bit of backtracking in the village itself? So the problem here is that as you guys definitely know, we're not fans of the village. We have our own criticisms of it that are extensive. Yeah, I do not like that game. The problem here is that what he's highlighting is like the... This is weird. If you say this game has backtracking, this game doesn't, we know which one's better. He's like, no, we don't. No, we don't. They did it. It's like, okay, well, this game, you have to actually manage your bullets and stuff. In this game, you don't really. You can just spend them. It's like, you could be describing fucking anything right now. I know what we know is describing village. What I'm saying is like you need to be more specific with how it's detrimental to the systems if the game is designed with it. We could go into that. We don't like village, but he needs to do that. He needs to tell us why this is where it is. Yeah, because backtracking can be good and it can be bad. Remember in the first Resident Evil 4, you go through the village three times and every time it's different, especially the last part when it's raining and now the plagues will spawn. You have Ashley with you. It's like, it's a way different encounter. There's literally different enemies and there's traps now and you're going through different places. It doesn't take long, but you do revisit that area. If they build the game around these changes, which by the way is famously known, Resident Evil 4, there are videos out there. I think that claim Resident Evil 4 destroyed the Resident Evil franchise, right? Because it was so, people enjoyed it so much. It changed the format forever almost. Yeah. You can make the argument, of course, but what I'm suggesting is that in concept, if someone said Resident Evil 4 is coming, it's going to have this, this, this, this and it's not going to have this, this, this, this. You can make this video. You can be like, you see what they've done? Old Resident Evil had this. New Resident Evil doesn't. It's like, yeah, Resident Evil 4 is possibly one of the most beloved Resident Evil games. So clearly we need to be more specific. They removed all aspects of player accountability and decision making for the benefit of a general non-resident evil demographic of players. Hoping the presentation would be so impressive that people wouldn't notice. How do you deal with many Resident Evil fans saying this game was awesome? Because we had that a lot. Yeah, we did. I'd be curious what he would say to them. I mean, it made me feel like the series would get beat up a lot. The thing is, Village was not, like, broken from the ground up in terms of concepts. All this could have worked. Everything was out of balance and the fundamental game shooting mechanics. We had loads to complain about that. Is... Yeah, the story was bad. The characters were bad. There was a lot of bad gameplay decisions in terms of just navigating the environments. You'd have those forks in the road where one of them would lead to the cutscene that you couldn't get back from and the other would lead to upgrades and goodies to make your character better and you didn't know which one was which. It just, like, basic video game fuckups like that were throughout the whole game. The reason I bring it up is if you're going to make this statement, this isn't made for Resident Evil fans. This is made to appeal to the mainstream. So what do you do with a Resident Evil fan that says this is a worthy sequel and has played like all of them? They must be mistaken, I guess. I wouldn't say I disliked this game, but it's my least favorite out of all. I can't remember if I picked it level below 7. I put it above 7. I haven't played 7, so... I actually kind of preferred 7 better than... I think I preferred at least 7 as well, yeah. I think 7 is... I think that this game had more going for it than 7 did. It felt like they took 7 and added a bit more, but 7 was like... I'm inclined to agree even though I would say 8 is hollow, right? It's like, look at all this stuff we have here. Whoa, cool, and then you look inside and it's just empty. Oh yeah, 8 is definitely at best an empty game, but in actuality, it's a bad game. Yeah. And then they slapped... Don, a bullshit extreme difficulty to satisfy the hardcore. Oh, we're back here again. Is that the connection of God of War? Does he not like hard video games, period? Hang on, hang on. Do all the Resident Evil's have really hard difficulties, right? Yeah, they're not bullshit, because they challenge you on inventory management and puzzles. This is only in the... Yeah, but you're telling me that. He's not telling me that. Even though Resident Evil 4 has the same attaché case system as 8 does. Well, as he said, ranks, 8 does not have item management. It simply has creative encounters. Okay. That's like they did with God of War, so that if anybody complains about how this game has been watered down and it's too basic, try hards who have no understanding of what a Resident Evil game is. Oh my God, dude. Make an argument. Don't just fucking saw you out. Make an argument. Did he stream these games at the high difficulties and he failed and his chat made fun of him? And look, this is his way of getting back at him? Like, what a pathetic lad. Just stop crying. Like, just make the arguments. Like, you can do it. You can say, like, look at this encounter in God of War Ragnarok, where on, I don't know, neutral difficulty, it's relatively balanced. You have to do this, that and the other. And then on the hardest difficulty, you just have to do the same thing a hundred times in a row to eventually kill the thing. Like, you couldn't make these arguments, but he's just instead gone like, shut up, bitch. You don't understand Resident Evil design if you think this is good. Yeah, try. I guess it is only a 10 minute video, but I feel like you could have said more. He is can respond by saying, oh, yeah, we'll play it on the extreme difficulty and see how easy it is when it's not about the combat difficulty and enemy sponginess and taking lots of damage. Finally, this is something like, why didn't why is the video about that? Yeah. Why have you just thrown that on right at the end being like, it's not about energy sponges? It's like, no, of course, but they wouldn't argue that is either. Would they? They wouldn't say, oh, it's good because enemies have loads of health. Well, I mean, maybe earlier on when he was setting the premise that he made all his points in his previous video, is that what he's referring to? No, I think even if he's making a video here that relies on those points, you got to make him again. If that's the case. Of course. You can't just be like, oh, well, he's talking about his issues with the castle is what he was in the other video as far as I remember. But even still, you need to tell us if that's the crux of the point. Oh, I wouldn't argue with that. I just think that's what happened here because of course, if he'd said everything in God of War sucks on the house difficulty because it's just a matter of everything's super healthy, it would be time to to be like, well, if you knew how to use the combat system, it becomes a hell of a lot easier. That's just and it's not on. It's hard not to make these arguments when we saw it in real time with the synthetic man, like not knowing how to work it being like too hard. You know, if we saw examples of him doing really well and still having to deal with ridiculously healthy enemies constantly or something, it's like, I feel like you'd have a much better standing instead. And remember, what did he say was missing in God of War? The enemies hitting you on the walls, the fact that there's like no box puzzle with archers shooting at you or that there's no, you know, walking across beams while like big old knives coming at you. As if if those things were in God of War 2018, which they could have been by the way, there's no reason for them not to be other than the fact that the devs did not think those were valuable challenges for the player to put in, which I'm inclined to agree with a lot of them. If you know what I mean? Like the underworld whole segment, I would have fucking lost that. I'd have been like, listen, I know you probably worked for a while on this, but it is nothing but pain. Like people fucking hate playing this. It's like, yeah, but if you know what you're doing, it's like, I don't know if you know what you're doing. A lot of people won't get to the point where they will know what they are doing. You think he thinks if those things were introduced in the new God of War games, it would be better? He was explicit. He said the change of hard to easy in the older games, man, they still had to beat those puzzles. But in the new games, they don't because they're not present because the philosophy is we've got to make it so that the average person can get through, even though, had they put them in, had they been difficult, even more difficult, let's say, as we pointed out on an easy version of that difficulty, you can make all the puzzles way easier, right? More than enough. And if you don't think so, that's just a lack of imagination on your part as a game dev or a game analyzer. Pretty much. So yeah, I think he's these arguments broken at several points. Like, I don't think it represents reality and I don't think in theory it even matches because we know how to make puzzles easier and harder. I still want to know how that is all God of War's fault. I mean, I think it's just catchy title as soon as reason he's put it in because ultimately the point would just be that mainstream gaming has led to a decrease in sort of challenge or creative challenge, which there's an argument to be made, but it ain't this. I mean, yeah, it implies that when they made Resident Evil Village, they were like, man, look at God of War. We need to do that. And bosses with a million hit points. None of that stuff fixes the massive gameplay issues these games have. And when I talk about developers not caring, this is what I'm talking about. I'm not saying the artists don't care or the programmers or the QA department and all those people who work really hard and feel proud of their work. I'm talking about the people at the top who make the games this way because this stuff doesn't happen by accident. You end up with a game devoid of any interesting gameplay systems because you choose not to include them because you just don't agree. He thinks that they platforming all those platforming segments like in God of War, those were the interesting game. Not the combat. Not the combat. Which is what a fucking alien pretending to be a human says. I just don't get why he was saying, let's pretend it did have it. And he was like, okay, so God of War original on the hardest difficulty when you put it down to easy, good God, wouldn't his possession be? They destroyed the combat. They made it so easy you can just fucking tap square. But luckily, thank God, they kept the puzzles as hard as they were. I was thinking the same thing, but the other way around, which is surely this problem could still exist with those games, regardless of whether they have platforming or puzzles that if you had a higher difficulty, couldn't it easily fall into the same trap of having bullet spongy enemies? Oh, you're going a different route than I was. Oh, well, I'm just, I'm just saying like talking about how Resident Evil has inventory management or how God of War old games had platforming and puzzles is like unrelated to whether or not including higher difficulty levels would still have bullet spongy enemies or just bullshit, you know, bullshit encounters or whatever he said. It doesn't, they're totally independent. And also if he's bitching and whining because he's not good enough at video games. So if God of War 2018 had those platforming segments, it wouldn't impact at all his complaint that it's just a bullshit difficulty where you just die a lot. It's literally wouldn't change anything. By the way, if this problem is the combat, he needs to highlight the mechanics. This isn't a relevant, it isn't a relevant observation and it was what led the video. And if we could be a little spicy, what if someone made the video like, so Resident Evil Village drops and they say, oh, fuck, what an amazing game loved it. And they talk about all the things like, oh, the characters are so amazing and different and the landscapes and stuff. And I was so into Ethan Winters. Oh my God, the combat just top notch and I was bouncing out, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. And then Resident Evil One like original drops and they play it and they go, this is just indicative of the modern sludge of video games. They couldn't even be bothered to have like a full combat system with all kinds of enemies. Instead, you've got like very few enemies. You have to awkwardly try and either avoid or kill with your one bullet because they couldn't be asked to create actual challenges. They instead just hamper you in resources completely. And then they drop so like, oh, do you want to grab the sack of flour? That might be useful in five hours. And do you know what I mean? Is it's like this, this is indicative of modern gaming development where they've gotten so lazy they just put shit in your way. Do you remember some of the scorn puzzles rags that were like boring as hell? Oh, I think in that entire game there was only like two puzzles I actually liked and the rest were just like a boring chore and a waste of time. I guess the point I'm making is when you go this broad, you could just make any narrative and it matches like whatever. Basically, yeah. If you pretend like you're not, you know, full of hindsight over which one was first or second and you got to be specific about the mechanics or you never know how you can, you know, sort of describe things to paint a picture. If they just like, if God of War 2018 or Ragnarok, they're like, we listened to you. We put it a puzzle and it's just, you have to play like, you have like 10 stones and you've got to put them on the right slots and they're all different shapes but they match the indentations and Kratos walks when he picks them up and drags them toward it. You'd just be like, this is the worst fucking thing ever. And he's like, yeah, but it's a puzzle. Yeah, it's a nice puzzle. Yeah. Okay, man. And like, if you put one in the wrong slot and they look similar, it's a game over and you have to redo it. Yeah, the floor breaks. Perfection. Perfection. As long as there's no bullet spongy, bolchered enemies for you fucking tryhards. I can't believe that a man who I imagine is very aware of gaming matter and has reviewed a whole bunch of games has simultaneously in this video said, we need the puzzles back in God of War while citing the fucking Hades missions which everyone hates and that he described Resident Evil 4 as not having item management. Can't believe those two things are said. He's saying that we should have the puzzles back in God of War because of the Attache case in Resident Evil 8. Oh, yeah. It's like connecting these, connecting these bizarre different points through these at what can best be described as spectral connections. They're just certain things that you make statements on that you should be ready for everyone to be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, why would you say that? I mean, isn't it hard to make these videos to like impart your knowledge on to other people and tell you how you feel and why you feel it? Like, don't you want to explain how you feel instead of just saying, yeah, there's fine because of the dead and things? I'm going to put it out there. Make it 11 minute video instead of 10. Make it 12. 15. What? Oh, stop. Stop. You can't talk that long about stuff. How long? Gamer wisdom. 15. You take that back. Well, like 10 hours, which if I made a video and got all ragged and all, you can guarantee it would be at least that. Oh, there are as much as I love, you know, we always talk about Resident Evil 4, especially when we talk about other Resident Evil games. And Resident Evil 4 is just a good piece of knowledge to have when it comes to game design because it does so many things well. But you could you could talk for a long time about, you know, Resident Evil 4's failures or its problems and its issues. And in order to do that, you kind of owe it to people to be specific as to why things should be the way they are. You don't want to just throw this stuff out there. Like, do you really want to bitch about the Ateche AK system and just like just kind of throw that out there and then say it doesn't promote item management? Like, do you really want to just do that? You know, I feel like you should feel like you need to work harder. A little bit. A little bit. Don't care about your game having engaging gameplay. You care way more about your game being accessible to more people who didn't even like the other games anyway. And fuck that. I've seen this happen to God of War and Resident Evil at this point. No, fuck off. Man, I love how, like, thin it is. I've seen it happen to God of War and Resident Evil. And now I'm inky. The whole thing is amusing. It's not even like, I love the idea you're telling me. Man, I'm crying and coping the video. Just, you know, like, I'm cracking open fucking God of War in 2005 and then play them all over the years that he's like, you're not really a fan of it. If you like Ragnarok, say, okay, fine. You don't like Resident Evil if you like Village. Yeah, which I think is dumb too. I don't even like Village, but this is silly. I think it's dumb. Village is a shit game. But if you like it is like, you're not less of a Resident Evil fan. You're just contributed to its demise, but you're not less of a Resident Evil fan. Contrary to it's further in that line, right? Because it's running the remakes this and there's some other ones it's making at the same time, right? Like the over shoulder stuff. Do you remember how fucking terrified this game made us for the RE4 remake? Oof, yeah. Wish to be fair, some of the fears were realized. RE4 remake is not as good as we'd like it to be, but it's still pretty fucking amazing, I will say. Yeah, it's very good. I would definitely recommend. I'm saying that if you like the Village DLC, you're part of the problem. It made me realize that the remake team has a better handle on the franchise than the mainline team. Yes, which is just fascinating. You wonder if that's the fact that they return to the older ones when remaking and they're like, oh, look at this. This kind of works really well actually. Good. Right. And I think it's going to infect some other great series soon and it's going to suck. People are just going to be fine with it. They're going to accept this shit all the way till games literally. This reminds me of like, how everyone does the thing like gaming is going to shit, but then you inspect it and you're like, oh, we don't agree at all for why if we were to agree with this day. But if so many people do, it's the same with bobbles. Like, why is bobble full like a pot? There isn't a Muppets movie, man. That's the big problem. They got to get a Muppets movie. Like, wait, what? That's a Muppets. They got to do more references to each movie in each movie. That's the big problem, bro. No, no. The more seasons of Loki, man. That's what's really killing it when you more. He asked them to do nothing. Well, that's a depressing note to end on. Oh, well, the streets of rage. Hope you've ended it anywhere you want. Okay, you wrote it by doing. Yeah, you did it. You put it. I didn't want to make this video at the end of the video. I guess points for effort in terms of waiting this long to say it. I would have liked to sigh at the beginning, but oh, well, good, doesn't it? Why, sorry, rewind, rewind like five seconds. Pressing note to end on. Oh, well, the streets of rage for DLC looks pretty good. Does how was he allowed to? It's a combat game. It only has combat. Yeah. Is there even puzzles in that? I don't know. All right, it's a beat them up. Damn, you can unlock new attacks and abilities for yourself. That's like a project. I mean, streets of rage for is really cool. I just find it funny. Surely that's irreconcilable with the observations that he's made in this video about how what saved these four was platforming and puzzles and navigation. And then he praises a game that is strictly focused on combat. Like this like the like, like what's this icon? Isn't it weird that he has this cool under the mail? I would do it and then he's spending this video bitching about how God of War. It's a Marauder from Marauders from Doom. Doom Eternal. But God of War is too difficult for me. I just don't understand why you couldn't have made a better video. It's stupid. Yeah, I actually feel like I'm going to go out on a limb and say he is capable of making a better video. As in like, I feel like you had better things to say than what you put in there. That was shit. I feel like I could make a better takedown of God of War 20 than that as like a efforts of failing in mainstream video game. It's allowing grandpas to play the game is ridiculous. Keep grandpas out of the game. We need more shitty puzzles. Fuck grandpas. We got one video left, ladies and gentlemen. Oh boy. It's the shortest one. So don't worry, you're on the homestretch now. He said one of them is for for mean potential. This is a old one. It is five minutes and it is the man himself, the myth, the legend. We haven't covered him in a little bit, but you'll know him. I don't know him so well. Okay. Oh, really? This is Oh, no. Oh, you're God. This is what I'm going to be. Oh, my God. Welcome back, Robert. This is his. I wasn't ready for this. This is a very like it's 12 years old or something. His video on Halo combat evolved. Okay. Thing is that you said it's 12 years old and it just it's probably just going to look exactly like you won't tell the difference. Oh, man. Combat. Combat evolved question mark. Is it evolved? Really? This combat does evolved. Hey, welcome to my new show. You know, when the escapists told me they wanted to do another show for them. This is the first of his big picture show. Oh, my great. Okay. We're watching genius. It has to be an avatar. No, is he? He's not evolved at all. I couldn't quite process what was going on, but when they said it could be a show where I just get up on my soapbox and say whatever I want about whatever random nerdy thing is on my mind at the moment. Well, these pop art representations of my fractured psyche spell out my. So it's always been a thing. Yes. Really long sentences. Yes. Yep. Is this another one of his videos where we have to play at 0.5 times speed? I'm hoping we'll get away with it's not talking too fast. It's just these are long sentences, dude. Am I only one to cut that those PFPs are supposed to be representations of his fractured psyche? Yes, that's what he said. I think you are. Okay, that is what he said, but I was distracted by a lot of other stuff. And it all became crystal clear. I am working for crazy people and it's awesome. Okay, now providing my producers don't experience a sudden moment of clarity as to the dark and terrible force they're about to unleash upon the interwebs on the big picture. God, he was always lame, too. You know, I'm getting I'm kind of getting boogie vibes from this. Oh, yeah. Talk about all kinds of stuff. TV, science, food, movies, comics, politics, monkeys, whatever. But because I like to make a big entrance, I'll have you know it. Donkey Kong is not a monkey. He's a gorilla. You wouldn't have thought. Movie will say that make that mistake. You'd think he'd be the one to say the unless he was preparing to just diddy Kong, but he said monkeys, not monkey and gorilla. Maybe he wasn't the one who edited it. And I feel it's important to be a chimpanzee. Isn't he? He's got a tail. Do you know? I guess. Yeah, you're right. Chimpanzees and gorillas do not have tails. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. He's taking a while. He is taking a while, Joe. You're right. But for reference, everyone, we're a fifth of the way through. Considering the length of the video. He's taking a while to get to Halo. Yeah. Kick things off by talking about video games. Oh, these games. All right. So it's no secret in the gaming world that I'm not a big Halo fan, but because some are kept asking, I did go and give Halo reach a shot. I'm still not feeling it. Sorry. Hey, big ups to bungee on all that brilliant characterization on noble team though. The girl soldier is a badass. Well, no, he's being sarcastic. Yeah, Rex. Because I was like, I was about to say they actually do a pretty good job considering, you know, it's Halo. But I was just like, I don't think it's brilliant, but it's good. And he's just like, no, it's shit because the woman is you know, there's clearly character and personality distinction between the two. If you fucking gave a shit. Wow. You just should have over his opinion. Move him up straight. I love him. He's my biggest fan. I'm his biggest fan. Who's the character on noble team who is not a badass? Well, that's that's what I find kind of funny. Look, all right, noble team are very straightforward and kind of shallow. OK, but like you can still characterize them more distinctly than just the bad soldier person. They each have like they do the personality where the team has you've got the stoic leader kind of the snarky tech girl, the gentle giant, you know, those sorts of archetypes, the cheeky sniper. Yeah, there is an element of if you just had a transcript of Halo reach, you could probably do a decent job assigning names to the dialogue lines. There's there's something there. Well, well, well team, though, the girl soldier is a badass. The other badass likes to stand out. The really big guy is actually a big hearted softy. Oh, there you go. All right. Way to break the mold, fellas. But Jesus Christ, I mean, here's the thing. Ironically, Movie Bob is not a proof of the big guy being a gentle giant. I just know they don't break the mold, right? But Movie Bob is because he's a fat guy and he's evil. So there you go. Creative. I know real life soldiers who fit all of those archetypes. Yeah, because they're boring personalities. Fuck those people. Boring, boring, boring. It did lead me to a kind of revelation or at least a notion that had been slowly in my subconscious finally broke out and flowered into a full formed thought. You guys know Movie Bob speculate. What is this revelation he's had? I have no idea. Oh, I guess it's going to sound incredibly racist. Something to do with fascism. Oh, it's probably going to be something along the lines of gamers are dumb because they like this stuff and they don't actually like stories or narratives and games and it's probably going to be it's probably going to be something that started with Combat Evolved. The combat sure hasn't evolved much. Oh, maybe that's why they only called the first one Combat Evolved, even though there's actually quite big differences between the three. What he said. I don't know. That might be. That might be. Oh, but would he say that when he's openly said he's never been a fan of the others, but he finally tried reach. It implies he hasn't played two or three or ODST. More like combat. Bob is not nearly as smart as he think he is. So he might actually say that. Did he play Combat Evolved or only reach? I think he played Combat Evolved and he said it wasn't his thing, but enough people told him to play reach, which is probably like six people. And then he said that then then he did it. I think all he says specifically is I've never been much of a Halo fan. He just shows a copy of Combat Evolved. Well, that's why I don't think he's played two, three or ODST because he said he's not a fan of it. So I'm going to assume he hasn't played this game. I'm not a hundred percent sure he's played any of them. I think he's probably played Combat Evolved because I think he was honest when he was saying it wasn't for him. I let what what is this revelation he's home to? Wait, I got a we got CJ's going with fascism. Rags going with the gamers need like better tastes. Fringy going with mechanics. Actually, I'm going with Fringy. Huh? I'm going with Fringy. I'm on Fringy's team. Too bad. It's not yours. No, yes, I am. No, he can have I can. Yeah, I am going to be on his team. But he likes it or not. No loud metal. What's yours? It has to be different from the first three. Oh, I said it's probably going to sound something that's indistinguishable from a Nazi quote or Hitler quote. Something indistinguishable from a Nazi. He's having a revelation. You got to guess his revelation. I enjoyed playing as the super soldiers fighting the alien menace invading our homeland. It's for big. I mean, it's weird lame jokes. I was more like combat regressed or something. That's mine. Can't do that. Wait, oh, that's the dammit. Well, I say it's close enough to mine. Yeah, I guess so. I believe in you now. You can come up with something. That's the thing. The only thing I had. It's late. Okay. All right. You think about it. I'm not really a mug. I'm not familiar with. Yeah. Well, I was just going to say I'm not really familiar with movie Bob and I'm wondering if he's the type of person to inject some political bullshit into this and that's the reason he doesn't like it or if he's just going to say like, Halo's too straightforward or something. I don't know. The political thing is highly possible. Okay. I don't know. Is that sort of his thing? I mean, he's not an unfair assumption. We'll go with that view. Mark, you got anything? I think he's probably going to say that the combat is too similar to the other games that it doesn't seem like much has changed. That's what Franky said. Yeah. Okay. So I'm on Franky's team then. No, it's gonna work. Yeah, Franky's got three people on his team. You understand. Freaky gets the point. You two get nothing. Maybe this is a trick by Molly. He's seen this. Maybe he set us up with the... I'm not at all trying to save them from joining a team that'll lose at all. No. No, no, no, no, no. I'll give Franky's right. Your ease does in here. He's going to complain that there's not enough platforming in the comfort of all. I'll give him some credit. I'll say that he liked the bloom mechanic and the DMR and thought that having to control your recoil really made the game feel a bit more intense for him and that really got him into it. All right. Actually, I think there actually is a platforming segment at the beginning of the one level where you get the jet pack. Yeah. What's it? Exit? New Alexandria, right? Exodus is an exodus. It is exodus. Yeah. When you meet up with the OSTs, they're actually that's like the middle of the game. Maybe that's why I was getting confused at, but good level. So really good ones. All right. Let us discover this revelation. The Covenant is so much more interesting and diverse visually than the Spartans are. Does anyone else notice this? Now, to be fair, this that way, but the Spartans, there's the they're more diverse than a specific group of individuals. An entire alien alliance comprised of several different races is more diverse than a handful of soldiers who are all humans from the same program who are in the same culture. I mean, he's right. I guess Covenant is more diverse, but that's because it's many, many, many, many, many, many beings. It's literally, yeah, it's a it's a cooperation of multiple species that are united. He's going to make more points on this. Makes sense in context. The Spartans are a military outfit specifically raised and scientifically augmented to be largely faceless, emotionless force of living weapons. They're a militaristic quasi fascist wet dream. Basically. Oh my God. CJ is definitely one, but it might be it might be room for more than one win. That's not fair. You're not allowed to say that movie Bob was going to say fascism. That's not fair. Something to do with fascism, but he is correct. I think I think you. Wow. But to be fair, John said, inject some political bullshit, which I mean, again, that is the same. But that's just less specific to the thing CJ said. Yes. That's why CJ wins that one. Definitely chicken dinner. No, you have no idea just how much CJ has won this one. It's not going to talk about platforming then fascist platforming maybe. How old is this video? I think like I said, it's something like 12 years. Let me find out. Oh, okay. Yeah. 12 years ago. Jesus. Man. When he 11, it came out July. Wow. It's kind of crazy how long movie Bob has been around doing his thing. Yes. I don't know how he's still going, but he's exactly the same. Look down to the fucking fascism claims. He's exactly the same. Just wet dream. I didn't know he was escapist, but escapist is done now. Yeah. So yeah. So he's just on his own now still doing videos. Movie Bob. Yeah. Okay. Living weapons. They're a militaristic quasi-fascist wet dream basically right down to being named after the society that wrote the book on militaristic quasi-fascist wet dreams. This stuff has been the lifeblood of the military sci-fi genre ever since Starship Troopers, except there the Space Marine guys were up against an enemy whose collective insect hive mind makeup made them even more faceless and anti-individualist. So it kind of balanced out. I find it's so interesting. All right. I didn't see the right moment. So the thing is he hasn't been given the update, which is the you can now defend the bugs because they were attacked first. That's the new talking point that doesn't actually line up at all with the film or the director's comments. Yeah. I 100% thought that's where it was going. But there's a review this 12 years ago. So he doesn't know about that. He would have put that in here if it was made today though. 100%. But in Halo, look who fights for the Covenant. Big guys, little guys, creatures from tons of different worlds. Yeah, but do you know why they're doing it? Look what he just did. Yeah. Look, it's the good guy. Yeah, it is an intergalactic theocracy bent on the destruction of our entire civilization, but at least they're diverse. Look how diverse they are. Big guys, little guys. We got those. We got big guys, little guys. No, we don't. We only have guys. Man, I'm guessing he actually doesn't know anything about people. He doesn't. He doesn't know anything about the Covenant. Give him a second. He might know the context and still make these claims. Does he know? Does he know the nature of the grunt service to the continent? Does he know? Let's find out. Guys, little guys, creatures from tons of different worlds in every color of the spectrum. I mean, just look at all these dudes for a minute. It's like reaches being invaded by a Benetton ad from space. In terms of diversity, the Covenant makes the planets here look like the KKK. What the fuck? Well, at least I know it might be controversial, but at least the KKK only wants to destroy one race. Can you ever imagine you'd be in a world where someone would say the Covenant make the planet here's look like the KKK? The Covenant might want to eradicate all of humanity, but at least they're diverse. I was not prepared for this. This is the one apparently CJ was. Holy, this is amazing. It's like this video. It you like I took a while for the video to start, then it just fucking dropped off. People said I should play reach and this is really off. Why are you ready for bed now? I feel like there's got to be someone someone to the escapists cleared this and again wishes and I seriously think they were kind of trolling to be like no, no, let him cook. He must have like a video of someone at escapists like cheating on their wife or something. He's got to have he's got leverage. It's Occam's razor. It dictates that he must have dirt blackmail on escapists for a minute. It's like that's such an extreme comparison to draw that I would usually I would think it's satire like bird thinks about movie Bob where it's just like, okay, I guess this guy has ridiculous opinions. Here we go. But movie Bob, it's like reaches being invaded by a Benetton ad from space in terms of diversity. The Covenant makes the planet ears look like the KKK and of course these are the bad guys. Yes. They're in a war of aggression against our entire species for theocratic reasons. Oh, they are the bad guys. But Rags, they're pretty diverse. That's true. They are pretty diverse. They have big guys and little guys. Benetton at what I don't even know what that is, but I guess I didn't get it either. Is that a weird thing? People like share the insane commentary from different like accounts these days on whatever website. This is one of the stupidest and most insane things I've heard. It was 12 years ago. How did this not get around? Like what the fuck? It's wild. Yes, he's like the KKK. WTF has a question that has multiple answers in this context. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, I know. I know all these different species come from different worlds because they were conquered and converted by the Covenant. So it's mainly diverse because it's essentially a slave. Well, what is that? Oh, movie Bob. Why are they on reach? What are they doing? Why did they hate our faces so much? Why did they hate our faces of humans? Which is of course supposed to remind us in part of another famous multinational slave army that went to war with another bunch of guys. Why? Why? Why? Why? What? What is happening? What is happening? What is happening? What is happening? What is happening? He thinks 300s racist and therefore Halo reaches also. You know the people that escape this for like they two guys like play Halo. They just go, yeah, I like the shooting in it. No, I like the wills of years. Oh, we need to write up something about this. We got a movie Bob guy. He'll probably say something unique. Yeah, I know. I'm telling you. They check out the video and they're like, wow, that's unique. We definitely need to put that out. Okay. People listen to this. It's like, wait, dude, we're getting accidentally brilliant satire from this guy. He just doesn't know it. Lord. Well, most funny is I think it would have been kind of amusing to see if we could have sold this as being a recent video from him. How many people would have believed it? Because of how crap it is, like in terms of, you know, quality. Yeah, never improved in a decade. Nope. I think the troopers take would have surprised me more if it was from last week. Well, the thing is he would if he remade this video would be even worse. Like he would say even more crazy shit nowadays. Oh, yeah, I was actually surprised he brought up Starship troopers in the way that he did because like me, Mark and metal were talking about Starship troopers recently. We were talking about how, you know, the way that movie gets misinterpreted because people see a military that's like remotely elaborate, you know, with its armor designs and the budget that it has or whatever. And people immediately think fascism. And so it's just like if he thinks that of Halo, I'd probably think the same Starship troopers. Well, to be to be fair, Fashem is when defense budget. So well, non-fascism is diversely apparently the military and Starship Troopers leave the military whenever you want. If you want to convince people, you're not a fascist. Make sure to have big guys and little guys and you're on me. Yep. You can do anything. You can get away with anything. You can genocide anybody as long as you have big guys and little guys like someone sees you commit a war crime. You just point to a little guy like that. But like on my team, look, I literally have a guy like salute all the guys with him. That's a little gap over there. Come on. How many people actually play Halo for the context? Think about how this looks when viewed in macro. Good number of people play Halo. Okay, everyone. Story long series of novels. Yeah, I mean, the game is the game. Have a good story. So yeah, a lot of memorable moments and characters. But I mean, okay, Bartons, but come on. How many people actually play Halo for the context? Think about how like, why would you say there's a campaign on Halo? Halo campaigns are well regarded. Yeah, they are played and played over and over with in co-op. Yep. Yeah. Yep. There's plenty of people who have their friends playing Halo co-op at whatever age. I always not like Call of Duty, where there are plenty of people who do not play the campaign and would be surprised to even know it existed. The context. Think about how this looks when viewed in the macro. Militaristic culture visibly pretext on submission of individual self to quasi-fascist collective equals good. They're just trying to not die. They're doing their best to not get wiped out. They might have to, if you're fighting in an existential, you know, war for your existence and you're losing, you're not doing all that good. And so you lean into the defense budget. I don't know if it's fair to call you a fascist at that point. It seems a little mean spirited. It's probably the guy who wants to live in space. Well, he wants to live in space and wipe out all conservatives. Yeah, because the Covenants are in space. Did he want to wipe out as many as seventy, seventy five percent of the population? So he wants this, I guess, organization full of pseudo-fascist. Well, I feel like the population would be a hell of a lot less diverse. We wiped out seventy five percent of it. Just saying. Yeah, Bob would not approve of the elites leaving the Covenant. He'd say he'd call them traitors. They're making it less diverse by leaving. I think he would welcome on you Covenant overlords. He'd be like, well, look like a little guys, big guys, guys with tentacles. It's great. I'm a big guy. Multiple races and species working together to a common goal equals the common goal of destroy humanity. Yes. Also humanity, which has in a different context, multiple races in many different cultures and religions and political orientations. They're all kind of pooling their shit together too, so they don't fucking die. Exactly. The Covenant is working towards a common goal. What goal, movie Bob? What goal would that be? Why would you not apply this to the Germans in the forties? They were all getting together for, you know, just to it's a uniting for a common goal. It's like, what? Yeah, they were. I mean, when the skid. Oh God. We have a swastika in our Halo reach review. Like we got to hear the context. If you loved Halo, you're going to love American history. Yeah, seriously. All equals evil. I mean, when the skinheads and neo-Nazi bigots in general talk down about how diversity is bad and why is the cat and the dog? Is there multiple species working together? I guess. Look, there's a big guy and a little guy. The races. Isn't this usually the basis of their crazy argument that mixed societies or mud races or whatever they call them? What are we talking about? What's happening? They're in your Halo reach video. I just wanted to shoot the aliens. They're trying to kill me, Bob. Have you thought about how devastating they are, though? Like Jesus Christ. What the hell? Video games, man. What happened, Bob? You need to calm down. What is going on? Those are whatever they call them. Ten Davidi's destructive, unclean hordes. Well, pure cultures emphasizing sameness and conformity are superior. Look, I'm not here to accuse Bungie of promoting fascism. Yeah, because I would be really fucking stupid. You're kind of doing that a little bit. You're kind of doing it. You're implying it softly. I wonder what he feels about Dune. I don't know what explode, especially since what we do see of Spartan creation does cast the whole thing in an air of morally ambiguous gray and holy crap. No, no, it's not morally ambiguous. It was a bad thing to do. It's bad. It's yeah, it's not. It's never really. It's never been morally ambiguous, especially when you add on the additional context that they weren't created to stop the Covenant. They were created to stop insurgencies. So the Covenant just came along at the right time for them to be pivoted into that role. There's like a lot to talk about there. It's something something that the show sure as hell isn't particularly interested in doing that much. Games and particularly the novels are very clear that it was not a you're going to take a get to get some renegade points for that one. Wait, wait, can we go back to that? Did his eyes just turn blue? So hold up. You got this movie. Oh, no, just like well-shaved turned into the ultimate human weapon. And you know, it worked because his eyes are blue now. Bungie, that's some pretty scary unintended symbolism there. This is some kind of parody, right? I've never heard this before, right? Guys, we heard of we should have stopped movie Bob 12 years ago. What did we do? I think we left this happening now. Like the signs were already there. Like we failed like as a race. We were a human race. That's not our fault that there's outliers like I don't know. I feel responsible a little bit at least. Remember, Trump stole his Halloween. That's true. That's a big deal because that's the that's the candy. Oh, wait, it's not my only my fault. God damn it. Bar the show is called the big picture after all. And in this case, the big picture isn't the creepy fascist undertones and halo or the rather embarrassingly vast pantheon of Heinlein wannabe space marine stories. It's the fact that this primitive tribalistic idea of the pure and thus noble monoculture under how does he square away the fact that not a human. How does he even square away the fact that humanity then worked with the with the elites in Halo three? Well, I was going to ask humanity fighting on our side in Halo three. Well, he can't call it a monoculture because you literally threw in the first mission of reach. You have to have an interpreter to talk to the locals because you don't know how to do it because they're a different culture from a different part of the planet. It's just how how has he gotten? How did he do this? How did he end up straying this this far into insanity? It's pretty straightforward. The governments are an alliance of aliens that are seeking to exterminate all of humanity and humanity is fighting back. It's pretty straightforward. Yeah, but at least the Covenant are diverse. They got big guys and little guys working for common goal. I love how he still glosses over the fact that the grunts are enslaved. He's like, yeah, I mean, they're enslaved. Yeah, but still though, it literally mentioned the grunt rebellion in Halo two. I'm still hung up on the on the fact that this is not on his own channel, but on the escapist channel. Like they just let that happen. I guess that's the idea that he uploads it. He's like, you're going to watch it before we release it. It's like, I don't think we need to do that. Do we? He's like, nah, I can't like if I hired someone to make a Halo reach review and it was five minutes long and this is what it was. They'd be fired on the spot. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? I might be like, we can release this on April 1st. Just so you know, T culture is still so tragically pervasive in the human imagination that it even crops up here, which is especially ironic since the whole idea of the Covenant is bad guys is supposed to be critical of blind loyalty to arcane belief systems. Why does some part of it is though? It is. Humans are fighting for their lives. Is that he's real is that he realizes that he was misled, misled into doing terrible things based on a lie. It's all humans to most of the time you spent on Earth in the entire series is in Africa. That's right. Psyche still fear the concept of racial or cultural. Wait a second. Wait, what? What did bungee mean with that? You can go to anywhere on Earth and instead they destroyed Africa. Uh-oh. What did what did bungee mean by word cahoots with Capcom when they made I don't know the five. It must have been it was the it was the style at the time to destroy Africa. I ordered to have Master Chief being the guy who's putting his life on the line to save the people of Africa. Yeah, that's really racist. Why save you a bad trope. Oh God. Well, mixing and why is it so ingrained that we hardly even notice it anymore? More importantly, why aren't we more inclined to try noticing it and even getting rid of it? Well, end up like you. My dude. Yeah, I'm having it good because they're diverse. Shut the fuck up. Mm hmm. I'm Bob. That's wild picture. What the fuck is this video? Name. What the hell is that? Work about a at a weird thought of yours. That is not the big picture of anything. What the fuck my Matt is my God. I think I jinxed it guys. My bad. Jesus. I'm up wild. Okay. We all love CJ beer. He played Hillary and then he decided to go on this massive time. Oh man. Geez. He's crazy. Yes, he is. And it did not happen recently. Oh my god. It's hardly possible. He just didn't play the game. They're like, Hey, do a review on this game. We'll pay you for it. And he just apparently they told him you can. You should do another show for us because apparently he did so well with his other shows. It's like you can talk about whatever you want. That was their first, their second mistake. Wow. Then this happens and I guess he's allowed to upgrade uploaded and here we are. It's so funny that he presents. This is being like really thoughtful when his interpretation is hyper superficial. Yeah, and it's not even like a complicated story to grasp. It's pretty straightforward, but it's literally just look at all of the different aliens. They must be the good guys. Yeah, the little guys want to kill us. The big guys want to kill us and the medium guys want to kill us. But that's the least different looks different. God, that was shit. What does he think about the flood? Don't you want to ask? Are they ultra diverse or not diverse at all? They've got to be. Well, you know, I can't predict anything from him. You never know what you're going to know. I don't even know what he would take away from the flood. He'd probably think there was some kind of metaphor for the Jews. He threw the fucking orcs be like, you see this is like, Oh God, don't go there. Not you too. Let it get. He probably has gone there. Well, I guess he was on that well before. What's that? What are the extra credits before they decided to throw that? Yeah, ask for this. And I think they wouldn't even the first people, you know? No, they won't. Well, I find it so funny that movie bobs like format of making videos hasn't improved at all in over a decade. Either in substance or style. How is that even possible to be making stuff consistently for 10 years and for you to not naturally get better at it? You know, even even down to the most basic things of getting a better microphone. How does that not just happen naturally? Never change a running system. But yeah, because it's all been working well for him so far. The saying he goes by is if it's broke, don't fix it. Okay, that's how he is. I was perfect to begin with. What is there left to improve? I mean, he doesn't need to improve his production values. It's profound and mind blowing insight is enough to to see through the end. Well, which of the three videos was your favorite? Why did you show us this to ask you what your favorite was? Oh, I mean, the second one got us off on a lot of really fun video game tangents. So yeah, maybe for that reason, I liked it the most, even though the video was shit, but, you know, I just decided to check the comments. Many people just pointing out that Sergeant Johnson exists. It's a major and prominent character in the games. He just like decides to admit as part of his narrative. I think film Robert's video was the funniest to me. Yeah, I think it was the most unexpected. I mean, the second video was the one that prompted the most interesting conversations, but the video itself was very messy. I guess the first one is the best out of the three. But even then, that one was very messy as well. This has been a mess. It is just all around big destructive mess, which is why I still wanted to check them out. There's some. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. None of the three had a clear thesis. Well, I mean, movie Bob had a clear thesis. I know it's fascist. Yeah, I guess fascist and the Covenant are good guys. Mm hmm. They're going to wave at a flag when they invade. Like, yeah. What? Like, he's just like, then there's their fight charging up their laser. It's like the people on top of the building in independent state. Yeah, independence. That's what I got. I'm all up. It's just bizarre that that's the thesis of a halo reach review. You're a gamer, right? Talking about the mechanics and everything of the game is that's not the big picture. That's the little bitty picture. The big picture is something fascism, something diversity, alien good. I don't know what it is with the escapist because I remember like extra credits really got on my nerves. And now I've learned movie Bob is that extra or is the escapist like if the same company hires movie Bob and extra credits, I have to like question their hiring practices. He's got to have dirt on someone because he's never been popular. He's always had these insane bizarre takes. He's not involved or improved in any way and he always kind of drags their reputation down. And I don't I don't know how he lasted that long. I don't get it. He must have dirt on someone. I hear he's best friends with Lindsay Ellis. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah. Man, that was he's great. Man, that was that was tough for him. Wasn't it? That was I was like a rough sort of alternative events. Yeah, it was for those who don't know it's just Lizzie. I was basically said, leave me alone. He kept messaging him or you kept saying I remember that she was his friend and she was like, I'm not your friend. Stop saying I'm your friend. It's like. He was bad, man. I'm just kind of a way to say like, no, are you listening? I don't like you. I never liked you. Here's the exact moment where his heart breathed. It's the exact moment where he's gone and rinsed it off. I'm pretty sure that wasn't far away from when Quentin got it from Sarah Z. And someone else. I think it was Jenny. It was also Lindsay. Love wasn't it? It was about the same. It was around the same time. Yeah, because because they badly hid his icon. But people wonder if they did it deliberately. Like, well, we didn't leak it. Okay, but it's just into that sleuth. That's how it goes. Yeah, in any case, that wraps the episode. That's the three, the three videos. I feel like you guys need to recover now. I do need to recover physically, mentally, and I think spiritually, but before we go, we shall have a little, little thing about it. You know, what's everyone up to? Why don't we start with CJ? It was wonderful to have chat with you again. So how are you doing these days? What's up? Hello. Oh, God. I think my call just dropped. Oh my goodness. No, I'm doing all right. Working on stuff on and off. Plodding on, as they say. Anything struck your fancy with like new media? Um, well, I got a couple of things in the works I need to do before, but probably going to take a look at madam web now that it's out. Oh, it's good. It's a classic. It's really good. Best movie about paramedics ever. Well, that's, that's going to be a fun one. We enjoyed it. Uh, so many memes. I'd even recommend checking out the marketing. I'm sure you will, but just saving stuff for like months. It's, it's been, it's crazy. Funny, funny movie. Oh, it'll be fun to see whatever. Spring's forth. I'm sure you, you, you've probably got a couple things, but I keep a bit of secret, right? You know, what's going to, what's going to happen? We won't tell anyone. It'll just be, it'll just be between you and us. And we won't tell anybody. No, you have to wait and see. Ooh. Very well. John CJG, what are you up to? Uh, last, are we in the chief that I did was about chief taking his helmet off because that's such a mean issue for a lot of people with the show and everything. And I'm pretty deep into shooting a new machinima series. So yeah, if you want to check my stuff out, John Graham on YouTube. Hell yeah. Um, Marcus, what about who tomorrow? Metal and I will be talking about the film one percent warrior. It's a new Japanese action film that, uh, metal didn't like very much. I liked quite a bit, but I think both of us agree that the ending sucked. That'll be on metal commander channel tomorrow at 11 a.m. Eastern and, um, five German time. Well, yeah, if people don't know, metals for now hosted by the two of these fine gentlemen, indeed. Is it still called metals forage or? Yeah. Okay. Metal box for about blocks. She already had a title. I think it's a good title. It's a marks that he really liked the name. So wow. What a what a cuck what a coid. You know, I'm going to make a video. Call it Mark Scorino. What do you think? God of War ruined Mark the side. M&M's forage. That's like getting married and saying, no, honey, you don't have to change your name. Well, so you got the forge. Are you making any videos yourself? I assume you're streaming games, right? Mr. Mark. Yeah, yeah. I've been playing my way through Final Fantasy 7 rebirth. I think I've got some sort of busy work to do in it, like going around and clearing open world objectives. But I'm getting towards the end of the story. And then I might be playing some dragons dogma after that. And every so often you'll see me playing some hell divers because, you know, the only good bug is a dead bug. You know, I just hope that whatever game you play and there's plenty of puzzles to break up the combat. Hard ones. Oh, yeah. Right. I guess the puzzles and hell divers are the stratagems. We all love that platforming and hell divers. It's quite good. Hey, you can dive off stuff and it looks cool. It does. It's dramatic. Moodle. What about you? Well, as you already heard, metals forge tomorrow on 1% Wario or 1% or you find another both things. But yeah, that's what we're going to talk about. Streaming wise, I'm playing for Dragon's Dogma. I'm probably do like one or two more streams on that and then I'm done with that and move right along to Dragon's Dogma, too, when that comes out. So that should be good fun. Go come, come check that shiz out and yeah, just work in the way on other stuff as well. Oh, yeah. All right, sweet. Well, links to everybody's Flizzoflasm in the description. Rags free. Anything you guys want to mention? Any way you should perform perhaps? No, I don't think I want to mention anything. No, I do not. I don't want to do that. I don't know. No, no, no. I'm going to be reviewing Halo Reach from a political standpoint. I really want to delve into the politics through a feminist lens. Yeah. I've been inspired. Working, editing, you know the deal. Very well. I will say the entirety of the EFAP TV low key season two series is out. Go check out our entire coverage edited by Fringy starring Jedi Brooks as guest and it was it was fun and totally not mind-numbing into the middle. Yeah, if you if you understand what happens in that show after watching this, you're out of luck because nobody knows what happens in that show. I think Mel's been in all of the EFAP TVs except the new one that will she should be arriving, which is I mean, it's already very much. We've been doing Halo because I saw someone ask what's the plan with Halo. I think we mentioned it before, but I could join restate and we've got a team for watching it and reacting to it like creating the EFAP TV episodes. Some of them are, you know, the whole process is it takes a while as you guys saw with low key. So next week Wednesday, you'll be getting your war arc, which is going to be Kingdom of Heaven. Brace yourselves for that one. So ready. Good talk chat. Oh, are you going to have to scrap it? But yeah, the week after that is probably going to be like a gap for for the Wednesday. If you would sort stuff out in the week after that, I believe is when the Halo TV arc will happen. Of course, the show will have ended, but our coverage will have just begun and you'll be watching Descendant of Madness, probably, but also will be setting up an episode to talk about it as a whole with good old E.R. And oh yeah, John, who's right here. I'll be nice and fun. Um, but yes, I was trying to think if there's any other announcements. I'm working on EFAP movies war arc still myself. Try to get it fixed up before Lord of the Rings is fixed. It's all good to go. Some of you may know every Friday you're going to get in a little super cut of stuff from the the main line episodes. Just an attempt to have some form of monetization as well as it's another form of people being able to watch it. And I assume that'll be fun for you. Then we got catch ups every Monday and well more EFAP every Saturdays and it should be expected. Other than that, I got nothing else to say. Anything else for anybody else? I want to start just the general thing. I want to try to do more this year. I want to do more party gaming streams again. We haven't been doing a lot of small game and stuff. It's true. Yeah. New Year's resolution, especially like the metals birthday. Hummel party. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, rumble party. That was it. Hummel party. Hummel party. But that's always fun stuff. I'm going to make it my mission to make more of these this year. Make it happen. Whoever is available at the time. But yeah, I think that those are always really fun. And we kind of been neglecting those. So I want to bring it back. I want to bring him back. Just so nice. Just one thing. I'm inclined to leave. Yeah. Is there anything else before we sign off? The gentlemen's a really good show. It is. I recommend it. It was a fun. All right, then. Well, thank you all for keeping us company. Thank you for the kind messages and generous donations. We shall all be addressed. Don't you worry in the future. But for now, good morning. Good night. Good afternoon. All of them and everything. You do goodbye. Bye. Bye everybody. Bye. See you later. See you. Bye.