rebel with a cause. [The Counter Hit #5]

Hey, I've got a question for you.

Have we lost our

sense of civil rebellion?

If so, how do we get it back?

Let's talk about that.

(Music)

From emotional

intelligence to street fighter.

Poetry to nature.

Comic books to other curious things.

And everything in between.

This is the Internet Show that asks,

"What can this teach

us about being human?"

I'm your host, Sam Kirk.

Welcome to Team Human.

This is...

The Counter Hit.

(Music) (Applause)

Welcome, welcome, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

How are we all doing today?

Yeah, I hear the shouts.

They're not artificial at all.

They're real.

Real shouts.

Folks, it's my

pleasure to be with you today.

On this episode of The Counter Hit,

episode number five?

Jeez, five of these things?

We do it that many times that often?

That's crazy.

Welcome aboard.

I'm pleased as punch to

be with you this week.

This week of August 24th, 2026th.

Or when this will be

aired, August 26th, 2026.

2626.

Hmm.

That's a mouthful, isn't it?

Folks, like I said before, my name is Sam

Kirk, also known as Scarequotes and Other

Circles, and I'm your host today as we

talk about all different kinds of things.

But the central theme today is about

rebellion, a healthy dose of rebellion,

if I don't say so myself.

And the question remains, have we lost

our way when it comes to that?

Have we become so glued to our digital

devices or preoccupied with our other

thoughts that we've forgotten what it

means to be just a little bit rebellious

when it comes to tyranny

and all other kinds of things?

I'm not promoting, by

the way, violent rebellion.

I'm talking about just the human small

little pieces of rebellion we can do in

our day-to-day lives that can kind of

send a message to other people, also send

a message to ourselves

and create boundaries

that let people know and yourself know

that that's where you stand.

We are, of course, here in the Team Human

layer, here at Zero Dot Media, as we

discuss some of these topics, and I

thought it would be a great opportunity

for us to dive right in to what I think

are some great examples of some healthy,

maybe zealous, but good,

healthy amounts of rebellion.

Let's take a look right now.

(Music)

Folks, have you heard the news?

Spider-Man might be in

your neck of the woods.

That's right.

We've got some Spider-Man appearances

happening all across the United States

and probably other

parts of the world as well.

No, I am not talking about, specifically,

Spider-Man Brand New Day,

although have you seen it?

It's a good movie.

I quite liked it.

Good old Spooter Man doing the old Tom

Hollins and Diya thing.

Good stuff.

Good stuff.

Recommend watching it.

But no, I'm not talking about that today.

Instead, I'm talking about, hmm, what's

happening over in Minneapolis?

That is right, folks.

Minneapolis.

The town of really tall buildings?

No, not really.

Not really tall buildings at all.

They do have, however,

their own local Spider-Man.

So look, literally, if you want

something beautiful to happen in your

heart right now, just search up

Spider-Man in your

favorite social media platform.

And you'll see amazing people do

fantastic fan art renditions of this.

I love this piece right here, just really

getting that Superman punch right there.

Just absolutely phenomenal

and beautiful and wonderful.

Here's another wonderful image right

here, Marvel Comics Group, again, taking

that exact image and making

it into some kind of ad hoc

photo.

This is beautiful and phenomenal.

Love that.

Ah, brings

a smile to my face right here.

Folks,

let me be clear.

Let me be

really, really, really gosh darn clear.

I'm not pro-violence.

In fact, I'm pretty anti-violent.

I'm anti all that stuff.

Sometimes a fascist needs to get punched.

I'm not saying it had to be this guy.

It's just good to see that Spider-Man,

who's always just a symbol of the people,

the real people that are kind of dealing

with struggles and strife and believing

that no matter what, we

can disagree with each other.

That's okay, it's okay to

disagree with each other.

It's okay to argue about stuff.

But the non-negotiables about all of us

being allowed to finish the finish line

on our own terms, all of

us being in this together,

believing that if there's any single one

of us that is disproportionately

positively affected by things, and

there's a ton of people, like millions,

even billions of people who are on the

other side who are not doing so well,

it's a moral responsibility for us to

equalize that in some kind of fashion.

I'm all for that.

That's what Spider-Man represents.

And so to see that image of Spider-Man

just punching the

literal January 6th rioter

makes me happy.

I would have loved if Jake Lang didn't

get punched and just changed his mind

about a couple things and learned that

maybe he was wrong.

I would love that.

That's not the narrative

we're living right now.

Any single human being that wishes to

hate on us any specific group of people,

well, that's the one group of people I

think we can all agree.

You need to wake up, call my friend.

And

hopefully, even if Jake Lang's opinion

will not change as a result of this, he's

probably gonna be planning his next

rally, whenever that is.

Hopefully people see this and go, "Look,

if Spider-Man is doing this,

"if Spider-Man has to come."

If some person needs to jump into a

Spider-Man suit and feels empowered, like

I need to do something and they do it,

again, I'm anti-violence,

but it's a beautiful image.

And to the individual who is Spider-Man

Thanks for embodying the spirit of

humans, that I think we all needed to

hear and see right now.

So

I share this story, not to, again,

promote violence, but rather just to

indicate to all of

you, you are not alone.

If you feel like you

are in an echo chamber

and everyone's reverberating against you,

you can push back, not like this.

Literally, I wanna make that super clear,

not like this, but on your own terms.

And we'll get to that a

little bit later in the episode.

But to Minneapolis, you

can have Spider-Man, right?

Now, Spider-Man is for

everyone and you can have him.

My heart goes out to you.

And Jake Lang, not that you're watching

this, you've never

watched this, but if you are,

shut the fuck up.

Say whatever the fuck you wanna say in

your own private garage, in your own

private basement with your own friends

and family, but get the

fuck out of the public sector.

Because if you do keep doing these

rallies in the public sector, expect

human beings, good human beings to, as

peacefully as they possibly

can, protest against that.

I love the people were

throwing glitter, that's amazing.

So once again,

Spider-Man, ladies and gentlemen,

he's for everyone.

Hey, have you heard that maybe?

Maybe cryptocurrency is a scam, a money

laundering scheme, some way to defraud

you of tons of money that you probably

aren't ready to give up.

Have you heard about that?

No?

Are you a crypto bro?

No shade if you are.

However,

some heroes don't wear masks and we have

another hero that's coming in through the

ranks to kind of guide us along the path

towards sanity in some way.

And that hero goes by

the name of Ben McKenzie.

Remember Ben McKenzie?

You might know him from the OC.

I know him as Commissioner Gordon, but

more importantly, I know him as Batman.

That's right.

He played.

He was the voice of Batman in the lovely,

fantastic animated

adaptation of Batman year one.

And that is right.

Fellow actor, now kind of fraud

journalist, now filmmaker and director

has gone to Congress

and talked a bit about

what he believes is the

largest Ponzi scheme in history.

And of course, this news

doesn't come from American news.

This is coming from ABC at Australia,

reported by Amelia Terzen and Kate Ryan.

Headline being Ben McKenzie's journey

from the OC to calling crypto, quote

unquote, the largest

Ponzi scheme in history.

A little a little brief of

what they talk about here.

For many millennials, Ben McKenzie is

still best known for his role as a

troubled teen on the wrong side of the

tracks, who was adopted by

the wealthy Cohen family.

The now 47 year old actor noted as much

in that in his note to Congress when he

appeared before the Senate committee on

banking four years ago.

You can also call me

Ryan Atwood from the OC.

He quipped and there's a nice image from

him when he did that

before a long time ago.

McKenzie's appearance before the

committee highlights the career swerve

the Hollywood actor has made since

appearing in television shows

such as the OC and in Gotham.

That's right.

He was Commissioner Gordon, a young

Commissioner Gordon.

He is now drawing on his undergraduate

studies in economics to publicly

criticize one of the highest profile

financial movements of the past decade.

In my opinion, he says the cryptocurrency

industry represents the

largest Ponzi scheme in history.

He told the US Senate third time we're

saying that he says that he believes it.

Speaking to the US ABC News, McKenzie

explains how he became a cryptosynic and

why he was just put out why he just put

out a documentary openly calling the

movement, quote unquote, stupid.

That documentary, by the way, is called

Everyone is Lying to You for Money.

I've seen bits of it.

It seems pretty good.

I highly recommend checking it out.

The star and director made the film as a

follow to the book on cryptocurrency.

He wrote with journalist Jacob Silverman.

I had a lot of imposter syndrome about

playing this role of

investigative journalist.

He tells ABC News about

making a feature film.

That's clearly not my training.

So he recognizes that, hey, look, he

comes from a pedigree of actors.

And here he is.

It's like a total left wing curve of just

changing up his modus operandi and kind

of digging deeper into the subject.

He writes later that one of the reasons

why he got into

cryptocurrency was it was the pandemic.

It was covered.

He didn't have a lot going on.

A buddy of his told him to kind of look

into crypto and invest in it.

But he had little did his buddy know Ben

McKenzie has a background in economics

and he looked into it.

I

don't know.

I don't know.

And so what he ended up doing.

Well, he ended up shorting the

cryptocurrency market, not

investing in cryptocurrency.

And that funds that he made

from shorting the cryptocurrency

industry

ended up supplying and paying for a

majority of the documentary he made about

cryptocurrency, which is hilarious.

By the way, for those of you who don't

know, shorting is when you do the

opposite of investing in something.

I believe in something.

It's going to grow.

So I'm going to

keep buying shares of it and with the

promise and hope it's going to keep

growing and growing and growing.

He had the opposite belief.

He believed that it's going to dovetail.

So he would bet against

the market when you short.

Typically it's incredibly risky because

if you're wrong about your short, you are

on the hook for an almost

infinite amount of money.

Like it can be incredibly dangerous.

So when you short the market, you have to

be very confident you're correct in your

thesis and sounds like he

was in that particular regard.

One of the most notable things about this

documentary, if you get a chance to watch

it, is he actually interviews

FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried.

If you don't know who that is, he is now

in jail for defrauding

many, many, many people.

I highly recommend checking out that

particular clip of

that documentary because

it's amazing the question Sam

is willing to answer to Ben.

And fun fact, Ben McKenzie is drinking

from a cup here that

says, can we zoom in on this?

Probably not.

It says fraud investigator on it.

But during the clip, I won't spoil it,

but Sam has no idea

that's what Ben is there for.

He just seems like he's an interested

party, kind of interested about FTX and

all that good stuff.

So

Ben is a champion of the people and he's

fighting the good fight.

Why are we talking about him today?

Well, we're talking about this because

he's promoting his documentary that he

had a kind of a soft launch for before.

And he's kind of making the rounds upon

the news racket circuits.

But I think it's an important opportunity

for us to listen to a snippet of what he

actually said during a congressional

hearing back in 2022 as it

pertains to cryptocurrency.

Ranking member to me,

members of the committee.

Thank you for inviting me

to testify before you today.

This hearing has been

called for two reasons.

The first is to examine the spectacular

collapse of the crypto exchange FTX and

its sister company Alameda Research, both

owned by Sam Bankman Fried.

These companies valued

at more than $32 billion

earlier this year are

today worth less than nothing.

In fact, they are $8 billion in the hole.

The demise of FTX and Alameda represent

the most spectacular corporate downfall

since Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme

imploded in the wake of

the great financial crisis.

It has captured the nation's attention.

Like Madoff, FTX and Alameda owe enormous

sums to supposedly sophisticated

investors such as venture

capital firms and hedge funds.

And like Madoff, they also owe a lot of

money to regular people.

However, the carnage at

FTX is far more widespread.

Madoff defrauded some 37,000 clients.

FTX claims 32 times that

amount in the US alone.

According to FTX, some 1.2 million retail

traders, aka regular folks, and 5 million

worldwide have lost access to the money

they entrusted to FTX.

It is unclear when, if ever, they will

get any of that money back.

The harm to those consumers, I would

prefer the term investors, is the second

reason we are here today.

And it is fitting that I am here.

For those people are

the focus of my attention.

I believe they, and the estimated 40

million other Americans who have invested

in cryptocurrency, have

been sold a bill of goods.

They have been lied to, in ways both big

and small, by a once seemingly mighty

crypto industry whose entire existence in

fact depends on

misinformation, hype, and yes, fraud.

The first lie is the most obvious.

Cryptocurrencies are not currencies by

any reasonable economic definition.

Anyone with even an undergraduate degree

in economics, such as myself, can tell

you that money serves three functions.

Medium of change, unit of

account, and store of value.

Cryptocurrencies cannot do any of the

three well, and they have

no hope of ever doing so.

For reasons I am happy to discuss at

greater length during our session.

But in the interest of time, let's keep

it simple for now and

focus on the present.

If cryptocurrencies are not

currencies, then what are they?

Well, what do they do?

How are they used?

Via FTX, Binance, and a host of other

exchanges, usually domiciled overseas,

millions of Americans have used real

money to purchase some of the over 20,000

cryptos in existence today.

According to a recent Pew study, they are

doing so as an

investment, a way of making money.

So, what do we have

in the eyes of the law?

We have an investment contract, more

precisely, a security.

An investment of money, and a common

enterprise, with the expectation of

profit to be derived

from the efforts of others.

To my mind, the four prongs of the Howey

test are easily satisfied by every coin,

token, or whatever nonsense words the

crypto industry attaches to lines of code

stored on ledgers called blockchains in

an attempt to convey legitimacy or

technological sophistication to them.

But if these cryptos are

securities, they are bizarre ones.

They offer no products, no

services, no revenue streams.

The projects they represent accomplish

almost nothing in the real world that

cannot be done better by other means and

add no overall value to

our economy or any other.

They are best a vehicle for speculation,

an exercise, and a zero-sum game of

chance, much like online poker.

At worst, they are an

instrument of crime.

Surveying the cryptocurrency mania during

the summer of last year, I came to a

terrifying conclusion.

The supposedly multi-trillion dollar

industry was nothing more than a massive

speculative bubble bound to pop.

Worse than that, I had myriad reasons to

believe that the crypto bubble was built

on a foundation of fraud.

Investment contracts that are effectively

valueless are often described as Ponzi

schemes, which are regulated under

American law by the Securities and

Exchange Commission.

In my opinion, the cryptocurrency

industry represents the

largest Ponzi scheme in history.

In fact, by the time the dust settles,

crypto may well represent a fraud at

least 10 times bigger than Madoff.

10 times bigger than Madoff.

Wow.

Okay.

So

that was his opening

statement back in 2022, the U.S.

Senate congressional hearing.

And to be more pointed about this, he has

a couple of scathing words to say about

the United States is current residing

president to President Trump.

So President Trump's views have changed

about cryptocurrency.

Back in 2021, he said this about crypto.

Since

then, he has changed his

tune and he has said this.

We're making the United States the

Bitcoin superpower, the

crypto capital of the world.

And it takes a lot of the

pressure off the dollar.

It does a lot of good things.

At the same time, according to Forbes,

Trump has made an estimated $1 billion

off of his crypto holdings.

What does President Trump's

embrace of crypto tell you?

That

he's the most corrupt

president in U.S. history.

Nice.

Not even close.

I mean, to state the obvious.

And he's

the main vehicle for his

corruption is cryptocurrency.

That's where the majority of the money

that he's made in his brief time in

office, the second time

around, where it comes from.

He made a little money off of these

meme coin things like

Trump coin and Melania coin.

But he made most of the money, he and his

family made most of the

money off of a stable coin.

I mean, it's so grotesque.

It's really kind of infuriating.

We have to remember that Donald Trump is

a convicted fraudster.

The Trump organization was convicted on

34 counts by a jury.

The amount of the penalties has been

thrown out, but the verdict still stands.

So he's a convicted fraudster.

He is selling a coin and a scheme that I

and many, many others, including Nobel

Prize winning

economists, have called a fraud.

I mean, if the president of the United

States is participating in this scheme,

does that legitimize it?

Perhaps to some people who believe in

this convicted fraudster president.

But

what it really does is allow him to use

his power to get crypto

further into our regulated system.

And when it blows up again, we will be

footing the bill collectively.

All the while enriching himself.

Correct.

Yeah.

So,

yeah, cryptocurrency,

not super great.

And Ben, good old Commissioner Gordon

Batman himself is

fighting the good fight.

And we love that.

You know, we we at the counter hit one

celebrate those people that fight when

our resources seem their lowest.

And this seems very zero dot coded to me.

Zero dot is the term when your resources

are basically at zero.

And yet somehow you come through and

become your strongest.

Full disclosure to my zero dot family and

my counter hit folks.

I, Sam Kirk, have invested in some meme

coins back in the day.

I still probably have a few of them in

some random bank

wallet thing that I have.

They're basically worth nothing.

They have no value of any kind.

I invested them in the same way that you

might have heard of Dogecoin.

Dogecoin went up from like fractions of a

penny to like 64 cents at one point.

A lot of my friends made

some money off of that.

Full disclosure, I do have

a few of those investments.

I don't expect them to

do anything with that.

I have no Bitcoin.

I have no Ethereum.

I have no none of the quote unquote

stablecoins and I have no problem saying

cryptocurrency as a whole

has no real true value as

far as I've been able to tell.

We have decided as a human species to

give it some kind of value.

I don't think it has burst as big as it

will yet to be burst.

And I think what Ben

McKenzie is saying here is true.

I think there's going to be an element.

There's going to be another big blow up

of some kind of another big bubble.

That's going to catch a

lot of people red handed.

And sadly, it sounds like Trump is going

to be the one that makes all the money on

that particular regard.

So

I bring all this up to say, hey, look,

you got Spider-Man on one

hand, literally punching Nazis.

You got Ben McKenzie literally going to

US Senate and making films and

documentaries and going on new shows and

talking about this using his expertise,

whatever way he can going

past his imposter syndrome.

That's pretty remarkable.

If you ask me, it's pretty amazing.

So I think we have two contenders for our

zero dot people of the week.

Good old Spider-Man from Minneapolis and

Ben McKenzie as a whole.

What can you do about this?

Well, I'm not a financial advisor.

I can't tell you what to do,

but I would generally try to stay away

from cryptocurrency if you're in the

market for investing your money, anything

as a personal just friend to you.

That's what I would say to you.

Of course, know that if you are doing

cryptocurrency, if that is a choice you

make, just know that it

is a form of gambling.

That's what it is.

It is purely gambling when the goods that

you are investing in have nothing to do

of any kind of value, real world value.

And it's just all speculative.

That is truly gambling with the emotions

and hearts of other also

whale investors of some kind.

So be mindful of that.

But let's also just be

mindful of the fact that

the US United States president has made a

lot of money off of cryptocurrency.

A lot of money.

And no other president has

made that amount of money

on speculative markets

as far as we can tell.

That is certainly an indicator of this

current presidency in

that particular regard.

I'm not here to give us,

you know, doom and gloom here.

I'm just here to put things

in the context for us all.

Ben McKenzie said, according to him,

Donald Trump is the

world's largest fraudster

and world's most corrupt

president by a very large margin.

So thank you, Ben, for keeping us honest.

And thank you once again,

Spiderman from Minneapolis.

We need more of you.

You show you show us a way in our small way,

in our small realm of influence of

pushing back against whatever we call

insanity and just showing people that

what's right truly can be right.

Thank you.

And that brings us to more news now here

in the video game sector.

That's right.

Video game stuff happened in video games

this week or last week, actually, and not

the best kind of thing.

That's right.

Notable developer Riot Games announced

that they're free to play fighting game

that they've been hyping up for years.

Two X K O is ceasing all major

development by the end of

December of twenty twenty six.

That stinks.

That stings a lot, folks.

They had an official

announcement on their Web page.

They gave a very candid,

detailed response to

their ceasing of development.

A couple of cool things about this.

If you have paid for anything up until

the point which they made this

announcement on August 20th, you're all

of your assets that you paid for getting

refunded to you,

including your characters.

They're making all the characters in the

game free to access.

Now,

I think

there's going to be some things you can

buy still at for this particular game,

but it's going to be bundled together in

a very cost effective package.

they say that the servers for two X K O

will remain open for the foreseeable

future, whatever that means.

This at home for me, this at

home for me because I hate it.

I hate seeing

things made by beautiful, wonderful,

talented, creative people get shuttered

by what I believe are

very bad business practices.

For those who don't know, two X K O was

in development for quite a bit of time

before it ever got released, something of

the tune of maybe tenish years or so.

It was developed by

people that are very close

to the FTC like Tom Cannon.

Seth Killian was a developer on the game.

It went through many, many, many, many,

many different revisions before it kind

of became this kind of tag fighter.

It was initially announced

as Project L back in 2019

before it ever got released in 2025.

That's a six year gap between the time it

gets announced versus when it gets

released and just a series of what I

would consider business

fumbles go along the way.

And that's kind of strange because Riot

Games is the developer and publisher of

League of Legends, which I believe is a

very profitable and lucrative

video game still to this day.

I don't know for sure.

I don't know the

economics of the situation.

That game came out in 2009.

And they've been making

this extended universe

Based on their League of Legends IP.

Like there's a there's a television show

on Netflix that came out that was highly,

highly publicized and highly reviewed.

And then there's a fighting game, this

fighting game called 2XKO, which was a

name that was kind of funny.

We all kind of like Project L a little

bit better, but OK, 2XKO.

Everyone that I know that's

played 2XKO has enjoyed it.

I think it's a great game.

They want more characters, of course.

They want more this, more that.

But what was there?

The bones was good.

But this should have been seen as

inevitable because shortly after the

game's launch, Riot Games announced

significant layoffs for the game.

Including those that

worked actively on 2XKO.

One of our very own FGC folks, Pat the

Flip, Patrick Miller.

He was a he was a consultant and he was

he was one of the

people that worked on 2XKO.

He found himself laid

off as a result of that.

By the way, if you're a big fan of Pat

the Flip, go check him out.

He is a fantastic patron where he shows,

wonderful articles about fighting game

content and fighting game content.

And all that other good stuff.

We were sad to see him go.

This shouldn't have been a surprise, and

it really isn't a surprise.

It's just it's baffling to me that if you

spend 10 years on a

project, more than probably.

You don't give it enough

time to cook and incubate.

You don't go for the long haul.

That's what's surprising to me.

A lot of people have been critical about

the fact that it took them

so long to make a game and.

I'm not going to be that person to talk

about that because I

don't know the particulars.

I don't know the details.

I know that making video

games is goddamn fucking hard.

I know that probably making a fighting

game that works within Riot Games, his

own game launcher that's free to play

that you don't have access

to is is tricky and sticky.

But I have to believe from a business

perspective, if you're investing enough

time into something.

You've got to you've got to believe in

the thesis of what it's going to try to

achieve and you want to give it time.

Now, according to Riot

Games, his own literature here.

On the business side, and this is a quote

from their actual website, you can go to

on the business side.

We hope that by making the game free, we

could make the genre more accessible and

discoverable discoverable to new players

that they could fall in love with

fighting games in the same way we did.

Ideally, this would have happened over

time, starting by earning the trust of

lots of core fighting game players

growing into a larger player base and

then more features

and content came online.

We also went into this project knowing

that from the start that free to play

comes with a minimum player requirement

to support those ambitions.

Early on, we saw pockets of the FCC fully

embraced to XKO and we got proof that

this approach was

working at a small scale.

Players pushed the game to its limit in

high level play and brought their non

fighting game friends to play with them.

Duos became a great way

to mash buttons together.

Tournament organizers added the game to

their weekly lineups and players told us

they wanted more

champs, events, features, etc.

While this is exactly what we wanted to

see, it wasn't just happening enough.

There's the key word there.

Even within the genre, diehard tag

fighter players love to XKO, but most

other fighting game players struggled to

find reasons to stick with the game.

And their reason for ending development,

we evaluated the game's overall

performance, not just revenue, but

retention, new players

and engagement through 2026.

We saw positive player reactions through

the releases of Akali, Sena, and Thresh.

The climb, PvE and some amazing

competitive events throughout the year.

Again, I'm not brand

loyal to League of Legends.

I've never played the game.

So if I'm mispronouncing it, I apologize.

Even in these highlight moments, however,

we saw no meaningful

sustained change in 2XKO's trajectory.

Only a fraction of what it would take to

trend towards sustainability.

Over time, it became clear it would be

impossible for us to continue actively

developing the game as we are today.

In recent months, the team has continued

to take bold swings while

fully aware of 2XKO's challenges.

But to attempt another year, hoping for a

way forward would have been an

irresponsible choice for

players and the dev team.

What?

But to attempt another year hoping for a

way forward would have been an

irresponsible choice

for players and the...

Hah.

If it gives the developers a job for a

year, and it gives players more content

for a year, how is that irresponsible?

Irresponsible to you, not to them.

I don't like that line at all.

I think that's inappropriate.

To be super clear, we would have

continued active development if we saw

any viable future, but 2XKO costs us

substantially more to operate than it

brings in, and engagement has stayed

relatively flat

despite our larger updates.

You're not making enough money.

It's not worth the squeeze.

That's it.

Don't try to say it's irresponsible.

Don't, don't, don't, don't spend it like

it's an irresponsible moral thing.

Don't make it a moral choice.

Don't do that.

Come on.

You need the money.

You're not making enough money.

And you've decided that putting any more

effort to rebrand it, to repolish it, to

refresh it, to rehaul

it just isn't worth it.

Just say that.

Fine.

So we looked at all the options

available, i.e. reducing team size, which

you already did, you already did that.

Adjusting our patch

schedules, changing our business model.

You could change your business model!

You could do it!

I promise you could do it.

We concluded that finishing the rest of

our work in progress content and

sunsetting active development was the

best route forward

for players and rioters.

Ah!

That's garbage.

That's a garbage explanation.

It's just simply, as far as I'm

concerned, you're not making money,

you're bleeding money.

Got it.

Cool.

You've tried a bunch of things that have

not worked yet and you're

like, let's cut our losses.

Let's not give in to some cost fallacies.

Okay, fine.

Unfortunate, but fine.

Now, I'm brokenhearted about

this, but I gotta be honest.

I'm not...

This isn't the end.

Except for one caveat.

As someone who loves fighting games, a

lot of the fighting games that I love are

generally what we call, or what people

have called, "dead games."

They're not in active development.

There's no patches coming for them.

The game is what it is.

And I love playing dead games.

I love going to my locals and playing

fighting games with people for a "dead

game," knowing it's

never going to get a patch.

So that way, when we come across a

certain situation in a matchup, we know

that the only solution

to solving that matchup

is if we fix it ourselves.

Us, the players, adapt and figure it out.

And then a whole new meta arises from it.

And honestly, it's one of the most

beautiful things to see in

the fighting game community.

So 2xKO being a dead game.

Sure, it would be nice if there's more

content for it, but you know what?

It sounds like they are going to get

everything they had planned for it up

until a certain point, be done with it.

And then it will be

in the dead game camp.

And that can be

really exciting for folks.

For some people,

now that 2xKO is done active development,

now the game is what we call

"finished."

It's done.

And because it's done,

now the real work can begin.

For some people, that's

going to be really exciting.

And who knows?

Some dead games become

undead after a while.

Remember Killer Instinct 2013?

I got, I think, three and a half seasons

of updates, and then it was

in its final form for a while.

And then it got a surprise, like, 10-year

anniversary update announced by James

Goddard himself at Evo.

I think it was 23 or 24.

I think it was 23.

I think it was 23.

Yeah, it had to be 23

because it was 2013.

Yeah.

Wow.

So that could happen.

That could always happen.

Here's the caveat.

Here's the problem.

Here's the problem, okay?

The problem is

the servers are all

owned by Riot Games, okay?

All of them.

They're all owned by Riot Games.

And so, because they're

all owned by Riot Games,

as much as I love the fact that this is

now a dead game of some kind,

there's nothing stopping Riot from

literally pulling the

actual plug on this video game.

And they have every reason to pull the

plug once they don't see

enough players playing the game.

And we also know that a lot of people

that play these types of games, these

active development games, only want to

play them while they're

being actively developed.

It's going to take a while to see a

groundswell of people kind of emerging

into the FGC to embrace the game, even

though it is "dead."

That's a problem.

You see, in the games that I play,

despite the fact that Capcom and SNK

doesn't like the fact that we do this, I

get to own the game in my own way.

I own multiple Street Fighter II and

Alpha and Third Strike and

Neo Geo boards of my own.

I get to literally play

the game on my own terms.

I get to bring friends over and we get to

have a good time

playing those games together.

And then we have this thing called

Fightcade, which if you own a legal copy

of the board, which I happen to own a

legal copy of the board,

wink, wink, nudge, nudge, I do.

I get to play those

games online with friends.

And unless there's going to be some kind

of DMCA kind of takedown, which could

happen, but I doubt they would want to do

that because they lose a lot of good will

and good faith from the FGC

paying customers.

It's unlikely they'll do that.

So I get to basically play those games

for as long as I want forever.

And those games are ours.

They belong to the players, the people.

So even though I'm not upset, I think

this can be a beautiful

thing for a lot of people.

I think we should be very cautious

because the whole beauty that I think

that arises from fighting games is when

well, a fighting game isn't owned by the

publisher or developer anymore.

They're owned by the people.

When the community owns the game and runs

everything, it's a

beautiful, wonderful thing.

And that's the problem

that Riot kind of fell into.

They found this problem of trying to

figure out the commerce of a situation

where you make a game, you make your

sudden amount of money or some kind of

money, and the community

just keeps giving to that.

And it sounds like as an experiment, we

found out that might not work, at least

in this particular capacity.

It sounds like Riot was trying to do

things differently, not have you spend so

much money up front for a fighting game

because fighting games are expensive and

you need to make those

upfront costs pretty quickly.

They wanted to give in to the risk, to

the slow grow and kind of fruition of a

fighting game's lifespan

and make money that way.

It sounds like

they learned the logistics and economics

of that pretty quickly.

I would argue they could have marketed

the game way better and differently,

not to discredit their marketing team.

I mean, I was at Evo 23 and 24.

I played 2XKO

at their booths and their lobbies.

It was a lot of fun.

The lines went by quickly.

The fans there really embraced it.

They even had a couple secret setups at

the arcade corner there,

which was fun to play at.

Again, the passionate fans wanted the

game to be successful.

It sounds like what they were trying to

do was make a game for FGC fans that

would embrace other people, other walks

of life, which is great.

The Riot Games had different ambitions.

I believe that this game now that it is

quote unquote dead is going to be more

alive than it ever has been.

I do truly believe that.

My concern is the day when Riot Games

decides arbitrarily whether to cut losses

or get a tax write off as other companies

have done for other endeavors.

Looking at you HBO.

They can pull the plug at any point and

now we don't have access to the game.

At all in any kind of capacity.

That's unfortunate.

I didn't play too much 2XKO beyond the

betas and beyond the play tests.

I was at Evo for.

I liked what I played.

I had a good time playing it at home.

It kind of sucked.

I hated the launcher.

I hated navigating that.

I hated that I couldn't play my one good

friend who's across the pond for me.

He's in England.

I couldn't play him.

I couldn't I couldn't do it.

It just couldn't work out without doing

some weird finagling with the Phoebe and

that whole launcher business the whole

Riot Games things what got in the way the

game itself had good bones.

Speaking about rebellion.

I think what the FGC can do here.

Instead of walking away from the game

especially if you like the game.

Brace it even more.

Show the entire world that doesn't matter

if the game is an

active development or not.

We're going to take this game and carry

this game and play this game to the

highest level we can.

And show how

inclusive we possibly can be.

That in its own way is its

own way of being rebellious.

If Riot Games wants to have us pay

attention to the

economics of the situation.

Let's do the opposite.

Screw the economics.

Bring setups to your local.

Even the cost you money even if you don't

make a dime off of it.

When I think about my favorite fighting

game moments that's

what it was all about.

People barely breaking even

if anything at all just to make

a night or sometimes a couple of nights

of magic happened for a lot of people and

those nights meant a lot to

a lot of different people.

So 2x KO.

Development is done at the end of this

year in December but the light still

burns brightly in my opinion.

So you want to be rebellious and you like

fighting games go play

some 2x KO show it some love.

You might really be surprised by what you

find when you do so.

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Well folks, it's the 35th anniversary of

something pretty special.

Do you know what that is?

Yeah, got any ideas?

35 years of something that's

shaped a lot of people's lives.

Any idea?

35.

That's right.

The Super Nintendo turned 35 this month.

Pretty incredible.

Of course, if you are in Japan, you would

have called it the Super Famicom.

The Super Famicom.

Fun fact, the original Nintendo

entertainment system, it was never

officially called the Famicom.

It's now known that colloquially, but it

was just called the

Family Computer System.

Famicom for kind of a portmanteau short.

Only during the Super Nintendo era when

it was officially called the Super

Famicom, did it kind of get known as

that, which is kind of

incredible when you think about it.

So 35 years, Super Famicom slash Super

Nintendo is released.

35 years of memories.

And just looking at the controller, you

can kind of just have those

memories come back to you.

I gotta put my cards

where they are, folks.

I was never a Super

Nintendo guy back in the day.

I was a Sega Jenny drive, Sega Genesis

slash Mega Drive fan.

That being said, I've come to love the

Super Nintendo and there are some truly

incredible and amazing games on that

particular piece of hardware.

Like,

So we're looking at a console that,

again, the Super Nintendo, the North

America equivalent, came out August 23rd

of 1991, making it 35 years old.

The Japanese version is a bit older than

that from November 21st, 1990.

And it literally lasted until in Japan,

September 25th, 2003.

That's a 13 year lifespan for a piece of

16-bit gaming hardware.

And folks, man, what a run the Super

Nintendo really had.

I mean, yeah, sure, you got the classics

like Legend of Zelda, Link to the Past,

Super Mario World 1

and 2, Yoshi's Island.

It's one of my favorite games ever.

Final Fantasy 4, 5 and 6,

Super Metroid, Kirby Super Star.

Folks, don't forget Earthbound, Mother 2,

as it's known in other regions as well.

had so many great games.

And I would argue that a majority of our

gaming today is heavily inspired by this

particular piece of hardware.

Like

our expectations for gaming literally

comes from this particular hardware, the

games and masterpieces from this.

But let's not forget, if I can get this

data point right, and this

is according to Wikipedia,

which is not the most reliable source,

but it's better than others,

1,757

games were released on this day.

This is a piece of hardware.

That's 717 games in North America, 521 in

Europe, 1,448 in Japan.

Japan had double the amount

of games that America did.

That's a lot of goddamn games.

Jeez Louise.

I mean, sure, there are other consoles

like the PlayStation 2

and the Nintendo DS and the

Game Boy probably, that probably rival

this, get close to it.

And probably Xbox 360 if

you include shovelware.

And probably today, if you include the

Nintendo Switch with its amount of real

bad AI slop shovelware, sure, you can get

close that number, but

this is before AI slop.

This is before the time of

which anyone could make a game.

You had to literally get a partnering

agreement with Nintendo.

You had to get your dev kits in order.

You had to publish it.

You had to make sure it showed up in

retail stores, 1,757 goddamn video games.

And it doesn't matter if you're a Super

Nintendo fanboy or not, you have to

recognize that number and

just be kind of marveled by it.

You also have to marvel the controller.

I'm a big fan of the

Super Nintendo controller.

It's a good controller.

And it is literally the basis that almost

all other controllers

are based off of, right?

You've got

or face buttons.

You got a diagonal D-pad, a directional

pad as it was called, fun fact.

Nintendo had a specific

patent on how this D-pad worked.

And that patent went

out a couple of years ago.

And that's why a lot of third party

D-pads are now suddenly a lot better

because they couldn't use the technology

Nintendo had patented before.

You have shoulder buttons and you have a

select and start button.

Notice how similar this particular game

pad is to a more modern one.

Yes, this is designed to look a little

bit like it, but I mean, the basic

pillars are the same.

Look at this.

four face buttons, a D-pad.

You've got a trigger of some kind.

Now you've got two triggers.

Now you've got analog sticks.

You have at least a minimum of two

buttons in the center, but then you also

have a big giant home button to get you

to whatever the home screen is.

And then usually like now like a

screenshot button and

then other buttons here.

The basic principle

of controller design has not evolved

change much over the Super Nintendo.

And we got a lot of this

from the Super Nintendo.

We like this design so much that when

Nintendo would go on and make the

Nintendo 64, a console that I talked

about before on this show,

had a once in a generation controller

design that we would never see again.

The GameCube, same thing.

Once in a generational design, we use it

now sparingly with Smash Brothers

tournaments and so forth, but we don't

see that controller ever again.

Nintendo's always evolving

with its controller design.

And it's not until we got to like the Wii

U slash Switch, now Switch 2, that we are

kind of going back to our roots and kind

of going back to what kind of works when

it comes to controller ubiquitous design.

It's a very universal setup.

We talk about controllers.

Think about it.

Street Fighter 2 World Warrior, one of

the greatest selling

games of all time on the Super Nintendo

specifically, I think it

was like 70 bucks at retail.

You didn't need a fancy controller.

You had all six buttons

right here on this game pad.

You had them all.

Here's your buttons and

then you got your triggers.

Was it the most comfortable?

No, that's where the Sega Genesis or Mega

Drive six button fighting game pad was a

little bit better, but you had to buy an

extra fighting pad for that.

Pretty amazing, pretty incredible.

Also, as a Nintendo guy, I still play on

my Switch quite a bit.

I've always just, it feels like home with

the buttons being the way they are.

So you got B and A, Y and X.

On the X-Box, those are inverted and it

always throws me off.

I kind of wish we would just keep this

roadmap here, but I get it, I get it.

It's a little confusing

for us Westerners here.

What a great, great console.

And this was such an innovative

controller, by the way, that after the

SNES had come out, they would make a

revision of the Nintendo system or the

Famicom or family computer system.

And they would use

this as a framework for

their updated NES controller.

Look at that little dog bone guy.

And I stand by this.

This is the most comfortable

NES controller ever made.

More comfortable than

the traditional flat piece.

I love the flat piece.

It's very iconic, but this is way more

comfortable and amazing.

They really knocked out of the park with

the Super Nintendo design.

I'm not even joking.

Oh, can we talk about the

Super Game Boy for a moment?

Go to design here.

We're gonna give you one of the greatest

portable gaming systems of all time.

And then we're gonna give you the ability

to play all of those games, all of them

on your Super Nintendo, if you'd like to,

with some additional bells

and whistles, if you'd like to.

Now, fun fact for those that are diehard

in Super Nintendo, the original Super

Game Boy is a little less than perfect.

It runs the games a smidge faster than

they're supposed to be run.

And if you like that, great.

However,

Japan got the release

of the Super Game Boy 2,

which did two things.

It allowed you to communicate to a second

Game Boy in the controller port if you

wanted to, which was awesome.

And two, it ran the games at the proper

speed that you would run if you had an

actual Game Boy in hand.

Also, goaded for fighting games.

If you had a fighting game Game Boy game,

I'm thinking like Battle Arena,

Tashinden, and some of the Fatal Furies

and the King of Fighters games, you could

plug them into your Super Game Boy and

use both controller ports to play the

game in two-player mode.

Wild, so good.

Then we had the BS Satellaview, which we

in the United States, and I believe in

Europe, we never got this.

It was kind of a satellite digital

broadcast service where during certain

hours of the day, if you turned it on and

you connected to, I

believe, some kind of landline,

you'd be able to get games

broadcast into your system.

Either they were custom games or rental

games or like special

contest event games.

There was a very famous version of a link

to the past that was a remake of Zelda

one that was broadcast this way.

never got this, but we

got something similar

There was a thing called X-band here in

the United States, which where you could

download games and play people online.

That was, I believe, for both Super

Nintendo and the Sega

Genesis using a dial-up modem.

That being said, this particular piece of

hardware never reached our shores.

And of course, we know that the Super

Nintendo was so ubiquitous that at one

point, they were working with Sony to

make the Nintendo PlayStation.

The Nintendo PlayStation.

Look at that guy.

Look at that bad boy right there.

That was it.

The Sony Nintendo PlayStation.

Notice how it has a Super

Nintendo port right there.

Very cool, very cool.

And I got to give another win for the

Super Nintendo pad right here.

There was a piece of hardware that Capcom

made called the CPS Changer.

It was exclusive to Japan.

It was basically a dedicated

super gun for specific games.

I'm thinking like

Street Fighter Alpha One.

I'm thinking

Punisher, I think was on that.

Street Fighter II Turbo was on there.

The original Hyper

Fighting Turbo was on there.

And guess what?

It had a port for a Super Nintendo

controller because they thought at the

time, this is the most popular controller

right now and it works

with all of our games.

Kind of wild, kind of cool.

Of course, you could also plug in an

arcade stick if you wanted

to, but yeah, look at that.

Look at that port.

There's the SNES port right there.

The Super Nintendo is

in contention with being one of the

greatest video game consoles of all time.

I can't argue that.

I have my own personal biases, but it is

truly a remarkable piece of kit.

And

kind of amazing when you think about the

fact that it's base resolution, we're so

fixated on like HD graphics and

resolution going into 8K now.

Remember when we were all obsessed with

720 and 1080p, now we're

at 4K and 8K, et cetera.

The resolution, the base resolution of

the SNES is identical to that of the

original Nintendo, the Famicom.

That didn't change.

We did get some additional

modalities like mode seven.

We had the ability to use sound via

samples, which is why the Super Nintendo

has a very distinctive sound quality to

it, because you get to apply samples to

the memory mapper and have it have some

phonic textures if you wanted to, et

cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Just a really interesting piece of kit.

And

it was not cutting edge at the time, but

it was eye popping at the

time, which was Nintendo's MO.

They never were of, with the exception

of, I think, the Nintendo

64, they have never been

obsessed with trying to make the most

cutting edge technology.

They've always been obsessed with taking

preexisting technology and creating a

market for it and saying we

can create joy out of this.

And Super Nintendo was

kind of one of those things.

So hmm,

kudos to Super Nintendo.

Again, like I said,

I'm a Jenny drive guy.

I'm a Mega Drive guy.

I'll save all my Jenny versus

SNES stuff for a later time.

But right now let's just

celebrate the Super Nintendo.

I'd love to know in the comments below,

what are your favorite

Super Nintendo games?

It doesn't matter what they are.

What's your favorite Super Nintendo game?

I'll tell you what,

a Super Nintendo game that I'm having a

ton of fun playing right now,

which has a wild history, is a game

called Tetris Attack.

You ever hear of it?

Tetris Attack?

So get this, this is

like the mid 90s, right?

And Tetris is like the

hottest fucking thing ever.

I had Tetris on my original Nintendo.

My dad and I would play it all the time.

If you played that version, you know that

sometimes if you won certain criteria,

you'd get like the Nintendo characters

like Donkey Kong and Mario to like give

you a victory, like dance if you won,

which was always cool.

There was Tetris on the Game Boy, which

was like the version of Tetris to have if

you had an electronic

device of that nature.

And then there was Tetris 2.

You remember Tetris 2?

You probably don't.

It was a video game.

I

was never the biggest fan of Tetris 2.

Basically, it wasn't quite Tetris.

It was more like,

It was like,

if someone decided, hey, we love Tetris,

but the five Tetrominos that you have,

let's switch them up and like constantly

be rearranging them and changing them up

and have not only just the shapes play a

factor in how you develop lines, but the

colors are a matter too.

It's like one level of

obfuscation that I think kind of,

I don't know, it makes the

experience not quite as good.

So, Wikipedia says, the gameplay is a

variation of Tetris concept, blocks

descend from the top

of the screen as before.

However, rather than aiming to fill the

horizontal lines with blocks, the player

aims to match the colors of the

descending block to those blocks of

already on the game board.

So, you'd always, it was like a Dr.

Mario thing.

Like you come in and you have a bunch of

blocks and a bunch of different spots and

you were meant to kind of

match colors with colors.

Was not my favorite.

I'd rather just play Dr.

Mario, if that's what I'm gonna do.

And this was during a time of that era.

So,

Nintendo is making this puzzle game

called "Panel de Pawn."

Panel de Pawn is a

really cool video game.

It's got fairies involved.

It's got this idea of matching shapes and

colors to the same shapes and getting at

least three in a row, whether it's

vertical or horizontal,

whatever it is, it doesn't matter.

Getting that to work is beautiful.

It's a really good game.

It came out in 95 and somewhere,

somewhere down the line, someone talked

to the then owner of

Tetris Elorg, the company.

"Hey, can we license your name Tetris for

our localized version of this?"

And I believe,

I believe there's a quote talking about

how that was one of the

greatest mistakes they had ever made.

Hold on.

There's a quote here

the

game has no relation to the Tetris video

game franchise, leading to Tetris company

co-founder, Hank Rogers, saying in a 2009

interview, he regrets giving Nintendo

permission to use the name.

Although Rogers liked the game, he

believed it got lost in history due to it

using the Tetris branding.

All right, looks like this interview

comes from a destructoid back in the day.

The question comes from, well, I wanted

to ask you about two specific games, how

you feel about Luminous,

which is a beautiful game.

How do you feel about Tetris Attack?

And Hank Rogers says, well, okay, well,

Tetris Attack, we'll

do the second one first.

Tetris Attack, Nintendo.

Came to me soon after we

formed the Tetris company.

We were just wrestling

with what we were going to do.

And so at the time we had the copyright,

the gameplay and the name Tetris and our

Russian partners who

knew nothing about nothing.

And I'm not talking about Alexei, I'm

talking about Electronica Technica.

They wanted to make money no matter what.

That's it.

However you could make money, make money.

When Nintendo came to us and said, we

would like to take this Japanese game

called Penel de Pon and

rename it Tetris Attack.

I'm saying it's not Tetris, but my

partner saying, but it is money.

So, uh, yeah, we, I reluctantly agreed.

In retrospect, we

should have never done that.

I don't think that's a good idea.

It dilutes the brand.

It's like naming another cartoon

character Mickey Mouse just

because you need the money.

It's just a bad idea.

So I wouldn't do that again.

So there's some regret there, right?

There's, there's some

little bit of regret there for sure.

Here's the thing, though.

That's a screenshot of

what Penel de Pon looks like.

The fairies and all that stuff.

Great game.

Tetris Attack got a rebrand and used

Yoshi characters instead

throughout the entire campaign.

And I quite like it.

Also, there's a couple of game breaking

bugs in Penel de Pon that Tetris Attack

kind of fixes a little bit in the

localization came out in 96.

And as a Yoshi fan, I

like it quite a bit.

And I've become quite addicted to this

particular puzzle game.

And it's a game that I do not believe

will ever get a rerelease beyond the

original Japanese version.

So if you want to play this version in

the Japanese original with no English

translation, it's available on Nintendo

Switch online service.

But if you want to play Tetris Attack,

the localized special cool version,

you're going to have to

play that any way you can

or buy a car.

I don't think it's that expensive.

I don't know.

Let's find out.

Hold on.

Let's see.

Yeah, it's like 12, 14 bucks.

Yeah, you can buy that.

No, no big deal.

It's a pretty common

cartridge, but it's got so much charm.

It's beautiful.

The gameplay is incredibly addicting.

Also, there's a sequel to this called

Pokemon Puzzle League once again, having

nothing to do with Pen-El-Dapon.

I never got an official Japanese

correlated release of that on N64.

That's right.

They made Pen-El-Dapon the American

localized version be associated with

Pokemon, now not Yoshi.

What a wild, what a wild thing.

You go right here.

League and the Japanese Pen-El-Dapon for

N64 never got released until a

compilation came out on

GameCube, which included Dr.

Mario, something else.

I think it became

with Yoshi's Cookie, Dr.

Mario and Pen-El-Dapon.

And Pen-El-Dapon in this version is based

off of the canceled N64 port.

Wild how video games work.

But anyway, we're talking about the Super

Nintendo and I think this is becoming one

of my favorite just go to games to pop in

right before bed,

play some Tetris attack.

It's fun.

It's got good music, good vibes.

The sound that your clicker makes when it

moves around the screen and things pop

and go, it's very exciting, very fun.

But you tell me, what is your favorite

Super Nintendo game?

And if it's a game I have

not played, let me know.

Oh, I do feel it appropriate to mention.

That there some people on the Earthbound

mother community took the first mother

game and the translated official

localization of that called Earthbound

Beginnings and retrofitted that into the

Super Nintendo Earthbound engine.

If

you have your own copy,

you can patch it yourself.

I've been having a lot of fun playing

that with my wife during the evening and

just having a ton of fun playing mother

one, also known as Earthbound Beginnings

remake on the Super Nintendo.

And again, we'll talk about some other

time, but rom hacks are a ton of fun.

It's a great way to kind of bring more

life to your console.

And as long as you have the original copy

of the game, go at it, my friends.

So, again, what's your

favorite Super Nintendo game?

Drop it down below in the comments.

All right folks, and that brings us to

our Patreon requested section.

That's right.

Our Patreon section where we talk about

what it is our Patreon members are

requesting we talk about and

today it's another

fighting game terminology term.

An FGC term as we break down what this

term might look and feel like for us all.

And I thought today we'd

talk about a term that...

I'm gonna break away from

the script a little bit.

It means something to many people,

especially if you look it up on

glossary.infil.net but to me it means

something a little bit different and

we'll talk about that in just a second.

I'm talking of course

of the term the shimmy.

The shimmy.

So in a fighting game, typically

speaking, even if it's three-dimensional,

in some capacity there's some kind of

two-way play between

two different players.

And the shimmy as defined by infil.net is

tricking someone into thinking you're

going to throw them by walking close and

then at the last second

walking backwards out of range.

So they whiff a throw

tech attempt like a dummy.

You

can then pummel them with a huge punish.

Shimming is easier to do in games with

small throw ranges so you

can walk out of range easier.

That is true.

Shimming was not much of a thing in good

old Street Fighter 2

because there's no throw whiff.

And B, throws are like massive.

And games without crouch teching so they

can't defend against throw while also

hitting you as you walk away.

Which makes it pretty common strategy in

a game like Street Fighter 5.

It's one way to enforce a very basic

throw or not 50-50 on someone and you'll

see the style of throw

bait used very often.

Here's a quick video demonstration of

what that looks like.

There you go.

There's that shimmy right there.

I would say shimmying

exists in older games as well.

I'm thinking of not shimmying against a

throw though, but rather shimmying

against say a crouching roundhouse or

some kind of punish or crouching medium

punch which has a little bit more range

than a throw and seeing that it's about

to come doing a quick

walk back than forward.

Again, in a game like Street Fighter 2

where block stun is really a thing, you

got to be careful because if you walk

back too much, you can actually get

yourself locked in block stun.

However, I'm bringing this term up

because as we start kind of unraveling

more FGC terms, these things can mean

different things to different people and

have different contexts.

And this reminds me, this concept of

shimmying reminds me of what a certain

player in the Street Fighter

2 circles used to do a lot.

DGV, Dark Gaiden

Vintage as they are known.

I said they, that's because DGV is

actually two people.

It's actually twin brothers, one's Dark

Gaiden, one's Vintage, and then went by

DGV on their online handles.

A real online warrior back in the day.

And here's something that kind of I

always think about when I

think about the word shimmy.

During an interview with Super Turbo

Revival, they were discussing with DGV

how they had a proclivity towards the

Super Nintendo ports of Street Fighter 2

over the arcade versions.

Hey, look at that, bringing

it back to Super Nintendo.

They grew up on Super Nintendo, Super

Turbo, and Super Street Fighter 2

especially, and they

found the movement to be

crisp and good and fast and neat.

Whereas on arcade, they felt it was a

little sloppy on their end.

And to describe some of this, we're

talking about the differences

between pad and arcade stick.

The question was, what can you say about

your level of execution with stick now

compared to your best day with pad?

This was during a time when DGV was

transitioning from pad to stick.

Fun fact, DGV used to have a custom made

Super Nintendo pad that would work on

PS2s and PCs and all that good stuff, but

it kept breaking on them after a while.

They wanted to play on arcade stick, so

they wanted to play on an arcade setup,

and that's kind of how the Super Turbo,

Super Street Fighter 2

Turbo community plays on.

So he had to teach himself how to use

arcade stick, which is a shame because I

would love to see him play

back in his prime and pad days.

But again, the question is, what can you

say about your level of execution with

stick now compared to

your best day with pad?

And they answered, hmm,

it's hard to say on pad.

I never played ST, so I don't know if I

could execute some of

those combos as well.

With pad, I do feel that I

have a better footsy skill.

I can maneuver much faster laterally on

pad compared to stick and the highlighted

part right here, for instance, just two

weeks ago, I picked up our modded SNES

360 pad, which I touched in almost two

years, and I did a lateral

drill my bro and I used to do.

It's pretty much pivoting back and forth

to the point where your character

flickers constantly.

My bro calls it blur footsies.

Blur footsies or shimmying, who knows?

Even after not touching the pad in years,

I was able to do it instantly.

However, on stick to this day, I still

can't achieve that speed.

Hence why my bro always

says that I'm too slow.

The thing about that technique is that

it's a great way to hide your movements.

Yeah.

So even back in the early 90s, late 90s,

Street Fighter II players were doing what

we would have called now a shimmy.

But what he's talking about is literally

moving Ryu so lightning

fast, it's like a blur.

And you can do that in the SNES version

of Street Fighter II.

I'm not sure that's a control thing.

I'm not sure that's an

arcade versus a SNES thing.

I'm not positive because you don't see it

quite as often on

good old arcade hardware.

But it is possible.

It is possible to do it pretty quickly.

The question is the efficacy because as

you're moving your stick, you then have

to move the stick into the relative

location you want to be in.

Whereas with your thumb,

you're doing the shimmy and then your

thumb is probably a little bit faster to

get to wherever you want to be in

whatever direction you

want on the D-pad as a whole.

So when I think about shimmying, I think

about how some OGs used to use shimmying,

how we used to use

shimming back in the day.

Same basic concept.

Shimming is just basically when you have

an opponent who's programmed to think

you're going to keep doing the offensive,

walking back a little bit, letting them

bait out some kind of reaction, and then

you counter punish them.

It doesn't have to be a throw attempt,

although it can be part of that.

So there's your FGC

terminology of the week.

And that brings us

back to our main topic.

The topic I've been wanting to talk about

this entire time, and

that is rebelliousness.

How can we do our own form of rebellion

in a way that makes sense for us,

that allows us to...

Well, allows us to not give in.

I mean, there's got to be a way in which

we can, in our own small

minuscule way, fight back against

whatever tyranny that we see.

That doesn't have to put ourselves or our

family in harm's way.

One of the things I think about quite a

lot is this idea of burying your head in

sand and waiting for all

this to kind of pass you by.

And if it's okay with you, I like to

disagree with that

modus operandi, that notion.

Of course, if your number one objective

and job is just trying to put food on the

table for your family, get a roof over

your head, if you're in

survival mode, of course.

But you were always going to kind of

discard all the noise

that was happening in life.

That was always going to

be what you were doing.

But if you had the spoons to listen to

what was happening around the world and

be aware of what was happening in your

local and maybe not so local politics,

I think there's a better way.

A better way to

manage feelings of unrest.

The first thing that I'd suggest you do

that anyone does is find out what is the

most important thing to you.

What is so important

to you that it's worth

fighting a good fight for?

I was about to say dying, but

Let's not go there just yet.

And then decide in what small way of your

world of hemisphere are you going to do

something about that?

To kind of fight back against that one

thing that matters most to you.

It can be incredibly tiny and small.

It can literally start with the

conversation you have with friends and

family and just pushing

back on misinformation.

It can be the way in which you go to

events and actively seek like-minded

individuals and just bring a sense of

community to everyone that you're around.

It can be, if you want to, be you going

to your municipality and going to

hearings and speaking at or at least

listening to what people are saying about

a certain issue that matters a lot to you

if that's what you want to do.

But here's what I

don't think is an option.

I don't think the option

is to do absolutely nothing.

Choosing to do absolutely nothing and I

mean truly absolutely nothing

gives the bad guys their win.

And we might not be

able to win every fight.

In fact, we might not win most of our

fights, but we'll win

the ones that matter.

And so it's in our best

interest for our own mental health.

And for those of our well-being of those

that we love, the fight back in whatever

way makes sense in a diplomatic,

socially warranted way.

I don't condone the actions of good old

Spider-Man literally

punching with violence.

At the same time, though, that

individual, Lang, was using hate speech.

And we're not a fan of that.

I'm not advocating you

don a mask and become

our next Spider-Man.

You don't have to be, but you can be a

Superman or a

superwoman or a Wonder Woman

to those that you care about

by showing up every single day

and just being the truest version of

yourself that you can be and acting with

what we call integrity, doing what you

say you're going to do

and not betraying that.

So give yourself permission to challenge

yourself and some of your biases.

Ask yourself, are all my actions

mirroring the person that I want to

become, whoever that person is?

And then what small

little behaviors can I do?

Can I make?

Can I change?

Put myself on the better path forward.

What small things can I do to make sure

that the person that I want to be,

wherever that is, matches who I am today?

Whatever small thing

you choose is enough.

I'm really proud of my wife.

I'm proud of myself.

We had a moment of thinking to ourselves

that, you know what?

But we asked ourselves deep down what we

could do that would match

the person we want to become.

We thought to ourselves, what would the

person that I want to be do in this

particular situation?

Well, the person I want to be wouldn't

take over anyone's autonomy, but would be

a little bit more forceful in giving

suggestions as well as

giving support wherever we can.

That person also would read into what

people were saying and know that what

they were saying wasn't just angst at the

world, but rather it was a cry for help.

They just didn't know how to communicate.

And if I can read between the lines,

maybe I could kind of dig a little bit

deeper and be more supportive where I

normally wouldn't be.

And I'm proud of that.

That was my entire weekend.

This weekend is just kind of handling

that with my family and my wife's family.

And we're going to continue to do that.

It's going to be hard.

But I'm glad we're making that choice and

not just giving in and just saying,

whatever, that's your problem,

not mine.

Because that's not the

person that I want to become.

That's my little tiny bit of rebellion

against all the forces

telling me just to push it back.

No, I'm not going to push it back.

I'm going to roll up my sleeves a little

bit, dive in, offer

what support that I can.

So keep my mental health in check

and keep moving.

Keep trucking.

Because I cannot control a lot that's

going on in the world, but what I can

control is how I see myself every single

day after I've had a

good day's worth of work.

And I think you have

the same choice as well.

So consider that the next time

you see anyone act against your own

values, what small way that does not

jeopardize yourself.

Can you push back a little bit on that?

That makes sense for you.

So you can literally look in the mirror

the next day and be proud

of what you're looking at.

And that's how you counter hit.

All

right, folks, and that about wraps it up

for this week here at the counter hit.

We talked about a lot of

different things today.

Rebelliousness.

We talked about Super Nintendo, talked

about cryptocurrency

and how that's a scam.

Spider-Man entered the chat.

We talked about how, you know what, just

because something's not actively being

worked on doesn't make it dead.

And how that can all manifest in our own

brand of rebelliousness, however that

looks and feels for you.

So

it's been a pleasure

talking to you this week.

My name is Sam Kirk.

This has been the counter hit.

I'll see you all next week.

Who knows what we'll talk about then.

But for right now, stay curious.

This has been the Internet.

We were here and so were you.

Thanks for wasting time with us today.

I'll see you next time.