Category: Entertainment & Lifestyle

It’s been over three years since Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown was released for the PlayStation 4 on June 1, 2021. However, this was actually just a enhanced remaster of Virtua Fighter 5 which originally appeared in the arcades back in 2006. So in actuality, it’s been nearly 20 years since a new mainline entry in the Virtua Fighter series was released.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Sega declared in an interview with Video Games Chronicle that a new Virtua Fighter is in fact in development. Sega had recently left fans with a cryptic tease about this, but this is the first time that they’ve outright confirmed what people have been speculating about.

“Sega is currently planning to bring back some really historic franchises across games, television, and film, like Eternal Champions, Shinobi, Comix Zone, Space Channel 5 and Crazy Taxi. Some of these IPs are nearly 30 years old, so how challenging is it to be sure that they’ll still resonate with a modern audience?” asked Video Games Chronicle.

“So we have a suite of titles in development right now that fall into that legacy bucket, which we announced last year at The Game Awards; Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Streets of Rage, Shinobi, and we have another Virtua Fighter being developed.” — Justin Scarpone

A number of games that we already knew about was addressed here. Therefore, it was actually surprising to see Sega acknowledging a series that wasn’t even mentioned in the question.

“So we have a suite of titles in development right now that fall into that legacy bucket, which we announced last year at The Game Awards; Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Streets of Rage, Shinobi, and we have another Virtua Fighter being developed,” said Justin Scarpone, Sega’s new global head of transmedia. “And so all that’s very exciting.”

Unfortunately, this is the only point in which Scarpone mentions Virtua Fighter in the interview. He ends up going on to talk about how Sega is currently working on both a new game and film for Shinobi, a series initially started in 1987 that hasn’t had a game since 2011.

Evidently, Sega is apparently putting a great deal of emphasis on some of their older IPs now. It’s actually quite ambitious for them to also be developing a new Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, and Streets of Rage alongside a new Shinobi and Virtua Fighter, not to mention a third Sonic movie and an upcoming Shinobi film.

Based on the aforementioned cryptic tease, Sega is likely working on “Virtua Fighter 6.” In an image, they posted a 6×9 table spelling out “SEGA” 54 times, except it was spelled as “SE6A” in one instance.

SEGAじゃないのはどれだ？

Can you spot the odd one out? pic.twitter.com/Cca6XrC8OS

— セガ公式アカウント (@SEGA_OFFICIAL) October 5, 2024

Leading up to this hint, there were many rumors circulating about a new Virtua Fighter being in development. Back in December 2023, the company even acknowledged fan interest in Virtua Fighter despite there being no announcement at the Game Awards 2023 as many had expected.

“We are evaluating right now,” said Sega back then. “Virtua Fighter doesn’t use so many tricks, special moves like in Street Fighter, it’s very realistic. How can we make it more dramatic? It’s something we’re working on.”

With this in mind, it seems that Sega is trying to figure out how to make Virtua Fighter as flashy, similar to the Street Fighter or Tekken series while also somehow maintaining that feeling of realism.

The ultimate big beam clash is an iconic motif in anime that we’ve now seen countless times, often giving audiences a stressfully detailed perception of just how hard the struggle between good and evil can be at climactic points. That same clash, though transformed through the medium, often occurs in fighting video games as well, especially in over the top and fireworks-filled team fighters like 2008’s Tatsunoko vs. Capcom.

In his latest video creation Desk has conjured up some high stakes scenarios that explore what happens when the game’s most unstoppable onslaughts of offense are shot off at one another simultaneously.

It’s one thing when Ryu manifests a Shinku Hadoken at the same moment Frank West, for instance, throws on his Mega Man cosplay for a Megabuster, but another when you pair two mirrored teams of Ryu and Frank launching off four supers at the same time.

This is where Desk’s imaginative project starts, but it only progresses from there. Sure, the multicolored explosions and zero damage after the dust clears thereafter can be surprising to see once or twice, but what if you had enough meter for each character to launch more than one Super, and they take turns in a back and forth?

What happens when you take control of one of the game’s giant boss characters, who do not play by the same rules as the standard roster thanks to armor properties and even more ridiculously powerful super attacks?

Leave it to Desk to turn things on their heads and see if he can pull off a super-filled sequence wherein the super attacks mostly whiff as characters are strategically positioned (in other words, he momentarily tricks the game) to face away from one another while blasting all their meter into the void.

Get a peak into the creative mind of Desk, who times the beats of the action to line up with the rhythm of a deep cut piece of background music from Eschatos, as he presents “Clash.mp4” in the style of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom below.

The Super Smash Bros. series is known for its unique take on the fighting game genre. Rather than depleting an opponent’s health bar, the object of the game is to ring out the opponent (unless the game mode is set to Stamina Mode).

Needless to say, each character is armed with a number of recovery tools to help them get back to the stage upon being launched away. Of course, some are clearly intended to be better than others, but characters are meant to have wildly differing attributes in a game like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to ensure that everyone feels unique.

Recently, Esam created a tier list that ranks all 86 characters based on their ability to recover. In his video, Esam arranges everyone into one of five different tier categories.

Characters like Bayonetta, Steve, Sonic, Pac-Man, Pikachu, Mr. Game & Watch, Hero, Jigglypuff, and a few others sit at the very top of the tier list as they’re typically known for having absolutely absurd recovery options. These combatants just simply need to be dealt enough knockback in order to deplete their stocks as they’ll almost always be able to make it back to the stage with the correct execution.

Meanwhile, Little Mac, Chrom, Dr. Mario, and Ganondorf are declared to have irredeemably bad recoveries. Aside from Chrom, all of these fighters also tend to rank as low tiers on traditional tier lists, which really emphasizes how problematic a bad recovery can be for a character in a game filled with strong recoveries.

However, it should also be noted that Pyra & Mythra and Min Min also tend to have rather linear recovery options despite typically being high tier or top tier. Of course, these are the sort of fighters that have a lot going for them and are almost exclusively limited by their weak recovery options.

Check it all out below:

Click images for larger versions

Street Fighter 6 Director Takayuki Nakayama recently made an interesting Tweet. Thanks to translations provided by Nicholas MajinTenshinhan Taylor, we know that Nakayama has previously envisioned a moveset for the X-Men’s Bishop in a fighting game.

It turns out that Nakayama is quite the fan of X-Men: The Animated Series, similar to how he used to watch Batman: The Animated Series. Nakayama has also apparently spent a bunch of time at the arcades playing X-Men games.

“Every evening with my Capcom co-workers, we would watch the Japanese version of the X-Men cartoon,” said Nakayama. “I loved the wonderful directing work as well as the hyped up opening by AMBIENCE. I played lots of X-Men at the arcades too. My heart was set aflutter by the incredible animations of Spiral, Wolverine and Psylocke as I spun my stick while playing Big Bro Piotr [Colossus?].”

To this day, Bishop has never been playable in a Capcom fighting game even though they’ve developed games like X-Men vs. Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom. As such, the idea of conceptualizing a brand new moveset for Bishop would indeed present the Street Fighter 6 Director with a new experience.

“From the X-Men, I love Bishop (who isn’t in the games),” continued Nakayama. “Having projectiles that are only beams and counters using various gadgets in a game would be so cool! That was what I used to imagine back then.”

Of course, it should be mentioned that Bishop has appeared in X-Men: Next Dimension, a fighting game released for the GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox back in 2002. Of course, Nakayama’s ideas for Bishop would likely differ greatly from that game.

Within the lore, Bishop has the ability to absorb and then redirect energy that makes contact with his body. Despite being a mutant, he actually utilizes an energy rifle in combat that he took with him from the future.

Overall, Bishop would probably function similar to Cable from Marvel vs. Capcom 2, but Bishop would probably bring his own take on a few things. He’d likely be particularly effective as an anti-zoning character since a lot of characters in Capcom games tend to use energy-based projectiles.

The idea of Takayuki Nakayama getting the opportunity to create his fantasized moveset for Bishop could actually someday happen with the way things have transpired in recent years. Considering the recently released Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, the possibility for another collaboration between Marvel and Capcom feels stronger than ever since the release of Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, which ultimately flopped.

Shortly after the announcement that Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui would be appearing in Street Fighter 6 as guest characters, Street Fighter 6 Producer Shuhei Matsumoto indicated that Capcom was open to the possibility of a Marvel character guest-starring in Street Fighter 6 or some other game.

However, it’s certainly worth noting that Nakayama was specifically asked which Marvel character he thought would fit in the best with the Street Fighter 6 cast back in November 2022, and Nakayama responded with “Killmonger.”

悪役好き #マヴカプ #ファイコレ #MVCFC #MVCFC自己紹介 pic.twitter.com/cVBXtmwzUB

— TAKA-nakayama (@takaNakayama) November 5, 2024

X-MENではビショップ（ゲームには未登場）も好きです。ビーム系限定の飛び道具あて身技とか再現出来たらアツそう！と当時妄想していました。

— TAKA-nakayama (@takaNakayama) November 5, 2024

Posted by EventHubs • 6 hours, 20 minutes ago • Comments: 5

Tensions are high this November 5th as, if you needed any reminding, it’s election day and the United States of America will be choosing either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as the country’s big boss for the next four years.

We don’t often get into politics here on EventHubs, but there have been some president-related stories in the fighting game community over the last few years that we felt might be fun to look back on today. From the time Harada seriously wanted to put Trump in Tekken to Bill Clinton’s brush with and eventual inclusion in Guilty Gear, continue on to see some of the times fighting games and the US presidency crossed paths.

A quarter century ago Bill Clinton was leader of the nation and one of the controversial issues of the day was violence in children’s media. The first fighting game franchise that’s inevitably going to come to mind when you consider violent children’s media and the 1990’s has to be Mortal Kombat, but that’s not the one Bill had his eyes set on.

Instead, Clinton brought a magazine ad for a little game called Guilty Gear to one of his speeches in the White House Rose Garden. The ad had an (admittedly clever) play on words that did not sit well with the sitting president.

“Here’s an ad that turns the argument I just made on its head: Psychiatrists say it’s important to feel something when you kill,” said Clinton about a different unnamed game.

“And then it goes on to say, you ought to get this technology because it bumps and you feel it. It says: Every sensation, every vibration, every mutilation, nine programmable weapons buttons. Customizable feedback software. Push the stick that pushes back and feel your pain. And here’s one that’s the most unbelievable of all. It says: Kill your friends guilt-free,” finished the President.

i cannot believe this pic.twitter.com/hvJUMi7yA3

— juno (@happycalcium_) January 12, 2022

The narrative doesn’t end there, however, as some 20 years later Guilty Gear Strive creators (the game’s story takes place almost entirely in the White House, by the way) put an obvious homage to Bill Clinton in a prominent background painting.

The year was 2016 and Donald Trump had just won the election. Tekken 7 Director Katsuhiro Harada and Producer Michael Murray were in San Francisco when Harada brought up the idea of putting Trump in Tekken 7 as a playable character.

“Me and Michael Murray were in San Francisco the night Donald Trump won the presidential election,” tweeted Harada. “I remember I asked him (Michael), ‘If I recall correctly, there is no licensing fee for making character goods or games about the President of the United States, is there? There’s a lot of buzz around it, so why don’t we put him in the game?’” he continued.

“Michael and I had a blast talking about Trump’s fighting style and the Rage Arts idea for a moment, then cooled down and sealed the idea. Why did I seal that idea? Because the driver of the UBER we were in at the time started blasting off at 200 km/h while calling out ‘FXXX Donald Trump,’” finished Harada.

If a random taxi driver put the kibosh on this idea with an emotional outburst, others likely would have before Harada and Murray got remotely close to bringing it to fruition. That said, can you imagine if Bandai actually put a president in Tekken as a playable character?

Don’t worry, you didn’t miss him as a hidden character in Street Fighter 4 or 5, but Barack Obama was indeed playable in a Street Fighter game at one point. The time was the mid 2000’s and the game was called Street Fighter Online: Mouse Generation, a PC venture Capcom teamed up with action figure company Revoltech to create.

Mouse Generation only featured Ryu, Chun-Li, Zangief, Guile and Ken as far as Street Fighter characters, but also offered fighters from Rival Schools and a collection of other non-fighting game properties.

From beyond left field, developers also chose to include a tuxedo-wearing Barack Obama on the roster. They added him on Valentine’s Day and… that’s about all we know. Game services were shut down on August 31, 2009, about a year and a half after initial launch.

There isn’t much left of Mouse Generation these days, though we do have a few screen shots, one of which features the Obama model:

Click images for larger versions

During the previous election cycle, some five years ago now, Democratic candidate Andrew Yang made a move to garner support from younger crowds by creating a president-themed fighting game: Yang2020 Path to Presidency.

Though it was more a gag than anything, PtP actually did come out and actually did feature both a story and versus mode. Users could play as long shot candidate Yang as he fights his way toward the Oval Office, unlocking additional content such as stages and characters to use in versus.

You can still purchase and play Path to Presidency on Steam for $2.99. You can watch the trailer to see what kind of action (such as brawling with Joe Rogan, Donald Trump, and MSNBS anchors) the game offers:

Back in 2017 we found out about a handful of character designs from legendary designer Akira “Akiman” Yasuda that never wound up making it onto playable rosters. One of these characters was a “fighting president” intended for Street Fighter 4.

The idea of a fighting president indeed did come to fruition as G was added as Season 3 DLC for Street Fighter 5 in 2018, but where G looks to be inspired mainly by Abraham Lincoln, this fighting president looked a lot like someone else.

With a red power tie and eccentric blonde hair, the concept art for this unnamed character looks suspiciously like Donald Trump, perhaps depending on whom you ask.

Ghostface is slated to hit Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns later this month, but it looks like there’s a bit of work that needs to be done before the Scream icon can take the stage.

NetherRealm Studios announced that MK1 is going to be seeing some server maintenance tomorrow, November 6, and a lot of players are asking for one thing in particular.

According to their statement, Mortal Kombat servers are slated to go down on Wednesday at 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET though it’s not listed how long they expect them to be offline.

While the maintenance period is underway, all online features including matchmaking, towers and invasion rewards will remain unavailable.

As to what the downtime is actually for, the developers haven’t said yet, but it’s usually indicative of a new update dropping.

Homelander post patch : pic.twitter.com/OJaeyJVVY9

— Sol (@slr_pwr) November 6, 2024

That’s leading a multitude of fans to hope for a new balance patch to address Homelander specifically.

The guest start from The Boys has already been hit a few times in previous updates to fix his infinite combos and invisibility glitches though it seems a vocal number of players feel like NRS didn’t nerf him nearly enough to his mixups and grabs.

Homelander running from his upcoming nerfs pic.twitter.com/CfT3uKlU0c

— Chloe (@Chloeee1000) November 6, 2024

It recently came to a head when tournament results for a Shirai Ryu Sundays MK1 online event showed Homelander taking all top four spots and another in the top 8 though it’s hard to know who is just jumping on the bandwagon to make jokes versus those with real gripes.

“We did it Paulo. We slightly nerfed command grab scaling, made low Ferra THEORETICALLY punishable if done point blank, and took away some health. We saved the meta!” pic.twitter.com/c4gD1AdweP

— Ludi (@LudiFGC) November 4, 2024

It seems we’ll be finding out soon.

Ghostface himself isn’t scheduled to release in early access for Khaos Reigns owners until November 19, and we still need to see his full trailer and Kombat Kast breakdown before then too.

Stay tuned for more information on Mortal Kombat 1’s updates as they become available.

There’s been a wild amount of buzz and speculation about what the future of Nintendo is going to look like after the massively successful Switch, and we have a slightly better idea now of what that could be.

Nintendo just released an official statement regarding the Switch successor’s backwards compatibility as well as a comment on more details for the new console.

The sixth president for Nintendo, Shuntaro Furukawa, just released a statement through Nintendo’s official channels to address the public following their own corporate meeting.

“This is Furukawa. At today’s Corporate Management Policy Briefing, we announced that Nintendo Switch software will also be playable on the successor to Nintendo Switch. Nintendo Switch Online will be available on the successor to Nintendo Switch as well.

“Further information about the successor to Nintendo Switch, including its compatibility with Nintendo Switch, will be announced at a later date.”

This new statement contains some echoes of what Nintendo has been saying previously since Furukawa said an announcement of the Switch successor would come some time during this fiscal year.

That means a reveal should be coming sometime before March 31, 2025, but rumors had been circulating the big unveiling would happen sometime in November — with the new statement indicating fans may be continuing to wait for a while more to see the system.

Story is developing…

This is Furukawa. At today’s Corporate Management Policy Briefing, we announced that Nintendo Switch software will also be playable on the successor to Nintendo Switch. Nintendo Switch Online will be available on the successor to Nintendo Switch as well. Further information about…

— 任天堂株式会社（企業広報・IR） (@NintendoCoLtd) November 6, 2024

Tune up the defense at your own risk…

If there’s one component of Street Fighter 6’s Drive System you’d be forgiven for remembering existed, it would have to be Drive Reversal. While we expect to see rush, parry, impact, and overdrive at least once or twice in every round, Drive Reversal feels like a much more specialized tool that, if you don’t well understand it, can feel like it’s simply not worth the two bars of Drive Gauge it costs to use it.

Drive Reversal is the subject of MC Mura’s latest video as he tries to determine whether or not the SF6 sub-mechanic is more “meh” or misunderstood. Some people feel like DRs are garbage while others fear their potential if Capcom were to buff them even a little bit; let’s Drive Reversals under the microscope with Mura and see if we can’t come up with an answer.

It’s not hard to see why Drive Reversals might garner a bad rap in a short period. Using them costs two previous bars of Drive Gauge to begin with, and they’re not guaranteed hits. At best Drive Reversal (DR) will get you out of a defensive situation (often in the corner) and give you both a quick breath and a second chance at life, but when they don’t work they leave you feeling terrible.

Many times have we spent two bars only to have our DR blocked and receive a Punish Counter combo that leaves us either knocked out or right back in the same situation with significantly less health and gauge.

Characters that have no invincible reversals lean on DR in an obvious way, but those who can spend that same two bars for close to the same risk and usually better reward may elect to permanently shelve DR in favor of always using invincible reversals.

In a game that’s so about offense, shouldn’t the obvious, global defensive move be relatively strong to keep things fair?

Street Fighter 6 naturally leans toward offense, and it might not even be hyperbole to say that DR stands as a bastion that stops the game from becoming fatally imbalanced, but MC Mura points out the dangers of improving the mechanic by even small amounts.

You might argue that developers should make Drive Reversal a little safer on block by tuning their recovery down by a frame or two, but such a change could quickly make the maneuver overly powerful in burnout situations.

Mura puts everything in better perspective in the full video below, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the current state of Drive Reversals after you’ve had a chance to watch.

Especially amid titles from times when audio and visual were a good bit less refined, it could be hard to decipher what characters from fighting games like SNK’s Samurai Shodown or King of Fighters were yelling out during the heat of battle. This was especially true when they were yelling Japanese, leading to some very peculiar-sounding catch phrases that, if we’re honest, we still don’t know the true meaning of to this very day.

Thankfully YouTuber and fluent Japanese speaker Mrs. Eats is helping out with her latest video. Mrs. Eats goes through some of SNK characters’ most iconic lines to tell us what they’re actually saying, and in the case of poster boy Terry Bogard’s iconic “are you okay?,” she reveals the odd backstory behind it.

Even as recently as Street Fighter 4, I know my local scene would often yell “can of Sprite!” whenever a Cammy cried “cannon spike!,” nodding to the fact that the English was often hard to understand and the Japanese sometimes sounded like nonsensical English phrases.

One of the first characters Mrs. E takes a look and listen at is Mai Shiranui. For a long while fans of Mai have heard something akin to “me bouncy” during her win screen (the fact that Mai is obviously well-endowed and animated to indeed be, quite bouncy, doesn’t do us any favors here) but it turns out that she’s actually just being especially patriotic.

We’ll let Mrs. Eats tell you exactly what Mai and the rest of the characters in the video, which include the likes of Iori, Haomaru, Galford, and SamSho announcer Kuroko.

Check out the full video below (the historical bit about Terry’s most memorable catch phrase takes place near the end, by the way) and then let us know in the comments what kinds of mis-translated and/or misunderstood phrases you’ve been known to shout with your friends while playing fighting games.

If you enjoyed what you saw and heard here then be sure to check out Mrs. Eats’ video on the same subject from Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.

A new Super Smash Bros. Ultimate ICONART Metal Poster Bundle has apparently recently been made available to preorder on GameStop. This bundle, which comes with the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate game and a collectible poster depicting the Battlefield stage contained within a metal case, will go for $79.99 starting on November 18, 2024.

This is actually not the same as the GameStop Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launch poster, which showcased the Final Destination stage for the game. As such, the timing of the announcement for this new bundle is somewhat curious.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was released almost six years ago on December 7, 2018. Development on DLC characters concluded with Kingdom Hearts’ Sora on October 18, 2021, which was over three years ago.

Despite all of this, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is still being sold at full price even to this day. This is likely due to the fact that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the third best-selling game on the Switch with 35.14 million sales worldwide (newly reported) after Animal Crossing: New Horizons (46.45 million) and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (64.27 million).

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch) with ICONART Metal Poster Bundle is $79.99 at GameStop #ad pic.twitter.com/8etaZ51MK6

— Wario64 (@Wario64) November 4, 2024

At this point, the Switch is seemingly near the end of its lifecycle especially when considering that Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa confirmed earlier this year plans for the Switch successor to be announced within this fiscal year, which would have to be before April 1, 2025 for Nintendo. Of course, rumors about this mysterious console do suggest that it will be backwards compatible with the Switch.

Earlier this year, new Spirits were added to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in celebration of the game’s fifth anniversary. Additionally, the game was recently patched to version 13.0.3 just last month which addresses an issue that’s been prominent since launch.

Rumors also seem to be indicating that GameCube controllers are back in reproduction, which is supported by the fact that Nintendo UK filed a new trademark for the GameCube controller back in February of this year. Though it’s possible that Nintendo is simply gearing up for the inclusion of the GameCube library to the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack membership, GameCube controllers have typically been a telltale sign of a new Super Smash Bros. entry on the horizon.

Just last month, Masahiro Sakurai wrapped up his YouTube channel and revealed that he has actually been working on a secret game project since April 2022. Apparently, he whipped up the proposal for this unknown game back in July 2021 (while still developing Kazuya Mishima and Sora as DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate) at “lightning speed.”

Details about Sakurai’s next game are extremely scarce at the moment, but it seems likely that it’s intended for the Switch successor. During his last video, Sakurai stated that it “should be announced sooner or later” assuming that they’re able to get it made.

Considering that the game has been in development longer than Super Smash Bros. Ultimate before it was announced, the holdup for the game’s revealing is likely because the Switch successor itself hasn’t been unveiled yet. Similarly, the developers for Yooka-Replaylee officially confirmed that the game is coming to “Nintendo,” heavily implying that it’s for the “Switch 2” rather than the Switch.

With all of this in mind, it would seem that some combination of Nintendo and GameStop want fans to have Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on their minds with the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate ICONART Metal Poster Bundle. A lot of signs seem to be lining up for a new entry on the upcoming Switch successor (whenever that gets announced).

Of course, it is important to note that Sakurai did state outright that he wasn’t thinking about a sequel to Smash Ultimate during an interview back in November 2024, several months after he had written that secret game project proposal. On the surface, this does seem to imply that Sakurai’s next game is for something not related to that particularly series.

However, if we were to assume that Sakurai did actually have plans to develop the next entry of the Super Smash Bros. franchise, there’s no way he’d be able to reveal such a detail in an interview like this. Because of this possibility, we can’t just simply take Sakurai’s words at face value.

Ultimately, we’re still playing the waiting game. However, it feels as though more signs keep appearing that seem to indicate a possible reveal in the very near future. It would feel strange that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate kept becoming relevant like this throughout the past year if nothing was truly in the works.

Be sure to let us know what your thoughts are about all of this in the comments section below.