I had heard rumors of the game's existence on various gaming sites and messages boards, but I never thought it was actually real. I spent a little over a year trying to track down a copy, but I always came up empty-handed. That was until a few weeks ago, when the game decided to find me. I am here to beg you, do not go looking for it. If an unfamiliar game shows up at your door, leave it be. It can disguise itself under any platform and does not abide by the rules of our universe. If you are unfortunate enough to play it, I will provide instructions below to hopefully give you a fighting chance. The game decided to present itself to me on a Sunday at midnight, 12am. It had manifested itself into a blank Nintendo 64 cartridge with no writing or sticker logo, and was placed outside my front door with no note or instruction. I paced around for 20 minutes and tried to comprehend where it had come from, and who had delivered it. Eventually, I hooked up my console and inserted the cartridge. My version of the game had titled itself, Halloween 64, and included an inverted Nintendo logo. It also displayed a few presumably nonexistent Biff companies like Eulogy Incorporated and Last Breath software. The title screen included the words Halloween 64, press start and text made to look like cheesy green slime. As soon as the game begins, you will be unable to quit until it is complete. I'm sure you're thinking, just turn it off, unplug it, or walk away. If only it were that simple. The game has several methods of self-defense, and the harder you try and disrupt it, the stronger it becomes. The power function of the console will not respond if you try to turn it off, the red power light remains on and the system operates like normal. The cartridge cannot be removed. It does not matter how hard you pull, it will stay locked in place. If you annoy it enough, the cart will become scalding hot and burn your skin to the bone. In addition to this, all outside communication will be lost. Your phone and internet will not function while the game is running. Any door or window that leads to the outside world will be inaccessible. My front door wouldn't open and all of my windows became shatterproof. To be honest, I'm not sure if time even passes while playing the game, as every clock in my apartment remained at 12 while playing. You are given 10 lives. One aspect in the game will be nearer in reality.  As you lose more lives, you will get sick, very very sick. I became nauseous, my head started to pound, and my nose began to bleed. The more lives you lose, the worse you will feel, but you must keep playing. I can only conclude that losing all lives will result in death. Level 1. The Neighborhood. Your third person character in level 1 is a child dressed in a skeleton costume, carrying a jack-o'-lantern bucket. You start off in the middle of a suburban neighborhood covered in cheap Halloween decor. The street had a striking resemblance to the one I grew up on. I can only assume this is a detail that is different for each player. Although the street appears linear and endless, it is not. As you move forward, the street lights behind you will go out. Do not go into the dark, keep moving. If you move your character into the dark, you will lose a life. As you play, you will notice the darkness creeping behind you in reality. After a few hours of running down the virtual street, all of the lights in my apartment went out one by one. Whatever you hear, see or feel, it is very important to not take your eyes off of the screen during this level. You will hear doors in your home open and close, footsteps, and a familiar voice whispering in your ear. Do not lose concentration or you will lose more lives. You may even feel a hand rest on your shoulder. Eventually, the level will end without notice. The timer on the screen showed that I ran for 7 hours and 26 minutes before completion. Level 2, the house. Level 2 is displayed in first person. You will enter a house with limited visibility, as again flashlight is your only source of illumination. As you progress through this level, you will notice a difference in temperature around you. My apartment was freezing, making it extremely difficult to concentrate. Again, you must keep playing.  I lost 4 lives during this level, and started coughing up blood. As you move through the house, you will discover various weapons. When you recover all of these weapons, you can progress to level 3. These weapons cannot be used in self-defense. It is best to not equip them, as your character will only use them to commit suicide, thus resulting in the loss of more lives. As you move through the dark house, you will hear and see things that will test your limits as a human being. I will not go into detail, but I saw and heard things in the game that were deeply personal, disturbing and worst of all, genuine. Be prepared to witness every terrible experience of your past, all of those things you have repressed, forgotten, and maybe even went to therapy to try and work through. Once again, you must keep playing, and you must collect every weapon. Level 3, the finale. This one like the last, is in first person. I entered this level with 2 remaining lives, almost certain that I was destined to fail. Like the former levels, I believe that it is custom tailored to the person who is playing. You will enter a bedroom and see a person lying on the bed, asleep. They may resemble a loved one, a friend, or yourself. I saw the body of my best friend who passed away 10 years ago. You will have access to every weapon you grabbed in level 2, a knife, blowtorch, baseball bat, and screwdriver.  They will not fight back. Once their health bar is diminished, you will win the game. I chose the knife. I walked up to the bed, aimed, and struck the body with the blade. White hot pain filled my eyes, and I instantly discovered the catch of level 3. Whatever pain you inflict on the person, you will feel in reality.  If you take too long in between blows, your player will lose the life. The person on the bed will beg you to stop, they will scream your name again and again. It took me 20 minutes to stab them to death, and I could barely hold the controller when it was over. I completed it with just one life remaining. My body was cold, frail and broken. I remember reading game complete on the screen just before blacking out. And I am not sure who the game will choose next, or if it already has chosen. I just pray that they will read this before it's too late.


Hey everyone today We're going to be talking about the launch sales for links awakening and the Nintendo switch light in Japan Which you would figure should be a pretty big market for both titles because Japan Cares a lot about handheld gaming in comparison to the rest of the world Obviously the switch light being the most handheld version of the switch itself and the sales actually Underwhelmed in some regards, but we're going to talk about it because it's still pretty impressive and links awakening itself is obviously One of the most successful handhelds all the games of all time after those I don't know It is my very first ever Zelda experience I played links awakening on a bus way long ago when I was a kid then links awakening DX and obviously now We have links awakening on Nintendo switch fully remastered just called links awakening I kind of like that they didn't really throw the remastered or the HD after they say hey look it's just links awakening It's been 20 plus years. Here you go play this game again And see what you think so the sales are in and first Let's just focus on the games and I'm getting all of this data from Femitsu And I am using Nintendo life as the overall source for this information I'll put a link to the Nintendo life and Femitsu down in the description if you'd like to double-check on the sources And at the number one spot obviously this week was the Legend of Zelda links awakening brand new game So the hundred and forty one thousand three hundred and seventy five units now if you're wondering how this compares the breadth of The wild back at the launch of switch it sold around a hundred and eighty thousand units So it only sold about 40,000 units less with a game that should not be as popular as Breath of the Wild So that's actually a really great start for links awakening in Japan And we'll have to see how the week two week three sales and all that go and just see where links awakening is gonna end up Because I have this general worldwide prediction that I think links awakening is gonna sell about five million units Worldwide when it's all said and done of course, you know We're talking years down their home when it's all said and done So it'll be interesting to see where it ends up falling in Japan in comparison to prior handheld specific Zelda games You know the top-down style ones that have been exclusive to handhelds basically outside of four swords adventures since Ocarina of Time came out Now if you look at the rest of the chart There are three PlayStation 4 games including at the number two and number three spots monster hunter world ice-born master edition Is up there, you know at thirty nine thousand five hundred and ninety four units moving around three hundred thousand I believe that is the version that comes with all the brand-new DLC So that's not too shocking to see that up there because monster hunter is a very popular IP especially in Japan Obviously e-football winning eleven twenty twenty from Konami chiming in at number three on PlayStation 4 movie Nineteen thousand two hundred forty nine units But now we get into the bevy of Nintendo releases including one more new one That's more of a PlayStation 4 port, but still nice to have first off Super Mario maker 2 is in at number four Moving fourteen thousand nine hundred five units that has now moved over Six hundred thousand units in Japan as you're seeing on the chart So Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is still in the top five having released last December at twelve thousand two hundred sixty six Having moved over three point two million units in just Japan crazy numbers And then we see Nino Cooney wrath of the white witch again I said it kind of like a port from PlayStation 4 a late port But it moved eleven thousand two hundred thirty seven units in its first week on the market Minecraft for switch is still just chugging along moving ten thousand eight hundred thirteen units and moving over nine hundred thousand units in Japan probably gonna move over a million when it's all said and done Mario Kart 8 deluxe times it at number eight million ten thousand seven hundred eighty six Units and you know almost at two point five million Mario Kart 8 deluxe is getting up there And then we also see fishing spirits Nintendo switch version by Bandai Namco Moving another close to ten thousand nine point eight thousand And actually a decent amount on switch for a third-party game. It's all about fishing At hundred seventy thousand and then obviously one of the more recent big triple-a releases is still there at number ten for PlayStation 4 And Borderlands 3 moving eight point eight thousand units Now obviously we got to talk about the switch sales next because this is the launch It might people might care about more than links awakening is this awakening is gonna kind of trail off and you know Luigi's mansion three's gonna pop up Pokemon Sword and shield all that stuff who knows maybe even ring fit adventure in December But switch light is potentially going to be the number one selling unit in Japan for quite some time of switch Just because it's two hundred dollars. So it's a hundred dollars cheaper and it's portable And that's what Japan cares about more than TV play But we got some interesting numbers here So the new Nintendo switch light or you know, Nintendo switch light with the new moniker in front of it on the charts moved a hundred and seventy seven thousand nine hundred and thirty six units now That is actually really really good again launching outside of a holiday period outside of a launch period in general for a system but Nintendo stock did end up dropping about three point seven percent or so yesterday just because the Projections from a lot of stock analyst companies were that it would move 300,000 units in Japan. So it did fell short of stock analyst projections I don't know obviously what Nintendo's internal projections were but a hundred and seventy seven thousand units is not Terrible by any stretch of the means and this is in addition to the fact that the Nintendo switch itself the OG the one with The dock and all that for three hundred also move sixty one thousand eight hundred and four units last week Which is a lot that puts the combined total that over, you know 230,000 plus units sold of switches last week in a week when only a hundred forty thousand of the You know new Zelda games sold so pretty crazy and obviously when you compared to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 pro Xbox one Excellent excellent as as you're seeing on the chart Switch is kind of in the league of its own right now and it's on the switch I had already passed PlayStation 4's total sales a little bit ago It's only gonna get worse as the light and the switch continued to tag team that sales chart moving forward Obviously, I think it might have even surpassed the 3DS way. No, I know not it hasn't surpassed 3DS overall yet Sorry, these charts are only showing the new Nintendo 2DS and the Nintendo 3DS I'm not showing the original 3DS sales so switch hasn't passed that yet But it's getting there and obviously it's passed Vita, but I you know when I sit back and I look at the charts I start to feel like The switch lights doing just fine Maybe it didn't sell exactly what analysts thought it might do But I can we're outside of that holiday period and Link's awakening while a big launch is technically like a remaster of an old game It didn't launch you know switch light didn't launch with a Brand new big-name title like if switch light had launched alongside Pokemon Sword and Shield You can bet these launch numbers would be significantly higher So it's one of those things where there is a special edition switch light coming out with Sword and Shield in November So I think we need to really wait till we hit the holidays to find out how popular switch light is going to end up being in Japan because I have a feeling it's gonna sell multiple millions of units over the next few months in Japan So just stay tuned I mean people aren't gonna go buy a switch light when they don't want when it's not tied to a game They necessarily want to buy it right now the least awakening numbers are obviously pretty impressive But I don't know if it's gonna have as long of a tale of sales as Breath of the Wild is we're breath of the wild Still every now and then bounces back into the top 10 for Mitsu So I don't know what the wait and see what happens with that, but I'm pretty excited And obviously we know we have Luigi's Mansion 3 coming up on Halloween. Can you believe Nintendo's actually gonna release it on Halloween? That's crazy something to play fresh on my favorite holiday of the year. I love Halloween Seriously, I don't know if there is a holiday that I get more excited by then than this one But anyways, that's all I got for you guys today. So hopefully you Actually, I kind of just want to know your guys's thoughts on the sales themselves You know, are you impressed by these sales in Japan? I impressed by the switchlight sales Do you think it underwhelmed? Do you own a switch light because I actually am having a hard time finding anyone who owns a switch light because so many of People I know already owned a switch and didn't really feel like buying a light. So I do you own it We talked yesterday how potentially there's some drifting issues starting to happen Are you experiencing those drifting issues or you know, is it not happening to yet? What are your thoughts on the switch light in general? What are your thoughts on links awakening as well? That's been like the big launch lately There's been some controversy because of the frame rate drops from 60 to 30 back to 60 Even some transitional frame rates that seem to drop for like 15 or something when you go between screens and scenes So that's something just to note and keep in mind. I don't know if it's bothering people Maybe you're all in love with it. Obviously, there's a big debate on if it's worth 60 bucks I'm actually working on a video right now about the value of games and the subjectiveness of it and links awakening is gonna be a big topic in that one Whether it is worth that $60 price tag despite being a remaster despite being an old an older game That's not as long, you know, is it is the same value as Breath of the Wild because they both launch at 60 bucks So there's a big debate to happen there and I can't wait to make that video But until next time folks, I am Nathan Robeljens from the Tenor Prime I want to thank you for tuning in and I will catch you in the next video


Hello everybody. How's it going out there? That's all we can get for noon on the first day. Come on, let's bring people over here. Get people pumped. Let's go. Come on, MetaCloud crew over there. Sense of people over here. Shada and I want to talk to a full house and not people eating lunch. All right. Thanks everyone. I'm Sean Lynch with Feedback. Don't touch your mic. Yeah. Sean Lynch, CEO, co-founder at MetaCloud. This is Alan Waldman, our head of product. Today, we're going to talk to you about a new take on Hybrid Cloud. You heard a lot of talk this morning about OpenStack interoperability, how you make sure you have a consistent working environment, both on-prem and off-prem. We're going to talk about our take on that, because OpenStack does quite a lot. But when you're looking at a full end-to-end distribution like MetaClouds, there's a lot that we're doing that is extended upon OpenStack verbatim. We're doing things like VXLAN, Ceph distributed block storage, pretty enhanced and extended Dash and UI. When you look at that other stuff, we need to make sure all of that is extended to between both your on-prem and hosted environment. We'll be talking about that today. OpenStack is a service. In a nutshell, this is what MetaCloud does. MetaCloud delivers OpenStack where you just consume it. As you heard Disney mention this morning, they've been using MetaCloud for about three years now. And I think Chris mentioned, it's just an immediate turn up for them. They went one month, dev QA, right into production. And that's, if you're delivering OpenStack as a service, it really enables you to do that. So we overlay OpenStack on your bare metal in your data center. That's our on-prem product, which we'll talk about in a bit here. And we operate the whole thing end-to-end, which is pretty different relative to some of the other models for delivering OpenStack in the marketplace. Going to go to the next. So I'm going to talk a little bit about MetaCloud on-prem. MetaCloud on-prem is a product that we've been running was our first flagship product. It's been in production for over three years. It's an integrated compute storage networking and identity solution that's built completely on OpenStack, backed by Ceph, as well as we support Cinder, NFS. Pretty much any storage platform you have already existing in your data center, we integrate with it. One of the key things that we tried to build was that the platform was dedicated, or not really dedicated, but focused towards enterprise customers. So things like integrating with AD or LDAP, all the things that you'd expect from an enterprise environment. The other thing we did is really make the platform highly available. So full HA for every single service and core service that runs on the platform, networking, to Glance, to NovaNet, to compute, NovaCompute, all of those things are really highly available, which really makes our platform really unique. And as Sean mentioned, because we deliver it as a service, we could structure some really great SLAs around that uptime. Even though we are delivering as a service, it's super flexible. And the idea is that we build this platform and deliver that from a kind of SaaS style delivery software delivery model, but we work with our teams to really kind of customize and configure the platform so it suits their needs. So I mentioned storage before, but we have multiple network solutions where we can either use our controller tiers or use upstream hardware gateways and do interesting things by integrating VXLAN into the platform. A lot of really interesting things that we can do to really make the platform really work well for these enterprise customers. If you don't mind, when you're deploying OpenStack as a service and you're managing a large network of private clouds, one of the unique abilities that this allows you to do is push out major software upgrades in a way where your customers don't actually have to deal with the intricacies of that work. So our clients, for instance, have moved from OpenStack, Cactus, Diablo, Essex, Folsom, Grizzly, Havana, and they actually haven't had to do anything. They just log into their self-service dashboard and they see, wow, MetaCloud pushed out new enhancements. I have all this new functionality. So it is, when we say OpenStack as a service or when we call it a SaaS-delivered private cloud, it really is that experience, but on your bare metal. So as Sean I think mentioned, we're hardware agnostic, it is a software platform. We pretty much run on any x86 platform in your data center and we've worked with almost every single switch network on the planet. So in February, we announced a new product called MetaCloud Hosted. This is the same MetaCloud OpenStack, kind of OpenStack as a service platform offering, but it's hosted by MetaCloud. What we saw in the industry was people were coming to us and our existing on-prem customers as well as folks who are in other cloud platforms saying, hey, guys, we need you to deliver something that's more turnkey. We don't want to buy the hardware, we don't want to go do data centers, but we want a private cloud, we want all the great things that you could do in a private cloud. And we said, okay, great, we can do that. So with MetaCloud Hosted, you get a dedicated, multi-tenant private cloud platform. All of the infrastructure is dedicated to you. The starter package comes with 160 cores and about 35 terabytes of distributed block storage, a full 10-gig networking, and diverse internet providers, and it's worldwide. So we have five locations, there's three in the United States, one in Europe and one in Asia, Singapore, Europe is Amsterdam, and we'll soon have a couple of more. The great thing about this platform is you use it in the same way that you use the public cloud. It's an OPEX pricing model, you just buy what you need, use it when you need it, and when you're done, you turn it off. It's a really great platform because it gives you the same experience that you get with the on-prem product as well. So we're really excited about this product. Again, we launched it in late February, early March, and we're just getting it rolling. What's that? So the difference is in our distribution, we have a few things that I think set us apart, right? You have, we're using Corosink and Pacemaker for a horizontally scalable front end to every single availability zone. I don't believe, you asked about Rackspace, I don't think Rackspace actually takes every single orchestration and cloud component and wraps it in a horizontally scalable quorum layer. So our availability zones do scale. We've also integrated with Seth. So every time you add a new compute node, you get horizontal block storage, both in the on-prem and in the hosting model. I don't think the Rackspace offering does either of those. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe it does. Okay. So one of the things that we wanted to talk about was how Metacloud thinks about hybrid cloud. As you heard this morning, there was a lot of talk about what does hybrid cloud really mean and how do we deliver that to the customers. And I think we have a pretty interesting take on what the hybrid cloud model really is. Yeah, so in typical hybrid setups, as you guys are well aware, you might have some VMware on-prem, some OpenStack on-prem, maybe some cloud stack, maybe you're using on the public side EC2 or Rackspace or Azure. And it's sort of this pieced together convoluted thing. I mean, even if you're using OpenStack on both sides, I would argue it's beneficial to use the same OpenStack distribution on both sides. If you're leveraging more than OpenStack core, as is the case with an offering like ours. So, you know, we're really going after this truly consistent experience, not just from an API level or from a dashboard or functionality level, but also everything you build around a distribution like this. We're trying to make sure that that is consistent too. Even down to the support, you call the same support team for both. So let's talk a little bit about what it means to be kind of a metacloud hybrid cloud. So let's say you're a, you know, medium or large-size enterprise. You've deployed a lot of capital in your own data centers. You, you know, you need a DR strategy or you have a very bursting applications. You may have heard the folks on stage mentioned, mentioned us, Disney mentioned us. You know, they have interesting applications where they might need bursting, for example.  So you can basically leverage our on-premise product for all your existing capital. And if you need a DR capabilities or you need geo location of your cloud because we can do this worldwide, you kind of get it. And it's the same exact platform as what you get with on-prem. One thing, the combined volume pricing pieces, particularly interesting, because I don't think anyone else does this in the market. And that's, you know, metacloud, you just pay a nominal per physical socket subscription fee for our on-prem solution. As the hosted solution scales and you're utilizing more cores and more sockets, you get to leverage the aggregate of both hosted and on-prem to drive further volume-based discounts. And that's really unique. I don't think actually anyone else does anything similar to that, whereas you use more of one, the other becomes less expensive. So that's our take on what we're doing in the hybrid cloud space. We think it's really unique in the industry. We don't see anybody offering OpenStack as a service both inside of somebody's data center or outside the data center in a full, you know, fully kind of traditional hosting kind of way. I think we're happy to open it up and take any questions you have and appreciate the time. Yep, any questions out there? No? Yeah, yeah. So what is, what's proprietary, what's open source? So we're a big contributor back to OpenStack. We're a top 20 contributor to OpenStack. As you might imagine, when you're running many private clouds in a very large network on very diverse heterogeneous hardware configurations, we're amongst the first to see, you know, stability or performance related issues with OpenStack. So if we see, for instance, one of our clients is running Cisco UCS actually on MetaCloud at large scale. If we see the combination of that platform with ours result in some sort of issue and we see that another client might be trending toward a similar issue, we can take proactive action and it really allows us to do sort of collaborative monitoring of things. But I think to answer your specific question, what's OpenStack, what isn't? We're, when it comes to stability or performance, we're contributing back very actively. The product level features that I think differentiate us as far as our dashboard is pretty different than anything else out there. It's a dashboard that really lends itself to managing large quantities of compute efficiently. We don't really, we've ripped out a lot of pagination out of Horizon. We've added Graphite to Horizon. We've made it a little more visually appealing. That stuff stays with MetaCloud or with our distribution. Our VX LAN work, which we've taken all the layer two networking semantics and push it up to layer three so you get highly optimized East West bandwidth and big data workloads. That work is more MetaCloud proprietary. Lastly, the SEP integration, horizontal block storage as you add compute nodes and our HA work. So that stuff is pretty unique to MetaCloud service, but when it comes to just sheer stability, security, performance, that stuff is actively being contributed back up. Thanks, no more questions. Thanks everyone. Appreciate the time.