How to increase your stamina with terrible video game tactics | Unraveled

stamina that mysterious green juice that powers our muscles in video games that allows characters to cleave dragons climb volcanoes and lightly jog through a prairie I look at these heroic tasks and I think how look I'm usually pretty high energy but the fact of the matter is that I've been stuck at home for the past two months and I've cultivated the stamina of a cartoon basset hound I used to be so much more productive and my energy has just completely vanished is it because I've been having trouble adjusting to this new working from home lifestyle or is it because my build is trash today I'm saying goodbye to that boring languid Brian and I am going to use the things I've learned from video games to maximize my stamina [Music] I gotta go hey I'm on these graphics cuz I don't have a studio anymore there are two main ways that stamina is represented in video games stamina bars that automatically replenish and stamina bars that don't and these different representations lead to different techniques for boosting that stamina my hypothesis is that if I use these same techniques in real life then I will finally have the energy to address laundry chair there are four methods of augmenting your stamina and video games let's start with the easiest one to understand item refills you expend some energy you eat something to replenish that energy it's basic biology the Krebs cycle or something like that I'm not interested get that [ __ ] out of here the problem is that video games are usually more fantastical than real-life oftentimes the item you need to consume is an elixir made from arcane magics siphoned from the very lifeblood that sustains or if you're had a Okajima it's monster energy god bless you death stranding for having a magical canteen that effortlessly turns dangerous time fall into a branded energy drink you know for a videogame that loves to give you a 40 minute long cutscene explaining why some [ __ ] is named hot wet man or whatever this piece of world-building has a much simpler explanation money and thanks to this shameless product placement I have a concrete way to determine how to refill stamina judging by Sam's experience it takes about 600 milliliters of monster energy to fully juice your bar and given the fact that this logic exists in a world where everyone is stuck in isolated homes and delivery people are among the most important of essential workers I think it's safe to say that conditions could not be better suited for this experiment the biggest difference between me and Sam bridges is that I'm not getting paid by monster energy so I don't have to pretend to like it technique to slowing depletion unlike item refills this one asks you to do some planning you only consume one of these items before you have to do a huge task so it usually shows in games where preparation is key like when you have to go fight a 40-ton pickle Monster Hunter has battles that can last upwards of an hour which can make the preparation as important and as long as the actual fight itself kind of like eating a full pasta bake before the big track meet there are quite a few ways to slow stamina depletion in Monster Hunter but sometimes the simplest option is the best one and in this case the simplest option is State steak is made from raw meat in Monster Hunter and also the real world and if you eat it it boosts your max stamina but the effects change based on how you cook a rare steak refills your stamina bar and makes it longer but a well-done steak does all that and it slows your max stamina depletion the steak snobs among you may turn up your nose at the assertion that a well-done meat is better than a wet juicy rare one but I posit to you this question which one would you rather have jangling around in your leather satchel so I will be cooking these meats until they are all the way gray technique 3 stamina regeneration with this technique every time you use stamina you'll get it back faster and there is no game that makes you say come on refill come on come on come on come on reform more than dark souls in dark souls you consume stamina every time you attack block run parry roll back step back stab repost jump shoot arrows call your mom check and if you're in the middle of a boss fight and you have run out of the stamina necessary to dodge roll or swing your big sword well them's the breaks kid luckily there are some accessories that speed up that stamina regeneration and even more luckily you can purchase legitimate versions of these items for about 300 bucks no thank you I can make that at home and even if I did have the means to purchase these official props there's still one massive problem the in-game items are imbued with dark abyssal magics that I simply do not have the art luckily I do have one little piece of magic I can use it's called the placebo effect there are plenty of psych studies that show that clothing choices can have an effect on your mood and your confidence and there are even more studies that show that placebos can have legitimate beneficial effects so why wouldn't donning the mask of the child help me deal with laundry chair and finally technique or permanent increases this is by far the best way to maximize your stamina when you've got all the stamina in the world even the heaviest of tasks won't faze you there are plenty of realistic games that use this technique like Red Dead Redemption - where the only way to increase your max stamina is to do a bunch of stamina heavy tasks like sprinting but the thing about this technique is that it sucks I'm sorry you're telling me that in order to have more energy I have to use up all the little energy I have that's a recursive logic I don't have any energy to begin with and you want me to run a mile [ __ ] so since Rockstar doesn't actually care about realism let's talk about a more grounded game breath of the wild in this game link can trade for spirit orbs to increase his hearts or his stamina but I want to focus on this little guy the horned statue here you can do a different sort of trade a devil's bargain you can increase your max stamina the only problem is that I can't figure out how I would gain more stamina by doing something physically detrimental like using a shampoo with sulfates I wouldn't never do so for now I'll be focusing on the first three techniques here's how the experimental go I will spend one day on each technique rating my stamina level every hour of that day if I'm at a zero then I'm either sleeping or dead so most of my stamina levels will be between one and ten with a one being the stamina level of a hot box sloth and a ten be the energy of a six-year-old at a laser tag party who just finished his first can of mellow yellow' my goal is to be at a level 10 at all times I'll also be raiding the boosts based on 3criteria boost speed boost endurance and boost quality but first we have to do a control trial which is just a normal day just after 7 o'clock on a Monday I'd save my power level I went about my day as I normally do which is to say boringly if we take a look at this graph you'll see that there were two little spikes the first one which happened after I had my morning coffee and the second one after I hit a real low spot right after lunch I have no idea if I'm pointing to the right places it's half past one I decided to be productive by at least leaving my house and go buy a liter of monster you can't tell because I'm wearing a mask but I'm grimacing under here this is obviously just one control trial but it is emblematic of the lethargy I've been feeling for the past few weeks I never got above an 8 and in fact my average for the full day was just a little bit higher than how I was feeling right after I woke up that's pretty bad but it means there's nowhere to go but up and now be going way up with the first technique trial feeling about a 5 not super tired not super energetic but instead of making coffee I instead will go and take a swig from my canteen which I have filled up with three different monster energy drinks up to the litre market if I'm at halfway through my stamina right now I shouldn't be drinking 300 millilitres let's see if this kicks in and the effects of Sam bridges favorite concoction did indeed kick in 8 o'clock let's okay obviously the energy drink has affected me and put the stats so I can move around I can still have more stamina yeah I feel like I'm at an 8 right now you know normally I'd say that that's fine I'm trying to be at the peak performance level another 120 milliliters down the hatch let's do some work baby we steal and find probably a nine or maybe not and a half maybe a ten pride al nine and a half can we get waffle fries no filming let's go write more scripts things were going great for me in the stamina Department until they weren't now blue the crash and then right after eating lunch has kind of just brought the whole thing down to a three now that I have seen that monster gives me a super high and then immediately crashes me I'm gonna do the only thing a sane person would do and consume more monster energy let's go to work and though I went searching for that magnificent full stamina feeling I fleetingly experienced in that morning I still averaged less than the control trial for the rest of the afternoon I drank three full cans of monster energy if I hadn't had the monster energy would I have been dead right now I don't understand there was only one little spike that happened after I had to go outside to pick up stakes for the next day's trials and though the energy drinks didn't keep me up all night there were some other side effects that ultimately led to a bad review of this technique my body is tired but my anxiety and also I feel like physically not great still I had high hopes for trial two since the previous two trials trended downward I had hoped to that slowing depletion would help unfortunately due to the previous day's trials I was operating at a deficit went to bed alright and then I woke up about two hours after that and then kept waking up every thirty minutes I'll tell you what more than anything in the world what I would love to do is go ahead and brew myself a pot of coffee but you know I'm I'll do you one better super cheap beef i round steak go ahead and grill one of these puppies up to a healthy 160 degrees Fahrenheit get some breakfast going I tried my best to go into this experience unbiased and honestly the first steak of the day wasn't that bad I feel more powerful and though it didn't give me quite the same bump as the monster energy my stamina levels rose and stayed level for the entire morning it feels like I'm maintaining it a lot better maybe I really am good not degrading my stamina it is almost lunchtime maybe I'll eat too well-done medallions of steak that's exactly what I did sadly the second meats of the day were not as wonderful and this is where the true challenge of this technique came in I do really wish I was eating something other than this the problem is that I'm still very hungry and I but I also don't want to eat any more well-done steaks with my stomach rumbling and my stamina flagging I decided to try to take my mind off of it by working on the accessories for the next day's trial and this did give me a little stamina boost and that stamina maintained but other things weren't going so hot great stamina is going alright but I am so hungry and also so upset with the idea that I have to eat more of these well done pucks of meat but I'm gonna make the last two now a lot of you might be wondering doesn't it get easier over time and the answer is obviously no by the end of the day it's easy to see that though my stamina didn't get quite as high it did last longer so there might be some truth to this slowing degradation technique but unlike the monster energy trial this one was both literally and metaphorically harder to swallow there's a reason energy drinks aren't chewable luckily our final trial didn't make me consume anything I slept a little bit better last night at Lisa's so I'd say I'm it like four but the good news is that I know just what to do let me go put on Mike's I already feel energized okay full disclosure as much as I believe video game logic I did just tape some tinfoil onto some cardboard I wasn't expecting much from this trial but the results speak for themselves why don't I carry around a shield more often this makes me feel so powerful I had a morning boost that rivaled item refills sure working in full garb was a little bit annoying but that didn't stop me from being an active participant in my virtual meetings yeah I can I can help out with that Jenna if you need any extra help on that one yeah Brian I guess so but around 11:00 the mask and the shield were getting to me so I started altering which of the accessories I was wearing there's no set bonus so as long as I had one item equipped my stamina regeneration should be a little bit faster than normal for the past hour I took off the mask and I've just been living on the chlorine the-- ring I do feel more tired I'm gonna rethink about the mask at 1:30 I had to do a stream and I did that in the mask I'm sure enough my stamina was boosted after that experience in fact for most of the day the accessories helped end didn't make my stomach hurt but there were other costs I don't like wearing this mask I feel like my stamina has increased but it seems like there's an obvious trade-off going on here because like it's not it's not comfortable to wear you can see like it's been squishing my nose I'm deciding whether or not I want to have higher energy levels or if I want to feel comfortable is really what's happening at the moment take a look right there I imagine the Wright brothers wore a similar expression the day they went to Kitty Hawk because that is the face of a man who is ready to soar remember how I said I couldn't figure out how to trade health for stamina well judging from these previous trials each one of them was physically detrimental in a specific and wonderful way I feel like physically weird perhaps I could trade my health for more stamina by doing technique at once welcome to the final trial realizing what I was going to have to do today really just made me not want to get out of bed I am about to do all three stamina things at once I'm not expecting it to feel good but I am expecting an increase in productivity unlike anyone has ever seen for me so after donning my outfit and grilling up a well-done steak I sat down for breakfast god I hate this state and by 9 o'clock I felt the effects I think maybe God didn't intend for us to wake up and drink an energy drink and eat a well-done steak and then where it's in oil mask I'm out of five okay so the boost didn't happen right away but let's remember that some of these boosts take a while to warm up and given the fact that I'm increasing my max stamina I should be hitting a ten maybe an 11 or 12 by mid-morning except things didn't change it's 10 o'clock and I'm still at a 5 what the hell I'm just gonna cook all the steaks I'm gonna drink all the energy drink I'm gonna wear this while I'm doing it I'm just gonna do it all right now I'm tired of this it's also physically tired I ate four steaks I drank all of the rest of my energy drink I was going to increase my maximum stamina I'm ready to take on the day it turns out that doing every single stamina boosting technique at once fills your stem in the bar so full that the bar explodes I felt physically ill and had to lie down for several hours I can't even review this boost technique because it just knocked me unconscious but I will say that I did rebound later that day so I left my house came out here to take a little walk of maintaining adequate social distance I feel I feel a whole lot better you can't tell but I'm smiling under this and this made me rethink some of my trials most of my afternoon boosts words do too gimmicky ingestible z' they were because I took a small walk or I did a fun craft or I talked to my friends online was I doing these techniques for nothing is video game logic wrong no I just didn't understand what video games were teaching me getting good at Dark Souls or Monster Hunter is about knowing how many swings of your big sword you can do before you need to take a break it only becomes a major issue if you completely run out and you have to spend a few second staggered or spend a few hours lying in bed maybe the real stamina technique I need to learn is recognizing that right now I may not be able to do as much as I want to but if I focus on the little wins I can manage my stamina and I can manage my expectations for my stamina so although I may still where the chlorine fee ring it will just be for the fashion and today I'm gonna take care of laundry chair [Music] you tell me when the camera stops rolling so I can stop fold [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Polygon

Views: 1,699,518

Rating: 4.9751425 out of 5

Keywords: unraveled, brian david gilbert, bdg, stamina, death stranding, monster hunter, dark souls, zelda, videogames, video games, polygon, kojima, monster energy, energy drink, 3d, quarantine, breath of the wild, legend of zelda, stamina potion, elixir, steak, rare steak, chloranthy ring, boost, stamina increase, increase, maximize, max stats, stats, ridiculous, funny, logic, graphs, line graph, regeneration, monster hunter world, dark souls 3, sam bridges, craft, foil, cardboard, mask, shield

Id: UjDZR9QBIoM

Length: 20min 8sec (1208 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Phantom-N]

Brian using logic from my favorite game gives me unprecedented joy. He was like “monster hunter” and I was like “YES EXCITE”