A Great Game for Every Genre

You got any gross food stuff, Fresh?

Oh, I'd really rather not.

I don't.

I don't.

I don't.

That's too bad.

I mean, what do we even talk about without hoops?

We don't got gross food stuff.

We don't

agree.

Hoops is the thread that binds us together.

Truly is.

Like, you guys have always felt more like Hoops's friends.

And I know that, like, to you, it's for me, it's like, I'm Hoops' little, little bro.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And like, I come over sometimes to like watch you guys skateboard or whatever, but like

he is kind of the middle, the middle ground that we all kind of meet on.

And I'm glad we have a safe space to like finally just kind of air all this stuff out.

I'm so fucking good at skateboarding.

You have no idea.

Russ can do 10 kick flips.

And even when Chris was my neighbor, it still was sort of like Juice was the spirit in the room.

That was always kind of like the topic on our lips.

Yeah.

Well, we did have between the two of our houses a little kind of hoops mural.

Yeah.

So we could, you know.

And there were houses between ours, but like if you were driving fast enough down our road before they put the speed bumps in, you could you it would sort of blend and yeah, it's like that mad magazine.

If you fold the page at the end, it kind of makes it into one.

Yeah.

That's probably why that car drove into my house as they were trying to see the hoops mural by going at the top speed and then they just lost control and you know crashed into my room.

As they came just sort of barrel rolling into into your bedroom, they were like, sorry, Chris, I really wanted to see the mural of hoops in the way that it was intended.

And you were like, no, no, for sure.

I get it.

I get it.

I understand.

The only way I could do it was by having a blood alcohol percentage of 90%

being struck.

It helps.

It helps get the hoops mural together because otherwise you're like, well, there's...

It looks like a really lovingly painted picture of Justin with his hand up, but if you don't see your house with Tony Hawk on the other side holding his hand up for the high five, it's like, what's it all mean?

Why'd you even bother, right?

Yeah.

I mean, it is

the best way to go is, you know, 150 miles per hour seeing Hoops giving a high five to Tony Hawk because

I know this is a terrible, terrible, traumatic thing that happened to you.

I do feel like every time you tell us about it, the speed increases, the size of the car increases.

It does look like they're blowing out of proportion.

You put a little extra mustard on it.

My name is Griffin McRoy.

I know the best game of the week.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Bros Freshwick.

I know the best game of the week.

Welcome back, everybody, to the besties uh the show where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment it's the game of the year club and just by listening you my dear friend are a member this week we are sans one justin mcroy but we are whatever the opposite of san sans is we are pro so many games and we're going to talk about um all of them uh in just just a little bit i guess a quick rundown quick teaser of what we're going to be discussing this week grounded two chris like three words What's that?

A small survival game.

Cool.

Teenage Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown.

What is that?

It's a Ninja Turtle Tactics.

Oh, you're doing it.

System Shock 2 Remastered, huh?

System Shock More.

The Drifter.

I'll do this at one.

Australian Adventure Mystery.

And Primal Planet?

Survival.

Metroid Castlevania.

Amazing.

Why don't we only do it this way from now on?

Because it gets the people what they need and it gets them right out the door.

We're going to talk about all those games and more coming up just after this short break.

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Why didn't I not play Primal Planet after that pitch?

Yeah, I know.

Well, he didn't give you the three power words.

Yeah.

If only somebody had handed you a code and said literally this and said, Fresh, this is your thing.

But somebody's a real big shot now.

Somebody's gone full Hollywood, full Hollywood weird, and doesn't have time for old Chris Plant.

He says I can only play the games the kind of funny guy says I'm allowed to play.

I'm like, damn, Reggie.

Greg has to approve them.

What kind of deal did they give you, man?

That's crazy.

Emphasis on kinda.

Yeah.

Here we are.

We're here to talk about some video games.

Yeah, can we start with Primal Planet?

Because I am actually,

I have this one downloaded and it is next on the list, but I was playing a lot of stuff this week.

What am I in for when I tune into Primal Planet, Chris?

Not sure why I picked this one because I'm not a big survival game or a Metroidvania person, but it turns out when you put those flavors together, you get something delicious.

It is, it looks like the Super Nintendo Sega Genesis 2D platformers of your Salmon Mac, I think, bonk.

I'm going to go way back and say my immediate thought was like abuse.

You ever play that game Abuse with the Aliens and the 360 aiming?

No, sir.

It sounds made up, and it sounds like a bad dream you had.

There's going to be an old person listening that remotes.

Okay, describe the game a little bit more just so we don't leave on.

Have you ever played Abuse?

It's got dinosaur.

Oh, wait, you want to know about abuse?

Sure, just tell us.

Specifically the dinosaur game.

Oh, just like art-wise, it's kind of of that era.

It is like between NES and SNES.

Okay, I'm looking at this.

Kind of.

I see what you're saying.

So, yeah, the way of thinking about it is pixel graphic game, side-scrolling,

but you are geargated or doing the Metroidvania shtick by collecting materials and then crafting it.

So for me, it really helped once I started to think of it as, oh, all the materials are just different currencies that I spend to buy the new upgrades that I'm going to need to go further into the game.

And once it clicked for that, it stopped being, oh, this is stressful like so many survival games, which feel like work to me and feel like a bit of a grind, where this is much more about exploration.

As you're exploring, you're going to find the materials that you need to progress through the game.

It's just kind of more of an aesthetic hook for it.

It's structurally like, did you play Subnautica?

Sounds like that.

Oh, but even lighter in terms of the survival expectations here.

Because again, it is a 2D Metroidvania game.

So

you start out and it's like, well, you need to create a spear to be able to fight certain enemies.

And then you can light that spear on fire to create a torch.

And torches create kind of like save points or community points.

and then you need different types of poisons to fight bosses so you're just getting

different unlocks that are going to make it so that you can actually get past the different barriers in the metroidvania type of world and then there is a little bit of like build a hut where your characters can live but really what that's doing is closer to the um

Assassin's Creed did this where you would like build out a city and then you get like it's not like you have to choose where to build the hut and like no, design it yourself, it's already there, you just put in the resources and it's going to give you some different rewards.

There's a bunch of stuff

light on the survival craft kind of stuff.

It seems like that is

like terraria level in terms of like how well no, because in terraria, you can pretty much build whatever the fuck you want with it, wherever you want, but this is like you are getting the stuff you need to build the house that is already there.

Yes,

yes, it is definitely um

illusory, the survival bins, which I like.

Yeah, I like

survival stressful.

Yes.

But on the flip side, it made me enjoy the Metroidvania stuff, which, fresh, I know you enjoy these games much more than I do, but it felt less rote.

For me, sometimes Metroidvania feels like, okay, I'm running from one end to the next to get the thing so that I can progress.

And it feels like a bit of a chore list to do because I can see the mechanisms of the game.

In cheer, it felt much more like exploring, even though once I kind of zoomed out and could look at the map, I was doing the exact same thing.

A thing that I surprisingly

really enjoyed about this game is the way it conveys its story.

It is dialogue-free,

but these pixelated characters interact with each other in really sweet ways.

So you are a, I guess, like, caveman or whatever.

Sure.

And you are separated at first from your family, your wife, and I think your daughter.

And once you reunite with them, the characters will just hug each other if they're standing still.

Hugging's been around for so long.

It's been around for so long, but rarely a feature in a video game.

Is it?

It has just...

What

has been in games?

Oh, come.

No.

You're telling me that you went back and played Joe and Mac or whatever it was back then, and they're just hugging each other?

No, it takes a lot of time.

I don't think there's much caveman hugging representation.

There just isn't.

The other thing that I enjoyed about the game, great soundtrack, and there are space aliens.

That's right.

Couldn't just have enough with the dinosaurs.

They said Unelsis needs, it needs aliens with giant, powerful laser guns.

Are the cave people surprised about the aliens, or is that just part of their day-to-day?

You know, I think...

I don't want you to speculate.

This is not an improv.

I'm like genuinely curious.

No, I'm not trying to be funny.

No, so we saved that for hoops, and he's not here.

And Griffin's much.

I wouldn't get it.

I wouldn't get the jokes guys.

Thank you.

Too young.

Too little.

Mostly I'm asking.

I know.

I'm like giving you a real answer here, which is like, no, they're not surprised because everything is a fucking surprise.

They're cave people.

They look at the stars and it's a miracle.

What I'm asking is, is this a dinosaur world that eventually gets invaded by UFOs?

Or when you arrive, is it like a half dinosaur, half UFO world?

I think we're supposed to believe that it is a dinosaur world that is being invaded by UFOs, and I'm glad that you got that clarification.

Okay, yeah, very important.

Um, this looks really great.

I love the pixel art style a whole bunch.

I'll include some music in the um the show notes because

it is

my new background music for like working and chilling out.

It is such a good vibe.

So, yeah, I enjoyed it.

But speaking of survival games, there are way more survival.

Sure.

I want to hear about Grounded 2.

Yeah, man.

I played quite a bit of this.

The early access version of Grounded 2 launched on July 29th.

I've been really looking forward to this one because I, like, I don't know if it was earlier this year or later last year but I just played through all of Grounded One sort of after giving it a shot right after it came out of early access and then not playing it when they added like a bunch of shit to it and it's Grounded One is one of my favorite games in this whole you know open world survivor survival craft genre which if you're not familiar like Chris and Russ kind of suggested earlier it's a genre where you are able to collect resources and build and upgrade tools and armor and weapons and you build a base and you outfit that base with everything you need to survive and it had the stuff that plant was talking about right the like metroidvania like exploration you need this unlock to explore in this area so there were story beats and through those story beats you would unlock new kind of like systems in the game like one of them was like a zip line that would allow you to like quickly traverse from one area to another um and i would not say it was remotely sort of like metroidvania focused.

Like, I think if you, but there was a critical path through the game insofar as like, well, in order to beat the game, you have to do this underwater lab.

In order to do the underwater lab, you have to kill this one bug to unlock the blueprint for the diving mask.

And then you would need to, so like, that, that is kind of like how the whole genre handles that.

Same with your subnauticas,

the forest, I mean, Minecraft to to not to put too fine a point on it.

Anyway, Grounded 2, it's in early access now.

What is out is a lot.

When Grounded launched in early access, it was pretty heavily criticized for being fairly bare bones.

This is a lot.

What they have said is that Grounded 2,

which takes place in a big sort of community park this time around rather than the backyard of some disgraced scientist, is going to be three times larger than the map in Grounded 1.

And there is about a third of the map available in the early access stuff, as well as a bunch of story quest content

and a bunch of other stuff.

I know this is always like a big, I don't know, it is a big hang-up for me playing early access games now that I know I'm going to play the shit out of once they are fully featured and released, but I do also think that is going to be a while before that happens.

And I'm glad that I dipped into Grounded 2 because it's doing some pretty neat stuff.

How much of Grounded?

I know, I think we all played Grounded at some point together, but did you guys like get particularly deep into it?

Because I don't know where to start sort of like explaining the

systems.

I didn't.

I remember, yeah, when we played together, but I didn't play a ton of it.

But every time you've talked about it, like previously, your time with it sounded very enticing because I think what scared me off was like

what scares a lot of, like, me off from a lot of these survival games is even though I feel like I'm progressing, it's like, oh, my house is bigger and I have a silver sword instead of a...

bronze sword, whatever the fuck.

Whereas this had like narrative hooks to it.

You were seeing more new stuff.

Like that's really the beat.

And then the other thing I think was, I found really impressive was just like the building.

I thought was like the building is pretty next level, really great.

The whole game, if you're not familiar at all, listener with Grounded One, you play as a teenager who has been shrunken down, honey, I shrink the kids style.

And you basically have to figure out what happened, where you are, how to undo the shrinking process.

And you go on this great big miniature adventure, fighting against a bunch of bugs and harvesting their components and building bases at certain, you know, landmarks around the map.

And those landmarks will be like a grill that has toppled over or a picnic table.

And like, I don't know, that whole aesthetic is so rad.

And by the time that game was like fully, fully, fully finished, it had so much great stuff going for it

as far as like making a base that looked really cool.

All the gear

felt really different and gave you like certain special abilities.

So it wouldn't be just like, well, now my sword is silver.

It would be like, well, I just crafted a magic fire staff out of a shard of spicy candy, and I'm using armor that, you know, gives me this benefit and this benefit.

Anyway, grounded two,

very much sort of pitching the same pitch, right?

It's you're a miniaturized teen, the same four teens from the first game.

Yeah,

they very quickly get through like, and here's why you've been shrunk again in this new place.

Oh, you do actually get unshrunk in the first game.

I guess spoilers.

I think there's multiple endings, but yes, it is possible.

The ending I got involved being unshrunk.

um

and what they have added is uh i i think it comes in a form of like and this is not obviously reinventing the wheel as far as sequels go but like a lot of quality of life stuff as well as like a few i think tint pole features that all seem very fucking cool uh quality of life stuff includes um

So a big part of the first game is you have tools like an axe and a shovel and a hammer.

You use those to chop down this big weed so that you can get the components from it.

And you use this hammer so you can smash up a pine cone, but you need a certain strength of hammer to do it.

And all that stuff, like you had to keep in your inventory and you had to keep repaired so they didn't break while you're out in the field.

In this game, there's none of that.

You have what's called, I think, an omni tool, and you can upgrade that specifically, like at little like you know, science stations or whatever, but it doesn't even show up in your inventory.

You just run up to a collectible, interactable item, and there's a single button, and you automatically do the thing.

It's pretty fucking yeah, that's great.

Um, the game feels a lot better.

Combat feels great.

It's all the first game, I think, was only first person or only third person.

You have your choice in this one.

Um, it is made by

um Obsidian, uh, and so the combat is it feels kind of like Elder Scrollsy a little bit.

Like, it's a lot of hold right-click to block, uh, left, left-click to does it feel like the game they just put out?

Uh, what was it?

In

avowed?

I mean,

yeah, I guess so.

I didn't play a ton of avowed.

Oh, my God.

That one really

evolution of the Oblivion combat engine.

That one didn't super click for me.

It is not the deepest combat in the world.

What makes it work is the survival element of it, of like, oh shit, I'm pretty far from base, and

I've got some pretty good stuff on me right now.

And I just got jumped by a scorpion, and I really need this fight to go well for me.

Like that, that sort of thing makes the somewhat simple combat of like you block, there's perfect blocks if you do it like right before you get hit.

And when that happens, like you don't lose any stamina and you can stun your opponent so you can like get in a few hits.

They have made this idea of like

specialties much more

surfaced and a lot more accessible.

So whenever you craft a piece of equipment, a piece of armor or whatever, it will show you like this is warrior armor and that will give you this benefit.

And then usually if you're crafting, you know, fighter armor or whatever, it will give you a little bit more health, a little bit more whatever.

Then there's like rogue armor, ranged armor.

It like tells you pretty much on the tin, like if you want to play this play style, this is how you do it.

And that was not quite as easy to kind of understand in the first game.

And it seems like they're putting a lot more emphasis on that, which kind of dovetails with the sort of co-op focus of the game.

Can you turn off the survival?

Like, you need water or you need something?

I don't know if you can do that in this early access.

And granted, one, you could do whatever the fuck you want to any of the options, which I really did appreciate a lot.

i do like some of that stuff like i like the economy of having that hunger and thirst and then all of a sudden once you build a machine that can harvest you know dewdrops in the morning like that feels like a big deal um as artificial as that is maybe mechanically like i i do enjoy some of that stuff i don't i didn't look actually in in grounded two early access but i would be completely shocked if it was not in the game at some point.

I imagine they also have the

Arachnophobia mode, which I also enjoy.

Arachnophobia tells you right at the top of the game as you turn it on like hey if you don't like spiders this is going to be a rough ride for you but we have a thing that's going to i i didn't click it i think it just like blurs them out no i've used it before so in the first game i'm sure it's probably similar in this one the first game it the more you turn it the closer they turn into just like big 3d circles i love it that's great awesome which um they made those fucking spiders heinous in the first game so i'd imagine yeah and they're just as scary there's new the same bugs are back in this one there's new bugs there's scorpions this time around uh who are just fucking awful awful.

Really, really terrible.

So, like, quality of life stuff

is what makes me kind of excited.

The big sort of tent pole stuff, the biggest thing of all is now there are mounts, and the mounts are bugs.

And the first one you get access to is a red ant, like a soldier ant, you find its egg.

You have to go on this mission where you go into a red ant hill, you get the soldier egg, and you have to like make it back to your base before every other ant in the whole park kills you.

And then you can ride around on this ant.

He's fast as hell.

You can use him to fight.

You can use him to harvest resources.

You can like switch him into basically vacuum mode, and he'll just kind of like slowly trot around and absorb up everything and keep his own like little inventory slots.

And then there's like a, you know, you can build your own

like barn essentially for your bugs where they will live.

And you can call out whenever you need them.

And then there's other mounts that are, I think you can ride one of those big orb weaver spiders too.

And then they're talking about adding more, stuff to the game.

I have honestly, to be perfectly blunt, the timing of this is not great because I just played the shit out of Grounded 1, and I know I'm going to play a lot of Grounded 2.

So I did hit a point where...

I don't know, maybe after 10 hours or so in Grounded 2, the early access, I was like, I think I'm good.

I think I've seen what I need to see and I'm going to,

you know, hop back in as soon as possible.

Do you try to get to like a point where it's like, okay, things are relatively stable.

I would be able to pick it up from that point in the future

uh i don't actually know because i am not one i'm usually one where if i go a year without playing a game i'm not gonna want to hop back into the same like save that i had but i am very very very much into

like i spent a lot of time in grounded one building this like treetop base that i'd like scaled my way up to with like these leafy slanted roof pieces so i had this incredible this i spent hours and hours and hours on that and i don't want to do that yeah if I know that I'm going to not finish it on this save or whatever.

But I do really, really like what is there.

I played it mostly on my ROG Ally X, and it works great on there, and it seems to be

not performing as well on my PC, which I don't know what to make of that.

But there have been some complaints about optimization and stuff like that.

But

yeah, for me, if you're a grounded fan, it seems like a no-brainer.

I guess the big question is,

do you want to wait?

And I don't think they've given a timetable for when the full game is going to come out, but I do assume it's going to, like, it probably won't be this year if I were to go to the next one.

Well, usually it's like a year is the optimal.

Yeah, they also just released two games.

I mean, well, they released one already, Avowed, and then they have Outer Worlds 2 coming out.

So it's like,

they got a lot cracking.

This whole sort of like franchise just really, really works for me.

Like, I just really love the idea of a, you know, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids survival game.

And I love like finding some big real world thing and then figuring out like, wait, is that actually going to do any can I use that in my war against the, against the spider folk?

Like, that that stuff I think is really, really, I don't know, it hits really good.

And they've, they've also done a lot of very smart changes to to sort of the grounded formula

that I don't know.

At the very least, this has got me frothing at the mouth for the full release of this game because I know that it is going to

have a pretty big impact, I think.

Yeah, it sounds great.

I love it.

Should we take a quick break?

Yeah, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and talk about the rest of the stuff we got.

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Okay, we're back.

So the initial plan was to do an entire episode on the game that I'm about to talk about, but I'm pretty glad that we didn't

because

I thought I was certain everyone was going to get so mad at me because I played it and I didn't get it.

And it's such a classic.

And it was one of those like, uh-oh moments.

Well, okay, so the game we're talking about is System Shock 2 Remastered, which is,

it's worth noting, not a

reimagining, not a reboot.

It's not like Metal Gear Solid Delta, where they totally like modernize the whole thing.

It is the same game, more or less, before, but with like up-res graphics and some quality of life changes, broadly speaking.

But like

the...

enemies you're facing, the environments you're in are going to look like a game that came out in the mid-90s more or less.

In the last millennium, yeah, for sure.

I think the big draw for this is the original game became increasingly impossible or at least very difficult to run on modern devices.

So I think for fans of System Shock 2, of which there are many that are probably very old at this point,

you can now run it on basically anything.

I've played it on a Steam Deck, you can run it on PC, whatever.

What I find about, what I find interesting about System Shock 2 is a lot of the team that worked on this would go on and work on more, I think, currently relevant or at least quasi-relevant titles like Bioshock, for example.

This was the precursor to, but like when Bioshock came out, it was, hey, the System Shock team is making this new thing.

Yeah, correct.

Which is an interesting thing because Bioshock was a console game or it was targeting console gamers.

System Shock 2 was hardcore PC.

Back when that distinction fucking meant anything at all.

Yes.

But at the time, it was like having people, you almost needed somebody to translate why it was exciting that Bioshock was being made.

Yeah.

With System Shock 2, I think it's interesting because it does feel like the progenitor to Bioshock and not just in terms of plot.

Like the plot is very similar as well.

You basically land on a space station in this case and you're arriving after shit has popped off.

In this case, an AI named Shodan caused some fiasco to...

go off in the first game, whatever, and it has progressed to the point where she is a major threat, and you got to take her out.

And so once you arrive, the ship already has like fucking zombies running around and psychic monkeys running around and things are really bad.

You'll find bio-regeneration pods that are your checkpoints if you die, which is pretty much right

across the bow by Bioshock.

I mean, in many ways, it feels a little bit like a prototype of what they would later do.

Bioshock.

You're finding notes, you're finding audio logs, you're finding like little keypad codes to type in.

This game, when I first played it originally many, many years ago, I remember it being incredibly, incredibly difficult.

And I was like, I've since played so many of these immersive sims that I'm going to be fine.

And man, I was not.

No.

I think a lot of the issue is that you start and like your only weapon for the most part is this wrench that you have.

You do get other weapons, but ammo is such a valuable commodity that like using them on a rare, on like a a random zombie that's running around is a total waste shooting a bullet feels bad yeah it feels like you're fucking up with every shot you take well and part of that is because they have a skill system where you're investing the resources that you find throughout the world to level up different skills and one of those skills is standard weapons that you would pick up like a pistol or whatever and but to get to like a high enough level where shooting a gun feels okay requires probably seven or eight hours of like getting through these very difficult levels So you're just having to min-max every tiny little thing.

I think it's- You are not told, by the way, what any of the stats do or mean, as far as I can tell.

And then there's skill stats as well.

And so, like, you start the game by making all of these choices of what branch of the military you're going to go into and what your what different training regimen you're going to do.

And I was like, okay, I guess I'll just do like all tech and like hacking.

I'll go like specialize.

I'll just take the things that make me hack better.

And then like the first handful of machines I came up to was like, your hacking skill's not high enough, man.

And I'm like, well, then why the fuck did I just do all that?

Why did I do that then?

I think they more or less, in later games, Bioshock, whatever, streamlined all the things that like

were impossibly obtuse or difficult and just made those choices feel more meaningful the second you were making them, where you'd instantly know, like, oh, I'm better at aiming, or, oh, I'm better at hacking.

And it would like feel palpable.

And that was like a big change from this original game.

They did add a co-op mode, I should say, for this.

Yeah.

Which is in theory a nice solution where you could have somebody who knows what they're doing guide you through.

Show you around

what's happening, right?

I mean, Griffin, you did that for me with Grounded 1.

Like, that's a great way for me to get into those survival games that I'm otherwise terrible at.

But this game was not made for co-op.

And if you look at the reviews or especially just the general player feedback, this is

a buggy novelty more than it is a real way that you're going to want to play this game.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

I didn't dip into the co-op mode.

I played the single-player story until I just, I really,

I want to think I gave it a fair shot because I know that this is a game that, like, if I had played it in 99, would have blown my fucking gourd.

But there's a lot of games that came out in 1999 that I would still happily play to completion.

And I didn't, I just didn't get it, guys.

Like, I just didn't, I thought everything was so clunky and unpleasant to interact with.

And

I feel like I, I, I gave it a shot, but just could not hang.

Yeah, I, I would unfortunately agree.

I don't think it's aged well.

I think there's just a ton of other games, Prey and Bioshock games that like do what this game is doing just in a much better way.

And not just, I mean, I appreciate the like groundbreaking nature of this title, but sure, I think this release in particular particular is just for the hardcore fans that don't want to have to go through the hoops of running this game on their device currently.

I would

earmark this game if you're curious about it, though, because there is such an intense fan base around the system shock games.

And even before this remaster, they were doing a ton of modding to do all sorts of cool stuff with it.

And I think we will see a similar push from the modding community with this game over the years.

but that's more of a headache.

That's assuming they don't die before they finish the mods because they're very old.

Yeah,

150.

Jesus.

I would love to talk about my next game because it came out of nowhere, blew me the fuck away.

And I think it's one of the better games I have played in the year 2025.

And that game is called The Drifter.

The Drifter is a

very traditional point-and-click

sort of adventure game.

I say sort of because

one of the big kind of selling points is that they have also the developers Powerhoof, who I believe is just two guys in Melbourne, Australia.

Their last big game, as far as I can tell,

is Crawl, which came out in 2014.

You guys remember that one?

It was like a co-op competitive multiplayer control

game.

Yeah, so one player would control like all the monsters and traps.

And if you killed one of the adventurers, you got to take their body and take their place.

It fucking rules.

It's so good.

And the soundtrack is great.

And

I didn't realize that until today when I was like trying to look up more about the studio and was like, oh shit, I remember that game.

That game rules.

So the Drifter is

the point I didn't finish making, they included a special sort of like

controller control mech like design where you use one stick to move and one stick to kind of look around and then kind of just like point at things you want to interact with.

It all works so fucking well.

I played the whole thing on my ROG ally.

Um, but it is very much in that sort of uh traditional LucasArts, you know, Monkey Island, The Dig, that whole kind of milieu.

Uh, it is about a man named Mick Carter who

travels home after stowing away on a train to attend his mother's funeral, and he gets embroiled in this like wild sci-fi conspiracy, uh, where uh people are going missing, and there's been a string of

murders of other drifters, you know, living living out on their own.

And

he starts, he realizes that when he dies, he flashes back in time, which is kind of how they get around.

Like, oh no, you fucked up

in adventure games.

If you mess up and then you die, then you whoosh.

Fast forward back in time.

Do they animate the like gory death before you whoosh?

Oh, God, yeah.

Yeah, no.

I mean,

crawl was pretty gnarly.

Like, there was a lot of impaling and evisceration.

And in this game, Mick gets like absolutely destroyed

a lot.

And it is dark as fuck.

It like you need to be ready to hang with that.

If that is

your interest, I would suggest you watch a trailer for the game because it definitely touches.

He is, Mick is a dude who is running away from this horrible personal family tragedy.

And a lot of the story is sort of of about him and how he ran away

instead of kind of like dealing with the aftermath of this tragedy.

And

the game really does, I mean, it hits that stuff really, very, very, very hard.

And also has some truly gnarly deaths and stuff like that happening.

But the acting and the writing and the storytelling are all absolutely top-notch, fucking amazing stuff.

How does it not fall into the adventure game, the point-and-click adventure game traps?

I think, so I think it does.

I think that there are a couple of sequences where there's a lot of like investigating that you're doing, right?

There's a lot of like trying to get to the bottom of this big conspiracy, trying to figure out what is happening to you, trying to figure out like at one point, one of your family members gets kidnapped.

You're trying to figure out what happened to her.

And so there's like some sequences that you're kind of bouncing around a map, like getting something from here, taking it to here, trying to figure out.

The other sort of like trap that it does fall into, but it does so in a way that I think is kind of cool, is you do hit these moments of

tremendous peril where it's like,

there's a group of soldiers who are storming this office where I'm holed up, or I'm handcuffed to this hospital bed, and someone is coming to kill me.

And if you don't do it exactly right, you get killed, right?

But then those sequences are so short because you can only flash back in time, like a certain amount of time.

And so, while you do have that frustration of like, okay, I know the game wants me to do do something here.

I know it's going to involve, you know,

reaching to get this remote and then hitting this button.

And I know I need to distract this guard so that I can do this, but like, I feel like I keep fucking up with the order is.

But

because it's hitting you with it in such a short, like easily repeatable burst, like it.

It actually kind of works.

Like it kind of feels like you are kind of stumbling into the solution of like, oh, okay, so I definitely need to do this first so that I can get this and then do this.

Those sequences, there's only a handful of them in the game, but they end up being like pretty exciting because you are, I don't know, you try very desperately not to get killed and you will over and over and over and over and over again.

It is,

I don't really know

because it is so traditional in its styling, like I don't know that there's like a lot more to explain.

If you look at a if you watch a trailer for it and you have played any of those old LucasArts games, like i do think it is going to um you know res resonate with some deep part of your of your core memories yeah i i will say it looks phenomenal uh the just all the pixel art and the animation and the just the lighting effects and just everything looks looks really tremendous yeah it looks gorgeous

but just it it's it is a really

really really polished thing and this is not this is i have a really hard time uh hanging with adventure games I didn't, like, I don't know.

I feel like I didn't really click with a lot of the double find stuff,

a lot of the other

telltale stuff.

Like, some of that worked for me, some of it didn't.

I find the genre to be kind of just like,

what is the cheapest and easiest and laziest way that we can like tell a story with the game?

There is no dimension.

It's like the only recent one that I've

there is no game wrong dimension, that one.

There is no game wrong dimension is a great example of not doing that, right?

Because like it is a fairly traditional game, but they do it in such a brilliant, like constantly evolving way.

This doesn't even do that.

This is just like, this feels like a golden era point-and-click adventure game.

It's just done so fucking well.

And all of the production aspects of it are so top-notch.

And

I not only like...

I'm surprised not only that like I finished it, but I finished it fairly like breathlessly over like three or four days.

Like whenever I had free time, it was the thing that I went back to because I was so desperate to like figure out what was going on and figure out how to get past this sequence that, you know, seemed like this impossible death trap.

There's, there's a, there's a few clunky puzzles, but they are offset, I will say, by a few really, really great and exciting puzzles.

And

yeah, this one came out of absolutely nowhere, and I, I really, really, really liked it a lot.

I just checked, it is playable on Mac too.

So, like, oh, is it really?

Oh, that's cool.

I need that on my laptop.

Yeah,

I will also say, if you have friends that you play games with locally, get crawl also, because

not very many, many people played that game, I don't think.

And it like handles this hack and slash dungeon crawler genre in a way that I think is like really, really, really novel and fun.

I feel like that game, it was just at the tail end of the local multiplayer boom and maybe missed out on its moment in the sun, but I completely agree.

Fresh, you got one more game?

Yeah, one more game.

I was trying to remember if we talked about this game or not.

It feels like something that Justin would talk about and might have talked about in like an honorable mentions, but I just wanted to call it out.

So the game.

I think we have.

The game is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown.

It came out on PC in like May, but it just got a re-release on consoles.

I believe it's on Switch and maybe one other console.

It is a turn-based tactics game featuring, obviously, the Ninja Turtles.

What's interesting about it is it uses things that you've seen in turd-based tactical games.

They'll like use this ability.

It costs this many action points to whatever, leap over someone on a skateboard, and it has this effect.

But all of this is presented

as like a board game.

Like the turtles themselves are like board game pieces, and the like foot clan that you're fighting are like board game pieces.

And it gives it kind of

its own kind of vibe in that way.

It also allows them, I think, to scale the project in such a way that they're not having to animate every single attack or movement that the characters are making.

But I just think it's like a smart design approach.

There's also this element of

time, which is weird in a turn-based game, but you have to progress through these maps.

So you're kind of racing through these maps, killing or, I guess, beating up Foot Clan members.

And the area behind you will actually start disappearing after like a certain number of turns.

So if you're not keeping the pace up where you're constantly moving forward, you will actually actually lose and you'll like lose a life.

What did you play this on?

I played this on Steam Deck.

So it works great with a controller,

but it presumably works well on everything.

It's not exactly pushing the hardware too hard.

Yeah, sure.

But I do think it's a good example of just like an interesting...

unique approach to this genre that I haven't seen before.

It's made by the team at Strange Scaffold, whose games you might know as

they made El Paso Elsewhere, which was that like max paying vampire dope game and they also made i am your beast so they've been putting out a lot of like really creative games that aren't necessarily what i would consider to be like mass market and this is wait wait wait wait wait wait wait you're saying that click holding a game about cucking through clicking is not massive

that feels pretty mainstream i found it very interesting that they were able to get a studio to agree specifically like a studio as big as warner brothers whoever owns Ninja Turtles these days, to agree to like control their IP for a project.

And they did a really good job with it.

It reminds me of

Cadence of Hyrule in that way, where like, oh man, this indie developer got hold of like a huge property and let's see what they do with it.

And they did like a really cool job.

I was pretty pleased with it.

If you want to hear more about the Strange Scaffold and all the stuff they're doing, I actually did an interview with Zalivier Nelson Jr., who oversees that entire studio.

Over at Post Games?

Over at Post Games.

Brought to you by podcast serials.

It's just like that.

It's the post Malone of podcasts.

Looks like we got a piece of reader mail here calling me out, dragging me out to the middle of town for a

good old-fashioned standoff.

Yeah, so I wasn't here last week, but I guess you had a strong take on Donkey Kong Country.

Oh, I shit talked Donkey Kongza.

Yeah, I love Bonanza, but I did.

Yeah, let's get into it.

Okay, this letter comes from Bry Duck.

It's an interesting, it's interesting.

My take on Donkey Kong is very different from Griffin's.

I find the solo mode much more compelling than the pure chaos of co-op.

I also think Bazinga...

I almost said Bazinga.

You almost said Bazinga, didn't you?

Bananas.

Bazingas!

Overall design is superior and at least rivaling Odyssey.

My big problem with Odyssey is the vast majority of moons in that game do not utilize Mario's awesome movement at all.

The capture mechanic is fun, but most of the capture movesets are not nearly as fun as moving around with Mario.

I agree with that.

Whereas the majority of bananas are in some way utilizing DK's core moveset, digging and surfing and platforming, and the bonanza abilities are an additive to his moveset as compared to the restrictive capture abilities.

I think this, in this way, DK is a refinement on this formula.

I think that's a fine point.

I would agree with everything that you said.

I think it's just a question of like,

I don't know, design philosophy,

puzzle and collectible design philosophy, where

it feels more

footloose and fancy-free for most of the time in Donkey Kong Bonanza, like just smashing your own way to the thing as opposed to like

hitting this very specific line.

It's the difference between like having to, you know, having a Tony Hawk challenge where you have to clear this gap versus like a skate.

challenge where it's like, just get this, get this score or whatever.

Like it is a question of they're both doing the same thing.

It just, I feel like being able to,

I don't know, know exactly what I'm supposed to do is something that I felt like was missing in Bonanza.

And that's not the worst thing in the world.

It's just why I think the co-op mode worked better for me is because playing it with my son in that way was very, uh, was very rewarding.

I imagine it is harder to, you know,

jazz together some bullshit solution to get to get a banana if you don't have a,

you know, bazooka-wielding toddler on your shoulder.

But

yeah.

yeah, it was also a big co-op hit in our household as well.

Yeah, I like the I like the middle ground because they do have those challenge rooms that feel very like sectioned off and they allow you to like have a very specific challenge, but just having the fuck around big areas felt really, really good to me.

Yeah, and to make it clear, I love Donkey Componenza, I think it's doing two different things.

Um,

what do we got some honorable mentions?

Um, I've continued to play Pipistrello and the cursed yo-yo.

Uh, that game rules.

I, It does.

How far?

I think I got to the third like battery or whatever.

Yeah, I'm at the third

battery area, which is like inspired by like a Comic-Con thing.

Yeah.

And I think I'm pretty close to the end at this point, but it's the game that like

if I need like a good 20 minutes of like chill out, not think about anything and just like have a fun time, I keep going back to that.

I just love the art.

I love the controls.

The like upgrade systems are very smart.

It just feels as close to that GBA era of Zelda as I've seen from an indie developer, which is pretty impressive.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'll probably return to that one.

It's definitely one I'm keeping installed because I really liked what I played of it.

What are you doing here?

Are you copying my thing so you can paste it into a browser?

I wanted to see what it was.

Okay.

I think I've used this and I think I even talked about it.

Did you really?

Yeah, many moons ago.

Y'all have too many handhelds.

You don't even know which one's going to be.

We do, man.

I actually just dug some out of my office closet to put them on some shelves that I have in the back here, and it really sunk in.

It's a problem.

I take good Russ's advice, which is I hit a certain threshold and then I just give them away to people.

I think I'm done.

Right.

I like having one small pocketable one and one powerful one that I can,

you know, play whatever the fuck on.

Right now, for me, that is either the Retroid 5 or the Flip 2,

both of which I have kitted out to play basically whatever I want.

Arguably, I could probably do this much, much better on my ROG ally, like set it up with some, you know, suite of emulators or whatever.

But I wanted a new small one because

all the ones that I have that are kind of pocketable are all vertical landscape, vertical orientation, like your trim UI brick is like great, and one that I would fully recommend.

I wanted a horizontal one, though, so I got the Ianeo Pocket Micro Classic.

Ionio makes great handhelds that are pricier, I would say, than an Ambernick

or a lot of the other sort of competition, but you pay for like pretty great build quality, and this thing feels fucking great.

I've got it right here.

It's horizontal layout.

Imagine sort of like a Game Boy Advanced micro, but like, you know, scaled, scaled up

to the point where you could actually use it.

Where you could actually use it.

Yeah, like it fits in my hands really great.

It's got this sort of like rectangular design, but the edges are all like rounded in a way where it feels pretty, pretty great, actually, in my hands.

They originally, INEO, made the pocket micro

that had two thumbsticks on it that were

okay, but it's not like the most powerful of

the handhelds.

It can only run up to like a Dreamcast sort of thing sort of unreliably.

But like, I just kind of wanted something that I could play SNES and Game Boy Advance and Genesis and other sort of games on.

And so I didn't need the sticks.

They made this new version, the classic, that doesn't have the sticks, which is like perfect because now it just slides right in and out of the pocket so easily.

Runs Android, which is not my favorite.

I would much rather have a Linux like dedicated front end that I could kind of tweak and not have to fuck around with all of the other Android stuff that comes along with it.

But I can play some Android games on it, which is which is cool.

But I just love the form factor.

It's full metal.

So it feels really solid, really sturdy.

The screen looks amazing.

Buttons all feel really great.

But it's also like, I think it was 220, which is like a trim UI break.

You can get for like 50, 60 bucks.

So it's considerably more expensive.

Do you know the internals?

Are they?

Because the version that I played, that's why I'm remembering it, was the one with the analog stick.

So it was a little while ago.

I think it's the same.

I think it's the same internals.

I think the only thing that's different is just they had a lot of reviews that said, like, this thing is great.

it feels great the size is perfect it's just what i want and like a horizontal

if you're not like in the scene like there's a lot of

uh it's basically like elvis versus the beatles uh pancakes versus waffles like do you prefer a vertical old school Game Boy DMG style thing or do you prefer a horizontal like original Game Boy Advance

style?

And I do think I prefer the horizontal just because it fits in the hands a little bit easier and you don't have to.

Let's take a Game Gear if you want.

Game Gear is the worst example because it's actually horizontal, but it's unholdable because of how large it is.

But it's my new off-core buddy.

It's my new, like, I put it in my pocket and I can actually take it places because it fits really well.

I've been playing Final Fantasy VI with the

sound restoration.

Oh, good.

I was worried.

I did my first ROM hack by finding this

project that people had made of

fixing the terrible, really, really, really grainy, hissy, compressed audio that they took from the Super Nintendo version of Final Fantasy,

I guess, three in the States.

When they put it on Game Boy Advance, just the audio quality sounded absolutely like dog dirt.

But I do love the Game Boy Advance version of that game.

I think it looks great and has some extra stuff.

So I downloaded this ROM hack that made the sound sound marginally better.

And it's been a while since I've replayed this one.

And it is truly, truly

a staggering achievement, Final Fantasy VI.

I inadvertently have two things that are both recommendations and plugs.

The first one is Castle Crasher's new DLC, including the first new character that you can play as since 2011.

When you say new,

how new?

New.

Like today,

Winter Boss Paradise came out and it lets you add your own characters that you can design.

It has a new playable character that is like new stuff.

There is new content in Castle Crashers.

It is fucking cast.

Oh, that's so good.

Today, my friends.

Listener, I guess listeners maybe haven't heard that.

I don't know if that episode has come out yet, but we discussed this game at length as part of our most recent Besties Bracket episode.

It is out.

That is also out right now.

So if you want to listen to an entire episode about co-op games, you will hear about Castle Crashers in

an episode.

So this is what

you're doing.

You You know, they wanted to time it with us.

They've been sitting on this for probably at least 10 years, you know, waiting for a good moment.

They saw that the besties was out here and they said, Let's put it out.

The other one I want to shout out is

last week on post-games, I talked with one of the writers of Ambrosia Sky.

Which, have you all been following this game?

No, I don't think so.

So, Ambrosia Sky is basically what would happen if you merged Power Wash Simulator with System Shock.

Yeah, alright.

And it turns out sick.

That it's a great, great, cool thing.

There's a new demo that just went out on Steam.

So once again, I think that we are just inspiring people to make things available to the world.

This is, I believe, the same demo that was shown at Summer Game Fest.

It was kind of a hit demo of that show.

The story is so grim.

You are basically a cleaner of mass death incidents on off-worlds and like the far distant future.

And you are using your different like power wash tools to clean up these toxic scenarios and recover bodies.

I fucking love that.

That sounds awesome.

It's such a cool, cool, cool game.

It's nasty.

Let's see.

Yeah, you could check out that game.

And if you want to check out an entire podcast about how video games help us process death, you could also go listen to post games.

Those two things are just waiting for you right now.

Definitely going to get over there.

Got to get my post games.

Hey, thank you so much.

That's going to do it for us this week on the besties.

Chris, do you want to try and summarize all the games we talked about this week?

Oh, we talked about so many games, but the way I put it is a little bit for everybody.

We talked about

the System Shock 2 Remaster, The Drifter, Teenage Meeting Ninja Turtles, Tactical Takedown, Primal Planet, Abuse, the video video game, Grounded 2,

and also Pee Pistrello, the INEO Pocket Micro Classic with Final Fantasy VI that's been modded and kidded out.

Castle Crasher is a new DLC in Ambrosia Sky.

The demo is now available.

That blows my mind that there's Castle Crasher's DLC.

So great.

I haven't thought about that game in years.

Talked about it extensively for our Patreon listeners.

By the way, patreon.com slash the besties.

Thank you to everybody who supports the show directly there.

Go get yourself a membership.

You can gift a membership too if you go to patreon.com/slash the besties slash gift.

But we do bracket episodes every month, and there's episodes of the resties that go up there.

If you like our show, there's a lot more that you are not hearing if you're not a patron of ours.

A couple quick shout-outs for new members.

We have Mike, we have Charles, we have Johnny, and we have The Cliff.

Thank you all so much.

Again, patreon.com slash the besties.

There are like 60 episodes now.

There's a lot.

It bonkers how much stuff you get for signing up for a month of that.

Next week, join us again.

We are going to be discussing, I think, Mafia the Old Country.

Now, let me take you behind the scenes, listener.

This is one of those where before we started recording, there was a lot of wringing of hands

about whether or not this was going to be the one.

And we don't want to lead you down

some primrose path.

If this is not the game we end up talking about next week, we will find ways to tell you via the social channels.

Right now, the plan is Mafia, the old country, a game I don't know anything about.

Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Find out by joining us again next week for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

Besties