A Golden Age for Card Game Sickos

Damn it, guys.

Damn it.

Yeah.

It happened again.

I got the switch too in my hot little hands.

Oh, you got it.

Yeah.

Delivered fresh and hot this morning from Kmart.

And I got out my

katana and was unboxing it.

Cut the damn thing in half.

No, and

yeah.

Because they have not like the picture on the outside of the box that says no katanas.

Yeah, they, yeah.

So I actually had the box upside down because I was sort of beauty blogging it and I cut the whole thing.

I cut it in half and Kmart won't take it back.

And so I'm going to have to give this one a zero out of 10 because it couldn't withstand a single strike from my blade.

I mean, this is why

I get it.

I know that you love to sharpen your blade.

Every night before you go to bed.

In theory, it's important.

But when you have a blade that is so sharp that you merely drop the box on it and it slices directly through everything.

Oh, no, I used it in a distinct chopping motion.

There was a certain amount of user error because I was trying to get it like the bamboo that I go after.

It was a fruit ninja.

It was a fruit ninja, only a $550 game of fruit ninja.

Damn.

We should mention we were recording this early.

So, like, we don't know.

Yeah, I don't have a fucking name.

We don't have fucking anything.

I don't have anything, dude.

But it came came out today.

So, if you're listening to this, guess what?

There's a new Nintendo console, and we'll be talking about it next week, but we don't have anything right now.

Do we never do what you're doing right now?

Well, we don't exist.

We don't hold open for promotional.

This is supposed to be a safe place where we can just kind of goof off.

And you did business here, and it feels fucking.

It's reality here.

It feels weird.

You brought reality into the fun zone.

Yeah, but not, but you understand that we keep those two things pretty separate.

I do want to note that Griffin does not have a katana that could cut him in in half.

They keep it in the middle.

I just want to let, I want to let everyone know.

Is that what I sound like?

Just now, yeah.

My name is Griffin Macro.

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 Ross Frustric.

I know the best game of the week.

Justin's in the toilet.

He said, He texted me, he says, peeing, and the law.

He said it won't stop coming out.

Yeah, it just keeps coming.

So, um, it's just the three of us this week, and we're going to be talking about so many games.

We're talking about uh hot, hot deck builders like Monster Train 2 and Star Vaders.

We're going to be talking about Elden Ring Night Rain, the universally beloved.

Russ just put his

forehead to his uncle to his paw.

Sorry, that was an unrelated unrelated grimace of pain from Russ Freshdick.

We're going to be talking about a lot of games,

but first we're going to take a quick break.

So stay with us.

Let's start things off on a high note by talking about Monster Train 2.

I hope that's not presumptive of me that that's going to be.

That actually might be, but we'll go.

Well, is it really?

Okay.

How familiar are you guys with the original?

I played the original.

Okay.

I did probably like 10 runs of the original, so I know the basic structure

of it.

Yes, if you're not familiar, listeners at home, Monster Train is a deck builder, roguelike in the vein of a Slay the Spire.

You have cards that represent units and spells and equipment,

and you

play them to defend a four-tiered train.

from waves of oncoming enemies.

Terrible way to design a train, by the way.

Yeah, the train's usually not an up and down situation.

Yeah.

Typically, we're talking about forward-backwards, and that's basically it.

Here, you have a few levels to defend by placing down your units and casting spells and equipping those units with

stuff.

It should be an elevator.

Why is it not an elevator?

That's

monster elevator.

Actually, that is a kick asset.

Monster.

You can shorten it.

Monster Vader.

Yeah.

Monster Vader, you've lost it.

And yeah, I mean, it sort of iterates on that Slay the Spire format with this almost like,

it's not quite tower defense, but you are building up, you know, multiple levels of defenses

because after you finish all the waves of enemies, there's a boss, and that boss will just keep hitting, you know, whatever level it is on until it kills everything on it.

And so you have to have built a strong enough defense before that happens.

That's the basic premise.

Add on, you know, you're going through different tracks to choose, oh, I'm going to pick up some weapon upgrades, or I'm going to go down this track that gives me spell upgrades, or heals my

pyre, which is the thing you have at the top of your train.

That if enemies reach it, they'll do damage.

The middle game of it feels much closer to I think most of the like the slave aspires of the world.

Very, very much so.

Insofar as there's a little thing at the top of the screen that shows you all your artifacts that you have, and those are like permanent kind of modifiers that

go

over everything.

There are,

I believe, 10 different like factions.

And when you start playing, you choose two.

And you can choose a like a special unit that's like free to play, that it becomes kind of a

cornerstone of whatever your build ends up being.

And that, you know, hero unit will get stronger and stronger too.

There are different

ways you can upgrade your pyre permanently to like weird little modifiers on it.

There's so much shit.

It's too unbelievable.

Because I feel like a Slay of the Spire run, you start pretty small and then it kind of grows.

And this, within two waves of enemies, you're like balancing a lot.

Yes, it is definitely more mechanically dense than Slay the Spire.

And there's probably a lot of people listening to that who played Slay the Spire and are thinking like, well, fuck.

Slay the Spire is already pretty mechanically intense.

That's my question.

I didn't play the original game.

I found this game extremely overwhelming.

Sure.

The metaphor that kept coming to my head was

3D chess.

Or is it 4D chess?

It's like, I'm playing multiple games at once.

And it felt like I was, especially in learning the game, having to learn how to play a lot of systems all at the exact same time.

It does kind of ask that of you.

I will say that it is, there are some strategies that are pretty universally good, right?

Like you have three floors basically to work with that you are customizing by putting units on them and then like, you know, modifying modifying those units with your spells and equipment and everything and strategies basically kind of boil down to like okay I'll use that first floor to weaken the enemy or you know buff my other units and then the second floor I'll be able to you know sweep all the little guys out and then my third floor that's where my fucking juggernauts are that's where no one's gonna get past that line and by the time they reach there they're weakened and so like there's there's strategies that are pretty universal and are you know make make a lot of sense and kind of go with your tower defense strategies yeah sort of right it is kind of fulfilling that role a little bit uh what the game does that i really appreciate and i think makes all of these you know hundred systems pretty easily parsable is before you end your turn you can see a preview of exactly how the next round is going to shake out which is important because like you know on a boss round you're going to exchange 40 attacks back and forth uh it doesn't get into the nitty-gritty of that it will just show you like an x on the boss which means like you will kill the boss if you just hit intern and go about it as you are now.

And that is so good and so important and necessary because otherwise the game would be just fucking impossible.

Yeah.

As someone that played the original,

it does feel like the sequel is in a lot of ways like designed for people that played the

ever-loving fuck out of the original.

Sure.

And it does,

I did some like reading through the forums and things like that.

It seems like people are excited about the fact that the original had tried and true tested strategies of always put your strongest guys at on the third tier,

et cetera, et cetera.

And it sounds like this game

forces you to mix things up a little bit more.

Yeah, you will hit bosses that if you do have that strategy of, okay, I'm just going to wait and have my heaviest hitters on the final tier.

The game eventually will start to throw stuff at you that will directly counter that.

And that's

that

it does shake things up a bit.

It is not an easy game.

I have done like probably close to a dozen runs or so, and the runs last a long fucking time

and have only cleared it once.

And the rest of the time, I just have been getting my ass absolutely kicked.

But that said, I've really been enjoying it.

Yeah, what do you see as like the big improvements that justify the sequel?

Okay, so the game that I have the most

experience in this genre is Slay the Spire.

So if it's okay, I'll use that as kind of like the baseline.

Slave the Spire,

there's obviously like

four or five different characters, and there's like different ways you can kind of build them depending on like how your early cards and relics play out, right?

But then you start to get into this place where it's like, damn, I was going for this, you know, poison exponential multiplication strategy, and

the cars just ain't hitting.

It ain't there and it's taken too long to get my engines up and running.

I feel like Monster Train 2 throws so much shit at you all the time that you really have no excuse for like having something not come together.

Your strategy may not be what was correct.

to like get you through.

It may not be the most optimal strategy, but you are constantly making choices.

You are constantly every road that you like choose to go down will have a shop on it.

And those shops allow you to add up to two modifiers to like your units or your spells.

And they completely crack the game wide open.

You can take any unit in the game.

And if you put the right modifiers on it, all of a sudden it is

a beast, right?

So like with that much flexibility and that much customization

and opportunity to seize those things, it is kind of.

balls in your court.

And I love that feeling of like, of, of control and that every choice that I am making has, has some sort of impact.

Uh, and, you know, learning new things about what strategies work best with which factions based on like sort of the mechanics that they focus on.

Um, I, I, I am also, uh, pretty overwhelmed by it.

Like, I definitely don't feel like I understand it 100% of the time, but I also feel like it is doing a good enough job, you know, kind of like leading me by the nose and showing me like what the results of things are going to be before I do them.

that I don't know.

I just feel like I am constantly learning and getting better and

just having a really, really, really good time.

What do you think of the look and like the vibe of the whole thing?

Yeah.

It's fine.

That's fine.

It's a lot of demons, angels in there on a train, and it's pretty basic.

I don't know.

It feels a little flashy, right?

A little bit.

It's interesting.

I mean, it looks like Monster Train one.

And to that extent, they have, as far as I can tell, included all the stuff from, it's sort of like an Evil Dead 2 situation where

pretty much most of Monster Train 1 is in Monster Train 2.

So, yeah, I don't know.

That shit's not really that important to me for a game like this.

Maybe it should be, but I don't know.

I played A Million Hours of Slay the Spire, and that...

was a lightly animated experience.

There is a whale, though.

There is a big whale and the whale kicks ass.

Yeah,

I think it's it's great and I'm I'm

I have other stuff going on right now that I can't

I can't surrender myself to the

to the to the grind of Monster Train 2.

So I'm having to forcibly kind of like put it to the side now that I've played it enough to talk about it here.

Because once I get back into that game or I'm worried it's going to get me for a while.

I mean, it'll come out on mobile eventually, theoretically, right?

Jesus.

And that I don't think would work i've played there's too much shit i played the first one on mobile and it was playable okay it's just so much shit man i have been playing it on for what it's worth

uh rog my rog ally uh the controller controls are great and very intuitive um so you you don't have to you know mouse and keyboard it um but yeah if you played monster train one monster train two is like 10 times more sort of uh dense and if you liked monster train one that probably sounds good to you so so this is actually a good comparison to another game that we were talking about today that is also a card-based game called starvadors hell yeah do you want to lead the charge on this one chris or yeah did you play it too rust i played it as well okay cool play it you can why don't you why don't you give the rundown yeah i'll take a stab at it so starvadors is another card game in

theory it's weird to call any of these things card games because they've gotten so far away from cards right anything other than the attacks or moves that you're playing but there is a five by nine grid and the look and the feel of the game is imagine space invaders but instead of you firing up manually you're using cards to move around the playfield and to like fire bombs or actions and you take turns dealing out all of your damage and then the enemy getting its turn where it cascades down that five by nine field, right?

So that's the basics.

It starts to get more complicated by how you use those cards.

So you have a thing called heat, and each card costs a certain amount of heat.

So say you want to move, that'll cost you a piece of heat, and you'll use the card also.

You want to fire a special move, that'll cost you two heat, and suddenly you've maxed out your heat gauge.

And then you have an option to still spend one more thing and go overheating.

And this comes with a risk reward where if you overheat a card, you can use it, but the turn immediately ends after that.

And then it goes into the deck, and it's now burnt.

So if it ever gets shuffled back in, suddenly you have this card that's effectively worthless, making you have fewer cards the more times that you spend this.

But as with all of these games, what makes the game really special is how it complicates that with rules that change over the course of like a really long roguelike style run.

So you could have a thing where, oh, yeah, you're burning a ton of cards.

You in theory don't have anything, but then you get two abilities.

You get an ability that allows you to

reshuffle your deck back in, which in theory would be bad, right?

Like you don't want those burned cards, but you also get the ability that like ultra powers your the attacks you do have by however many burned cards you're carrying.

Yeah.

So it's I have not gotten that tactic to work out for me quite yet as sick as it seems.

So, like, that was one that I think our friends at Into the Aether had had.

The ones that I had that was just absolutely killer was I got moves where I could fire bombs on the field, right?

And then I would get a random aerial volley of three bombs, and I had a multiplier that whenever I used bombs while I was in the safe space, it would repeat that move, and then I had a double repeat on it, and then I had a thing that only made it so I got one heat for like anything.

So basically each move I was just firebombing the entire map

and ended up beating the game, which doesn't mean much.

It is a game that's meant to be beaten many, many times.

Yes.

On my very first run.

And

that was the difference between this and Monster Train is Monster Train.

I was wildly overwhelmed, but I have a feeling it's maybe a deeper game.

In this, I was, I finished my first run beating it by the skin of my teeth and felt amazing and immediately hopped right back in there's not like insane damage numbers you're tracking right like most of the time if you shoot an unarmored enemy they explode yeah and that that is it so it's very tactile and very easy to tell like uh what what is going to happen when you use this this gun card yeah

into the breach i think is a good analogy for that because you have these very low health enemies and you know what the next turn is going to result in.

And can you maneuver with your cards and your heat and use all those resources to get out of it by doing some damage, but also avoiding damage yourself?

Yes.

It is also like

Into the Breach, in that if the enemies reach the bottom three rows of the field, you accrue doom.

And once you have five doom across your whole campaign, it's game over instantly.

Yeah, doom is bad.

I found this to be like way more tactile than Monster Train.

Like way more, I know

the impacts that I'm making don't feel as like weirdly ephemeral as they do in a game, even like Slay the Spire.

Like it just feels like to some extent numbers going up.

And here I'm like, oh, I'm moving my ship out of the range of this explosion to go over here.

And it just felt like I was way more in control of the situation.

Even though, again, like you're obviously making all the decisions in Monster Train, it's just like a different style.

It's a totally different thing.

Yeah, this is where the card misnomer thing comes into play.

I mean, by all intents, you could frame this as a action, a tactical action game where you're not literally dishing out cards because you, like you said, you see the enemy's attack coming at you, you literally move around the battlefield and you dish out different attacks.

You just happen to do all that with cards that you were randomly assigned.

Yeah, I found it extremely compelling.

It has a very cutesy

kind of retro art style.

It reminded me of Mega Man.

This is kind of a deep cut.

There was a PSP remake of the original Mega Man called Mega Man Powered Up, which had like Chibi Mega Man running around.

See, I thought more Advanced Wars, but that's a good idea.

Oh, yeah, I can see Advanced Wars as well.

That's shit.

That's true.

Yeah, it's fun to do both of these games because they're both amazing deck-building, roguelike games that could not be more different from each other.

Whereas this one also has synergies that and strategies that when they come together are really great.

I had one using the bomber character where I had a card that would shoot a bullet straight up from any bomb I had on the field.

And then I had one that turned me into a bomb

so that anytime I took damage, I would explode, but I would also, when I shot this shot, I would shoot two bullets up because now I'm also technically a bomb.

Like that stuff is very, very satisfying.

It is not as

you don't feel like you're breaking the shit wide open as much as like in Monster Train, you get some synergy where you're buffing up your hero character permanently every game.

But again, like that's a totally different thing, right?

That is a totally different genre, basically.

Yeah, and I'm curious as you play this more and more if that changes because

you it is a roguelite or whatever we want.

Rogue light genre.

Yeah.

No, roguelite.

You're unlocking shit.

You're unlocking stuff, yeah.

And there's a lot of like different difficulty settings, different character types, different cards that you're acquiring.

And the game is evolving.

And I wonder how, just how powerful you can become by the end of it.

One question I have for you, Griffin, because I believe you're a Mega Man battle network person.

Oh, gosh.

I've played a couple of them.

Is that much like it?

I've seen that mentioned a lot with this game.

Yes, now that you say that, I do believe so.

You had, that was like a horizontal grid, and you would have enemies on one side and Mega Man on the other.

And then I think you had randomly selected moves that you, God, I don't know, man.

I'm

what that sounds right, but it has been forever since I played one of those games.

Yeah, it made me like want to actually go back and play those games because I've had them on my list forever and was so charmed by this.

But again, with this one, really,

for anybody interested in playing it, playthrough it once.

It's a long session.

It does have the ability to save in the middle of it, which is important because a run for me was like 45 minutes to an hour beginning to end.

But also really allow yourself to have fun with it.

Like I was kind of almost stressing out the first run.

It was great, really exciting, but I was weary of playing it again just because it felt like it was asking a lot of me.

And then the second one, I was like, well, I don't care this time.

I just want to see what absolute bonker shit I can pull off.

Yeah.

And it does reward that.

Yeah.

yeah, yeah.

It wants you to be trying to find silly ways to break it.

Card freaks eating good this week.

Should we take a quick break and then talk about Elden Ring Night Rain?

Let's do it.

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I mean, Russ is the only one of us.

I've been on tour and we did not get

a local area networking some Night Rain over there.

I guess I could have been having my own personal hotel-based LAN party.

Elden Ring Night Rain Land Party.

I will be honest, when I got home yesterday afternoon, I did not race to my computer to download Elden Ring Night Rain.

Can you lead the charge on this, Russians?

Sure, happy to.

Elden Ring Night Rain is a co-op-centric game set in the Elden Ring universe whose closest analog is probably Fortnite because you basically fly in with a team of two other people.

It's max of three players.

And there's a big ring that closes in on a giant Elden Ring-y map.

The Elden Ring.

Oh, is it?

I don't know.

That's what it is.

Finally, we know.

It's the Fortnite Death Storm.

Now we know.

So you land on this map and you very quickly try to level up and get better gear.

In the end, as the circle closes closer and closer in, eventually, once the circle is very tiny, you do a boss fight and then the cycle repeats itself, assuming you actually survive that boss fight.

And you do that two more times, and that's like a full run.

And what you get out of runs is like, you get some

cosmetic upgrade things, you get some permanent like buffable upgrade things

uh and then you do multiple runs because there's different bosses and different map layouts and things like that um

the big difference there's so many fucking differences from the original elden ring elden ring is i think to all of us very fond i probably like it maybe more than everyone here i don't know it's close

i fucking adore elden ring um

uh this is so just from an experience standpoint vastly different which is weird because our

artistically like the graphics are identical.

You're fighting almost all familiar bosses and enemies, although occasionally they'll throw in like a fun Dark Souls cameo, which is cute.

And it seems like the character classes themselves

have some fun mechanics.

Yeah, so that's them.

I would say, like, outside of the ring aspect, the like actual gameplay loop, the character classes themselves are the most different part of this.

So

instead of generating your own character and starting from scratch, you are picking

identities.

There's like a bird guy and there's like a samurai person and whatever.

There's like a bunch of them.

And each of those identities have very, very unique abilities that they can use in the world.

So for example, the like what I feel like is kind of the default.

all-rounder kind of guy has a grappling hook that you can use to like latch on to enemies and pull them towards you or for bigger enemies you'll like zip towards them um that's like the most basic some of them are much more involved so you'll have one of the characters like uses like sekro parrying for yeah all of your like special attacks you have to like utilize that sort of timing um I played as the bird guy a bunch of times.

I don't remember what the bird guy is called, but the bird guy has the ability, you can't dodge as the bird guy.

I guess birds can't dodge.

You can fly, fittingly.

And the bird guy can do these like giant like dive bomb attacks.

You can also revive people as the bird guy much faster than other people.

So each of the classes really does have like specific utility.

Some of them are going to be much more focused on range attacks.

Some are way more like tanky.

So you really do need to have like a team comp that's going to be able to cover a lot of bases in that.

So all that stuff is cool.

Like I like the idea of it.

Here's the issue.

Everything that I love about Elden Ring is not this.

I love slowly creeping my ass through a cave and oh no, a giant boulder shows up and can I dodge the boulder and oh, behind the boulder was a chest and oh, I'm like looking at all my inventory to see if this

sword that I just picked out of this chest is better than the sword that I had and I'm gonna upgrade this sword and feel really proud of this sword.

No, this is a complete reversion of that, like just like a total.

I wouldn't even say reversion.

It's just like a different direction entirely because you have to move so fucking quickly to succeed in this game.

Every single second you are in the world should be spent either leveling up or finding better gear or upgrading your flasks or fighting like field bosses that give you a bunch of experience and drops.

It's just like a fucking like someone was like, Elden Ring, but let's take meth first and see what happens.

I really like how in every gameplay video or people streaming it that I see

inevitably whenever a character stops at the

bonfire, whatever they're called,

bonfire substitute,

the menuing happens like

then they are immediately running away.

Every single time, I've never seen a streamer spend more than like a quarter second, like, okay, level up, level, level, and I'm gone.

Well, right, because you're not even picking stats.

It's just like you're just leveling up the number to get more powerful.

People are like realizing, like, oh, you don't even need to stop sprinting as you like sprint past a fire, one of the bonfires, you can level up in in that process.

So it is incredibly that and it makes sense because it's like you are trying to maximize the power that you will eventually have to use to beat the final boss, which can be really fucking hard.

Right.

I think my immediate question when I first heard about this game was, can I have a good time playing as a solo player?

Certainly not at launch.

I tried playing it at launch.

It was basically impossible as a solo player.

They have just for balancing reasons or yeah.

So they may they they did offer some balancing changes.

Specifically,

you were a little more powerful.

You got more runes.

Since then, because I think the blowback was pretty immediate, they've given you other things.

Like, for example, if you're a solo player, you get a revive once a day.

It'll just like auto-revive you.

If you die, previously, you only had one life.

That's crazy.

That's crazy that they can launch.

a balance change that quickly and have it not be something that was flagged for them ahead of time.

Well, they already had items in the game that could do that.

So, presumably, it's just like almost like just grant everyone this point.

I'm not complaining.

It's great that they listened to the feedback and changed it.

But if the feedback is, it's so impossibly hard to play this solo that they added this free instant revive

to

that experience, that just seems like the kind of thing that would have been caught with enough sort of like transformation.

I mean, they quite tested it.

I guess

I wonder if you have post-launch plans for a game like this like if the feedback is the game is too difficult in this mode here is a series of things that we will change to adjust for player feedback or if or if it truly is like they're winging it under normal circumstances i would agree with you but they had a pub effectively a public yeah beta where i'm sure that feedback was heard yeah um

yeah it's an interesting maybe just the people who played the beta were like really good at it yeah that that could have been um

It's interesting because it's just like,

yeah, as you said, how quickly that change came about.

But even with that change, like I've played it since.

It's definitely a little easier.

It's still fucking hard as shit and doesn't feel designed to be played with one player.

There's

a lot of boss fights in the game that just like

you know, you have to get around shields and there's like two bosses you're fighting at once and it's just like not do you get spirit summons or anything like that if you play there are like up there are like items you can get that'll like allow you to do similar sort of things, but they're random drops.

It's not like a guaranteed thing.

And some of the characters do have something similar as well.

But again, none of that is like the intention.

It's very clear that the intention is a three-player Elden Ring experience.

It's not even two players.

You actually can't play as two players.

If you queue as two players, it'll drop a random in with you.

Which is weird.

They say they're working on it.

All that is to say, like, as a person that adores Elden Ring and basically everything that FromSoft has made, it's really fucking hard for me to get into this in the same way that I didn't do a ton of PvP or multiplayer stuff when I play through any of their games.

I do it occasionally if I need help, but otherwise, no.

And I like taking my time and I like going slowly.

The idea of playing a FromSoft game without that constant progression hook is so unappealing to me that it makes me kind of re-evaluate my relationship with from software games where if you take away the fact that i'm leveling up a guy and finding all this stuff through exploration and customizing them and having that be something that i do over the run of a 100 hour long campaign if you strip that away it seems so bad like oh man then that that's it's not fun i'm only doing it to get tough and buff not not to be an armchair developer but i'm going to do it anyway just for just for shits and giggles if this game allowed me to play solo and and didn't have the like intense time limit aspects and was just like kind of a randomly generated Elden Ring game,

I'd be fucking in.

Like that sounds fucking fun.

I'm not saying it's balanced for that.

It obviously isn't.

And I'm not saying it's easy to do something like that.

It's a very big I mean, but you're describing Elden Ring kind of.

But like a little bit faster.

You're right.

You're right.

Well, let me just speaking of the length,

another issue specifically for me is if you do a full run it's about 45 minutes and it's as with all elden ring whatever all that stuff like you can't pause and in this case if you want to finish your run with two other people you better be there for 45 minutes and it's a commitment that's like a big fucking commitment uh it's it's longer than a fortnight match and even fortnight matches are kind of a commitment so uh that's and and like not to mention like uh there's no in-game voice chat you have to use like discord uh there's very minimal

directions that you can give.

There's a pinging system, but the pinging system isn't great.

It just feels like someone had a wacky hair.

How could we get an Elden Ring game out in shorter amount of time than it would take like a full sequel?

And they had a wacky idea for it.

And it is like very ambitious from a design standpoint, like super ambitious.

It's just not necessarily a game I really want to play as a fan of Elden Ring, which is a total fucking drag.

And it gives me

real worries about the Duskbloods, which is also multiplayer-centric.

We don't know what structure it is.

It doesn't appear to have a ring or whatever the fuck.

But, you know, when you hear like multiplayer-centric,

that tells me that single-player is not the priority and you won't have that experience that you're doing.

I mean, can you imagine, though, that all of the stuff that you're talking about and it is on Nintendo's online functionality?

Well, Well, we don't know.

I mean, you have to play it on the Switch.

No, I know, but we don't know what the Switch 2's online functionality is.

Yeah, you're right.

No, it's probably going to be great.

It's probably going to be great.

You can look at people's faces while they're out right now, and we're fucking grooving on that C button.

I'm playing Dust Bloods right now.

I'm playing Dust Bloods also.

We got super, duper, duper early.

Oh, shit, it's on his back.

I'm a weird

doctor, and he's got one of those bird masks on.

It's fine.

Love it.

Sunset.

Bloodborne guys in there, even though they won't say that.

It's Dudbourne.

So.

Did you say Dougborne?

I said Dudborn.

I'm Dougborne.

Doug Bourne.

I'm Doug Bourne.

This is my cane blade.

Do we have a mailbag or do we want to go to honorable mentions?

Well, there was one game you wanted to talk about.

One more game.

We've had so many games.

Yeah.

Oh, I guess I was thinking I would save it for honorable mentions, but I can do it now.

Originally, I was going to put it in here because Justin recommended it to me while we were on the road and it hooked me real hard.

Obviously, Juice is not here right now, so I'll carry the weight.

I've been playing a game called Cauldron, and I've been playing it a lot, and it's a real problem.

It is a new, idle, incremental game,

only it's also a lot of other things too.

The game starts out, you're this little witch in a clearing surrounded by a shadow.

And if you run up to one of those shadows, you can interact with it and you'll do a little turn-based battle.

Do a little turn-based battle against the enemy and the further you get from your like little home base the harder the fights get if you want to get stronger you have to put ingredients into a cauldron how do you get those ingredients by playing a little idle game um and it's not just one idle game there's five there's five different idle games and so you'll go and you'll collect some apples in this idle game and then you start generating apples for free based on the average of your five highest runs on the apple game and then you unlock some specific talents for the apple game that make it better at collecting apples but then you decide I'm going to take a break from that.

I'm going to go play the fishing game for a bit.

And then you go over and you play the fishing game.

You get five good scores, start generating some free fish.

You go back to the Apple game.

You've got so many apples you got from the idle process.

You dip into that.

You come back, the fish have been racking up.

You get some free fish upgrades.

You go down, you check out the minecart game.

It's

insidious.

I am one.

I just had the trailer on.

It's diabolical.

It's disgusting.

The chemicals that were oozing out of my brain as it'll fuck you up as that image.

It's just numbers.

They're just numbers and flashing things.

So many nodes.

And it looks so cute.

It's very cute.

And then, you know, you go around, you basically play these five different idol games to,

you know, make it so that you're, you know, earning idle currencies of these five different types.

And then you feed those in your cauldron.

You do that.

It makes all your characters stronger for the turn-based battle component.

You're going out in the world.

You're expanding what you can explore, unlocking new characters and finding new mini-games.

The worst part, the games, looking at this, you know, when you're flipping through TikTok and you see a commercial for some iOS game and the whole design of it is like, I don't know how to solve this puzzle.

And you're like, I do.

Let me solve it.

Yeah.

Like looking at these little games, I'm like, I know how to collect all those apples.

The five games are totally.

The five games are totally different.

There's like a

sort of Space Invader style

shooter.

There's a full ass Vampire Survivors in here, and it's really good.

And I've gotten very, very deeply into that one.

There's like a ridiculous fishing style game.

Like it's the five games are really great.

And you can seriously just spend a lot of time like doing five good runs to bump up your average so that the amount you earn incrementally goes up and you know unlock some new talents and you hit these break points where now all of a sudden you're going twice as far in that game than you did before.

And oh shit, I haven't gone and played the vampire survivors game in a bit.

I'll go down and check that out.

Whoa, I have so much currency saved up.

I can unlock all these upgrades.

Like, it's just, it has, it is like Hellraiser in how many hooks it will embed within you.

Uh, and

does the idol part work when the game is off?

I don't know.

I haven't

turned the game off.

Okay.

I've been sort of scared to.

I got it just kind of open here.

Yeah.

Ready, ready for me to.

And boys, I'm looking looking at some of the numbers I racked up.

As soon as I get off this call, I'm about to blow my shit

sky high.

The Steam Review's incredible experience from start to finish.

Oh, cool.

This person finished it.

What does that look like?

104 hours.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, but then when you finish it, you unlock new upgrades for all the different idol games.

Oh, okay.

You play a different mode.

Guys, it's called Cauldron.

How did you know that?

Have you finished it?

I'm getting close.

Oh, my God.

Pretty close.

I keep like slacking on the turn-based.

I'll be straight.

I don't enjoy the turn-based combat side of things that much because the battles will become like eight on 24.

And it's just so, but you can automate that side of things.

You can automate.

you know, the upgrade selections.

If you don't want to feel like fucking with that, it lets you pick the stuff that you are into.

And I'm into these five different idol games.

And then I'll go and I'll cash all this shit in the culture and I'll go around to all these fights that I was having trouble with earlier.

and the auto computer will just smash through it and it's so satisfying.

It's great, guys.

It's very, very, very good.

I'm not joking.

It's treat it

like a venomous asp because it is a it is a

deeply, deeply compelling experience that is genuinely tough to put down.

Fucking yikes.

Yeah.

It's not a good time for a game like that.

It's a bad time for a game.

It's a bad time.

There's a new console coming out.

We've got a lot going on.

I tell myself, like, you know what?

I'll just let it idle, but then I'll start letting it idle.

I'll be like, damn, I got a lot of apples if I could probably afford that one upgrade that increases my Apple damage.

It needs an Apple Watch app.

Yes.

Right.

It needs a cage that will only unlock every six hours so you can dip in to see how things are going.

I think I'm good at that.

I have a lot of willpower.

I can't download this.

This would ruin me right now.

What else are we talking about today?

You got any honorable mentions, Fresh?

I watched Murderbot, which I know we've been talking about, but I started watching it, and it's a lovely show.

They did a great job on this show.

I don't think the season has ended.

I'm caught up with all the episodes.

And it's just, I never watched, I never read the original source material,

but I imagine it is pretty consistent with what that was.

And I find it very funny and interesting and really well produced.

And the acting is dynamite.

And if you're looking, yeah, again, it's like a light 25-minute show, which I am like really hungering for these days.

So it's been really nice.

I still really want to check that out.

I have, sometimes I have like shows that I feel like, oh, I bet I could get Rachel into that.

And then I'll like hold off on watching it until this beautiful imaginary day comes where we actually watch that instead of one of the four shows that we watch every night.

It hasn't happened yet.

I might just have to break and watch all of it.

Have you watched Andor yet, you weirdo?

No, I'm planning.

Okay.

I'm planning on watching it like that's like a flight and like spare time during SGF because it's not a show that my wife is going to watch.

Speaking of shows, so I've been saving it for that trip.

I see.

So that is my intention, and I will make probably a lot of progress.

I'm very excited.

I

watched this full season of John Mulaney's Everybody's Live.

That is very interesting because you don't watch TV regularly, like with any sort of consistency.

No, I don't.

And I'm not really sure.

Well, I think I know how we saw him do like a prep set for this in LA, I don't know, a couple months ago, and then we ended up watching the show.

But what a really cool and interesting show.

Yeah.

Because it

is a late night talk show in the very literal sense, but without any of the obligations that make late night talk shows suck.

And by that, I mean late-night talk show has to go forever.

It has to air every night in the week, and it largely has to

act as a money-making device for like network TV.

So that means it has to be cheap to make, it has to promote a whole bunch of like random shit, and then hopefully draw in ads from all the stuff it's promoting.

And this show runs for

like, I don't know, eight or ten weeks and once a week, and they never even mention any of the stuff that people are promoting when they are there for it.

And every skit is just,

I think the show is very, very, very funny.

It is a show that is comfortable knowing that, like, I don't know, maybe a third of its stuff can totally bomb.

Yeah.

But

it's like

it would rather take the shot than bomb.

And that all builds up to a finale in which John Mulaney fights three teenage boys.

Yeah.

And the whole season, they keep saying this, and he seems pretty okay with it.

And there's a moment, maybe five minutes before it happens, where you can, for the first time, really see the fear in his face of

have I really put myself in the dumbest, crappiest corner after he's going to be able to do it.

Yeah, because you could get really hurt.

Well, not just get hurt, but like, is this just stupid?

Like, is this not going to be funny?

Right.

And

it is really cool to watch somebody who is at a point in their kind of life and career where, like, this is clearly what the juice is for him as it is it is aspirational comedy in the truest sense of like fuck man that's somebody just doing it doing whatever they whatever tickles their fancy and they have outrageous support to do so that's uh that's great yeah

good for him no idea how netflix decides to fund it or if he will keep doing it but yeah i think that's the larger question is like i'm sure a lot of the motivator was like they want to maintain their relationship with john mulaney who obviously brings in for his stand-up specials quite a lot of attention.

I know Netflix is fending off Hulu, which has been like hosting a lot of like major comedy specials lately.

So this feels like, you know, Richard Kine's probably not asking for too much.

This feels like a relatively cheap way to maintain a relationship with relatively little amounts of harm.

And if he does some fun stuff, I mean, I watch the clips on YouTube, some of the clips on YouTube.

It's some of his stuff is very, very funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can tell that the writer's room literally will design a sketch only to make the person who happens to be on the show that week laugh yeah so Pete Davidson is on at one point and they do an entire sketch about like one of the like I think its name is butterball from Hellraiser series being his like pizza delivery man

and no one in the audience is laughing at all but Pete Davidson is like literally hyperventilating and it's that shit I just I live for it I really do

it feels like the sort of show that's going to get canceled after one season.

And like for 10 years hence, video essays on YouTube will just be obsessed with it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That may be the best way to consume it, all things considered.

I'm still watching Devil's Plant Season 2, which I still thoroughly recommend to everyone.

I'm not going to give the hard sell on the whole show, but they did play a game that I wanted to.

talk about because it's such a good game that I feel like I would just watch a show show just about this one game.

It was one of the like deathmatch rounds where one player gets eliminated no matter what at the end of it.

And it's called Sniper Hold'em.

And it was just Texas Hold'em, like the poker game.

You know, you put you have two cards face down.

Don't describe how Texas hold them.

I'm not going to describe how Texas Hold'em works, but most folks know.

What is different is there's no face cards.

Okay.

And there's only four community cards instead of five.

But otherwise, it's the same thing, right?

You're trying to put together a hand using your two face-down cards and the four community cards.

The only difference, and the whole time you're like placing bets, like in Texas, hold them.

Uh, and uh, there were only a certain amount of chips to go around.

Once you hit 75 chips, you're free from the game, you get to leave and you're safe, right?

Yeah, that was the whole thing of the game.

What the big twist is, is and what makes it sniper hold them is after you know you get your face-down cards, community cards, there's a round of betting, two more community cards, and then after all the betting is concluded, at the point of the game where usually in traditional poker, you would then reveal to see who is what, every player who is still in gets to take a shot and you call a specific type of hand and that type of hand is neutralized and if someone else has that hand they are out so if you if there's shit on the table and you're like i bet you somebody has a full house of aces like they have three ace or not aces because there aren't face cards but like a full house of eights right they have three eights and a pair of something else and you say i call full house of eights and if if you get it right, they're out.

They can't win the hand.

So it is a way of playing poker where if you are actually doing the math and can predict what the other player has,

you can win with like a shitty high card.

Yeah.

As long as your hand doesn't also get sniped.

And it is, gang, the most exciting poker video I have ever watched in my entire life.

There are huge swings back and forth, huge like miracle shots that reverse fortunes on these enormous pots.

It fucking rules and it like adds this element of excitement to poker, a game that is a billion, billion years old, that has been played a billion times and like it exists in the middle of this as one challenge in this Korean reality competition show.

So just for argument's sake, if there's four spades in the community thing,

and someone.

There's no colors or suits.

It's just numbers, one through 10.

And so when you call something out, you are just calling like, you know, straight to the eight or

three of a kind nines.

You have to be very specific about the hand that you call.

You can't just say flush.

That makes sense.

There's no flush.

You have to specify

the hand and the number associated with that.

That's crazy.

That's crazy.

And so

you'll have like pocket pairs, right?

Like I'll have pocket nines.

And then no one's going to call that.

No one has any way of knowing that you have these pocket nines.

So, you know, maybe

your two-pair will win out because people don't know that you have this secret shit in reserve.

It's really, really, really, really good stuff.

All games this season have been rad.

There's a, I'm watching, the challenge we're watching right now is a variation of Moncala.

You're earning three distinct pools of points.

It's the Monster Train 2 of Korean Reality Competition Shows.

That's on Netflix or where is that?

It's on Netflix.

Yeah.

Both seasons absolutely kick-ass.

So

it's spin-off of a thought with Minecalla, but Grippen, did you see the New York Times officially endorsed Koob this summer?

No.

Yes.

To Wirecutter can the menu.

Wirecutter did a the game that you should be playing this summer is Koob.

And they are

right.

I love Koob.

I don't know if we've talked about Koob on this show.

I think there'll be a whole wonderful segment about it, though.

He's

a good idea.

How do you spell Koop?

Just for the people that are.

K-U-U-B.

I mean, do we have time?

Do you want to give a brief Koobe rundown?

Yeah, I mean, sure.

Kobe, I don't know.

It's from Norway or somewhere like that.

Vikings played it.

You throw sticks at other sticks, and there's a big pylon in the middle.

And I guess the lore is that they used to be bones and skulls.

But it is

fantastic.

Explaining the rules is not fun.

Actually, just watching someone play it once and then playing it is a blast.

It is a game.

It is that perfect type of game that can last five minutes or five hours, depending on if you get into the thick of it.

It's a momentum game where you are constantly like, yeah,

and it is also a one-handed game, so you can play it while having a beverage.

It is also a,

there's this king piece that has to be the last thing you knock over, so it has that eight-ball rule where someone can also end the game drunkenly at any time with a single wayward toss.

Pinches, I like that.

Very, very exciting it's my favorite yard game by a country mile it's fucking rules um all right that's it that was so much stuff you guys really got your money's worth busy this week

um if you thought this week was busy next week's gonna be even wilder because the nintendo switch 2 is out the day that you're listening to this probably and hopefully All of our different retail partners will come through for us.

TBD.

We will all have Switch 2s.

I've actually, so in theory, I'm maybe getting a Switch 2 on launch day, but I'm going to also be flying to Summer Game Fest that very same day, and I'm terrified to move my pre-order to another address.

So probably all of the impressions that I provide about Switch 2 next week will be on Jason Schreier's Switch 2.

So

here's Hofo.

You know, he's going to have overclocked it.

Yes.

And modded it and tweaked it.

He's going to be fucking king booing all over that game.

Also, I'm just going to let people know up front, I won't be here next week.

Because he doesn't like Calvin Dendle.

It is is because I'm getting a colonoscopy.

And if you're over the age of 50, which I'm not,

do take care of yourself.

That's what I'm going to say.

Keep your head on a swivel.

We will have a different Chris with us, though.

Oh, yeah.

That's true.

Chris for Chris swap out with Chris Grant.

Very excited for that.

So, yes, a lot to do next week.

Please, if you enjoy our show, consider joining our Patreon at patreon.com slash the besties.

Russ, you want to read off some friends who've been supporting us?

We have some recent members of the Patreon.

Thank you again for everyone's support.

But here's some recent ones.

We have Defiant.

We have Stefan or Stefan, Daniel, and Gabby.

Thank y'all.

We really appreciate you.

It's a huge fucking help.

A huge help.

Next week, Switch 2 and Summer Game Fest.

Are they going to announce that Persona 4 remake that has my TikTok algorithm ablaze, ablaze with rumor-mongering?

Christ, I hope so.

You'll find out before us, and then we'll talk about it next Friday on the Bessies.

So join us then, because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games?

Besties.