Let's Save Cats From Oblivion!

This is the first time I feel like in quite a while we haven't had to lead off with like a reboot.

Maybe the past few times it's been a little bit better.

Is that in my imagination or does it seem to be what the

four of us being here together?

Yeah, I mean, I'm on that fucking Pentagon crunchy pipes shit.

Like, I know it's hard, but sometimes I forget the way we do with the cold open in this show.

And sometimes I feel like I'm talking to my brother.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden I'm talking to Griffin McElroy.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's like, do you know what I'm saying?

It's like, I didn't realize.

So

let's just to demonstrate the difference, because this would be useful for me, like, yeah, when I'm out in the world and people see me.

So like, give me that, give me that again.

That was clearly Griffin McEroy, the internet persona trying to.

Right, because you were like, yeah, yeah.

So give me, give me that, give me that question again.

I'll do it like normal style.

Okay.

What was the question?

I was like, has your internet gotten a little bit faster?

Oh, yeah, Griff.

I feel like your internet has gotten a little bit better.

Is that in my imagination?

Yeah, baby.

Going zoom, zoom, zoom.

That's what I know.

I know the problem is that

once I realize I'm talking to Griffin McElroy, I melt away and Justin McElroy is there.

You know what I mean?

So we're already in that entertainment.

It's like a severance situation.

Yeah, exactly.

It is very, very much a severance.

Have people actually ever heard the real Justin?

I don't think so.

I don't think Justin is air.

He's very careful not to put that on the air.

Should we invite him onto the mic?

I think that's the right place to do do it.

You know, now yeah, I mean, I can just say, like, um,

Juice, have you been messing around with more Linux stuff, man?

Fuck yeah, dude.

You know what I actually did?

I accidentally hacked my neighbor's Wi-Fi with this little fucking flipper's ear.

I gotta put out a little sniffer PK.

That just sounds like Justin.

That's the same guy.

That's what he's saying.

That's what we're saying.

He's the same guy.

On and off.

So I'm the only one who wears a mask.

Yeah.

Persona.

Frustrated because fucking giraffe from New York half the time.

Yeah, I just don't realize it.

You know the difference?

I can't remember the last time my brother tried to make me happy.

But Griffin McElroy

tries really hard all the time.

Griffin McElroy is

very amusing.

Diplomatic.

That's what the AI Google search says when you look me up.

Popular banana eater.

My name is Justin McErhydride and I know the best games of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy.

I know the best games of the week.

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

My name name is Russell.

I know the

game of the week.

Yeah, your ears did not deceive you.

That's those four besties back together again.

The fearsome, forceless.

I got so excited.

They haven't lost a beat.

They still have a bat.

They haven't lost a step.

They're exactly as good as they've always been.

This week, this video game club that we are a member of, and you are a member of just by listening, we're going to be discussing the remaster of the Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion and Skin Deep.

Chris Plant, what is the Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion remaster and Skin Deep?

Such a great question.

Describe those two things in a sentence, please.

One is a remaster of a very old game.

One is a new game that is very inspired by old games.

Got it.

And we are going to be talking about both of those right after this.

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okay i'm really worried that i'm gonna forget to say this so i'll just tell you guys right now you know that big you know that big uh iv that they put up to hype the press conference for the Elder Scrolls for Oblivion.

Yes.

Okay.

I absolutely saw that image and absolutely parsed it as VI.

So like I, the whole day I was like, here it goes.

Yeah.

Here we go.

You forgot your Roman numerals.

And then I saw the story go but polygon about the Oblivion Remaster.

And then I'm like, dang, Oblivion Remaster and Elder Scrolls VI the same day.

Todd, you've done it.

Todd, you shouldn't have.

And we shouldn't have, I shouldn't have led off with that.

We should have said, it's also been 10 years since I've been wanting to play this new game skin deep.

That's right.

Can someone give me a brief history of Blendo's sort of body of work?

Because it's quite

singular.

That has to be Justin, right?

Yes.

So it is singular, and it is

a suite of games that really I think about as like when I was

in game journalism

professionally, because these were very very much like games I think of as joystick games.

These were and like polygon, early polygon games.

These were like the ones we would get fixated on.

They're not directly connected, most of these.

And the ones I'm thinking of here are like 30 Flights of Loving.

Gravity Bone.

There are a couple of Blendo games,

Flotilla and Flotilla 2, that are a little bit more like strategy type things.

Quadrilateral Cowboy was the last one, but these are like

first person action adventure games where the sort of hallmark of them besides the the

technically they get a lot deeper as as they go forward there's like an editing style that is consistent throughout these games it's a sort of an aesthetic like sort of blocky aesthetic and this idea of like

editing where you wouldn't necessarily expect it in video games like that that it is it's a little bit uh uh disconcerting i think the the first few times it happens if you're not used to it, but it's interesting to see that sort of like aspect come back.

What does that mean, editing?

Oh, like,

if you picture a movie when you're watching a film and somebody is talking, and then snap, you cut, and you're in a different scene.

Oh, sure.

And that's like not your brain is just used to moving from scene to scene that way.

When you're playing a video game and you're walking and you're moving towards what you think is a goal, and bam, snap, there's a cut and you're suddenly somewhere else pursuing a different goal.

It feels really strange.

Jazz Punk painted with that particular brush.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a good example.

I would say the thing that unifies all their games is

these are PC gamer-ass games, no matter where they go.

So they might be, yes, hardcore strategy.

The first-person games, you know, their origins are in Quake mods.

And then at the same time, they are us games because, Justin, you mentioned Gravity Bone.

Like, that used in the mood for loves music the one car why movie like they're very heady weirdos they they seem to love both like 1950s through 1970s tackiness and then also love like modern art house stuff there's another facet to these i think a lot of these games where they feel sort of

like barely together like they're barely holding together there's a certain um it almost feels like they've been suited

that I like the games are barely sort of like sucked together with tape and cardboard.

It's like a DIY aesthetic that I feel like is, it permeates all of them.

And silly, right?

We haven't really talked about it, but tonally, like their games tend to be very like almost Monty Python silly.

Almost.

You don't think so?

Well, let's be careful where we throw around the Monty Python, especially in this room.

We have some real critics.

I could not want to to talk about that less.

Okay, so

Skin Deep, I feel like, goes, I mean, close to

unlike the name.

Yes.

What the name suggests, it actually, I think, is

heads levels beyond the sort of immersive stuff they've done.

Heads above, you might,

you know, because there's a lot of heads in the game.

There's a lot of head stuff.

You got to do a lot of stuff with heads.

Yeah.

Skin Deep is an immersive sim.

The gameplay mimics games like Bioshock, System Shock, things like that.

And the idea is you are an insurance agent that's sent in to save various cats from various spaceships that have been attacked by pirates.

And the way you do that is by sneaking around those spaceships, hacking devices, opening vents, and clearing out rooms using stealth and thrown objects, things like that.

to basically get the upper hand on what is otherwise a very overpowering number of enemies.

So if you've played any of those games, you're going to feel pretty uh familiar ground here, but there are some very, very specific differences where this game kind of.

If you haven't played those games, a couple of those differences.

You're not running around Bioshock style with magical powers where you can just blow everything up.

You are quite underpowered.

You will eventually find things like a gun or a knife, but for the most part, you're finding a banana, eating it for health, and then throwing it on the floor to make someone slip.

And once they've slipped, you jump on their back, you ride them around the room, and you look for things to bash their heads against until they die.

And those things that you can break might be, let's say, a

thing of hand sanitizer.

But when you bash your head against that, it releases hand sanitizer into the air that is

combustible.

And then you bash their head against something that sparks, and suddenly the entire room is on fire.

And they're dead, but you nearly are too.

And to make matters worse, when characters die in this world, their heads pop off their bodies and they fly to a regeneration station.

So after you

kill someone, you have to grab their living head and then find a way to dispose of it.

So not only do you have to take out enemies, but then you have to be able to carry these heads to very specific disposable centers.

So that could be flushing one down a toilet.

It could be throwing it in the trash.

There's all sorts of ways.

So it's just the kind of flow of combat feels very, very, very different from a lot of its inspirations.

There's no Gears of War curb stomping here either.

Yeah.

The whole world feels very...

tactile and physical like every object in it is beyond just like there's a physics aspect to it i guess where you're picking up objects they have a weight they have a heft they interact with each other when you you throw them or whatever but there's also uh a lot of like tiny signage throughout the game that you can like zoom in on with your your camera and you can get hints about stuff but it also feels like very lived in uh because there's this like layer beneath where you can zoom in and everything feels very hand-wrought and yeah that's how they do the tooltips which i've never seen this in a game before i thought it was fucking brilliant is like

if you have a

let's say someone one of the enemy guards drops like a walkie-talkie

uh you can zoom in on that walkie-talkie and it might give you just like the instructions on how to use it another thing like a let's say it's a piece of wire, if you zoom on it in on it, it'll tell you, hey, if you break, if you hit this against the wall, it'll create sparks, and you intuitively know, oh, sparks might ignite the gas from the hand sanitizer thing.

So it's all kind of informing you about each object without, again, pulling you out of the game using like an on-screen tooltip or just like floating text or anything like that.

I really appreciate there's also a like running ticker like log of everything that happens.

Yeah.

All of anytime anything interacts with something else or

you know, you throw something at a character and it hits them, like it shows up in a log like this character was, you know, bonked by this or this thing was ignited by this.

So when things get extremely chaotic and, you know, in Chris's explosive hand sanitizer example, like it is actually pretty easy to follow what is happening in that case.

Yeah.

It's set up and not random, right?

Like it feels like you understand the interactions that are happening.

And I think that's a part of the problem with games like this sometimes is it starts to feel a little bit like I threw a bunch of junk together and we're not sure how it's going to interact.

Like the interactions make sense, but just like you may not intend on all of the interactions that you start.

Yeah.

I think the biggest difference as well, apart from everything we've talked about, is this game does not have level to level progression.

You're basically starting from scratch at the beginning of every level.

And the way the levels play out differently is mostly like the things you can find.

So, you know, you don't get pistol, you don't get guns for quite a few levels at the beginning of the game.

And once you unlock guns, that doesn't mean you'll always have a gun.

It just means like you might find more levels with guns in them.

And that I think is, it's very interesting because

if you played System Shock or you played Bioshock, whatever it is, As you're progressing through those games, you land on a build.

It's like, okay, I'm focused on whatever, whatever, rifles, and I'm really good at sneaking or I'm really good at hacking, whatever it is.

And because there's no progression in this game,

you actually are constantly having to reevaluate like how you're handling situations.

And so that is a big differentiator.

I think

it is a little challenging.

I mean, I think it makes it feel more like a puzzle game than it does like a immersive sim RPG, which I think a lot of its inspiration comes from,

Which, you know, has pluses and minuses to it.

I think, yeah, lacking that sort of progressive, progression sort of element, I feel like that is such a hallmark of the immersive sim genre that it, it, I don't know, it, it feels a little bit more

puzzly.

I kind of get it, though, from a design standpoint, like, like, honestly, when I'm late, when I'm late game in like a Bioshock, like, I'm using the three things I'm really good at.

Right.

Like, and that's all you do.

And by limiting it to, like, the gear that you you pick up along the way of a given mission, it does really force you to like see everything.

Whether that's to your taste or not is kind of up in the air, but it is an interesting kind of approach to that problem.

Later in the game, for those who have gotten there, how does it kind of like

evolve difficulty-wise?

My favorite Blindo game is probably quadrilateral cowboy, just because I really liked the kind of like on-the-fly hacking sort of mechanic of it.

But I also thought that like the way that it escalates and requires you to like queue up all of these different commands to go off at very specific times like got really, really difficult really fast.

I don't know if anyone's gotten sort of far enough to comment on this, but does it, does, does this game sort of evolve in a similar way or what's the sort of arc like?

I mean, you are fighting more objects.

I think the biggest like challenge leap comes when they introduce the idea of like after you go through and you save all the cats,

the ship that you're on gets basically invaded

and a boarding party will join where like eight or nine guards will come on the boarding part on the ship and you have to either steal a key from one of them or kill them all, which killing them all is incredibly difficult.

So that I think is like where part of the challenge comes from.

And also just like once new objects get introduced, those objects can also be used by the guards.

So you're kind of juggling a lot of the different mechanics all at once.

I like that phase style of games, of of these sort of puzzle strategic games.

It reminds me of, um,

oh damn, the your robots, and there's like a million of these,

and

one of them you Steamworld, Steamworld Heist, uh, two,

where you would, you know, you have the time and the the space to solve the first stage of the game, but as you actually complete it and then you need to make your exit, that it becomes almost a different strategy altogether as you're avoiding all the enemies that are flowing in.

I don't know that, like, staged games.

I also think of that

pizza, the Wario Weird Tower, or not Wario, the Wario-like game.

Pizza Tower, yeah.

Like having that A-B, I don't know, it's a really good flow.

There's also a lot of sneezing mechanics.

That's crazy.

Yeah, it's very funny for a stealth game, is that you have to account for how badly you want to sneeze.

If you go through somewhere where

the air quality index is not favorable, your sneeze meter starts to fill up.

Which is honestly, I don't know, a little bit annoying, but also hysterical.

It does seem like they came up with clever ways around the abuse systems of like, oh, you've been spotted.

You could just go in a vent.

But you can't because if you stay in the vent for too long, you'll sneeze.

I know we don't normally talk about the value proposition of a game, but this thing is $18

on Steam.

That's a great.

If this sounds at all like something you might want to play around with,

they don't make a lot of games like this.

And I think that it's really, really worth kind of messing around with and experimenting with.

In fact, they haven't made a game like this in so long.

This game is built on the Doom 3 engine, if you can believe it.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

It's Int Tech 4.

Intech 4, which was what they used for Doom 3,

which is why it looks like that, which is very funny to me.

The other thing I wanted to mention is outside of the just like the normal gameplay loop, the levels are not randomly generated.

They're all like created.

They made them.

And what that allows them to do is have like little side quests within the levels that are totally optional, but you'll have like little narrative beats where you're finding notes, and the notes will be like, oh, I left another note under this guy's whatever.

And eventually you're like repairing lighthouses and doing all sorts of like little side stuff that you don't have to do, but I found compelled because generally you'll find like the most fun narrative beats in those.

Just a good little bit of story, like that lighthouse mission that you're talking about.

There's a particular well, there's two cats in that mission that I would read a little novella about.

There's a little goth cat who's pretending to be a ghost, and there's a little troublemaker cat named, I think, like Gerbo or something.

The cat thing is so funny because when I started it,

when I started playing, I was like, there's a little bit of like, you know, I like this style, but I kind of miss like the wild, blocky and then like the most just there's no re aesthetically insane block cat the first time you encounter one yeah everyone looks like a doom three model and then suddenly it's a minecraft cat that pops out of a cake and it's like so well spotted

the conversations with the cats so funny to me i don't know why it is but when i see a blocky cat who's like giving me orders and stuff and uh is being treated like a vip i think that's great and when you save them they pop out like superman and you say meow with like a ton of reverb no and they just crush the earlier design it's so good i wish we still had the sega dreamcast virtual memory units so i could get little cat emails throughout my day wherever i'm going really nice it's great that they send emails in a game i just want to have it you know if i'm just walking around filling the gas check my cat email sounds nice um we are we have so much so much to talk about i think we should wrap our discussion here if that's okay by you guys is is that all right yeah

okay when we come back uh elder scrolls oblivion

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So the Elder Scrolls

for

Oxian.

Yep.

Not six.

It's tough because Lumenumerals are tough, man, because the order.

It's tough, man.

It's just we don't pay attention very close to stuff that you're like,

here's the problem.

You can't fit VI

into the lettering of Oblivion.

It doesn't work.

It's true.

Wait, Obliv?

No, it fits perfectly.

Oh, you can.

You can, though.

The message was that the secret...

The clues were there all along.

This is six.

This is six.

It's like counting the doctors.

They just like went out of order a little bit.

So

there was a long time that I said Elder Scrolls for Oblivion was my favorite game of all time.

Sort of tied with Link Between Worlds, but it was a really link between Worlds or Link to the Past because that's

crazy.

It's not Link Between Worlds.

So it was released at this weird time where it was right before I

moved out.

It was like the last time that all three of us were living in the same roof.

And it was just sort of happenstance right after my mom had passed away.

So the three of us and my dad like really

spent a lot of time in Oblivion.

Like, a lot.

Like, this game was like sort of foundational in getting us through that time period.

Like, we, it was that and hero clicks.

That's what we did.

We bought a lot of hero clicks, and we played a lot.

And those hero clicks have only

accrued value.

Those are basically Bitcoin at the time.

You've heard of Clint McElroy Island?

Well, I'll tell you what paid for that.

It's hero clicks.

Yeah, I have not played Oblivion.

We did it for Monster Factory a few years ago or something at this point.

And even then, it was like, this is this feels, it's strange how unfamiliar this feels because we spent so much time at like a crazy part of our lives.

And I was not prepared for just kind of the insane sort of sense memory of like walking out of the sewers for the first time.

And it's really, I don't think, you know, I'm saying anything that people who have played this remaster have not already said, but like it is amazing how much they have captured the weird,

broken shit about this 19-year-old video game

and managed to maintain that while also making it more enjoyable to play and look like a million bucks.

Without laughing at it, it feels like it's laughing with it.

You know, like there's a lot of decisions.

What I mean by that is, if you talk about the the broken shit, there's a lot of dialogue, for example, that is rough in this game.

Yeah.

And it recreates that roughness, but it's recreating it in the same way that if you made a perfect recreation of your favorite childhood stuffed animal, if you took all the effort to make it just, you know, as messy and disheveled as you remembered it.

I don't know, there's like care rather than I think there's a version of this, a kind of like, I don't know, gearbox version of this, where you're actually adding more and being like, can you believe how stupid it was, you know, back in the day that we like this?

We're here.

It's like, no, we, we genuinely love the rough edges.

And I do, on the rough edges, like, I do think part of the reason that I enjoy Oblivion more than Skyrim, certainly more than Starfield, is I think as the studio has grown in size and sold so many fucking copies you can't even imagine, I think there's a level of like safety that needs to be enacted to ensure that like these games don't launch totally fucking broken.

And I think the only way to ensure that is to like put a lot of guardrails in certain aspects of the game to the point where like in this game like you can craft any combination of any spell with any other combination of any spell.

Yeah.

You can I've talked about this before.

You can make a ring that makes you jump so fucking high that you die from the fall damage.

Like there is no limit to how much they are willing to let you kind of bust this thing wide open no that the practicing spells i mentioned that in slack but like the idea that you're just like no games do this where you're just like running from a to b and you're like you know what on the way i'm gonna cast cure on myself 10 times and i'm gonna level that up because that's fun man it's more fun than walking walking around leveling up casting cure that's great that's good stuff every game should do that i am it's that's yeah i guess i mean other games have figured out like maybe let's just make the walking more enjoyable Like, Elden Ring, you don't need to level up your skills like that in Elden Ring.

It's a different type of game.

When I'm playing this type of game, I want to be able to just be spamming my growth potential.

Yeah, there is a clicker aspect.

Yeah.

It's not just a clicker aspect.

It's like the,

I don't know what it is that's in the secret sauce of this game that makes you feel like...

you know what?

I am going to go do that.

I am going to go like level that up.

Like I have the ability to do that.

If you want to do it that way, you absolutely could.

It's a valid way of doing it.

like it's it's weird that i still don't think mini games match the

oh i see a cave over there

yeah i'm gonna go look in that cave like it's very rare but oblivion like makes the world feel consequential enough and it makes the the reward seem real enough that it's like yeah i think i think i will poke around it's also before

uh Bethesda started doing AI generated questing.

In Skyrim, Skyrim was the first one that did it.

And it was like, you love Skyrim, but you beat all the quests.

Good news.

We've got infinite quests because we can just generate them using all these little algorithms, whatever.

And the second you introduce that, in the back of my head, I'm thinking, is this an AI quest?

And is it going to be inconsequential in the way that all AI quests are?

But because in Oblivion, there's none of that, you know that everything they made in there is actually like a handcrafted, like has impact piece of content.

So it kind of elevates the value of everything you're experiencing.

Big, big

standout stuff for me is one, adding a sprint button to the game seems like, yep, the original Oblivion is kind of not so enjoyable to play because you feel like you're just going kind of slow most of the time.

But the biggest thing is the way they've changed sort of level scaling.

The way that leveling in Oblivion works is as you level up your skills, you earn basically like points towards your next level up where you get to increase your stats.

But it used to be if I'm not mistaken your stats would increase based on which skills you leveled up and you had to be very careful because like if you went on a shopping spree or a lock picking spree you would level that stat up level yourself up level up every enemy in the world and not have any skills to actually be useful wouldn't be related like they they leveled up not related to the skills that you leveled.

Well, the stats that you that got increased, I think, were related.

Oh, you're saying the scaling of the READ.

If you put on like heavy armor and you got hit a bunch of times in heavy armor because you just wanted to see how heavy armor was, it would level you up in heavy armor and give you more strength, even if strength wasn't something you were interested in.

Right.

So, you had very little control.

Now it's like

you, you have these minor skills that you don't pick, and those don't move you towards the next level as quickly.

So, it's not a big deal if you go and do a bunch of mercantile stuff.

Also, when you level up, you get to pick which stats you increase.

Like, just you spend points to do it.

And all of that makes, I don't know, there's always this underlying tension when you were playing Original Oblivion of like, you know, I have all this fucking skooma to move, but if I do that, my mercantile is going to increase and I'm going to upgrade my personality stat and I'm going to get fucked next time I fight like a big skeleton or something.

Yeah.

I mean, I

really have always wanted to get into these games.

And I struggle every damn time to really fall in love.

But a a funny thing happened here.

And it's not that I got, you know, head over heels for Oblivion.

I did return to Avowed.

That's what this game did for me.

It made me think, like, you know what?

I'm more of a, I'm more of an Avowed.

I'm more of that studio thing.

I like what they're doing here, but I want all of the modern niceties.

I don't need as much freedom as this game provides.

And it like sends me back into that world.

But I want to hear Hoops, because Hoops' eyes are are like trying to, they're looking to the sky, trying to figure out how my brain makes that connection.

I'm thinking about what you just said because I'm trying to parse.

I have like been trying to go back to Avald somewhat because I, not in relation to this, but just because like I keep going back to it because I feel like this should be the kind of game that I'm really into.

And like, I, I, I, yeah, I do.

I like a Vald.

Um, I think that, uh,

there is something about a Vald that seems much more interested in whether or not you are doing quests.

A Vowd would like you to be doing something.

And like, Oblivion seems perfectly happy to let you just screw around.

Like, Oblivion doesn't really care what you're doing.

And, like, I feel like a Vowd really wants you to

like, and a Vowd, I will say this also, like.

The scaling of the difficulty in a Vowed and the way that all plays out is like, is often very frustrating, especially for a modern game.

It feels off in a way that this, like,

at least if it's off here, you can kind of figure out a way around it or some sort of scam or something.

Yeah, it feels very,

very specific and kind of railroaded in some ways in Avowed, even though I actually do like Avowed.

Whereas this is like,

I mean, quite honestly, like, if I'm doing a quest in Oblivion and these fucking vampires are like two-shotting me, I'm just going to lower the difficulty because it's, because the comment is so inconsequential and stupid.

And I don't even mean that in a bad way.

It's just like a little bit mindless that it's not the challenge.

It's just the like, hey this is a fun thing to do for 30 minutes yeah

whereas I think the the combat in avowed is fucking spectacular and like there's some element that the difficulty adds to that experience I also just I really it feels good to level up so specifically the skills that you're using.

Like it feels good to use a bow and arrow and know that I'm getting a little bit better at it every time that I use it.

That just like for my brain, like, that feels, feels really good what it reminded me of as somebody who does not have a long history with this game in particular was weirdly crackdown the original crackdown game

where like everything you did also gave you that feeling right like yes you could go chase experience orbs but also if you just kept jumping yeah got better at jumping and kept running and got better at running um yeah and that there is something to that you're right hoops that just feels so good and weirdly not very underused they they have also made a few smart tweaks to like how things leveled up because previously like the only way to level up your mercantile was by selling one item at a time if so you had a stack of like 400 arrows and you would just sell one and that was the best way to do it and now they like factor in like how much money you're making which seems obvious but you know it's tricky making games what was the team who did this remaster it's virtuous virtuos i think they're called

they've worked on like a few others as like

you know, I don't think they've gotten like as much of a spotlight on the team itself.

Yeah, but I am incredibly impressed by the work.

Yeah, no, I again like that balancing actively.

Yeah,

I think it's hard to do this.

I think it's hard to make it

so much, the quality of life of playing the game so much better while also, you know, still feeling like it is pretty clunky.

uh most of the time how are y'all feeling about your appetite for this sort of game right now and by that I mean, I feel like we don't get this

every year.

And yet this year we get avowed, we get this, and then this fall we get the Outer Worlds 2, which feels just like a lot.

If I'm being completely honest, I've played it for maybe 15, 20 hours.

I completed all the mage guild stuff and started to get silly with like the spell crafting and enchanting.

And that stuff really is so fun from a sandbox perspective.

You can make a ring that drains your health if you have it on you, and then you can pickpocket someone and put it in their inventory and then just wait a minute and then they'll just fall down dead.

Like I find stuff like that, like really, really entertaining.

I don't think I'm going to stick with it just because it is a game I have a lot of nostalgia for, but it is also a game that I feel like, and this is true of Skyrim and honestly every Bethesda game, it gets a bit samey

after

not

too long.

And so I, I, and also there's just like, there's a lot of other stuff out right now that I don't know that I have it in me to dedicate, you know, 100 hours or so to get it.

I really don't.

You got to free it from the, I agree with everything you're saying, but it, it is

so

heartening, I think, to have a game like this be,

to have this work done just from a preservation standpoint.

And I know that this is a corporation, they're not doing this for, for charity's sake, but like, it's very, I think this game was so, we didn't really talk about the context, but like

this game for console players was like the first time really, really, that a game like this

felt good.

Like Morrow Wind existed, but like it was not, it didn't.

It like barely ran on.

It barely ran and it felt bad.

It felt chunky.

This, when, when Oblivion came out, it felt like I didn't know you could do this on a console.

And that was like, it's massive.

And I think it's really cool that people are able to see that part, that really important thing and like understand where that is coming from.

I think is really awesome, even if it's like kind of fighting for oxygen with a lot of other stuff.

But it seems like people are into it.

People for whom this is not a formative game are still kind of into it.

Yeah, I think it stands astride something like Skyrim.

It might be a little bit, again, rough around the edges, but it feels like.

kind of 80% of the way there in terms of like what I felt like when I was playing Skyrim.

And honestly, certain things in this game I like more than Skyrim.

So yeah, I like how this game doesn't tell you as much as Skyrim does.

Like it doesn't to the example I always see is to get into the mages guild in Skyrim, you go to a bridge and a woman's like, you're a mage, huh?

Just shoot a fireball.

And you do it and she's like, welcome to the school.

And in this one, you have to go get letters of recommendation from like eight different universities around the world.

Some of those quests are insane.

One of them was like, oh, yeah, go collect my ring under this well.

And you pick up the ring and it increases your encumbrance by 300, and you're like drowning in the well because the guy sent you on a death, death mission.

Yeah, yeah, like that's the sort of stuff that they, it feels like they take more swings in these quests.

There's also like the permanence is so funny, like the way that they handle it's right on this line between like real, okay.

I'll give you an example.

I go up to a shrine, and I see these three people, and they look like enemies.

So, I like get out my bow and arrow, and I snipe one, just dead, and then I roll up a little closer and it turns out they were just like other people that were there at the shrine, right?

But they didn't see me kill this person.

So they're not mad at me or anything.

But I'm mad at myself because they did have a name and it's like I would like to know what's going on.

But then I've had to return to this shrine as part of a puzzle that I'm doing.

I keep having to come back

every time there's this corpse and I'm like, I'm sorry.

I didn't know.

Like I didn't I didn't understand that.

But like there's no spell for this.

There's no fix.

I'm just stuck with this.

I was over-encumbered right in front of of the Mages College in the capital city.

And so I just dropped a bunch of garbage right outside the entrance to the Maga.

And every time I have to come back to the Mages Guild, I have to just wade through this

pond of detritus.

It's also a great reminder of how easily video games can get away with like...

the sort of tropes that would get you laughed out of the room in any other media but the fact that it's so effective for the for you to rescue the king king by a chance prison break.

And then as he's dying, he gives you a necklace and is like, find my son.

Hell yes.

Let's go.

That's all I need.

Thank you.

Like, seriously.

I will not.

I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to do that.

I saw a cave.

I saw a cave.

It is nice how quick that intro is because, man, that Skyrim intro takes so fucking long to get through.

And this you could really blaze through in like 10 minutes.

I have to say one other thing about Oblivion that is so funny that struck me is like it does have this reputation and for being a game that you like want to get out and explore, and that's so true.

But it also doesn't feel the compulsion to pat you on the head and tickle your butt and say, You did such a good job.

Like, because like you could explore a whole cave and not find much of anything.

It's like, I don't know, it's a cave.

We didn't tell you to come in here.

You came in here on your own.

Here's some tongs.

There's tongs and skeletons.

It's a cave.

Other games, if you went into a random cave, it'd be like, ah, yes, you found the black wolf cave where the black wolf dagger hides.

Good job.

Oblivion's like, hell, you want a cup?

It's a cave.

I don't know.

It's mud.

It's a cave.

Should we move on?

Let's do it.

Okay.

Hey, I'm going to open up the reader mailbag to talk about a tricky thing.

That sounded good by everybody?

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

Okay, so we had a few comments in the besties.fan post asking about how and if we would cover this game.

Basically,

to sum it up, some people asked us to consider, in very specific words, not promoting Bethesda and Microsoft by talking about Oblivion.

I want to talk a little bit about like what we do here.

So first, the context of why that was asked.

There is a thing called the BDS movement.

You can read about it on Polygon.

I'm going to make sure that I drop it in the besties.fan newsletter this week so you can get a link to it.

But in short, to just summarize the top of the Polygon article, BDS, it's a pro-Palestinian human rights movement focused on pressuring Israel to comply with international law by promoting boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the country and its economic partners.

One of those economic partners is Microsoft.

So there's that.

The big thing here is we do not see this show as promoting anything.

That's not what our job is.

We're not PR.

We are not taking advertising money from Microsoft.

And we cover a whole variety of games that we have very, very wide range of feelings about the people who make them and the companies that own them.

So we, for this game, didn't buy the game.

We're covering it like we cover anything else, as we do as both journalists and critics.

And that is it.

That's why we cover this.

It's why we've covered some games in the past that also had,

I would say, substantial controversies around them.

So I hope that's clarifying.

And yep.

I do think it is valuable to read that Polygon article just to sort of learn about

links between Microsoft, specifically their Azure Cloud stuff and the, you know, Israel military.

There is some very surprising stuff in there.

Okay.

I think that was it for Rear Mail.

We want to do honorable mentions.

Can we talk about the Retroid flip too?

Yes.

I kind of, I feel like

we teased the world with this last week, but I had barely had any time to mess with it.

And now I have.

And I know you guys have both jumped on board the bandwagon just before.

Right under the wire.

Right before things became

way more expensive.

Yeah.

Perilously expensive.

I got the, earlier this year, I think January, I got the Retroid Pocket 5.

And so, like, very recently, I set up a Retroid device and I wasn't really looking forward to doing it again.

But it looks so neat.

And I was like, man, am I going to regret this purchase?

And now that I've got it set up, I just don't think so.

It's insane how much more I want to use a thing just because I can close the lid on it and be done with it and then reopen that lid anytime I want instantaneous access to the thing.

It feels so good every single time to be able to do that.

Yeah, so for those that aren't aware, internally, I mean, we talked a lot about the Retroid Pocket 5 the first time around.

Internally, the guts of this are identical basically to the Retroid Pocket 5.

It can run all the same stuff, same power, et cetera.

Screen is the same, too.

The screen is the same.

The difference here is it is a clamshell form factor, and the control layout on the second half, the bottom half, if you will,

is

more offset.

The Retroid pocket 5 was like stacked analog stick d-pad and this is uh offset what do you guys think about that i think it's a huge i like it yeah it's the the retroid i

don't wait hold on specifically so i've got my rog ally here just to so we're talking about on the right hand side these are flip so the sticks are parallel oh i'm not talking about that oh sorry sorry you know you're talking about the xbox versus playstation model of like are the analog sticks in this in line with one one another versus not?

Yes.

Right.

Yes.

Yes.

It's where your hand rests, right?

Your hand, does it rest on two thumbs or does it rest on a thumb and buttons by the snatch, right?

Right.

I was more talking about the fact that if you look at the flip, and you could probably see a screenshot if you're listening at home,

I believe it's the D-pads are like further out to the edges and the analog stick is closer into the edges.

Got okay, yes.

So that means it kind of follows as your thumbs are moving back and forth between the two, you're not making an awkward like

kind of jamming your thumb in, which you kind of had to do with the Retroid Pocket 5, if that's clear.

It's kind of like a bad thing.

Yeah,

I find my thumb just kind of rests exactly where it needs to go

on it.

It's a bit boxy.

I do wish the plastic felt just a little bit,

I don't know, more premium, I suppose.

It does feel like some of the other kind of handheld, you know, retro handhelds I've gotten that.

Do you guys like the sticks?

You know, for what they are, like recessed sticks that you can close a lid on, like, I think they're pretty great.

They're better than the circle pad, certainly.

Much, much better than the circle pad ever was on the 3DS.

I do think that is,

I don't know, the Retroid Pocket 5 probably has sort of preferable sticks,

but I think that these work.

I think these work exceptionally well for

the form factor.

What have you been doing with this thing?

I have managed to get Vita stuff working on it for the first time.

It's the first handheld I've been able to do that, which is like really quite difficult to uh achieve.

I only got mine like two days ago, so mostly I've been sort of setting it up.

Um,

but yeah, I got Persona 4 Golden working on it, and I don't know, man, it feels weird.

It feels like I'm playing it on a 3DS because that is sort of what the form factor suggests.

The um, I tell you, the uh, the thing I've used it for the most this week has been uh streaming from

to like Steam streaming and

the Xbox streaming also are both fantastic.

I mean, it is the best streaming experience I've had on any

platform.

Like, it just works so well.

It's interesting that that would be even better than it would be on like a Steam Deck or something like that.

I just like the fact that like I've used a lot of these handhelds and there are a ton of them out there, obviously.

I have never used one where I could go between D-pad games and analog stick games on the same device with the relative same level of comfort.

I found that like some devices would kind of excel in one versus the other and this feels like it can do both.

What got you

specifically to like buy this?

Because you

every time we talk about one of these, you're like, resist.

You can hold, hold off.

There's new hardware coming.

There's new chips coming.

They're going to be better.

Was it purely the same?

Yeah, that's what he says.

He sucks shit at following his own suggestions because Russ, I feel like, buys quite a few of these.

This was a loaner review unit from Retroid.

So this is not my device for what it's worth.

Okay.

But the reason I was interested in covering it, because I did have to reach out and request it, was

Clamshell as a like.

You know, I'm carrying around all this stuff, the Steam Deck, for example.

Every time I bring the Steam Deck, which I absolutely love, but if I bring it on a trip, it's like a third of my bag.

It's huge because you need the protection to keep it safe.

And that's the same with the Retroid 5 and all these things.

And I wanted something that I could play all these games on, but I could feel comfortable like dropping it in a fanny pack and be cool with it, as I always am with fanny packs.

Very cool.

Super cool.

Clamshell makes a big difference so long as they designed it well.

I don't think.

Look, it's going to be six months before we know if like these things are falling apart on the clamshell, but they have made clamshells before.

They had some issues in the initial run, and then they fixed those issues.

So, my hope is that things are sort of fixed on the clamshell side, but we'll see.

I'm sure a good Russ will tell us if they're bad.

I just like,

it's shocking to me still how important instantaneous access to the game that I'm playing is for me where I'm at in my life now.

Like,

I never have

a good 20 uninterrupted minutes, like in at all in my day to like sit down and play a game and being looking like a man who just installed basite on his rog to uh right so that was what i was gonna say

yeah so like when i play games like playing oblivion on the rog ally x uh

you know playing it in just the straight up windows mode that comes standard on the rog ally x like if it's in hibernation mode now all of a sudden there's like 20 seconds of like loading shit that you have to do before you can like get back into the game there's annoying stuff like if you plug it into a charger, it just turns on and then you have to like log into it to turn it back off.

Like, there's so much shit that was so annoying.

And so, I followed Justin's lead and installed Bazite, which is a Linux-based,

it's basically Steam OS.

Like, it turns your ROG Ally X into a Steam Deck.

So, I dual booted that into it.

And now, when I press that power button, I'm back and I'm playing games within like three seconds for those like little two-minute chunks of my day where, you know, I'm not making chicken tenders or whatever.

Like, it's not having to finish.

It's a big chicken tender restaurant.

We should finish it.

That's taking up a lot of his time.

It's like, I, I, that, that is really important to me.

And I feel like I am always looking for the path of least resistance for like actually being able to pick up a game and play it in like a small window of time because that's all I really ever have to play games in.

And I think that this is the best version of that.

in the retro handheld world uh so far.

And I'm like, I don't know, I've got it set up now.

And I feel like sometimes I'll buy one of these devices and I'll get it set up and I'll be like, no, fuck, I don't actually want to play anything.

But now I like, I don't know, I want to play stuff on it because it feels great.

I know it's not video games, but how is chicken griffingers doing as a business?

It's doing,

here's the deal.

When I made the decision to open Griffing, what did you call it?

Chicken Griffingers.

I don't think that's the best version of it.

Chicken Griffingers.

When I made the decision to open Chicken Griffingers and I said, no sauces,

I said the taste of the chicken is good enough by itself that you can't dip.

If I see you trying to dip stuff in the restaurant, you'll be kicked out.

You also said it needed to have bird flu.

That was a requirement of all the chickens you served.

Yeah.

Recreating my favorite number from Andrew Lloyd Weber's Cats.

My name is Chicken Griffingers.

I'm giving you the flu.

You don't need no sauce.

You don't need no sauce.

You don't need no sauce.

They taste good enough already.

Good enough already.

The flu makes them wet.

The flu makes them wet already.

Anyone else been doing anything else?

I'm going to share something.

Can you just take a look at the besties sock real quick?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, man.

Oh, shit.

God dang, Chris.

I'm doing it.

What are we looking at here?

This is like

a 21-inch CR-TV.

Yeah, yeah.

This is a

Panasonic CR-TV with the VCR.

Get on down to Goodwill.

What's up?

Yeah, I mean, everybody's out here saying, you know, you've got to get those like Sony high-end models from the TV stations.

And I said, what if it just has some scuff marks because it looks like it fell off the back of a truck?

Works pretty well.

The great thing about it is what I'm playing on it is Promise Mascot Agency because I am running HDMI to S video into the TV.

And now I can play all these games.

All these games that they're like,

we want it to look like it's on an old TV.

I put it on this.

I say, turn off all those settings.

I've got the old TV

small.

Chris, I'm glad to know you, man.

That's such a vibe, man.

And I don't know anyone else who would put in the effort.

I mean, his name is Chris Grant.

I think you've met him before.

Grant,

he goes in that other direction.

It's like suddenly you've spent most of your child savings making sure that you have pixel perfect ratio recreations of Booger Man.

This is a slightly different, somebody'd say a much cheaper approach.

But dude, it rules.

I've been playing Tokyo Extreme Racer, which is the new game in the series that came out on PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast.

And I've played on this TV.

And let me tell you, it looks like it's just the exact same game back then.

They didn't even need to make a new one.

What resolution do you run these games at?

It is at 8.

That's, I mean, you got your answer, Fresh.

I don't know what more you want.

I don't even know how it would expand.

It's amazing that it does because I started clicking random numbers, and eventually it started to look pretty okay.

Love it.

So, what are we doing?

I mean, I guess.

I want to say that this week I played Hotel Dusk Room 215, a game which continues to whip ass.

It makes

your DS the wrong way.

What?

Is that DS or 3DS?

Are you asking what I played it on or what it was designed for?

What it was designed for.

The DS, the Nintendo DS.

You hold it like this, like a book, and you navigate the world.

The music's absolutely funky.

All the characters look like they're from an aha, the aha video, and it's such a good game, and it is so inaccessible because it's like it's locked to this bizarre form factor.

It's worth mentioning, like part of what got me thinking about this is the despite being very cool, the retroid flip 2 still lacks a second screen in the middle,

which presumably keeps the device cost down.

And I have a capacitive touchscreen at the bottom, but like it still can't replicate those great.

So I got a DS and I

put the game Hotel Dusk Room 215 into it and played it.

It's great.

I love that.

I love the notebook style gaming handheld.

I feel like Nintendo was only courageous enough to do that trick like two or three different times and Hodgkash.

What if right before the Switch 2 comes out, they like, they show you just like folding it?

It's like taking

Russ, when you did your hands-on with the Switch 2, did you try to fold it?

Try to fold it?

Of course I tried to fold it.

Did you ask?

Like, where's the fold?

They didn't like it when I tried to fold it.

They were against that, which

maybe because they were hiding the truth.

Yeah.

They wanted to save that as like a day one surprise.

Doug Bowser's is going to show up and fucking fold that shit.

Well, he could.

What are we doing?

It's so strong.

Next week, we are doing Claire Obscure Expedition 333.

The Painters is back, and so are we.

We're finally talking about it, so don't you worry.

Justin, don't worry.

We're also doing Revenge of the Savage Planet.

So you don't have to play the RPG that you don't want to play, and I don't want to play.

That's great.

We'll play the other one.

It's so sweet that you think I would have played it

without you saying that.

But thank you for releasing me.

I want to thank some members over at the Patreon, some new members.

We have Connor, we have Oliver, we have Jacob, and we have Becoming a Weeb Purely Through Plant Osmosis.

Wow!

That's great!

Hell yeah!

Which, you know, I get it.

I felt that same instinct before.

Oh, that sounds fantastic.

I'm looking forward to it.

Be sure to join us again next week for the besties.

Because, shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

Besties