Repo and Inzoi Will Terrify You – For Very Different Reasons

Griffin, I found myself in possession of 726 big mouth billy basses, and I want to know what you think I should do with them.

Well, and sorry, I messed up.

It's actually big mouth billies bass.

It's like attorneys general.

Is that true?

Yeah.

That's interesting.

I think that, first of all,

how handy are you with like a pair of,

you know, pliers and tools?

Not at all.

Okay.

No, I don't.

I was going to say, like, you could crack all of those open.

And, like, there's probably just trace amounts of rare earth minerals inside of each Big Mouth Billy bass.

Yeah.

But it's, you know, you add it all up over time.

And all of a sudden, you're, you're a very wealthy man.

Yeah, sure.

I should mention I don't actually have physical contact with the boxes.

Yeah.

It's more

an assurance or a verbal promise.

You have a verbal promise from a Big Mouth Billy's bass supplier.

Yeah,

pretty esteemed

out in Hackensack.

Okay.

What are they doing with them now?

As far as I'm aware, they're just storing them because they've got a warehouse and they're really just like looking to unload.

And they did show me one and it was in very good shape.

And then they showed me a bunch of boxes, which I was assured also had Big Mouth Billy's Bass in them.

Oh, I think they may, this sounds like a shell game.

They may be scamming you a little bit.

Where they show you one piece of the...

And

this happened to me with the new Furbies.

Yeah, yeah.

Where I had a supplier and they were like, yeah, all 600 of these boxes are filled with the new Furbies.

Here's one to look at.

I was like, hell yeah.

I dished out probably

$350,000 for that.

Worth it.

But then I open up the other 600 boxes.

You're not going to believe this.

Rocks.

In every single one, there was rocks.

Because sometimes some of the Furby variants do look like rocks.

So it's possible.

But I was gonna do like my thing with the 600 and I guess one Furbies was going to be sort of,

you know, fetish-related, not for myself, but like for production of content for the

people that like that, sort of, yeah, for people that, and I'm not gonna yuck any yum.

Actually, I will yuck this one yum.

Really?

The Furby yum?

I will yuck this one, yum.

Okay, don't hey, you put that down, stop it.

Yeah, that's a Furby.

There's nothing for you there.

You can fuck these fish, though.

What started this?

What started this in your mind?

You don't have it.

You're just shitting in your head.

I've been singing,

give me back that filet of fish.

Give me that fish to my son, such that now he sings it back to me.

That's beautiful, man.

Just it went from there.

What a well-adjusted child.

You're breathing over there.

My name is Griffin McElroy.

I know the best games of the week.

My name is Ross Frosty.

I know the best games of the week.

What a quick introduction.

You're fucking right, guys.

Maybe that should be how it is all the time.

There's just two, just the two of us talking about some random games because Justin and Chris fell into the same toilet.

Yeah.

But that's okay.

We're going to be doing

just a really cash hang sesh

with Du Bois.

And we're going to be talking mostly about two games that Russ and I have been playing this week.

One is topping the Steam charts, and one almost certainly will top the Steam charts when it officially launches, I believe, next week.

We are talking about Repo, the survival multiplayer horror

robot people game.

We're also talking about Enzoy, which is also sort of a robot people game by way of The Sims, but also Unreal 5, and

it is pretty wild.

We're going to talk about both of those games after this quick break.

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Repo.

Repo is apparently an acronym, and I don't know what it stands for.

Really, excellent.

Except here it is in the title.

Pick up orders.

Yeah, this is

so.

Did you play much?

What was it called?

Not Brutal Company.

Was that what it was called?

Lethal Company.

Lethal Company, yes.

Did you play much of that?

I didn't.

I do have, for some reason, I have the Fortnite skin, and that's really where my knowledge begins and ends.

Not sure why that happened.

I played it a few times, mostly for like stream with Justin and Travis.

And

we have to, I feel like it's important to talk about this before we get into repo because it does feel like there's a lot of sort of similarities.

My knowledge of this like sub-genre, this very specific sub-genre of like multiplayer

survival horror sort of treasure treasure hunts.

It's like an extraction.

An extraction game.

Yeah, I guess that is a good way of putting it.

It's quite limited, but this game really does feel like it was informed by Lethal Company.

I think that's right.

Like Lethal Company, in repo, you control a little robot guy uh it is but you were robots in lethal company they those no i don't i don't believe so uh you i think you were just sort of like faceless clones sort of uh

in repo you play as these little robots and uh it is fully a roguelike every run you start over from scratch uh you go into one of a uh you know a selection of levels that are randomly selected for you and they've got like what is it like a wizard castle They've got like a haunted man house.

There's like a scientific facility.

There's, there's all kinds of stuff.

Yeah.

You and I think up to like six players.

Yeah, Max is out at six.

Which is wild.

It seems chaos, but yeah.

You

go through these different locations and you try to collect valuables and get them to an extraction point where they will be cashed out.

And then you get back on your truck that you came in on and you get the hell out of there.

And then you get to shop for wonderful little upgrades and tools and weapons and stuff like that.

Things that set Repo apart, that was all true of Lethal Company too.

Things that set Repo apart.

It is

entirely physics based.

So

if you are creeping along and you see one of the many horrible monsters that will absolutely kill you in one hit in this game, if you are carrying like, you know, a lamp, you can chuck that lamp right at that fucking monster.

Yeah.

Bonk him right in the head a few times.

Maybe you'll kill him.

Probably not.

You might daze him.

I'll tell you what will happen.

That lamp's going to break.

That is the other sort of like

humor vector of repo is that you are trying to get all of these little extremely fragile items into a

hovering cart that you can take back to the extraction point.

And man, if you bonk anything with them, they are going to shatter and you will lose the money from it.

It is hysterically funny when all of these things start happening all at the same time.

Yeah, so so you've got those base gameplay mechanics, but then they also layer in uh

just like silly voice chat visuals because you're playing as these characters that are, as Griffin mentioned, they're robots.

They kind of look like the alien on the Android logo.

That's like the closest I can think.

Yes, the way that they talk.

So, this is another sort of lethal company thing is like you are encouraged not to use Discord or whatever while you play this game.

In fact, I would say it's pretty much necessary that you don't use Discord or something like that while you play this game

because it is proximity chat based with your team.

And that what that means is when you talk like into your microphone, you see the character's mouth move sort of like Terrence and Phillip style, just like opening and closing a trash can lid.

But it also means like if someone gets too far away,

you can't hear them as well anymore.

And so you hear like someone turn a corner in the distance and be like, hey, what's what's up and you're like well did they just leave my proximity or were they just murdered by a monster because if it's the latter you're not going to hear them anymore yeah if someone gets knocked off a cliff you'll like hear their

yeah it'll trail off so

it's really really really funny but then there's also lots of stuff where like some of the treasures do wild shit to you right some of the valuables that you're trying to collect do wild shit uh there's like a doll that uh when you when it's worth a lot of money but as soon as you pick it up it starts throwing a fucking crazy tantrum, and anything it touches, it will just sort of obliterate as it whirls its arms and legs around, including you or other players.

Yeah, I don't even know the strat.

I guess you have to like flinch it.

Just yeet it and hope for the best.

Yeah, I don't usually do not pick that one up because usually it does more damage to the valuables I've already collected than it is worth.

My favorite is there's an hourglass that when you pick it up, it makes you move very slowly, but it also makes your voice extremely low and slow, which is

when when that first happened when Russ and I were playing together, it was like so unexpected and so fucking funny that we just like passed the hourglass back and forth for a while so everybody could hear what it sounded like.

Yeah, there's some other, I looked on YouTube, I didn't know this when we were playing, but there are other pro strats where it's like, if you're looking up, it'll pitch your voice up, and if you're looking down, it'll pitch your voice down.

Oh, that's very, very funny.

There's also voice to speech, text to speech.

So if you're typing, it'll automatically like use robot voice to like communicate to the other players.

Yes, I like that a lot.

It is.

There is a thing about...

There's a few things about this genre of games, these extraction roguelikes, that do not,

I don't know.

They don't really light my fire particularly.

This is a roguelike.

As far as I can tell, there is no progression between runs.

Not that we've seen.

Not that I've seen.

Yeah, maybe I mean, I have not played enough of this maybe to speak.

it seems it seems counter to the spirit i could see them adding like cosmetics or whatever but and that's fine right like you don't i i like stuff like that in a game but since playing wonderstop i'm trying to play away my childish thing no i uh i like that kind of stuff in a game especially one that is as brutal and difficult as repo is because the other thing is

The monsters in this game will fuck you up really fast.

There's one called the Huntsman, which is just a guy, and he walks around around and he has a shotgun.

And if he shoots you, you die and you're run.

If you're playing, you know, single player, your runs over.

If you're playing with other players, they could run in and grab your head so that you can revive.

But like, it is a hard, hard game, which lends itself to the fear factor of it, right?

It makes every monster encounter pretty scary, right?

And as you play through the game, you get money and you go to a shop between each level where you can buy things.

There's exorbitantly expensive stuff like a shotgun, right?

Like Like that's pretty obviously useful.

But then there's like grenades and stuff like that.

But when you start out, you have very little in the way of

defending yourself, or which I understand that there's sort of a power curve to it, but I have had so many runs where just in the first level, I turned a corner, there's a huntsman, he shoots me before I even have a chance to like duck and hide under a thing, which is sort of the go-to strat when you start out.

And

then my run's over, and that's not especially fun.

Yeah, it does make me wonder if it's a spelunky thing or even like a Noita thing.

I've been playing Noita recently

where there are mechanics that we just don't know that will make those earlier runs much more fair.

Yes, right?

Like they

didn't know the thing where you could pick each other up.

Right.

Yeah.

So you can, there's only certain objects that you can pick up, right?

Valuables you can pick up and then items that you can use like health packs and grenades and whatever i haven't those might be scattered throughout later levels i have not found any but you can also there's a button where you can turn yourself basically into an object that other players can then pick up and throw around and put up on high shelves and uh do all that stuff you could also launch yourself with that button yes as like a project a tumble dive right so there's as if you're sprinting forward and you hit that now you can use that to damage an enemy or knock them over it also does damage to you it is hard it's hard to pull off, right?

There are ways to counter

each of the monsters that you face, as far as I know.

I'm sure I could watch a YouTube video that could inform me what to do when that fucking horrible little duck starts following me around.

I think the point with the duck is that so long as you don't touch it, it's just chill.

It's like psy duck.

Okay.

Well, that hasn't been like again, like, I think that's, that's sort of my point is like, I think there's a lot that the game does not bluntly explain to you

that will, like, eventually spread through word of mouth.

Right.

Um, that's cool.

It is a really funny multiplayer.

Like, I think that it has its own sort of siloed off single-player mode.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, it does.

And it's not really any different from the multiplayer mode,

except that, like, you know, it doesn't make you wait around quite as much, I suppose.

Oh, sure.

But it's, it, I don't really like that at all.

That's not really the point.

It simply is not the point.

The point is like it is a really funny, stressful

game to play with like buddies.

And I think it fills that role very, very nicely.

Yeah.

And I think that that was also true of Lethal Company.

But I don't know, this probably speaks more to my own kind of like preference and where I am at with my gaming time and gaming habits where like I don't really spend a lot of time plunked down in front of my computer and microphone playing online games with a bunch of friends.

And so like, I don't know how, how hooked it's going to continue to keep me aside from like, I, I can see us streaming this one, like, on Clubhouse and stuff quite a bit.

Yeah, that would be very good.

I also think when you and I played, obviously, just two players, I think it is designed

with the difficulty in mind.

I think it's designed for like three or four.

Yes.

Because I could see there's an element of like, I'm going to draw enemies away from the pack to like distract them or you kind of gang up on enemies to like take it out when it's two people one person instantly gets killed right and the other person just kind of like well do i yeah can i save them or should i just like yeah

invariably it just ends the run very quickly yeah so that is sort of a pro tip i i think from a core like

in the way that helldivers i think is a really perfect like oh we've got 45 minutes no one has been like leveling up their character it's not like destiny where you have to be caught up i think this fills that role really nicely Like, this is the sort of thing that I could easily see someone filling an evening with with a bunch of friends rather than having to,

yeah, again, go through the process of making sure everyone's like ready and kitted out and things like that.

I think if you are familiar with Lethal Company, I have been enjoying Repo much more

than that one because that one was it felt a lot more

like a lot more sort of slow creeping around, cautious,

you know, know, maneuvering around different things, trying not to fall down off a broken bridge and die instantly.

And

this one is much more, I don't know, it feels if a monster spots you, you can run and crouch and hide under a table.

And like the game is pretty tactile.

I can hide in anything.

I was kind of stunned.

Yes, because you can get your body to be so tiny.

Right.

Like at the tiniest little cupboard you can get into.

And it's also, I think, just because of the physics and the,

you know, hiding under a table with someone else and looking at them as they whisper to you and seeing their tiny little robot mouth flapping.

When Russ and I were playing yesterday, he was like adjusting his headset or something and it was making this awful, awful, awful racket over the microphone.

And while that was happening, his character's robot mouth was just like, bop, bop, bop, baby, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.

It's, it is just a very, very, very funny.

Very funny game.

Yeah, it gives me hope that like people, I mean, this has happened time and time again with a a bunch of different genres, uh, battle royale and whatever, roguelikes, uh, etc.

That, you know,

one installment comes out and it's kind of like a base version of the concept.

Right.

And I'm not saying I don't know the history well enough to know if lethal company was like the first take on this like micro roguelike extraction game horror thing.

I mean, clearly that has been a mode I know in like lots and lots and lots of different games.

I'm getting the fuck out, I think, is also similar to that.

But I cannot believe you said the full name, the full title of that.

Maybe it's not spelled.

Maybe that's not what it stands for.

I don't know.

Yeah.

But this one, I think, is like just an evolution of that genre in a way that is like very creative and looks completely different from any other games in that genre.

It has like a PS1, 3D.

Oh, it's more.

I would say it's more

early PS2, maybe?

I don't know.

It's a little bit slicker than that, than all that.

It definitely has a sort of stylistic kind of graininess to it that I think I think it looks great.

And also genuinely pretty scary.

Like in the way that when you're on a Dark Souls run and you have like

a million souls and you're just trying to get to a bonfire, all of a sudden every enemy that you run into is the scariest thing ever.

Like in repo, when you have a cart full of valuables and you turn a corner and, you know, fucking no-face is standing there waiting for you, it's terrifying because you are so stressed out.

you're so yeah this is not good no face this is not nice no face no this is mid sort of um

gross frog transformation yeah he's not riding the subway in this one no he's not he's uh he's in the baths and he's barfing out gold nuggets um my funniest the funniest moment that i remember was you were in the other room and you're like oh shit and i'm like what and you were like a giant face and i didn't even see it and i just like ran away and hid in a cupboard and you join me in the cupboard so we're chilling in this cupboard.

And then we like do a little peek out.

And holy shit, it's the biggest fucking face I've ever seen.

It's like an android face in a tiny little haunted mansion room.

Yeah.

So funny.

I just like they take so many swings with the different monster types and you really never know what you're going to be up against.

Yeah.

And I tell you, it feels extremely expandable.

This like

this concept.

Like there, it seems like there is a lot of stuff you could add into this game.

Even like new modes and stuff like that.

We didn't even talk about the fact that when you are playing multiplayer, if you lose, if everybody dies and you get the game mode,

which will happen over and over and over again,

before the game is like really over, it sends you to this scrapyard arena

where you and all of your friends drop into an arena and you have to kill each other using the tools and objects that you have been, you know, maybe utilizing against the monsters uh in the game and it's really very very very funny uh because you could find a tranquilizer gun off the ground and try and pop one of your friends real fast to knock them out and then you just kind of pick them up and drop them gingerly over the edge or you just like as someone's coming at you with a sword you can topple a statue over on top of them uh just all of the different but the physics is like so awkward that like trying to do anything deftly is nearly impossible right so it just looks very very funny Seeing someone hit another person with a baseball bat and watching their tiny little robot body just fly 300 feet into the sky as they scream like Jesse and James blasting off again, it's, it's, it's truly, truly hysterical.

And I really appreciate a game where like, I don't know, humor is so inherent to like all of its different systems.

I think it's fucking $10.

Jesus Christ.

Like, it's great.

Yeah, it's really, really good.

I'm, I'm glad we, uh, we played it.

Yeah, me too.

Um, that's repo.

I think people are are going to be playing this game for a while.

I think streamers are going to be playing this game for a while.

And

it's $10.

So

that gets our seal of approval.

I don't know what that means.

Like, we don't do that here.

And also, it would be fucked up to give anything the seal of approval without Chris and Justin's.

No, I think we can just do it.

Okay.

I guess we have a quorum.

Yeah, we do it.

We're going to take a quick break.

When we get back, we're going to talk to you about a wildly different game called Enzoy right after this.

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Do you know when the last Sims game came out?

Do you know?

So I think it's Sims 4.

Yeah, well, yeah.

I mean, okay, so last mainline Sims game, not counting like the mobile one and all that.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So am I right that it's Sims 4?

Sims 4, yes, is the last mainline one.

Okay, I'm going to guess it came out in 2013.

2014.

Okay.

It came out, that's a long, that's quite a long time.

Yeah, fucking over 10 years, Jesus.

11 years ago, basically.

10 and a half years.

It came out in September.

That's wild.

Obviously, that...

whole kind of franchise has become like the whole model of it has become different.

I just did a on Wonderful, I did a segment on The Sims.

And so like I was looking at kind of the history of it.

And it was wild to see like Sims comes out and gets seven little, you know, fun packs.

Then Sims 2 comes out and it gets like eight little fun packs.

And then Sims 3 comes out and there's like 10 little fun packs.

And then Sims 4 comes out and then nothing else comes out and it gets like 38.

different DLCs and eventually becomes it's free to play now.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, so like obviously that is sort of the model and Maxis is working on, I think it's called Project Renee.

It's like the next Sims title, but there's like nothing out there about it.

And so, the market seems pretty

ripe.

The soil seems to be a little bit more.

It's kind of wild that there just hasn't been anyone that's really tried to go at The Sims.

There's been a couple.

I don't remember the name of it, but in sort of like playing Inzoy and reading about it, there was one other game that people were talking about as like, you know,

aspiring to the throne a little bit.

Enzoy

is,

man, it is pretty wild.

It is really very, very, very Sims.

It's extremely, like explicitly The Sims.

Insofar as you make little, they call them Zoys

and

you have the whole, you got the needs meters.

There's a build mode.

You can give them jobs.

You got a shit.

You got to talk you gotta shit and wash your hands.

Um, there's you don't have to wash your hands, let's go to optional.

Like it's good to, it's good to.

Um, so like if you have played a Sims game, like it is very, very much, very much that.

Uh, it's developed by Crafton, which made well published, published by Krafton, published by Krafton, yes.

The studio that made it is called Inzoy Studio, right?

Um, so they're kind of kicking off.

Uh, a Korean Korean uh game publisher, uh, they publish PUBG and

Crafton does, yeah.

Crafton does.

The bar of quality is like pretty crazy.

It's Unreal Engine 5.

The game is quite demanding of

your home computer.

I mean, let me ask you this, Griffin.

Have you ever seen more realistic character models in a video game?

It's hard to say.

There is an aesthetic to this game um

and it is very striking and i don't know how to kind of describe it aside from like comparing it to like um

uh a lot of kind of like korean mmos

uh

i'm thinking like um

uh god what's it black black desert online or

I feel like there is a kind of like soft beauty to like the way that the character creators in those games work that feel very much like this the facial animations are in are pretty insane are pretty crazy yeah

and you can you can hold like you could have a webcam pointing at your face yes and it does a face mapping thing so i don't think it does a fit i couldn't get it i don't know if it does like a face scan and then it like the fucking ea game face shit that they had like typed yeah no no no it doesn't do that it does your animations yeah so if you're like opening your eyes or talk whatever you could could effectively it's like um a v2

yeah right where you're seeing like your full facial animations within the character model of the game i wasn't able to get it working for it's crazy it's a single scene videos it's a single-player game too so like oh there's no multiplayer i didn't know no so they've talked about like they may add you know down down the line but like i don't know why you would Want to do a I don't know.

I there's probably people who are deep enough into the like the life sim genre that the idea of face mapping

You know their facial reactions and stuff into a game that nobody else is going to interact with appeals to them.

For me, it just kind of feels like a bit of a flex of like, yeah, I mean, it's also Unreal Hat, like the app already existed.

So there's them taking the data from the app, essentially.

So, like, how I don't know how familiar you are with The Sims, but like, I feel like.

I mean, I've, I, so I, my experience with The Sims was I played Sims one.

Yeah.

Uh, probably like 10 hours.

I'd like had the loop, and that was

like very engaging for those 10 hours and then very depressing right when it ended.

Right.

And that's not me nagging people that like the sims like fucking do you you do different stress.

Right.

But my it just like was I was any game where I'm like, oh, I'm washing my hands and pooping like I can wash my hands and poop at home.

Like yeah, it just doesn't feel like a fantasy to me.

Sure.

But I do get it.

Like I designing your house and like all that stuff, the Animal Crossing stuff, like I totally get.

Right.

So I jumped into this really having almost no context.

Oh, so you didn't play like two, three, four, any games?

Wow, okay.

So, yeah, okay, this will be interesting because I have played all those games, so I'm curious how this I didn't know what to do in this, yeah.

And I don't, it's gonna be hard to ask you to, but please, please don't try to judge me for what I'm about to say.

I didn't know what to do because it's a life sim, and I was like,

How can I like

how long is it going to take for me to fuck someone?

So, that's interesting.

That is a lot of my immediate because I was like, or I could go to a job.

Yeah, no, I mean, you have a bevy of options available to you, right?

When you create your Zoy, and those options include going to work, becoming a volunteer firefighter, or trying to take one of your thousand beautiful neighbors to Pork City.

And that's fine that you went that way.

I'm not judging you.

Okay, good.

I appreciate it.

I guess that's it.

That's how you hacked, you know, that into the game.

That is there.

It's available to you.

That's normal.

And

you're a sexual being, Russ.

Apparently.

Okay, so do you want me to talk through my romance?

I want to talk about actually anything else.

Yeah, I did enjoy the primer that Russ did send me

the day we got code.

And we should point out that we were playing an early access.

It's basically what's going to be available to the public in early access next week.

Yes.

Felt pretty far along to me.

Yes, absolutely.

The release date of Inzoy is March 28th.

So yeah, this is next week.

I'm going to gist the experience.

So I was walking through the town as my Zoy.

Yeah.

And

I

met someone.

I was going, I started on a town that looked like Santa Monica in California.

Oh, the one with the pier.

Okay, cool.

The pier.

And I met

a nice lady on the pier, and I started talking to her.

Yeah.

And she didn't seem interested in talking to me because she kept walking by.

And let me just reiterate, this is not my MO.

I do not stalk people.

Jesus Christ, Russ.

I just wanted to see, like, how realistic is this going to be?

Because in theory, the realistic scenario is I try to talk to her again and she's like, get the fuck away from me.

She psychopath.

I don't know how you built your character.

Every conversation I have had in the game, anytime I, like, the options start to lean towards, like, compliment their hair, I do that, and they're like, no.

And they run away.

They do leave instantly.

Okay, so because I knew what my objective was before starting to play,

I picked Socialite, which is like the social butterfly one.

Yeah, sure.

Which apparently helped because when I talked to her again, she was really having a good time and we were chatting, chatting, chatting, chatting, chatting, touched hair.

You touched hair?

Touched.

Well, not, we didn't touch hair and hair.

Slow down, dude.

Like a navie?

Is that what you mean by lovemaking?

You did it navie style?

So I was like, oh, things are going great.

You want to go on a date?

We set up a date.

This is about six minutes into me talking to her.

We set up a date.

We met at the fountain, which was nearby.

Wait, you set up a date, and the date was, let's go over to that fountain in four minutes.

Like, it was in about, yeah.

I mean, I think that a Zoe day is like 96 minutes.

Yes.

So it was probably like an hour from then in real time.

Okay.

So we set up the date.

We meet there.

We have paninis.

I ask if I can kiss her.

She says yes.

Then she says, I think we're true loves now.

And I agree.

And then she texts me, hey, things have been going so great.

I don't want to forget about our great memories.

And I text her back like, yes, I completely agree.

Things are going great in these 30 minutes that we've known each other.

Yeah, that's been special.

And then I go home because it's been a long day.

I poop and then I call her and I say, hey, do you you want to come over?

And then we smash and then she starts cleaning.

Did you wash your hands after you pooped?

No comment.

And then she starts cleaning my apartment while I'm asleep after smashing.

Okay.

This is insane.

And I have photographic evidence to prove that.

Yeah, he sent me a, it was, it was Ferris Bueller's day off style whirlwind romance.

It's very strange that that was your experience because my experience of like socializing.

And when I built my Zo, my ambitions were much more like personal growth.

And

so maybe be not a fucking monster.

It was a fucking, and maybe it's a skill issue.

Like you are a Lothario.

I was picking some good things, conversation points.

My experience with like, you know, communicating with the other Zoys in the game, I don't like saying that word.

No, I don't know either.

It doesn't feel good.

Talking to other people in the game, you know, you, you have lots of different conversation topics to discuss, and it will like increase or decrease a few different like social meters.

So you have like a friend meter and a work colleague meter and a love meter.

And I'm really good at the first two, but those things like build very, very slowly.

Okay, let's start.

Let's, I very much enjoy that that was your experience.

Just some brass tack stuff, right?

Yeah.

There's a needs meter.

There's eight needs, your hygiene, your hunger, your,

you know, one of them I thought was interesting was validation is a mean.

So like the need to have people kind of like recognize your, your stuff.

Measure accomplished.

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah.

I can't imagine any more validating of an experience for a socialite.

And so like some of the game is kind of managing that stuff, right?

Yeah.

And you can automate it.

You do.

There's AI where it'll just do that stuff.

There is some AI stuff in the game that is like actual AI.

and we will yeah we're gonna get to that in a second we will get to it um so like some of the game is managing that stuff you have moods that you will get into if you are you know if you have to shit and you aren't doing it and the meter gets bad you'll become uncomfortable uh now you have this mood and that affects like your ability to talk to other people or like increase these skills or whatever so you're also kind of trying to manage your moods then there's things like ambitions where you you know i want to become a great painter and i have a few little side quests for that.

And you have like little random,

I forget what they're called, but just like little, little small goals that you have, like flex in front of the mirror that will pop up that are sort of informed by your, you know, your skills and your values and all of this different.

It is a pretty complex system

that I think

works really well.

Do you think like that stuff feels very different from The Sims?

Not, no, that stuff, not particularly.

Yeah.

What does

feel different from The Sims

is

gosh,

it's honestly kind of tough to come up with stuff.

There is there's a couple things.

One, I had a question.

So The Sims, and again, I haven't played one in a thousand years.

Right.

In newer versions of The Sims, are you directly controlling your character or are you using a mouse to just give it points to walk to?

Yes, yes, so you are it's the latter in this one.

You can, there's like WASD controls, yeah, weirdly.

I do like it, I like that, it felt a little more direct.

Yeah, you can jump the framing of the game is that you are like this deity that is in charge of a whole city, and like it views that through the lens of the Sims.

Oh, is that what the cat thing is?

Yeah, there's like a weird meta layer of like a magic cat, and you're like managing everything through a computer.

Anyway, um, that is reflected in your ability to truly truly change like anything about the game.

You can change elements of the city, right?

Like everything.

Like you, oh, that street corner, I want to make it look like dilapidated and that tree should be different.

And like, so like you, you have these extremely broad ranging

sort of powers of customization.

There are studio modes where you can

really get granular with like character creation or like home decoration.

um and then i believe this is not available in the build that we played but then you can upload that stuff to uh what's called canvas i think and then other people can like download these these prefabs that other players have made uh that is also something that is kind of like also in the sims but uh i don't know the the amount of stuff you are able to change especially with the like home decor stuff like i wonder or even just clothing like the idea that you could have any t-shirt and then like the sleeves there's like six different sleeve options for any shirt.

You can also, and this is where we start to get into

some of the like generative AI stuff.

You can,

and I was not able to get this to work and also wasn't particularly interested in it.

You can.

With your phone linked up to us, you know, this specific, I guess, Inzoy app, take a picture of a graphic or a shirt or whatever, and then like get that in a shirt or whatever in the game.

I didn't even know you could do that.

Supposedly you can like take pictures of objects in real life and then those will you can put them into the game.

I don't know how to do that stuff but it seems a lot like witchcraft.

And then the like even more blunt generative stuff is oh I want a heart pattern.

Yes.

You could type in like hearts for a t-shirt and it'll use generative AI, which this is where things get sketchy because I honestly don't know where this is being pulled from.

They say it's like they say it's all internal copyright-free stuff, right?

But we just realistically

checks that, but yeah, there's no way to know for sure.

They also say it's all client-side.

So it is not like the things that you are generating are being,

you know, uploaded for other people, I guess, unless you share it on Canvas.

I don't know.

It is.

What's weird?

here's what here's where i feel obviously uh the generative ai like art generation stuff like i want human beings designing shirts for this yeah there's also the like horror show scenario that the sims has fallen into which is oh you need to pay six dollars for a fucking dustbin yeah like upgrade so like i don't know those are probably two different things but like

i think so

this is I think there's a lot of when you start talking about generative AI, especially how it is utilized in

games or media in general, there's like a few different angles to it.

How is it trained?

Is it just full wholesale stealing shit from other artists and then using that to like train its AI?

They say no, but who fucking knows?

The other thing that gets like kind of weird is like it is being used

specifically for user-generated content, which is its own kind of like kettle of fish, right?

Like I think that user-generated content is very cool because like, especially in a sim game like this it gives you the the tools to

you know uh create and that is very satisfying in a way that just uh interacting with the thing is not and so if the generative ai is being used on the user generated content side uh the question becomes like is it replacing

uh you know an artist who would be working for this game developer right right that's the big question is it is it taking away a job from a human being?

And because it is being sort of like utilized for UGC, it's like, you know,

it gets weird.

If you say yes to that, then the question is like, well, does user-generated content in general take work away from people?

Right.

Like it gets very, very, it spins out very, very wildly.

There is also like a reality where you could play this game without fucking with that stuff.

I honestly didn't know, which is not good reporting for me.

I was clearly focused on a specific task, but I didn't know that there was the AI stuff until Griffin mentioned it to me.

Yes.

Which isn't, again,

that was my fuck up, but like, it did seem like the offerings, just like the base game without touching any of that stuff, was pretty fucking robust.

Yes.

So if you don't want to touch any of that stuff, but again, you are still supporting a company that is very much engaged with AI stuff.

So that is, it's really, again, very tough to talk about this stuff, but we want to kind of get it.

Especially because we are not smart men.

We're not, we aren't.

We are.

One of us is a Lothario, but beyond that.

And my shit was all about like self-improvement, which basically meant I sat in front of my computer.

I built my own house.

That was cool.

I genuinely enjoyed it.

Like your real life house.

No, not my real life house, but like, you know, I got deep in the gully works of the, of the build mode, which is sort of

true to form, kind of like how I also played The Sims games.

Like I would create.

These wonderful villas for myself and sometimes my family, but mostly myself to live in.

And I really love getting in there and and really making a space my own.

But I did something fucked up where like my Sim wouldn't sit down to eat anywhere except my desk in my office.

Oh, no.

Which felt

realistic.

Which felt like the game clocked me in a way that I was not like really comfortable with.

Yeah.

Whenever I would like have a gathering of other Sims, like they would only go into my office with me.

Like there was some weird shit that got very annoying.

One reason why I didn't pursue a lot of social activities is because when you're like having a conversation with somebody, you can sort of switch topics at will from this huge list.

Sometimes it'll like suggest stuff in the list that would be a smooth transition to the next topic.

But sometimes when you pick an option from that list, both of the characters who are talking will stop and then turn around and sit down in a chair and then they will do that part of the conversation and then they will stand up and kind of walk in a circle and then stand somewhere else and then continue that part of the conversation.

Like, there's a lot of

kind of weirdly clumsy stuff.

Anytime I cooked anything, anytime I cooked anything in my kitchen, I would make the food and I would have this plate of, you know,

of English breakfast.

And then I would walk into my living room and I would set it down on the coffee table and then I would walk away.

Every single time I'd be like, no, fucking, you got to eat that.

And he'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he would walk over it, he would pick it up off the coffee table, walk right into the fucking office, sit down at the desk to eat his English breakfast.

breakfast it's it's there's there's some like i don't know that pathing shit yeah yeah is the

is the is the difficulty of making a game with this like uh complex a system of uh interactions and stuff it feels like they're I ran into a lot of that shit, but.

Yeah, it doesn't feel, again, if assuming that the public build is the, which I'm pretty sure it is, the build that we played, it doesn't feel like rough, rough in the way that like a lot of early access stuff, right when it launches, is rough, but it definitely doesn't feel like a 1.0.

No, it does, yeah, it really doesn't, and especially insofar as like, I don't know, I've played a lot of Sims, and I spent my first hour and a half, two hours of this game like absolutely spinning my wheels because I was not, there was a lot, there was just enough that was kind of different from how The Sims worked, yeah, that I was having to kind of, I also haven't played The Sims in a while, full disclosure.

Um, but I was having to kind of like relearn how like a lot of this stuff worked, and it really drops you into these big cities

with very little guidance.

And so like day one, you feel this paralysis of like, well, should I go to fucking?

I didn't have that problem.

No, you didn't, did you?

No.

Fucking perv.

I think it's too soon to tell.

I think that it is

gorgeous.

It is a

I mean, I couldn't, for what it's worth, I had to run it on low

tracing.

Yeah, my computer's getting there.

So I'm due.

But

yeah,

my setup's a few years old.

And to get a stable frame late, I had to run it on low.

But I'm sure if you jack it up, it looks fine.

I've seen video and it looks fucking stunning.

I didn't have to do that.

My load times were pretty bad, pretty gnarly.

Where were you seeing load times though?

Because it's all fluid, right?

Sometimes

transitioning like between build mode and like city mode or like looking at one plot and then leaving and going to another another plot sometimes it instantly loaded sometimes it did not I don't know why and maybe it was like a you know caching textures or something

I'm not a smart man

so I'm glad we really showed the range of possibilities within Insoid between the two of us yeah right you can live a sort of like

Aramite existence where you build shitty puzzle apps on your laptop while you eat an English breakfast by yourself or you can go out and fall in love and boink in this.

Well, let's not go crazy on the love part, but yeah.

Well, it sounded like you guys made a really deep connection.

No, one of us did.

Jeez, Russ.

It is, yeah, I don't know.

It's too soon to tell.

I feel like it is a game that a lot of people are going to, a lot of people with more experience in this realm are going to have a lot to say about.

It seems crazy to me.

Again, this is me speaking with very little context because I haven't played.

It seems crazy to me that Sims people

wouldn't definitely at least try it and not find this to be like a pretty significant like

enhancement to what they've been playing for many, many years.

Yeah.

Like it just.

I mean, I don't, okay, here's the thing.

If we're going to get into that,

if you have been playing The Sims 4 for many years and you have the 38 expansion packs, the amount of content available to you is

unimaginable.

It's so much shit.

And this doesn't.

But I think the argument is there's a lot of stuff in here that is either in a lot of those packs that you had to pay for.

Right.

Or you can make it.

Or you can make it.

There's shit in here where you can make a movie theater and then upload a video file and then watch videos in your movie theater.

You can make cutscenes in a game.

Like you make a room and then you can put characters in it and kind of like make a cutscene.

Like it's it truly gives you the keys to the kingdom.

You'll eventually be able to drive like cars like GTA, like actual driving, not just like teleporting places.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I didn't know about that.

Pretty Pretty fucking wild.

Again, I don't know, but

I think it's my guess is it's going to be a huge fucking deal.

I think it's really going to do incredibly well for them.

It is certainly going to be,

I believe, in

South Korea, where the publisher is based.

I do believe it is going to be a pretty big smash hit.

There is something very neat.

I will say this to sort of like cap this off.

There is an element of

Korean kind of culture and sightseeing almost.

I guess depending on like which city you live in.

I lived in, it sounds like we live in different places.

There were only two cities available in the build that we played.

And you went with the one that is like a, you know, beachy California, basically.

Yeah, boardwalk town.

And I went with one that is like a...

like a metropolitan Korean city.

I think it's meant to, yeah, like inspired by soul.

Yeah.

And like, it's cool.

That's not really an experience I ever had in The Sims.

And I think the other city that's in there is also an Asian city.

I don't know what it's like.

The more rural

it looks like, but I don't believe it.

But that's, yeah, that's, that's cool that it's because all the Sims stuff, as far as I'm aware, at least a lot of it is very Western-centric.

Right.

So it's cool that they are.

I'm sure that there's DLC packs and stuff that like go out, but I don't know.

That has been an element that has like kept me kind of coming back and playing is like.

It's just kind of neat.

It's just kind of neat to go in and play and explore.

And like that is, I think, the appeal of sandbox games for a lot of people is that like, yeah, it's just kind of neat to hop in there and see what they do.

You, you can set up a schedule for your for your sim, which I really like.

You can say like, okay, every day at two o'clock, we're gonna go to, we're gonna go to Central Park or, you know, whatever.

You can augment that schedule however you want to sort of like automate the process.

Like, that stuff's really neat.

It has a lot of really, really good ideas.

It does not,

it has not hooked me in the way that I remember the Sims doing, where it's like, well, I got to get back home so I can, you know, as soon as I get home from school, I'm going to boot up the computer and play Sims 2.

Like, I don't, I don't necessarily feel that way about it.

That's more of a you, it feels like a where we are in our lives thing than it is.

Maybe, but like, I don't know.

I play a lot of other Sim simulation games that I've, that I very, very, very much enjoy.

Um,

it feels like you kind of need to understand this game to like have a, have a great time with it.

And it feels like there is a bit of a learning curve here.

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's, and that's maybe even putting it generously.

But yes,

again, in Zoy, a game I think people are going to be talking about for a while.

I will be paying attention to how the kind of like AI conversation shakes out about the game

because I don't know,

I can understand any level of skepticism and distrust around this entire conversation based on some of the bad actors who have been

using AI in gross and unethical ways.

But I think there's going to be a lot of things that people talk about when they talk about this game for probably

quite a while.

So, you know,

get ready for that, I guess.

Yeah.

Do we have anything else, Russ?

We could do some honorable mentions if you got anything.

I've got a couple of things to talk about.

I've been playing a lot of a game that we can't talk about yet.

Is it publicly

even

that it exists?

Oh, I know what it is.

Yeah, we can't talk about it yet.

I mean, I think there's a demo out on Steam.

If that's true, then I think I could talk about it a little bit.

I don't even want you to talk about it, quite honestly.

Oh, wow.

I will say the only way this game has been described to me as like a new animal will.

Okay, yeah.

That's kind of the extent to which I want to know about it before I actually start playing, but the embargo is not up for another three weeks.

You're right.

Okay.

Then I'll just say I've been playing a game called Blue Prince.

Yes.

And that's all I...

Oh, I just got the pun.

Did you get the pun?

Holy fucking shit, Russ?

I've been playing this game

so much.

And no,

that's the first time I've said the name of the game out loud.

Yeah.

Okay, so it's Blue B-L-U-E, Prince like a king, like royal prince.

Like a royal prince.

But it also has a secret meaning.

I think there's a demo.

I think there's a demo on Steam.

We will talk about it, but again, the embargo doesn't lift until mid-April, so it's going to be a few weeks.

It's going to be a while.

I have also, it is the Max Fun Drive.

It's Max Fun Drive time.

This is not technically a Max Fun podcast, so I'm not going to make the pitch here, but you can do it.

Part of Max Fun Fund.

Jordan, Jesse Go, what do you got?

What else is on there?

I mean, my brother, my brother, I mean, Taz.

Oh, that's a pretty good one.

Pretty good.

Part of that is we like stream every day, and

twice over the drive, I do a DJ set in Fuser.

And I, I don't know, I feel like every besties around this time of year, like I talk about Fuser because I get

like insanely deep into it, where it's like all I can think about.

I did see a clip on social media of you being a DJ.

Yeah, it's I it's just a genius, brilliant, you know, DJ game from Harmonics that,

you know, has been delisted.

It is not, it is not available.

My understanding is there are some features of Fuser, maybe not one-to-one, that are now in Fortnite, or at least some element of Fuser.

That's being extremely generous, I think, to what is available in Fortnite.

Like you can do some of that stuff.

Like you can do a jam sesh where you have like different parts of different songs.

But

the tools available to you to like modulate that stuff uh in in fuser and throw together in the fly is like unparalleled fucking just amazing little toy box really really really amazing little game to play with music in and uh it's it is still you can't buy it anyway can't buy it anyway it's it's a fucking tragedy right yeah uh this is this is

There's a community of people who build custom songs for Fuser.

And that is what has kind of like fueled my interest in it, you know, for these, for these streams every year.

Because

this community is quite small, but they are quite enthusiastic.

And so there's like deep-cut shit.

And you will find people in this community.

Like there's someone who has done a lot of.

custom songs based off of music from the hotline miami soundtrack oh so that shit all goes very very hard and then like you can mash that up with um

it's a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake from lazy town like

the tools are obscene and they are so brilliant.

And I genuinely, it is hard to think of a bigger tragedy in the loss of games' history than the fact that this game is like the most fun that I've had playing with music in a video game.

It's just like, you just can't get it

anywhere.

And I get that there's like licensing issues and shit that make that quite difficult.

At least there's sound shapes.

That's an insane comparison.

I mean, they're music games.

Yeah, but yeah.

Yeah, they're wildly different music games, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah, you got anything?

Yeah, I wanted to mention two things.

One, Josh Johnson, who's a correspondent on The Daily Show, also has a YouTube channel where he's been posting his like

sets, his comedy sets.

I am fucking blown away by the talent of this gentleman.

He is doing like full 45-minute sets on like current events from like the last three days

that feel like produced in a way that like these are like special ready.

Like you could go up on HBO and I wouldn't be surprised.

I'm like, he explains the like the Drake and

Kendrick Amar rap battle in a way that is like fucking hilarious and also like incredibly informative.

I prefer that.

I do prefer the Chet Hanks

explanation of the Kendrick Drake battle.

Oh, I prefer that one.

Oh, fuck, man.

I'll send you a chance.

Check it out.

But his stuff is great, and there's like tons of free shit on his YouTube at length,

and new stuff is going up every day.

So his stuff is awesome.

The other thing I want to mention, I mentioned it briefly earlier, I started playing Noita again because I've been on this action roguelike kick where I played Gungeon and to the Gungeon for a while, and now I'm playing this.

Noita, in case you don't remember, was the the wizard side-scrolling action roguelike where you like all of the pixels are generated such that they can like be set on fire or you could have pools of water.

There's like all sorts of fluid dynamics things.

And then you're crafting wands using these different spells to like get you further in levels.

The game is like punishingly difficult, maybe even harder than

Spelunky when you're starting out just because it's so complex.

I did go into the Steam Workshop and downloaded two Steam Workshop mods that I found to be make it a lot more approachable.

Okay.

I'm curious to hear this because I've tried Nuita a bunch of times and I have never cracked it.

Yeah.

One of them adds a mini map, a small

top right corner mini map that just gives you a little more visibility into like what is around you at any given time.

You frequently get like one-shotted by like a random ass guy across the map and this kind of helps alleviate that a little bit.

And the other upgrade or the other mod I installed was

adds just like random health drops occasionally.

Okay.

Normally you have to go to the end of each level to like fully heal up.

And this just allows you to get deeper into the game and experience like the true magic of the game, which is, again, the wand crafting, which doesn't happen until you get to like those level breaks.

I am so like, after my experience getting deep into Binding of Isaac, using some like straight up quality of life.

Yeah.

Like I cannot play that game without the item descriptions

mod that like tells you.

Like my experience after that, I don't know, it has become so much more on the side of like,

this shit should be available.

Like, this shit should be available.

It helps you play and enjoy the game that you otherwise would not play and enjoy it.

People who hardline, you know, say like, oh, you're ruining the

intention.

Like, yeah, but I didn't like it.

Yeah, honestly, and I've seen this with Bundy of Isaac.

I've seen this with Noita's community community as well.

Those people, those snobs that are like, you're ruining the pure experience, I think are in the minority.

I think the majority of the people that love the game and love the community also love the fact that people can make changes to the game in ways that not only prolong the game's life cycle, but also make it more approachable for new players.

So I think that stuff is great.

I will say, like, my...

patience for like doing non-Steam workshop games mods is very, very low.

Sure.

Like I'm not going to generally speaking do that, although

I did replace the missing songs in the GTA remakes.

That was like the extent of my willingness.

That's great.

But any game that has a Steam Workshop, I'm almost always dipping in there and seeing like, oh, what are people like, what's the most popular mod right now?

And that invariably, like, there's going to be two or three quality of life things that'll just make the game a lot more fun.

Yeah.

So

those are my things.

I think that's going to do it for us this week.

Yeah.

I want real quick, let me just thank some new members of the Patreon over at patreon.com/slash the besties.

We have John, we have Dave the Birder, we have Trenton, and we have Russ, no relation.

Uh, thank you for being supporters of the Patreon and us, and thank you to everyone else who's been uh great supporters.

We have uh a new RESTies coming to you on Tuesday, we also have a new bracket battles episode coming to you in the beginning of April to look forward to.

Uh, what are we doing next week?

Patreon.com/slash the besties is the link.

Oh, yeah, good.

I thought I said that.

that.

Oh, I don't know.

Next week, we are putting on the cowl and grabbing our blades to play Assassin's Creed Shadows.

And

hopefully, we'll have the whole crew back together for that.

Thanks for sticking with us as we ran a lightweight ship this week.

We hope you enjoyed yourself and learned something.

And stick around next week for the besties.

Because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games?

Besties.