The "Something Old, Something New" Week in Gaming
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Transcript
How do I make my son not afraid of Bowser?
Golly, that's the question.
Why is he decorating Bowser?
Right?
You got to put him up in like something like cute.
Like, you know, you got to maybe have him coming out of a birthday cake.
I think that's probably good.
That would scare the shit.
Kind of like sharpen his teeth, maybe.
Sorry, are we talking about my son or are we talking about Bowser?
Cover him in tomatoes.
You have to make your son better prepared to fight Bowser.
Give your son the tools.
If your son fears Bowser, there's some, there's a weakness in him, Russ.
You need to replace it with strength.
If your child, or really anyone's child, came upon Bowser in the wild,
maybe it's a good thing for them to be scared of Bowser.
He's a horrible dragon man
who wants to burn you with fire, crush you with his stomps.
The only reason
spikes, the little plumber is allowed to talk shit because he knows where where there's stars that can give him an incredible boost at any moment.
You don't have that.
Bowser would rip you.
Would rip your body in half.
And these fucking stars.
He would probably consume you.
Yeah.
Like it would be, you would be living Bowser's Inside Story, but not in like a fun, frivolous way.
You would be devouring it.
No, in the way that you would merge with his amino acids.
And you would be fucking killed.
You would become more Bowser.
And
guys, I'm sick of all these Mario RPGs trying to make him seem like a clumsy...
The fucking movie is bullshit for so many reasons.
Non-canon.
To make him seem like
a fucking oaf and not a killer Dragon Man, I think is irresponsible.
Honestly, I think they've made us so focused on being Bowser's inside story.
Yeah.
Because they don't want us to think about what happens when you become Bowser's outside story.
That's really good, Chris.
I mean, that doesn't make any sense.
Not even
with a sort of MC Escher-esque Lewis Carrollian sort of like jumps of logic.
Like, even if the Caterpillar had been like, Sometimes in Minion Max, you go inside the Mario.
My son is afraid of Doug Bowser.
Oh, wait a minute.
Yeah.
Why are my kids afraid of Bowser from la la la?
My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week.
My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week.
My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week.
My name is Ross Roskick.
I know the best game of the week.
Welcome, friends, to the besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in-home interactive entertainment.
It's a video game club.
And just by listening, you, my friend, have become a member.
On this week's episode, we have a twofer.
We have a bit of a curveball.
A bit of a pivot.
Yeah, a bit of a pivot.
Because we kind of told people
we were going to do Mario Brothership, Mario Luigi Brothership.
I played some of it.
Griffin, did you play it all?
No.
No.
Yeah, I did not.
In my experience,
I don't think it would have been made for the best conversation.
So we kind of pivoted a little bit.
IGN five out.
IGN gave it a five, which I think is a little harsh based on what I played, but they did play the whole game.
So maybe I don't know.
But I just wanted to give you some background.
Hey, Russ, can I just say...
Brief time out.
It's so, you've been in this business for literally, I mean, 15, 20 years, right?
Yeah.
The idea that you would still, at this point, as a man, and a father who has been in this industry so long, the fact that you would still do a side swipe of like, five out of 10 for the new Mario Brothers show, bust seems a little low anyway.
Like, the fact that you would still do that.
You're incredibly dull, man.
You're like, I didn't play much, but anyway, five out of ten seems low, IGF, maybe on the dole from Nintendo.
Maybe Tobias is in.
You didn't kick the hornet's nest as much as you walked up to it and looked at it and took a bite out of it.
So fucking.
For no reason.
You're also a professional in the same field.
You're right.
You're right.
I rescind my dumb note.
No, I love you.
No, I do.
You're right.
Who might have fucking say,
me who played several hours, but not 40 hours.
IGN's on the Sega payroll, clearly.
So what are we doing this week instead?
Yeah, we didn't actually get to the intro yet.
Okay, so yeah, we're mixing it up.
What are we doing, Juice?
This week we're going to talk about
which is the new one from the Dead Cells, folks.
And I would still like to know something about Brothership.
Like, I would like to.
Yeah, I'll speak about it in the honorable mention section.
All right, good.
I would love to hear about that.
And then we got a quest,
a quest of a different stripe featuring the dragons that everybody loves.
And Griffin was excited about Dragon Quest 3 coming back on, and I really don't understand why.
And I'm really looking forward to it.
remake.
It drips off the tongue.
I am drizzling.
I feel very validated in my flippance.
Yes,
you are valid.
Let's go to a break and then talk about some shit.
Okay, we're going to start with Windblown.
Yeah.
This is a game that is in early access.
It is made by the folks who made Dead Cells, and it is a isometric roguelike in the style of Hades.
Okay, do we need at this point
define what that is?
Is he?
Well, no, it's, it's, the structure of this is so regimented.
I'm almost starting to feel like it's a genre unto itself, right?
This idea of like the isometric run-based,
uh, like the layering of powers.
So you're like building a power set that would
upgrade thing.
Yeah, a meta-upgrade that can kind of, well, not just a meta-upgrade, but like the run is like a layered, like the pace of powers is like layering on top of, and you're like building a build as you go right and it's like not just about managing health but like managing all these different like currencies and upgrades and like i mean the problem is that's rogue that's rogue that's a rogue game so it's like it's a hack and slash roguelike i think that's yeah i don't think
yeah you're right no no no i understand yes no i i i get the instant
if it is so similar to hades and you almost want to divide that from like traditional rogue and those rules
i guess rogue light, right?
That's what they call it.
To me, there's a difference between the
okay, to me, there is a lot less of a, with the kind of game I'm thinking about with the Hades, it's a lot more dependent on like good roles
giving you a build that is dominant rather than a skill-based thing where you're getting good with all these kinds of different weapons, which I would argue what Dead Cells was.
Sure.
It was like learning how the weapons work.
And it was a lot more about that versus like, I got these different upgrades that all sort of complement each other.
You do get,
I mean, there are rules in Dead Soul.
Anyway, let's think it's an interesting distinction.
Let's set up like what the game, what the game actually is before
you do this, Russ.
Okay, fine.
It's an isometric rogue light.
You're like, oh, God, there is a story, but I really didn't grok it.
You're like an animal person.
There's a bunch of animal people on a floating island, and you have to
something.
It's
you're you're fighting a bunch of guys don't don't worry about the narrative you're fighting a bunch of guys in arenas that again are pretty similar to hades if you played hades um
and honestly the core of the game to me feels like
it feels like
Hades merged with Dead Cells.
Like you have very similar kind of weapon slots and ability slots like you did in Dead Cells, but obviously the combat being isometric and arena-based.
there's definitely an idea of like the two your two main weapons like complementing each other and how they how you're switching between those two main forms of combat which is a big part of dead cells and i think it's not as not as much it's not that like main special distinction from a hades it's kind of like a dual yeah wielding right and you've also got these two abilities they're on cooldown so you might have like a bomb that you can activate every 30 seconds and then you'll get passive perks that'll like decrease cooldowns or increase damage Again, very dead cells, but in a Hades format.
Okay.
Yes.
Do you get to date monsters?
It's in early action.
I don't think you have to imagine you get to date monsters.
It seems more kid-friendly than either dead cells or Hades.
Yeah, it is.
Not for kids.
The way it's structured right now, I would say that they are really not intending for you to linger in the hub world currently.
They are very much sort of like you get the base currency, which in this game is gears.
You spin the gears that you manage to bring back from your last run and you, you know, move on.
And there's a couple more like dalliances there, but they're really not trying to weigh you down with story.
They really want you to hop back up and
go start a run again.
Does it do the Dead Cellsy thing where you unlock sort of more,
you know, tools and weapons and blueprints?
Yeah.
Blueprints that appear out in the wild that you yeah, that is that is in there as well.
Okay, cool.
So my big bummer with a game like Dead Cells and this entire kind of like air.
I'm so excited.
Go ahead, because this is perfect setup for segment B.
Go ahead.
Okay.
Oh, don't worry.
I'm aware of the problems with the game I'm bringing.
Don't worry.
You have to
play so much to unlock.
the various things that are the actual game.
Yeah, I mean,
well, and here's where it is different than segment B and RPG.
Yes, I get it.
RPGs have to play too long before it gets fun.
Weirdly, this one's going to be the opposite.
But here,
where it's like, oh, if you just want to see the game, which is happened in another game I played recently, which is like the like,
there was a vampire survivors game, I think, is like guilty of this, that entire genre.
I guess I'm saying is like, how long do I have to play this before it actually feels like the game?
So
I will, if I could address this with Windblown, I think the issue right now with Windblown is actually more about it being in early access and what it decide, how it decides to meter out information.
Because my frustration, I think, is it was teaching me the things that I already know
because I know the genre.
And it spends early stuff teaching you those sorts of ideas, which if you have fluency, you already know them, right?
So you're not like, it's not that engaging.
And I played the first like, really only like 20, 30 minutes.
And I'm like, I don't really get what's special about this because it just feels like the other games but that's because they're teaching me the stuff that i already know that once you get a little bit deeper in um legitimately like 30 minutes in it's doing some cool stuff i'll give you an example we're talking about dual like having two weapons you're switching between you uh it has this idea where if you string together enough attacks with one weapon it incentivizes you to flip to the other weapon and you do a special more powerful attack attack.
So you've got a flow going there and you're incentivized to break what you're doing and switch to your other weapon and bring that into your flow of combat.
So like finding good moments in the flow of combat to like switch weapons to keep this going.
And that is a very smart evolution of Dead Cells where oftentimes I'd be on a Dead Cells run and I just would forget that I had a secondary weapon.
Yeah, because my primary was so strong.
So this encourages mixing things up.
I think I have a better way of asking what I was getting at, which is there's that threshold in a Dead Cells Light game where you get to a boss and it's like, congratulations, you've made it to the boss.
You're just going to have to play this section over five or six times.
This happened with that Prince of Persia game that we brought.
Not the great one, but the one that was like good.
Rogue?
Yeah, Prince of Persia Rogue, where it's like, okay, it doesn't actually matter what my skill is.
I have to grind it to get to that point.
No, I understand.
So, Justin and I have had a different experience with this.
Okay.
I played my very first run, I played through and I made it to the second boss of the second area
and was doing pretty well.
I know Justin being like worse at games overall.
Something guides, I know.
No, I'll say that I didn't, I was actually trying to rush the tempo too much.
Like, if you, uh, range is a pretty good option in this game, and it's not something that I would normally normally think about, but it's actually really effective here and you kind of have to utilize it.
And I don't think I'm using enough because Russ and I last night or yesterday afternoon played together.
And that is how the other...
This is the thing.
That's the hook that you don't know.
And honestly, the game is not very good at telling you that there's multiplayer in this game.
Yeah.
But
how does it work?
It's cool as hell.
Can I tell you how it works?
Because it's really fucking cool.
You go in and you're just basically playing the game in tandem with each other and you get an upgrade.
And I was a little unclear, Russ, on whether or not we were each getting upgrades, or we were like sharing or splitting them.
It seems like they were instanced unless you drop something on the ground, in which case anyone can pick it up.
But
this game is very fast-moving, right?
So it's very much like you have a very fast dash that you can use to not just get around fights, but get around the islands.
The battles are like smaller.
They're more condensed than a Hades.
They're more like drugs.
You might fight like six guys instead of Hades where you're fighting like 30.
So it's moving a lot faster.
But I think the time to kill on yourself is fast too, right?
So it's not like a run falls apart over several minutes.
It's like, oh shit, I'm getting my ass kicked.
Oh no, I'm dead.
A little closer to vampire survivors in that feel.
A little bit like you get overwhelmed fairly quickly.
But in the multiplayer, when you're going through together, when one of the players dies, the other player has a kill counter above their head, and they got to get 10 kills
to revive to revive.
Okay, so cool.
Well, and also you're in you're in sudden death.
So if you get hit once one time while in that mode,
it's the end of the run.
That's the end of the run.
That's really good.
So that is like, it's
so smart in terms of how do you balance for two players who are unequally yoked, if you will, because I died and suddenly I was
way
into
what was happening on the screen because it's suddenly this intense thing where I'm watching a much better player have like a high-stakes run all of a sudden that could bring me back into the game or not.
And then, and so we're both like engaged with it, even though like our skill level is very different.
It's like it's really smart.
I love that.
As long as you are playing with somebody who isn't going to be mad, if like, because it sounds like they die too, effectually.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
You, what you meant to say is
as long as you play with somebody who has learned over a decade how to mask their anger with you, not just as a player, but as a human being.
And by a decade, you mean however old Russ is.
Who cares?
Well, how long Russ and I have known each other.
Yes, Russ has gotten really good.
I love that it doesn't have the multiplayer thing where it's like, oh, great.
I died.
And now I have to just watch.
And who knows how long I'm going to have to watch for it?
Am I going to have to watch for a long time?
Well, you do have to watch, but you're watching with purpose.
Five, 15 minutes.
You're watching for like a little chunk waiting.
And you're not passively watching.
You are biting your nails.
Yes.
Because like the whole run is going to fall apart right here if the other person can't
come through.
The flip side is for somebody who's not Russ, but somebody, you know, like Russ.
As bad as that feeling of, oh no, I died because my partner died is, the feeling of, I am such a great and generous God that I brought my friend back to life far, I suspect would far out exceed it for a person like russ but not us yeah if someone could just recreate the sistine chapel ceiling and me reaching out to just touch justin's hand to bring him back to life that would be it feels it's really and also in addition to it being very tense when you pull through the other person comes back with like half health and the other person is usually back at full health because they haven't been dinged yeah and it's like you're way back in it like you are absolutely it's legitimate like the run is like absolutely back on if you can pull through the the sudden death thing okay so that being said trying to go back to it after russ and i did that
i found it a lot less engaging for me personally trying to play solo after it was that fun to play multiplayer like yeah i felt like it was not showing as well for me right now is it up to four players it's it's three so it maxes out at three i've played three with randoms for what it's worth um and that worked totally fine i didn't feel any lag when i was playing with justin or with randoms i think it was
impressive because it's really fast.
Really fast.
I mean, it was definitely designed from the ground up.
So there's probably some fudging going on to make sure you feel it feels good.
So it feels great.
I think the multiplayer is the defining factor of why it sets itself apart.
But I also think the minute-to-minute feels really strong because they've been making some variant of this game since Dead Cells launched, however fucking years, eight years ago, whatever it was.
The weapons feel cool, too.
They've already got some interesting ideas.
There's a like a crossbow that you you fire on a beat.
And if you fire in, keep the rhythm going.
Yeah, there's like a quick time circle.
So if you're hitting the circle each time, you do critical.
And the music is fucking killer in this game.
Great music.
And if you're firing in with the beat, you keep a combo going, your damage is increasing.
But if you roll out of it, then you lose it.
So it's like this, like,
how long are you going to stay stationary and stay on the beat?
And that's just the one weapon.
But the first time I got that, I was like, oh, wow.
If they have a lot of different ones like this, because a lot of them have really cool ideas like that.
Yeah.
The other differentiating factor with Dead Cells is if you've ever played a lot of Dead Cells, you know the feeling of like, I'm doing really great.
I have a streak going, whatever.
I haven't been hit for a while.
And then I make like a dumb platforming move where I fall into acid.
There's no pits.
Oh, sorry.
There are a ton of pits in this game, but there's no way to fall into them.
Wait, strike that.
There's lots of pits.
But there's no way to fall into them.
You've got the air dash, basically, and you spend a lot of time between arenas you're just air dashing automatically across from platform to platform but it just like does all the work for you such that you literally can't fall into anything okay so there's no the only time you're ever going to get hit is by getting hit by an enemy um so that kind of simplifies a lot of the exploration aspects which are relatively simple compared to what they were in Dead Cells.
But if you found that frustrating, the platforming stuff frustrating, there's essentially zero platforming in this.
A bit of a behind the scenes question here, but this is early access.
Do I need to play this game before we do the besties, like the final besties, besties
for this year?
Yeah.
No,
I don't think it's ready.
I could see it being a contender next year for when it hits 1.0 or whatever.
I would say the biggest, and I always struggle with this because I know this comes down to taste, but I would say my biggest problem with it right now is that
it is so smooth with like easing you back into a a run after a death that I feel like it doesn't feel chunky enough for me to where I really feel a loss or a gain.
Like I don't have that sense of like
having to, like,
I worry that it's not impactful enough to keep me engaged with it.
It's like it doesn't really frustrate me.
And I feel like that's going to keep me with a lot of these run-based things.
That's part of the magic for me, I think, is like, all right, I'm going to go back.
And I don't feel as compelled to like just one more run this time.
I mean, there was that run where we dropped like 100 cogs on the ground after a death and that was pretty brutal.
Utterly demoralizing.
But I do think that there are, I agree with you because when you go to the store and you like look at the potential upgrades, it doesn't feel as enticing as it probably should.
Yes.
And a lot of the upgrades in runs too are like 5% better damage, 10% better like money, whatever.
Like it's like not fun.
It's also not necessarily, and this is a totally personal thing.
So look at screenshots and video to decide for yourself.
Not necessarily my preferred aesthetic.
I much prefer the like look and feel of dead cells.
Sure.
Feels like a canceled MOBA.
That was Justin's note, which is
pretty spot on and also very hard.
It looks like a canceled MOBA that was spearheaded by a first-person shooter designer.
Yeah, it's very, I don't even know how to describe it.
Am I wrong?
No.
I mean, no, I'm not wrong.
You're not wrong, but, you know, lots of things don't need to be said just because they're true.
It's very funny, but it's mean.
It's pretty funny.
It is mean.
It is mean.
It looks like a game that could be called like Lucky's Crystal Adventure, even though the gameplay itself is much more elevated than that.
Yeah.
Don't shit talk Lucky's Crystal Advent.
It looks like a game that's my favorite game of the year.
It looks like a game that somehow South Korea pays you a dollar an hour to play.
You don't exactly know how it works, but like, yeah, okay, fine.
But it's very, like, as a game, it's a lot of fun.
So, yeah, now that, I mean, I don't know how to address that problem.
It's really just a taste thing, but maybe we're just old men and don't like that look and feel.
But the feel of it.
I haven't liked the way a game has looked for five years.
I don't remember.
No, you know what?
Are you trying to think of a game you like the look of?
Yeah, there was one game.
What was the card game with Stoats?
Fucking inscription?
Inscription.
That looks cool.
I like the way that looks.
That's the only game you've liked the look of in the last five.
Okay, man.
Take that, Greg Kasavin and team.
What?
They rest.
Hey, listen, baby.
They're resting on their laurels.
Hades came out more than five years ago.
Okay.
And I like the way Hades looked.
They didn't even finish this one before they put it out, Greg.
Got Greg's like...
Paper towel and Sharpie drawings that he just like had laying around.
Finish the game, Greg, before you let me play it.
I'm just kidding, Greg.
Please, please don't kick me out, man.
I barely made it to Olympus.
Oh, man.
Okay.
This is cool.
It really is.
There's a lot of, there is a lot of really smart ideas here that I think that, like, and they're the kind of thing that feels like you want more of.
Like, the early access is fun because you're getting to get these like new weapons that will be really fun and interesting.
It's also not rough for an early access game.
It's incredibly well polished.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What's there is very smooth.
Yeah, yeah.
Hey,
Frush, while he's been talking, has been sharpening knives for the next section.
He's ready to just
why?
I don't know why.
I'm so ignorant of this.
I'm so thrilled.
I am so ready to talk about Dragon Quest III HD 2D remake right after this break.
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To begin, Dragon Quest was released as Dragon Warrior on the NES.
Good.
And so if you don't understand what Dragon Quest is, you should know that it's the same as Dragon Warrior on the NES.
And do the numbers match up?
The numbers do match up on like Final Fantasy, yes, which I is.
How many people do you think we're listening and are like, oh, now I know you.
Now I get it.
Now I understand.
Doesn't
have to slime out on NES, man.
This does so many fucking slimes.
Came out on the NES.
So
was pretty groundbreaking.
It sort of proved you could do a big RPG like Wizardry, like Ultima on a console, as tiny as the NES.
But it was just one guy, one character, and that was it.
It was pretty, pretty straightforward.
You didn't have a whole team.
Dragon Quest II introduced like a couple party members that rocked with you, but they were pretty static.
And then Dragon Quest III came out and really almost completely destroyed the economy of the nation of Japan
because of how deeply, deeply into it people got.
Like many people got arrested for truancy laws because of that game.
It was like
just bonkers.
And the reason why that is, is because it sort of it adds a party creation sort of mechanic that was way, way, way, way, way ahead of its time
and sort of expanded the world in every direction.
So you had more choice in where you explored.
There were entire like side quests and areas that you wouldn't go through.
Things that like,
I feel like to talk about Dragon Quest III, you have to be able to
place it
in its era in the context of like what it meant because it truly was way ahead of its time.
Now, if you don't like Dragon Quest games or JRPGs, is this the one for you?
Fucking definitely not, because this is still a Dragon Quest-ass Dragon Quest game.
Although, Chris, you might dissent to that because it seems like you like this one more than you were expecting.
I feel like I've transcended and I have
probably you to thank the most for that.
I've been Griffin-Pilled.
Yep.
I have been Griffin-Pilled.
The past year especially of playing Yakuza, or sorry, Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, which I think we've talked about that.
That combat kind of eased me into turn-based.
And then Metaphor, which fully brought me in.
I was just ready for this.
And
I thought I wouldn't enjoy it because I played Dragon Quest XI and overall liked it, but the combat was like slow and turn-based, not really my thing.
And the idea of going from Dragon Quest XI all the way to 3 sounded terrifying.
But the game looks good.
Looks and sounds good.
Go further.
Can you explain what's going on with the visuals?
I mean, yeah, it is Square Enix's sort of patented Octopath Traveler,
you know, flat sprites on these gorgeous sort of 3D,
dynamically lit uh worlds and that's what that 2d uh jason trever had to explain this to me because i didn't i thought the title was insane it is it is insane they're even explaining it it's still insane 2d what is it hd 2d yeah that's how they're branding this look yeah so 2d sprites in a 3d world with actual lighting is 2d
hd 2d yeah and kind of
shift focus and a tilt shift yeah like blind and stuff so i
will say I am deeply into this game, unsurprisingly.
I had my own sort of voyage through the whole catalog of Dragon Quest games during COVID.
That is how I decided to spend my quarantine time.
But I didn't really ever get around to this one because I was excited for this game to come out.
And I'm having a really good time with it.
I think that the party planning stuff is like...
It's very satisfying to like make a team of heroes with different jobs
and sort of like feeling like that sort of experience is your own.
And like other Dragon Quest games, you can really kind of interact with it as much as you want to, to wit, like this game has tactics where you can tell your party members what to do and then you don't have to give them orders in combat.
And then you can speed that combat up to a hysterical degree.
It has difficulty settings.
It has a lot of quality of life stuff, like stuff that's never been in Dragon Quest games before, like a map with waypoints on it.
You can turn that on, turn it off at your leisure.
So you can...
Waypoints, like fast travel waypoints?
I mean, the game does have fast travel.
It's always had a spell that you can use.
Now it's free.
Like
they have really, truly, more than any other Dragon Quest game, smoothed off all the rough edges of the experience.
So like, I don't know.
If you've been interested in Dragon Quest and you've liked some of it, like say, like, Russ, you started playing 11, but it didn't really click for you.
Maybe this might work because I actually, based, and I'm curious what you guys think.
Do you think the narrative of this is like relatively light oh yes oh Jesus Christ okay so that's a good thing for me yeah sure because 11 what turned me off of 11 is I'm a very special boy and I need to climb a hill and I'm gonna spend six hours climbing a fucking mountain to get my very special magic power no
I would rather it be throw me in like it's spelunky and like whatever I get the gist I'd rather fucking fight monsters immediately
maybe well maybe you might like it because yes the the narrative of the first five hours is like go to tower.
Go to tower.
Get stone.
Get stone from tower.
Unlock gate for boat.
It's like very, very, very, very simple.
That's enticing.
Yes.
I am absolutely smitten with the design of this and everything that you talked about, Griffin, of making it accommodating for whatever you enjoy about the game.
So for me...
I effectively just blast through combat, even randomized events.
I preset my party for what I want them to do.
I have it on ultra speed.
And the second I go into a battle, I hit attack, and then I go back to watching TV.
And then the fight ends.
And then I've finished that grinding and I move on a little further.
And the same thing happens over and over again.
I think, Fresh, I messaged you that it's like a perfect podcast game.
You kind of want to be doing something else during large parts of it because it is a grind, but it's not unfun.
It is pleasant to
it.
It is.
It is.
Doodling is a really, really, really good way of describing.
It is so lightweight.
It is fun to watch the numbers go up.
There's like cross-class mechanics that you eventually unlock to like further.
Like, I've got a priest that I just made a martial artist so he can heal and do fighting stuff.
Like, it's so simple.
It's so, there's nothing truly revolutionary about most of the stuff that it does.
Now, that wasn't true back in 1993 or whatever, whenever the original game came out.
Then it was pretty fucking revolutionary.
But now it's just just that's the fun is that because everything else is made so easy as a kind of like a history lesson of like hey I've always wanted to go back and see what made these games so special because all of the annoying parts are completely out of my way I I'm just enjoying like seeing exactly what you're talking about Griffin where I'm like recruiting characters and using these items to change their jobs in all these absolutely strange ways.
And the map is huge.
The open world, it's like an open world map.
And Griffin mentioned that, yes, you can
get these kind of like goals on the map where you need to, you know, head to X.
But the system that I love the most is you are motivated to talk to all the characters because characters are constantly dropping clues of where things might be.
So you're talking to a random character and they're like, oh, well, I had heard something about this mysterious treasure that was dropped by these pirates in this part of the land.
And then if you hit start on the Steam Deck, you can can save that piece of dialogue into a like dialogue bank.
So I like that a lot.
In theory, you could play the whole game like you would with a notebook, turn off or ignore the waypointing,
and spend the entire time actually having an adventure.
And that's where it
hit in my head of like, no wonder this game was huge.
Because imagining playing this on the NES where you have this giant open world and
characters are just kind of throwing little bits of dialogue at you, and you can go anywhere you want to have your own adventure.
I mean, to some extent, it sounds like Zelda 1, where you have this very large space and you're getting cryptic hints of like, hey, there might be a heart on a peninsula, wherever the fuck that is.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's an apt comparison for specifically for Dragon Quest I, right?
But I think Dragon Quest III,
as a pretty die-hard fan of gRPGs with like a pretty like, I think strong familiarity with the lexicon of the whole genre.
It is astonishing how much of that came from this game.
And I think that like if you do enjoy JRPGs and you were like me a few years ago, having never really gotten into Dragon Quest,
I think that this is actually a pretty quick way to like learn what this whole series is about because it's also like there is a charm to this series that is difficult to
encapsulate.
It is like, every area of the map is like sort of a microcosmic version of a real world country or city.
And so you're like going on this weird world tour of like, yeah, now I'm in Italy and now I'm in Egypt and now I'm in
and all of the dialogue.
I don't think I'm the right person to describe whether or not that is true.
I will say, I will say.
I'm not going to be able to accents that are like nothing like wherever they're.
I don't know.
The Italian accents are, they sound pretty.
It has voiceover?
Yeah, so there is some voiceover for like during like important scenes.
I will say that they did change.
There's a city in the sort of like Egypt-inspired part of the land that the original game was called Isis.
And they have gone ahead and changed that to Ibis.
Cool.
So they did change that one for
giving a thumbs up that you can't see right now.
Before we close, what else would you like to say?
My only kind of, I guess, warning for people
of my elk who are not hardcore RPG people and are kind of just coming into it is I did hit a wall around probably like seven hours or so where you start to get into dungeons and you can fall off edges while you're navigating dungeons.
And again, there are these like randomized battles.
So you will get through a dungeon, you'll be doing really well, and then you'll just drop off an an edge because you aren't paying attention because it's a chill-out game.
And suddenly, you are a one, two, three lower levels.
And you have to be-it's very, it's quite demoralizing.
Yeah, there's also like cursed items.
And at first, it was like funny, and then it was less funny each time it happened.
You don't really get much description for what the different items and pieces of equipment do, and some of them are secretly cursed.
Where if you equip them, like you're just kind of fucked.
Like, there is lots of, there's lots of, uh, there's lots of really classic kind of cruff to it.
It is not going to be the game that changes your mind about Dragon Quest if you already know how you feel about the series.
But I don't know.
I think there's lots of people who are who are really, really going to enjoy it.
I certainly am.
I guess I had a question.
We've talked a lot about in the past about games with
upgrades or items that don't feel very satisfying, like a 3% increase to damage.
And every time that I've played a JRPG,
it kind of makes me feel like every time I level up, it's meaningless because even though the numbers do go up, it equates to essentially a 3% increase in damage.
So how is that different from like God of Wars issues where a piece of armor is doing the same thing?
So there are items in the game and pieces of equipment that just do very different things.
So you can get like a boomerang in the game and it will attack every enemy on screen, which as you get going later on is like eight characters versus having like a sword that does one or you can have a whip that does a kind of a version of that.
The other thing that you have is just like the different spells that you're getting with each of those upgrades.
So yeah, you're
rates are going up, but you're getting different spells that change how your characters play and perform.
You can also multi-class once you get...
Once you get them to level 20, you can like multi-class.
Like there are big breakpoints to like hunt down to like make the the characters considerably stronger.
And I think just having those kind of in front of you, every time you get a new spell or ability for a character, like it really, you're going to use it
because there's not a ton of stuff you can do in this game.
So like, I don't know, all of that stuff feels very tactile and very sort of meaningful.
And
the combat is somewhat punishing if you are not like making steps towards getting stronger.
And so it, I don't know, it feels necessary and rewarding to do that stuff.
Yeah,
I am enticed by it again because it is that de-emphasis of narrative.
Yeah.
It bums me out because I know what the steps after this are, which is like more and more and more and more narrative, which doesn't appeal to me.
I don't know that that's going to happen in Dragon Quest III, man.
No, no, no, but I mean, in this game, this was like...
kind of the end of this period of like relatively light narrative.
Dragon Quest games have more narrative than this, but not so much that
if you liked this, I would just say that I think like, oh, you found your RPG series.
Dragon Quest in general is like it.
Before we close real quick, Russ, if you could open up the box art that I sent in the bestie slack, I would just love for, imagine everyone that the year is in 1989 and you go into your local funkland looking for a new game and Russ is behind the counter and you're like, hey, Russ.
I am looking for a new NES game.
I'm just a kid.
And Russ is like, actually, I have one that I'd love to recommend to you.
Russ, if you could just read this box.
Oh, sure.
Um,
Dragon Warrior: the epic beginning of a new era in video games.
Good.
Good so far.
Mere finger speed and sweat are no match for the challenges of this game.
You will be required to use deductive reasoning, not a quick sword to defeat your enemies.
All is darkness.
The dragon Lloyd.
The Dragon Lloyd.
The dragonloyd.
The dragonlloyd.
Has captured
the princess and stolen Erdrick's powerful ball of light.
Oh, wait.
Six ass.
You are Erdrick's heir.
It's now there's no space between us.
Yeah, now it's just Erdrick.
To you has fallen the most dangerous
Erdrick's dad.
Erdrick is my dad.
This is spectacular.
Okay, go ahead.
Please.
Oh, okay, sorry.
You are Erdrick's heir.
To you has fallen the most dangerous task to rescue the king's daughter and recover the mystic ball of light.
Your mission is deadly, but it is your fate.
Prophets have long foretold your coming.
Three keepers await your journey, each ready to aid you with the mystic item of great power.
Gather three objects.
Scribes will record your deeds.
Use cunning and wisdom to choose your commands.
Gain experience, weapons, and armor as you battle your way through the world.
Rest if you must.
Rude.
Search out the Dragon Lord's lair and face your destiny.
In this role-playing adventure, you are the Dragon Warrior.
So I do think it's supposed to say Dragon
Lord.
I think in the second paragraph, I think that's what Dragon Lord is.
They're trying to type.
It's just a typo, I guess, on the back of Dragon Warrior.
And Erdrick is probably a typo, too, with the space between amazing.
I'll buy it.
Thank you so much.
I'll buy this.
It's dynamite.
It sounds dynamite.
And And the box heart is just fucked.
I don't know
if it's
not.
I mean, this is for the first game.
This is not for three.
No, but that NES gap between box heart here, the Mega Man gap is in full force here.
Yeah.
Cool.
Cool.
Well,
what else is going on, guys?
So,
yeah, in Art Road Mentions, I'm going to talk a little bit about Marion Luigi Brothership, which, again, I didn't play a ton of, but I played, I think, enough to at least have a short statement on it.
Here's the thing.
I think Nintendo has learned the lesson that maybe
reimagining the combat of a Mario RPG every single time they make a game is not the best idea.
And I know they've struggled with like the crazy origami combat and the sticker star combat, whatever it is.
This feels like a return to, okay, we're just going to kind of master the combat that was in Super Mario RPG and the Mario Luigi games, and we're just going to like refine that to the point that it feels good.
And you know what?
It feels really good.
I really, really like the combat in this game.
What the issue is, is you're...
It's just like pacing-wise, it's incredibly slow, which I know has been a complaint of others on this podcast regarding some of the Mario Luigi games.
And the characters you're meeting aren't very interesting.
And it just doesn't necessarily draw you in.
Again, I only played about four or five hours, but I was not enticed to,
you know, solve the problems of this world.
And I think part of it is just they're so unwilling to tap into the Mushroom Kingdom like catalog of characters.
So they keep having to reinvent these like standalone random ass like cloud people that no one cares about rather than like we were talking about a thousand year door.
We're like, hey, this shy guy kind of sounds like he's dealing drugs.
That's pretty funny.
And so they don't really, you don't get that level of like enjoyment out of it.
It also doesn't run very well, which I think may be a consequence of it maybe being designed for the Switch 2.
I don't know for sure, but it just doesn't run great,
which shouldn't necessarily be a problem.
But there's like a lot of Twitch combat stuff where you're trying to like nail timing on a jump, and it just doesn't feel as good as it should.
So I'm super bummed.
I hope this doesn't like doom the future of the Brothership franchise.
I actually heard that both remakes of the two RPG remakes that they put out in the last 12 months have sold better than this game at launch.
So I worry what this bodes for the future, but
kind of a letdown.
I'm definitely disappointed.
But yeah.
The other game I wanted to talk about is a game called Redacted, which I know that Justin.
Ah, this is a...
This is a good one.
Yeah.
That is an inner, really cool ideas.
Interesting.
It is another, what did we decide to do?
You're not allowed to call it a Hades-like because everybody shot me down and they're like, Justin is an isometric roguelike Hades.
We need something as clean as search action games.
So if you could do some research, Justin, and come up with something that's not too specific of a genre, but yes, it is the Hades.
So it is in the style of Hades.
But this one, you're kind of breaking out of a prison.
And
the combat, it feels a little slower than Hades or certainly windblown.
slightly and a little more tactical, I think.
The competitive aspect is really
what's interesting about it.
Right.
So as you're escaping from this prison, you're also racing against a handful of AI folks that are also trying to escape the prison.
And the AI folks will drop like
curses on you that'll make your runs harder.
So for example, one of them will like drop a darkness curse.
So now you can only see enemies within your flashlight cone of vision um which makes things very interesting and then eventually you if you catch up to them you'll have these mini boss fights against your rivals that if you win those boss fights you get like a huge boost in power um and then you're obviously no longer chasing them because you've killed them you are also able to create hazards for them yeah the same way you can slow them down uh by choosing you know some sort of hazard or is there a multiplayer component to this where no it's just single player i was gonna say that would be like it would be, but it's just.
But there is, it's a, there is an idea of like you developing a rivalry.
Think more like
the Lord of the Rings games, where it's like, it's very clear who you're competing against.
They remember you.
There's a history there.
Okay.
You're also
unlocking
upgrades that is like, and this is kind of what the redacted thing is about.
you are gaining information about your competitors.
And once that information is unlocked, it manifests as like damage buffs to them.
Okay.
So it's like, as you learn more about each of the competitors and unlock more of their story, you become it's easier to fight them because you know their weaknesses.
Yeah.
The game also has like a cool look to it.
It's it's like very self-shaded, very comic book style,
which I can't think of any other Hades likes that look like this necessarily.
Obviously, Hades touches on this, but the whole gameplay has that like same kind of comic book art style.
It's also set in the universe of Callisto Protocol.
Did you know that, Justin?
I didn't, and I don't know what that means.
They've really buried that.
It feels like...
I know.
I think intentionally.
I think Kraft in the studio, who's probably best known, I guess, for PUBG at this point, is trying to use some of the IP that they have to launch stuff.
And I think they've realized that the IP that they have doesn't necessarily carry a lot of cache.
G-Russ, do you think, considering they called this game redacted, they don't have a lot of cache bag?
Literally, no title is better than any title that they could come up with.
Callisto Protocol for the people who have already forgotten was the like Dead Spells Spiritual Success.
Sorry, thank you.
Wait.
You combine just space and dead cells into Dead Spells, which sounds like a fucking cool game.
I'm so amped amped about dead spells.
Fuck you, dude.
That sounds kick-axe.
Winston, drop some info about death spells.
Don't just get me all worked up.
Dead spells on the skin.
Does it use a bumper?
Are spells on the bumper are the triggers?
Just tell me that, at least.
Are the dead spells on the bumpers are the triggers?
I'm crazy about run-base fan.
It's a romanticy?
You're telling me it's also
fuck, dude.
There's angel romance in dead spells?
Fuck, I love this game.
Molyneux.
What?
He's bad, baby.
Molyneuxiana involves every time.
He's in the game.
It's funny.
It is on Rails, though.
We should mention that.
It's on Rails.
On Rails, FMV Romantic starring Peter Molyneux.
Fuck that.
What else are you doing?
I've been playing some good stuff.
I've been playing Pokemon TCG Pocket, which dropped on Halloween real quick.
It is a game about opening booster packs of Pokemon cards.
You get two a day and it's
without the mess, yes.
Without the mess.
When it's your time, every 12 hours, basically, you just open a booster pack.
It's your time.
The angel of death will come and say, how much time did you spend opening Pokemon cards?
And then you pick your pack, and then you get to drag your finger across the screen, tear it open.
Very satisfying.
You get some cards out of it.
And then there's like a bunch of missions and goals and quests and stuff to like collect certain cards there's like a lot of different ways to to to get cards and speed that are you buying them or is it just like so you can right like if you don't no it's free to two two a day are free um but then you have to have
two packs of five cards each um you there are lots of ways to speed that timer up uh
and you can also pay money basically to to speed that timer up if you want to there's also a premium membership you can get that like now there's a third pack a day and you get all access to all these different other quests to help speed it up.
The cool thing about the game is that it also includes
like a playable version of the Pokemon trading card game.
And it is way streamlined.
It's very, very, very streamlined, so much so that matches last like three to five minutes.
And a lot of times it's different rules from normal Pokemon?
So yes.
The biggest one is that there's no energy cards.
You just get one energy per turn that you can assign to any Pokemon that you want, which really speeds things up considerably.
And then like matches,
you only have to like knock out three Pokemon instead of, I think it's five in the main version of the game.
Anyway, it goes so fast.
It's so simple.
I've been playing it with Henry
and it is the perfect just like open it up while you're sitting on the toilet, open a pack of cards, maybe do a match, hop in, hop out.
It's not like amazing by any stretch of the imagination, but uh it is i don't know it's scratching that sort of like tcch itch for me what i really want to talk about is maybe my biggest surprise of the year of games and is that i picked ufo 50 back up when there was a brief lull in the uh in the releases and i was
like the new dragon age game by which i mean i did not like the new dragon age game and i was like you know there's a couple games in here i really liked it i liked party house i liked grimstone i liked pilot quest i'm just gonna like just dip into those and see how far I get.
And then I finished all those games and was like, well, I'll try another one.
And then I'll try another one.
And now I'm at 18 cherries, I think, out of 50.
That's right.
The fucking
immense amount of satisfaction I get out of picking up a game in that collection and trying it and saying, okay, like I'm not going to put this down until I get really good at it.
And every game, it feels like that that sort of arc is very achievable.
I try to do the Forex one that you recommended, Griff.
Just speaking of the arc.
Avianos.
Avianos.
That one was tough.
I will say this too.
Like, what's really cool, what I am really enjoying about UFO 50 is that the community around this game is quite small, but they are like really involved in like.
straight up schoolyard NES cheat codes level, like helping people figure out what to do.
So there's like certain strategies in Avianos that are more effective than others.
And so like, that's cool.
I cherried Avianos because I looked up like,
what am I missing here?
What are some like different strategies that work?
Once you get your, you know, feel for that.
That one really, really, really got its teeth into me.
The most satisfying one was Magic Garden, which is like the third game in the collection, I think.
I like that one.
Where you just run up, run around and you collect the little blobs and you have to cash them in and drop potions.
I played it and I fucking sucked at it so bad, but I I was like, there's something cool happening here.
And so, for maybe like four or five hours, I just played it on flights and while like chilling in a hotel room, getting better and better and better and better until finally, uh, on a flight home from a tour, I finally cherried it and it was so
good, verb, though.
I hate the verb.
If you could just not verb that again, cherry,
what do you not like about it?
Is it
sexual connotation to it?
That you have a very unpleasant sexual?
You cherry something.
Yeah, well,
I beat it as good as you could, as good as one can beat.
It's not sounding good to me.
That's fair.
That's fair.
Yeah, man.
I just,
I want to go back and do that episode over again because I feel like this game optimally requires
a mental shift and
an amount of investment into the games.
And if you are willing to do that, what is amazing about this collection is like all of the games are
able to reward you for that.
I fucking got the cherry on Mooncat.
Oh, I love Mooncat.
But it's also like a pretty obtuse game that I played for one minute.
And I was like, nope, not for me.
This is crazy.
Going out to the game.
So you decide which ones you're going to do this with, Griffin.
I think about which ones are
most easily doable, right?
So for Mooncat, like Mooncat, if you die, it just starts you over on the same screen you're on.
And in order to get the cherry on it, you just have to like beat it, beat the different routes that are.
Yeah, you don't need a perfect run.
Don't need a perfect run.
Very doable, right?
Then there's onion, onion delivery,
which fucking is brutal.
And I don't think I will ever cherry.
I tried that.
I was like, I don't like playing this.
I'm not.
This is too much.
I'll never cherry.
So you do have to like like it on some level or at least be like engaged with it enough.
You're like, let me see what else is going on here.
Yeah, right.
And that's so interesting to me because like my first pass through it, I was like, I'm going to look for the games that are of the genre and are familiar to me in a way that I'm really going to get into.
I don't like 4X strategy games, but I played Avianos and after a couple of rounds, I was like, there's something really cool here.
And I bet if I put more time into it, I can understand it.
And I did.
And that's awesome.
That's very, very, very, very cool.
There are a few games in there that are like aspirational games that I really want to do, but I know I would have to take extensive notes to be able to finish them.
One of them is Barbuda.
Barbuda.
I know I can beat Barbuda, but I got the cherry on Barbuda.
Nobody.
Good work.
But I know I would only be able to do it, and I would imagine this was the case for you if you like really.
Got a lot of notes.
Yeah, sure.
And then the other one is Mortoll 2, which is the open world version of Mortoll that also seems like design-wise totally my shit, but requires like really precise routing through it.
Yes.
Yes.
That one I have not even attempted to try and beat yet.
More Mortal 1 rules, though.
That's probably my favorite in the collection.
Yeah, man.
I could go on and on.
I think it would be fun to do another UFO 50 episode if you all would
ever think about getting back into it.
Because I do think
there is a ton going on here.
There's a ton to talk about.
And a lot of what is amazing about...
the collection and the games inside of the collection like really require you to want to
like an archaeologist like dig into them and figure figure out, like, figure it, figure them out.
It feels like a conversation between you and the real developers and fictional developers of these games.
And it is so, so satisfying once you can kind of let it get its hooks in you.
I think it could be a B segment down the line, but definitely it's going to show up in the game of the year conversation, right?
It has skyrocketed up my list considerably.
It is way, way, way the fuck up 50 games.
It's 50 whole games.
That's true.
Barbuda is number one.
Has anybody watched Shane Dusty Old Joints?
Well, I know you're setting me up for Hangover Square.
I'm trying to set you up for like an old classic.
It's an old classic.
Hangover Square.
I just, I brought it here because I felt like we didn't really do enough to celebrate Guy Fox Day this year.
Thank you.
And that's on us.
And, you know, we were supposed to remember this day in November, and we didn't.
We didn't even remember which day it was in November.
You know, I always forget which day in November to remember.
But Hangover Square is a classic, just nasty ass noir
set during Guy Fox Day.
And you got a dude who's like...
He's just trying to write some music.
He's trying to write some symphonies.
But every time he hears a discordant noise, he goes into like a fugue state.
And who knows what happens when
he's heard a discordant noise you know I don't know tell me because I haven't seen the movie it's getting trashy I'm not gonna tell you but here's the other thing I wanted to bring up is Fresh can I spoil World of Goo 2 for our audience
I guess so I think that's okay right heads up we're gonna spoil World of Goo 2 speaking of games to maybe go back to Jacob Geller released a video of games that contain their own sequels and I won't go into many of those games but one we've talked about on this show is the Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, which turns out to be a sequel to itself.
is mostly just more World of Goo levels at the beginning, which we talked about on this show, or one of these shows.
But at a certain point, it time travels.
into the distant, distant future, like thousands of years.
And suddenly World of Goo is now set on a train that is like kind of snow piercer style looping around the world endlessly and then it time travels again and suddenly you are just getting effectively sequels to world of goo including a like golfing world of goo and ultimately a cyberpunk pixel noir adventure game um
and it is
wild I don't know if everybody needs to play this, if they did not enjoy a World of Goo 2 as much as they'd hoped, like us, but this game is, I think it's like maybe like five or six hours long.
You can watch a playthrough of it on YouTube, and I strongly encourage it.
And I can definitely watch Jacob Keller's most recent video.
I'll put that in the newsletter, too.
And it makes it even more frustrating that they structured it the way they did with like hitting you over the head with the perfect run stuff if like forward progress was really what they wanted you to do yeah that's a good point of like
my number one complaint being that they hit that stuff so hard.
Yeah, yeah.
Anybody got anything else?
Yeah, just super duper quick.
I finished Dragon Age Velgard.
Without getting too negative, because I did like it enough to play the whole thing.
I think it runs out of good ideas before it runs out of content.
There's a there's a lot, a lot of just like content.
And if you're loving it and you're deeply into the characters and everything and you're enjoying all that stuff, there is a lot of it there.
But it's like not, it gets less engaging.
The difficulty and the powers and the abilities, it all kind of like levels off at a certain point.
And you can run down.
It also does a very unpleasant thing, I think,
unpleasant.
When you're about to start the last mission, it's like, hey, you're going to start the last mission.
And just so you know, here's how things are right now.
If you start right now.
A bunch of your people are going to die and most of the communities aren't going to help you because you haven't done enough quests.
And it's like, well,
I'm 25 hours in now.
So it's like, do you want to see the bad ending that we have for you at 25 hours?
Or do you want to invest another 10 if you blaze through cutscenes to see the good ending?
And it's like, well, gosh, guys, I don't love either of these actually.
I don't love either of these options.
I guess it would have been like in Mass Effect 2, you go on the suicide mission and like literally everyone dies.
I mean, it's like, it's, it's, and it's laying it out like you could finish it now, but like you wouldn't like it.
If you want the good ending, you have to do all the stuff.
And it's not like a your choices will be reflected, right?
It's not like a you have to go see how all these things connect.
It's you have to complete this if you want the happy version.
Did you have to pay us enough time to get the good ending?
And it's exactly the right game, is what I paid.
Did you get the sense that any of your choices were making like major changes to the story or not really?
It all makes major changes, but it all feels
like it's constructed around those choices, but not in a cogent way, but in a way that's very interactive.
It's like very responsive to you, but it doesn't necessarily feel like a cogent ending.
It feels like a bunch of response.
It's like how you could choose for any character to love you by choosing their love dialogue enough times.
It's like,
this isn't really interacting.
I mean,
it's branching, but only in the sense that like I chose which one I was going to hit the heart button a a lot on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, I also just wanted to say very quickly: uh, the Jackbox Survey Scramble is the new Jackbox product, and it I had not heard about it, and it's frigging great, and I'm thrilled because I love this kind of crap.
Rather than doing creativity or trivia or anything like that, it is survey-based
questions, single-word answers for the survey responses.
And all the games are built around that core idea.
So it's to give you an example, sign words that you would see on a sign at Disneyland.
Okay?
Bathroom.
Bathroom.
That's really good, Russ.
That's probably in the top 10, right?
So in one of the games, high, low, it's everybody's on their phones.
Everybody enters an answer that they think will be, like at first, you're trying to get the best.
So highest possible answer.
What's the best one?
And everybody goes around the room, does their best guess.
And then maybe later it'll be like, okay, now we we want the lower end of the
cholera, danger, death, poison, right?
Like whatever it is.
And then so you're trying to get a lower
one.
And so you're shooting for worse answers.
That's great.
There's a game where it's like a Pong style thing and you have a paddle here and your paddle is on a spectrum from like one to 100.
One being the best answers and 100 being the worst answers.
So if you want to return service on this ball, you have to find a really good answer to to the survey question or a really bad answer, depending on where you want the paddle to move to.
There's also like a speed game where everybody's trying to enter as many guesses as they can.
Um, for like uh, one round we had for that was like grandma names.
What's names of grandmas?
Ruth, Ruth, Gertrude, Russ.
I got to say, man, you're incredible.
This is now the third time, and it's not even a bit.
You just can't help yourself.
You have to.
And it's really, I love that.
Like, I love the
lack of pressure for just sitting around a room full of people.
And, and it's easy for kids too.
Kids can stumble into like,
you know, Mickey on Disneyland signs.
Oh, they're in the top three now.
They crushed it.
And the answers that you're inputting are folded into the data, which is evolving over time.
So as you play and return to it, the answers, even if you got the same question again, the answers may not even be the same because it's folding in all of this survey data as you as you play when it's like a low answer do you it needs to be something that was picked so it can't be like gibberish right it needs to be like you are rank one yes but you are adding it just by putting it once i see like yeah the one time you enter it for the first time it won't be on the list right but the next time the list is not a fixed number right there's 475 words that might be on disneyland sign i don't know how many votes something needs to get for it to get like traction as something that makes the list, but yeah.
No, that's so smart.
It's really, really fun.
I love Jackbox stuff, but I also hate like winning at party games or losing at party games or people getting frustrated with games.
And it's really like you can't get, you can't feel dumb or frustrated because
100 people didn't think the same thing as you.
You know what I mean?
It's, it's, it's great.
Real quick, just because I mentioned it and kind of talked around it earlier,
Karate Survivor is the vampire survivors like that I said earlier it takes too long to get going, but I want to mention it because it is very interesting.
It is a vampire survivors game but set
against like 1980s karate action movies and it is very melee oriented and the way that the combat works is there is a like
string of
film frames at the bottom like i think it's like six or seven individual frames And you, as you get those upgrades that you do in survivors games, you add a piece of combat as one of those frames.
And those pieces of combat that you add, so it's like a punch or a roundhouse or like a jumping kick, some of them complement each other.
And if you pair them together, you can create these combos.
And then the combat itself is melee-based.
So you have to really kind of get into
the flood of enemies that are coming at you because you're delivering these different, like, karate combos.
And as the game proceeds, you start to unlock the things that actually make it fun, which is like a great, especially Jackie Chan did a lot of this environmental combat.
So, any like dishes or a broomstick or a baseball bat or a vase that's lying around, you can turn into a weapon, or you can like roll over a table or slide under a piece of the environment.
And it gets really, really good.
The only issue is you really do have to kind of endure almost an hour of this game where key features just are not available, like the ability to like roll away from enemies.
So, if you can get through that, there is something really special here.
I think it will get patched.
It seems like balancing this game is totally doable.
And once that happens, it'll definitely be on my top kind of, if you like this game, you should try it out.
Yep.
Cool.
We talked about a lot of games this week.
We did.
Do it, punch.
Games.
Hey, speaking of, what did we talk about this week?
We talked about Windblown.
We talked about Dragon Quest III, HD 2D Remake, Redacted, Mario and Luigi, Brothership, Karate Survivor, Pokemon the Card Game Pocket, UFO 50, Dragon Age of the Veil Guard, Jackbox Survey Scramble, and the film Hangover Square.
You You can find all of those and more on our newsletter at besties.fan, including that YouTube video by Jacob Geller that I mentioned.
I want to thank the following patrons.
Patrons, we have Kevin, we have Spencer, we have Cage.
I think that's how you pronounce that.
Sorry.
And we have Emily.
Thank you for being patrons at patreon.com/slash the besties.
Thank you to everyone else who has supported it.
We've got a new episode of The Resties up.
We've got got this month's episode of The Bracket Battles up.
So that's very exciting.
Next week, we are talking about a game that I haven't fully discussed with everyone on this podcast, but I think it's going to be genuinely a game of the year contender.
I am totally smitten by this game, and it has the worst name maybe of the entire world.
Oh, you want to do a whole episode about this one?
Yes.
Yeah.
I think it's going to be good for a whole episode.
All right.
What's it called?
The game is called Echo Point Nova.
That's a great video game title, actually.
If you think about it.
If you think that now, but try to remember it in 90 minutes.
I had to text Russ twice.
Yeah, so the game is called Echo Point Nova.
It has pretty bad key art as well.
So ignore that.
But it rules and
crazy.
It's a great idea.
It's going to be really good.
It's wild that you're suggesting this Quake bot.
It's like the game we're going to test in here for it, man.
I'm really excited.
All right.
That is going to be next week's episode.
I hope you enjoy it.
I hope you are ready for it.
And I hope you will join us again next time for the besties.
Because shouldn't the world's best friends make the world's best games?
Besties
