The "Something Old, Something New" Week in Gaming

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

Windblown,

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. Dragon Quest 3 HD 2D remake.
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.

This episode of the Best These is sponsored by Aura Frames. The time has come again to talk about Aura Frames, which is a super awesome product.
Here's the deal.

You probably have someone in your life. Maybe it's a grandparent.
Maybe it's a parent.

Someone who doesn't understand technology, but they want pictures of you, they want new pictures of you, they want it all constantly updated in a digital picture frame format.

That is where Aura comes in. The really cool thing about Aura frames, you can get it.
You can log in and you can upload all of the photos to the frame before they even get it.

So all they need to do is plug it into the wall and they will be good to go. You can even set it up so that it's pulling down new photos from the internet before they get it.

So again, super easy for them. And suddenly you are the best child in the world.

If that sounds good to you for a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carver matte frames, named number one by Wirecutter by using promo code besties at checkout.

That's A-U-R-A frames.com. Promo code Besties.
This deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast. So order yours now to get it in time for the holidays.

Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.

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.

Well, no, 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 the layering of powers so you're like building a power set that would yeah with a meta 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 it's a hack and slash roguelike i think yeah i don't think that's yeah you're right no no no i understand yes no i i i get the instinct because 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 a 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 roles in Dead Cells. Anyway,

I think it's an interesting distinction. Let's set up

what the game actually is before

you do this, Russ. Okay, fine.
It's an isometric broke 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 something you're fighting a bunch of guys.

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,

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 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 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 will 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 an 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 from

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

tools and weapons and

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 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.

Well, and here's where it is different than segment B and RPG. Yes, I get it.
RPGs get 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 it's happened in another game I played recently, which is like the like

act, 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 decides, 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 you 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,

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.

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.

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,

the 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.
That's 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.

Some of these guys

no, I'll say that I didn't, I was actually trying to rush the tempo too much.

Like if you range is a pretty good option in this game, and it's not something that I would 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 hook this is the thing that's the hook that you don't know and i honestly the game is not very good at telling you that there's multiplayer in this game yeah but how's it how's it how does it work it's cool as hell can i tell you how it works because it's really cool rad you go in and you're just basically playing the game in in tandem with each other and you get an upgrade and i i was a little unclear russ on whether or not we were each getting upgrades or we were like sharing or splitting them like it seems like they were instanced unless you drop something on the ground, in which case anyone can pick it up.

But the it the uh 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 the battles are like smaller.

They're more condensed than a Hades. Like they're more like

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 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 sudden death. So if you get hit once while 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 so 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, 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 go?

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.

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 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 Russ.

Yeah. If someone could just recreate the Sistine Chapel ceiling and me reaching out to touch Justin's hand to bring him back to life, that would be fun.

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.

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

sudden death thing. Okay, so that being said, trying to go back to it after Russ and I did that, I found found it a lot less engaging.

For me personally, trying to play solo after it was that fun to play multiplayer, like, I felt like it was not showing as well for me. And is it up to four players?

It's three. So it maxes out at three.
I've played three with randoms for what it's worth.

And that worked totally fine. I didn't feel any lag when I was playing with Justin or with randoms.
I think it was. Which is impressive because it's really fast.
Really fast.

I mean, it was definitely designed from the ground up to, 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 fire on a beat. And if you fire in to 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 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, I'm 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 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 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 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 it's 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 a hundred 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. 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 look and feel of dead cells. Sure.

Feels like a canceled MOBA.

That was Justin's note, which is

very 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 me.
It's pretty. 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 Adventure. 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 and don't like that look and feel. But the feel of it feels cool.
I haven't liked the way Davis looked for five years.

I don't remember.

No, you know what? Are you trying to think of a game you'd 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?

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. I think it's a good thing.

It really is. There's a lot of, there is a lot of really smart ideas here that I 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.

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.

This episode is brought to you by Dell Alienware. Alienware's biggest sale of the season lets you unleash peak performance at Cyber Monday savings.

Get the best prices of the year on select Alienware PCs like the groundbreaking Alienware 16 Area 51 gaming laptop, taking performance to the next level with Intel Core Ultra processors.

Plus, you can save on all the latest accessories and displays like the Alienware 32 4K QD OLED gaming monitor. A fantastic monitor, I know, because it is the one that I use.

You want to go check out all this great stuff? Visit alienware.com slash deals before the lowest prices of the year go dark. That's alienware.com slash deals.

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, unlike Final Fantasy. Yes, which I is.
How many people do you think we're listening and are like, oh, now I know what you're doing? Now I get it.

Now I understand.

Duns. This is

an NES man. It's done so many fucking slimes.
Came out on the NES. So

Dragon Warrior 1

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 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

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 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 in its era and 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. You've been Griffin-Pilled.
Yeah, 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, right?

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 I 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 three sounded terrifying.

But the game looks good. Looks and sounds good.
Before I go further, can you explain like 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 worlds. And that's what that 2D.
Jason Treyer had to explain this to me because I thought the title was insane.

It is insane. They're even explaining it.
It's still insane. 2D, what is it? HD2D? 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 like when you see that in a

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 like 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, 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?

No, 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 going to 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 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, 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- 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'm just enjoying like seeing exactly what you're talking about, Krypton, 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, 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 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 like a notebook, turn off or ignore the like waypointing and spend the entire time actually having an adventure.

And that's where it like hit from like hit in my head of like, no 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 like cryptic hints of like, hey, there might be a heart on a peninsula.

Whatever 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 JRPGs 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

to encapsulate.

It is it like every area of the map is like sort of a microcosmic version of like a real world like 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 dynamic.

I don't think I'm the the right person to describe whether or not that is true.

I will say no accents that are like nothing like wherever they're from. 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 cool cool cool for

you can't see right now

Before we close what else would you like to say no my only kind of I guess warning for people

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 edge because you aren't paying attention because it's a chill-out game. And suddenly you are

one, two, three lower levels. And you have to be careful.

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 gonna 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 the 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. There are big breakpoints to hunt down to like make 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,

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 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 1989 and you go into your local funkal land 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.

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 deductive reasoning, not a quick sword to defeat your enemies.
All is darkness.

The dragon Lloyd.

The dragon Lloyd. The Dragon Lloyd.
The Dragon Lloyd. Has captured

the princess and stolen Erd Rick's powerful ball of light. This

kick's ass.

You are Erdrick's heir. It's now there's no space between you.
Yeah, now it's just Erdrick.

To you has fallen the most dangerous

dad.

Please, 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, 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 sounds like dynamite.
It sounds dynamite. And the box heart is just fuck ass.

Oh, that is

a dope anymore. 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 Arnold Robinson, I'm going going to talk a little bit about uh marioigi 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 um

here's the thing uh i think nintendo has learned the lesson that maybe reimagining the combat of a mario rpg every single time they make a game uh is not the best idea uh 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 Marion 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 Marian 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 this shy guy kind of sounds like he's dealing drugs that's pretty funny yeah and so they don't really you don't get that level of like enjoyment out of it um 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 um

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 uh i hope this doesn't like doom the future of the brothership franchise i i actually heard that both remakes of the the two rpg remakes that they put out in the last 12 months have sold better than this game at launch so uh i worry what this uh bodes for the future but kind of a kind of a letdown i'm i'm definitely disappointed but yeah

uh the other game i wanted to talk about is a game called Redacted, which I know that Justin. Ah,

this is a good one. Yeah, I have

really cool ideas. Interesting.

It is another.

What did we decide? You're not allowed to call it a Hades-like because everybody shot me down and they were like, actually, Justin. It's 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.
It's too specific of a genre, but yes, it is the style of 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,

which makes things very interesting.

And then eventually 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.

And then you're obviously no longer chasing them because you've killed them. You are also able to create hazards for them in the same way.
You can slow them down

by choosing

some sort of hazard. Is there a multiplayer component to this where you're

just single player? I was going to say that seems like it would be, but it's just. But

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.

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.

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 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 is probably best known, I guess, for PUBG at this point, is trying to use some of the IP that they have to like launch stuff.

And I think they've realized that the IP that they have doesn't necessarily carry a lot of cachet upon it.

G-Russ, do you think, considering they called this game redacted, that they don't have a lot of cachet today? Literally, no title is better than any title that they could come up with.

Callistro Protocol, for the people who have already forgotten, was the like Dead Spell spiritual success. Dead space.
Sorry, thank you. Wait.

You combine just dead space and dead cells into dead spells, which sounds like a fucking cool game, Chris. I'm so amped about dead spells.
Fuck you, dude. That sounds kick-axe.

Drop some info about dead spells. Don't just get me all worked up.

Dead spells on the bus. 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 bumper to the triggers?

I'm crazy about run base fan

it's a romantic you're telling me it's also

fuck dude there's angel romance in dead spells

fuck i love this game

molin use

what he's bad baby

involved every he's in the game plant a tree it's most

It is on Rails, though. We should mention that.
It's on Rails.

On Rails, FMV romantic starring Peter Molyneux. Bad.

Fucked. 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 fake 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

get cards and speed that timer. Are you buying them or is it just like so? You can, right? Like if you don't, no, it's free.
Two

a day are free.

But then

two packs of five cards each.

There are lots of ways to speed that timer up.

And you can also pay money basically 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. So 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 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 it is, I don't know, it's scratching that sort of like TCG 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

by which it means he didn't 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.

I liked Party House. I liked Grimstone.
I liked Pilot Quest. I'm just going to 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,

this one was tough. Avianos.
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, what is, I'm, what am I missing here? What are some like different strategies that work?

Once you get your, uh, you know, feel for that one, 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. It's like

where you just run up, run around, and you collect the little blobs and you have to cash them in and drop some potions.

Uh, I played it and I sucked at it so bad, but 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

fucking

good, Varbio. 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?

Very unpleasant sexual connotation. You cherry something.
Yeah. Well,

I beat it as good as you could. As good as one can beat it.

It's not sounding good to me to hear.

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 into You decide which ones you're going to do this with, Kirfin.

I think about which ones are

most easily doable, right? So for Mooncat, like Mooncat, if you die, 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.

You don't need a perfect run. You don't need a perfect run.
Very doable, right? Then there's

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 lovable 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 yeah one of them is barbuda barbuda i know i can beat barbuda but got the cherry on barbuda no beat 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 had a lot of notes yeah sure yeah and then the other one is mortoll 2 yeah which is the open world version of mortoll yeah 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. Mortoll won 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 if you all would

You know ever think about getting back into it because I do think there is a 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 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. It's 50 games.

It's 50 whole games. That's true.

Barbuda is number one.

Can I? 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

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 no noise he goes into like a fugue state and who knows what happens when he's 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 uh i'm not going to 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 going to spoil world of goo 2 with that speaking of games uh 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.

World of Goo 2

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.

This is good. I wish that

it is

wild. I don't know if everybody needs to play this, if they did not enjoy a World of Gucci as much as they had 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.

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.
You know what I mean? My number one complaint being that they hit that stuff so hard.

Yeah, yeah. Um, anybody got anything else? Yeah, our just super duper quick.
Uh, I finished Dragon Age Velga.

Um,

on 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's a lot of it there.

But it's like not, if it gets less engaging, the difficulty and the powers and the abilities at 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 gonna die and most of the communities aren't gonna 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 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 a paid attack?

Did you get the sense to get the good ending? And it's exactly the correct game, is what I picked.

Did you get the sense that any 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 lot on.
Yeah. Yeah.

I also just wanted to say very quickly,

the Jackbox Survey Scramble is the new Jackbox product. And 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?

Everybody goes around the room, does their best guess, and then maybe later it'll be like, Okay, now we want the lower end of this. Cholera, 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 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 gertrude russ i gotta 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 play.

When it's like a low answer, it needs to be something that was picked. So, it can't be like gibberish, right? It needs to be like

a rank one. Yes, but you are adding it just by putting it once.

Like 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

a hundred people didn't think the same thing as you. You know what I mean?

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.

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 Karate Survivor, Pokemon the Card Game Pocket, UFO 50, Dragon Age the Veilgard, Jackbox Survey Scramble, and the film Hangover Square.

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 wanted 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 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. Oh, you want 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 look at it, 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 crazy thing.
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 discuss next week.

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.
I hope you will join us again next time for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

Besties