UFO 50 with special guest Jason Schreier!

Guys, I messed up so bad.

I

misread the game we were supposed to be playing this week, and I did play USO50.

And that one is

you play as your favorite comedians:

Jane Cook, Bob Hope, Bob Hope, Drew Carey.

Drew Carey is a good pull.

You go around, you perform for all the brave military heroes, and you get points for every laugh you get, and points for every tear because sometimes they say stuff that makes them think of home.

But I did platinum it.

So

is that worth anything?

Did you stop all wars by platinuming it?

I did tell a joke as Dane Cook that was so good that all wars stopped.

Okay.

That is necessary for the platinum.

Can you tell the joke right now?

Oh, yeah.

Did you remember any of the jokes?

Well, it's, I mean, it's early.

So it's like, all you hear is like,

because it's like 8-bit graphics.

But like

the way the little pixelating show says it, it seems like it probably busted him up.

Yeah.

And it's the 50 because you're going to 50 different.

The game costs 50.

Who is that?

I just stopped up on this call.

No.

A fifth person is a panic.

That is how he gets the scoops.

He's just on every call.

I just

listened to every podcast

before it publishes.

Wow.

I don't hit right there.

Right there.

That was it.

That was it.

For everybody who's asking, that was Bob Hope.

This is a

USO 50 episode.

We are doing it.

Bing Crosby, come on right out.

Ring-a-ding-ding.

Ten years ago, we had Bob Hope, Steve Jobs.

Now we have no hope, no jobs,

no McElrier.

Limited Najimi.

Limited access to Najimi.

Thanks, cancel culture.

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

My name is Griffin Macra.

I know the best 30 to 40 games of the week.

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

My name is Boss Frostchick and I know the best games of of the week.

Welcome to the besties where we talk about this latest and greatest in home interview.

Hey, I didn't get to go.

It's a vital, you'd go last.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, you're going to be a good guy.

You go after it because you're such a special guest.

After the guest,

it's easier to cut out that show.

And

now he's ruined my whole flow.

It's Jason Schreier from the internet.

Hey, my name is Jason Schreier, and I'm here to shill a book.

Hell yeah.

The Scoop Smith, they call him.

Yeah.

Most people write one book and they're like, I get it.

Not Jason Schreier.

He'll write more.

You can't stop him from writing books.

What's your, what do you shit?

Let's shill up top and then chill at the end as well.

We will shill up top and at the end.

It's a shill sandwich here on the besties.

Yum.

My new book is called Play Nice the Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, a video game.

Coconuty.

So it's not a weather book.

It is not a weather book, although I would love to write a book about the weather.

And each page is just a different forecast or like a different day's weather.

Has anyone ever written that?

It's called an almanac.

This is an almanac.

Does it have the weather for each

previous day?

Yeah, you should read up.

Somebody said you care about it.

I should become an almanac writer.

How many cheat codes for Diablo?

Is it this one?

Yeah, Overwatch 2 Pro Strats or what's up?

We do.

It's a guide.

It is a guide to all of the Blizzard games.

It'll show you how to buy the most cards in Hearthstone.

All right.

Legendaries.

Yes.

It'll show you.

I mean, that's the way to win in Blizzard games these days is just spend the most money.

So that'll be fun.

Yeah, and that pro tip comes straight from Bobby, right?

Are you doing audiobooks?

We do have an audiobook.

It is not me reading it.

Oh,

it is Ray Chase, best known as the subway announcer in Persona 5.

Also, like Noctus in Final Fantasy or whatever, but he also.

Yeah, the others have two.

Yeah.

For a second, I thought you got the stand clear of the closing doors guy, which would have been really impressive.

Holy crap.

That would have been great.

Stand clear of video game news.

Well,

don't knock this book till you've tried it.

Okay, so we did.

I forgot that this is the way it works.

Is I say the name of the game.

Yeah, we're also talking about a video game.

That hasn't happened.

This week we're talking about UFO 50.

Chris Plant, what's that in detail?

UFO 50, Derek U, John Perry, many other developers, they are all back because they said, what if instead of making one video game, we made 50?

What if the experience of signing onto Steam could be a video game, but make it the NES?

And we're going to talk about it right after the break.

Hey, UFO 50, I can't believe this actually came out because I kind of assumed it just wasn't going to come out.

Can we get a

like

one minute long synopsis of the history?

Because I feel like this has been a known quantity for me, even though I haven't followed it.

I do podcasts with people who have followed it very, very closely.

Jason, you were probably there when they came up for the idea.

Like, what?

How are you?

You were on the call.

I was on their podcast as they like listening secretly.

Yeah, it's a cool thing.

It's like Derek Yu and this guy, John Perry, who Chris mentioned before, they're these childhood friends who grew up together making games.

And they had this wild, ambitious idea to do this compilation of 50 games and brought in a bunch of other designers to help out as well.

And the concept is really cool.

It's like this idea is that

there was this console in the 1980s that none of us had heard of called the LX, and this company called UFOsoft that actually made 50 games back then.

And now we're discovering them for the first time.

And there's an entire fictional backstory behind the company.

And

when you open up the game, you get the selection screen,

the Ape Its theme, as Chris said.

And you can look at the description for each of these games and it'll give you like a little tidbit about when it was made and like some funny, pithy description.

Like the designer did this on his own in his attic for a year or something like that.

And it's super fun.

It's really cool to just kind of dig into it.

I also heard, because I know for sure Derek got started in making these smaller games on like Tigsource and things like that, and kind of got to the point where he felt like

selling those sorts of smaller games wasn't a viable property.

And maybe the approach was to sort of bundle them all together

to make it like more of a cohesive product that people would actually buy.

I love what an analog the whole package is to basically the progression of games development on the NES.

Like

the first game that is on the list is called Barbuda.

It's probably going to be a fevered point of conversation in this very call because I think it's the worst game in the collection and I know Rust Bear is

impossible that you can say that authoritatively.

It is

so rough and so slow and so chunky and it looks so bad compared to the later games in the collection.

And that is because when the nes came out people were like so it's just like a stronger commodore 64 right we're just gonna keep making our shitty commodore 64 games on it right and so for like the beginning of the eds history you get these like pretty

rough marriages i will say the nes thing the nes thing to me

i understand the the easy comparison there and it makes sense some of this is like that but to me and and we did not have one of these growing up but to me what it feels like is a commodore 64 where like you had these, this scale of game that didn't have to be complete beginning, middle, and end.

I'm thinking of like, for example, there's one game in the collection where you are hosting a party, and each part, that game's good.

It's called party house.

You're hosting a party, and there's different types of guests you can get on your roster, and you don't know who's going to show up when you answer the door.

But you're sort of deck building where the guests can give you like more popularity that you can recruit use to recruit guests or more money that you could use to upgrade your house and you're like building a rollodex of people it's it wouldn't be a full game like but that it's it is fully five levels and a and an endless it would be like a computer like i think you you would have seen this as like shareware or something like that a long long time ago yeah i i see what you mean especially spiritually in terms of the designers that would be making the games.

And I think that's, that some of these games feel very pre-Atari Crash, and some of them feel very post.

Yeah, and the type of games that you're talking about are the type of games that were being made when you know three people who didn't even games weren't a thing, like we didn't know what they were, they could be anything, so people were just like, Yeah, I'm gonna try to create a game about party planning, right?

And I will make it.

And then I think especially the back half of this game becomes much more of the Sega, uh, Master System, the SNES, and a few other kind of variations of, okay, we know what a video game is.

There's actually like, I think like a sequel in this there's several.

There are a couple.

Caspinella.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're right.

And in the way that you can see those games build, I think kind of gets.

There's crossovers too where like in Pilot Quest, you are fixing up the ship from the like the shooter type games.

Okay, we have to we have to talk at least about a few of the games, ASAP, and Pilot Quest is as good of a place as it can be.

Yeah, Pilot Quest is an idol game in a sense.

It's sort of like a hybrid between idol and Star Tropics.

Star Tropics, yeah.

Let's say Zelda 1 for a game that people have actually played.

Wow.

Okay,

yeah.

People listening to our video game podcast probably don't know about Star Tropics.

Yeah.

Hey, welcome aboard, everybody.

I hope you enjoyed the football games on Sundays.

So anyway,

it's a cross of Star Tropics and an idol game

where you are leveling up your action yo-yo and then going out out and getting more Zordnaks or whatever the fuck, and bringing them back and upgrading your camp.

And what's cool and kind of neat is that you should play this one first because it is an idle game, but it only works while you're actively playing the UFO 50.

So while you are playing other UFO 50 games, the timer is still going up.

So it is, it is, it is a, but that's just like, I don't know, that's a really fun idea.

And that is not something that would have existed at that time period.

This is going to be a very difficult game to talk about.

Can we just go round the horn and just like rattle off like one of your favorites?

Yeah.

Let's start with Jason as a guest.

I want to hear what you got.

Have you guys played Attatrix?

Yes.

I found it.

Yes.

That's my favorite one.

Oh, really?

I beat the entire thing.

Holy shit.

24-level campaign.

So that is a game.

It's kind of like, I don't know.

It's like a cross between like chess and like a real-time strategy game.

I've never played an auto-battler, but it kind of feels like an auto-battler, too.

Basically, you have

you're playing on two sides.

There's the red and the blue.

You're on the left, you're the red, and you're trying to take out the blue unless you play multiplayer.

And then you can play against two, like someone else.

And you have little units that get summoned every few seconds.

And every few seconds, they automatically move forward.

And you have to kind of position them in the optimal way to take out your opponent's little units and then get to his castle to damage it and take away its health.

So then you win the game.

And it's really, really cool.

You have to kind of balance the strategy of like figuring out that you're going to use these shield dudes to block the arrows with this kind of frantic pace that it goes at because you won't have enough time to do everything you want to do each round.

You just have to kind of make quick decisions.

And it's really fun for someone like me because I'm a big RTS guy.

I'm like a StarCraft II addict and

was like grew up playing Warcraft and stuff.

And so this is who made those games.

Oh, a little company called Blizzard that is documented in the upcoming book Play Nice, The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment.

Available October 8th.

Pre-order now.

It's really cool.

Attachx is probably my favorite.

And then the other one I really like that I'm sure you guys got into too is, God, what's the name?

Vergain or something?

It's like the Metroid one.

Oh, yeah.

Gravity Shift.

Not the, you're not, not the Dino.

Not Warfare.

Van's one.

No, it's.

Hold on.

Let me.

Oh, oh, yes.

The one where you can invert.

It's a Metroid.

Yeah, you flip the gravity.

You can invert gravity.

Oh, like XXX, whatever that game is.

Vanguard.

Sorry.

Vanger.

That's the name of it.

Vanger.

What about you?

Plant?

Any ones that you really don't like?

I mean, for me, Seaside Drive was my favorite

by far.

Try and describe that one because

that one's really weird.

It's such a sick idea.

So

you are on an auto-scroll, it's basically an auto-scroll schmup in a weird way, but you are in a car stuck to the bottom, and you can shoot up into the air in kind of like 180 directions, or you can shoot behind you or in front of you.

The problem is, as you shoot, you lose strength, your bullets.

There's like a power gauge at the bottom, and to refill that power gauge, you have to like slam on the brakes and skid out to the back left of the screen.

So you're constantly being motivated to drive fast forward into like kind of the thrall of the combat while shooting everything, and then slam the brakes and reloading, basically reloading the brake.

Reloading, basically.

Yeah, that's a great way of putting it.

And it, it especially has that Sega

look that that it's perpetually,

you know, like,

yeah, it, it, it's always um,

dusk is setting, you happen to be in Malibu, the sky is somehow purple and orange, you know.

Um, it's, it's so good,

uh, Russ, anyone see you?

What

games that release

from From the UK 50K.

What are we doing right now?

Tell us about the first one that you like, despite it being so fun.

I like two games.

I'm going to talk about two games.

So the first one that I like that is not fun is called Barbuda.

It's the very first game.

Barbuda is cool.

I like the game.

It's the very first game in the package, and it is incredibly unwelcoming because you move at a snail's pace and you have limited lives and there's no saves and there's a giant fucking map.

It's like, it's basically, I love Animal Well, I've talked about it a million times.

It is like, if Animal Well was made back then, because the game is

90 years ago.

The game is filled with secrets and hidden little things that you really have to like examine the environment very carefully.

But because there's no saving and limited lives and things like that, you start from scratch if you die all the way.

When you start Barbuda,

you can walk to the left or to the right.

And if you walk to the left, the game begins.

If you walk to the right, the very first thing that happens is you hit a trap and the part of the ceiling falls down and kills you.

Like instantly.

Like if you walk, if you do the very first thing that you instinctually do in video games, you will die instantly.

And I normally hate stuff like this, but it's so brutal that I found it intriguing because it's not like it's hard.

It's like impossible.

Unless you are doing exactly what you need to do, in which case you start to get these little cracks.

Like you start to chip away these little like, okay, wait a minute.

If I'm able to do this, then maybe, because even the way to proceed is not clear.

I think it's genuinely quite bold that this collection starts with Barbuda, because it is there is a lot of purposeful antiquity in a lot of these games' designs, right?

And

I think some of the games suffer for it, but as a whole sort of like picture, if you look at it comprehensively, it's really, really interesting what they've done here.

Barbuda is the most antiquated, the most punishing.

Here's a theory, though.

What if they don't want you to stay too long in one game?

Like, the hotel.

I bounce off Barbuda after two tries.

You go try something else, right?

I think it's intentional.

It's like, yeah, okay.

Not every game's for everybody, right?

Clearly, you didn't like that.

What I was terrified, I was like, if they're all like this, and we've been like...

bumping this game up, like excited about talking about this game, and they're all like this.

Holy shit, this is going to be a blood bath.

I think that's an important note because I do think a lot of people have said, oh, a lot of these games games are designed, like, it's a fun experiment, but it's not really a fun game or meant to be fun.

And I don't think that's true of these games.

I do think that they demake them to some extent to like pay homage to the era.

But I also think a lot of that is like part of the design is the tension of like every pixel mattering in Barbuda.

To the point where I spent like three hours playing that game.

Like I did not put it down for a while.

That's crazy.

That's crazy.

There is something enjoyable about finding the secrets.

And I think one key thing, I think probably the main reason it's the first one is because it's kind of teaching you that there's more to this whole experience than what's on the surface.

And it's very much like, hey, every single little thing is hidden.

There's so many secrets in this, which is also true of the grander UFO 50 experience, which it turns out has all this crazy metagame stuff where I'm sure you guys saw the terminal.

You can enter these codes.

One of them unlocks like a new game.

I think players are still trying to figure out everything that's going on in this whole package.

My theory from the beginning, ever since I first heard about this, is that there's some like backstory that gets super like evil, and there's some crazy twist in Addison.

I don't want any more games.

I don't think it should unlock more games.

I think it should get rid of

UFO.

I do want to say, though,

when we were talking in DMs about the terminals, and I implied that it was going to unlock another 50 games, Chris Plant bought it, Hook, Line, and Sinker.

He was convinced.

Oh, what a sucker.

I mean, it did take ages.

Because I like fun.

I'm sorry.

I like joy.

I like to dream.

Russ, what was your second game?

Okay, the other game I want to talk about is called More Tall.

It is so, it's probably my favorite from a design perspective.

And just like playing it, I think it's fucking genius.

You basically start, it's a side-scrolling platforming game.

You have limited lives.

You have like 30 lives.

And you play as these little soldiers that you can sacrifice so you can cause them to explode or you can cause them them to turn into stone and you use their corpses as platforms to progress through the level.

It has like dark lemmings.

Yeah, dark limmings.

Lemmings is already pretty dark.

What's really cool about this is that it has save points at the end of each level, so it'll save the number of lives you had.

So you can go back to previous levels and try to improve the number of lives you used to have more lives later on in the run.

So that feels very modern to me,

but I was kind of blown away.

There's a sequel to that.

It's like even headier and crazier, so yeah, I skipped to that one.

It's crazy.

That one's no, I played them both, but that one was wild because that one has like different classes, so you can sacrifice to create a teleporter, for example.

That one does not have a safe system, though.

So, that one is way more punishing.

They actually allude to that in the history of the description, saying this was the original intent of the game, was no saving.

But if you use the teleporter, that's essentially the same thing for that one.

I have two quick ones: one, Valbrace,

which is a dungeon crawler,

that sort of like first-person perspective.

You're going through this maze of corridors and monsters and traps and treasure chests.

Kind of like an Ultima thing.

Sort of.

Wizardry, yeah.

It's very much in that style.

When you do get into combat, it kind of turns into punch out.

It's not that like stationary.

You just hit attack over and over again, and you and the monster trade blows.

You dodge side to side, and you can block with a shield, and you have to time out your attacks.

You can cast spells using like these glyphs that you have to like, that you will find on walls and then you have to input with the D-pad.

It's just fun to play.

I've really enjoyed playing it.

My other one that is probably my favorite is Mini and Max, which is

one of the last games.

That was really neat.

Imagine Chippendale's Rescue Rangers, where you can run around this very cartoonish world, jump on boxes, and pick them up and throw them.

That is very much the gameplay loop.

But the thing is, you are a girl who has been locked in a small storage cupboard.

And that storage cupboard is the world of the game because at any time you can hold down and you will shrink.

Now, all of a sudden, you are down in this box of the game, right?

Now, all of a sudden, that potted plant you were standing on is now like enormous and you can explore it.

But it's also sort of a search action game because there's a ton of like unlockables to find.

There's a ton of abilities that you can find.

A ton of mysteries to solve and like sort of quests.

It is a very, very deep game.

uh and i don't want to spoil anything but it it goes much much much deeper than you would assume uh after playing it for like a few minutes i put a a few hours into that one and i adore it uh i feel like that's true of a lot of these games much much deeper than you would expect yeah

so i i i i'm really struggling with this as a package though and i think this is something that we have

I think there's so many individual experiences in this collection that are really, really neat to have.

I think I am struggling with the return rate

of time that I invest versus

the pleasure that I am deriving from the experience.

I think that

I'm in this weird spot where even if I enjoy a game pretty well, I start to think like, I wonder if I would enjoy other ones more though.

I kind of want to see what else is here.

And I don't feel really compelled or incentivized to spend too long with any one of the games.

And it's like, I don't know that the game wants me to do that either.

The game seems kind of ambivalent as to whether or not I keep playing them.

And so I find it a little bit directionless, I think, is because if I spend too much time on any one game, it starts to feel like...

Not all of them can sustain that level of interest.

Like, not all of them should are worth that.

So yeah, like I don't know how it was to play.

I'll tell you what I did to sort of conquer this because I think the Steam comparison is good.

I played Conquered.

I played Conquered.

What I did was the first time I played this, I basically went through over the course of several days and played 20 minutes of every game.

give or take 10 or 20 minutes just to like understand which what they were and i used the favorites you can favorite games i use the favorites system to basically say like oh this is the game i want to play this is the game i want to play and by the end of the 50 50, I had about 15 games.

And what I've been doing since I narrowed that down is I just use the favorites list.

Like there's a way you can filter by favorites.

And I've just been bouncing around a few of those.

And in that process, I've spent, I've finished three of them.

Porgy is one that I finished.

And I spent like eight hours playing Porgy.

But you really, I think it's better if you limit the field of view.

Because every time you land on that page of 50 games, you're like, what the fuck?

I'm just going to keep on bouncing around.

But I think if you limit the field of view, you end up playing and going a lot deeper into the games.

And I do think a lot of them are going to be.

What I'm saying, though, is a lot of you creating.

I understand what you're saying, but I'm hearing you creating a meta structure that should have been in place.

Well, no,

I'll build on what Fresh is saying, because I agree with both of you.

I think this game is a bit of a mood ring.

about your taste in video games on two levels.

One, I think when we are all talking about our our favorite 50 video games and how often one of us says a game and the rest of us are like, really?

That's the one you liked?

It reveals what your tastes are.

It's not surprising that I picked the action schmuck because when you fall in love with one of these games, you are having to make way for a lot of problems because they feel like old NES games.

You have to make way for the poor controls or the lack of save states like in Fresh's game.

Not surprising you liked it.

It's a big, weird Metroidvania.

So like, i think if you have ever wanted to figure out what is your taste in video games you will figure it out on this because you are going to have to be okay

with the game being a little incomplete and it will reveal that but then the second part is i think the game on the top level is really revealing of

rust rush dick type of game players which are people who do not want

what you're talking about.

The like, here's what the game is.

They want the like, okay, it's a mystery, and I'm gonna have to create a list, and I'm gonna have to write it down, and I'm gonna have to text my friends, and we're going to figure it out together.

And there's a secret code, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Where like, I, I aspire to be that person, but in reality, I am the person who's like signs onto Steam and sees 50 games.

And it's like, I would love to play all of those, and then I don't play any of them.

And I like

end up playing, I don't know, crazy texts or something.

This is like, but I guess I feel, I feel like I'm struggling with the fact that this game is leaning into

like compulsions and tendencies that I don't necessarily love about myself as somebody who plays games, right?

Like,

I would like a slow unravel of these games.

So I am in, like, I am forced, forced is the wrong word, but incentivizes me.

But like...

A slow rollout where I can spend time with each of the games individually and figure out which ones are like worth my time and which ones I'm not going to click with.

So the game that I assumed this was going to be like was Retro Game Game Challenge DX, I think is what it was called, which was a...

Yeah.

What was that, a DX?

Based on the TV show.

And it was supposed to be like the game channel.

What is it?

Takashi's game challenge.

I can't remember what the name of the meeting is.

But anyway, the idea was that it was this home retro console and there was this like sentient

game character who like led you through these fictional classic games and there were like challenges and as you did good in one, it would unlock the next.

And there was very much a progression to it.

And that's not the case at all with this game.

It is literally drops you.

And then here's a screen with 50 games on it.

Fucking go nuts.

I kind of agree with Justin in that I think I would have preferred as a,

I don't know, as a structural experience, like some, I mean, any kind of structure, right?

Instead, what I've come to kind of realize is like.

I have to be to enjoy this game, to enjoy this experience, because I didn't, guys, like I did not really enjoy UFO 50 for the first few hours hours I played it just kind of like bouncing around games is like playing a game saying like well I didn't like that so that one's done I'm moving on from that just scrolling through the boxes and seeing like what's a cool title Grimstone sure oh shit a Wild West dragon quest game like I'm gonna play this for a while oh I liked that but let's see what else is out there like you have to

in loot in because there is no structure you have to you do have to make it yourself and while I would have preferred the other way around I also think it's like pretty fucking interesting that it's like a.

Oh, 100%.

Yeah.

It's not even like a critique, I guess.

It's like it's so often.

It's a warning, right?

It's like, it's not going to be.

It's not going to be this.

There is a version of this game that is much,

of this collection rather, that is much more user-friendly, right?

That would give you any fucking tutorials aside from A jumps and X shoots for any of the games because some of them are fucked up and weird with no sort of X, but but that is very much kind of what it's going for.

And frankly, if you played Spelunky and you expected anything like that from this game, then you are a, then you are, did not pay very much attention to the lessons, the hard lessons that Spelunky was trying to teach us.

I think the real lesson of this game that it's trying to teach us is what it's like to live in a world without games media and how important it is to have podcasters and YouTubers and guides to help you discern the wheat from the chaff.

This is genuinely cool.

Jason is kind of kidding.

I like that.

He's kind of kidding on the square, but I 100% agree

in one sense that

I feel like that if I was laying out this collection end-to-end

and I was saying like, okay, these are the ones that you would enjoy.

These are the ones

that may not click as well for you.

That experience, if I wasn't a critic or somebody who needed to synthesize my opinion about this package and like consume enough of it to have a viewpoint about it.

If I didn't have that pressure, I might be, I think I might enjoy it more maybe because it does reward the time that you spend poking at stuff, right?

It's not,

it's, it's not tossed off.

It's not like a 50 shareware games collection, right?

It's it's like there's a lot more thought input to it than that.

I also wanted to mention what's very cool is that because it's 50 games and because they're retro games, there's not really a return on investment for many sites.

Polygon is one of these, to write guides for these games.

This is not going to be a million billion seller game.

And to write guides would require writing like a 50th of the entire game.

I looked up party house deck building strategies today.

Like, please Christ, I can't get past the third level in party house.

Please Google Christ.

Show me party house strategies.

Yeah, so you really are kind of alone.

I'm sure over time that will change a little bit, but even then, you're still digging through like random Reddit posts to get strategies for things.

There's not going to be a lot of hand-holding and helping you.

If you try to find information on Pilot Quests online, it's really fun, actually.

It's kind of crazy because

there's people just talking about their understanding of it, like their best guesses.

I want the AI like summation of all the UFO 50 strategy guys.

It is genuinely cool, though, the kind of like community element of like seeing a YouTuber I follow like get into this game and be like, oh shit, you gotta play, you know, Mooncat or whatever.

Well, and that's a Mooncat.

No, Mooncat is like the weirdest fucking game in the entire package.

Yeah.

And that's like, you guys know the Mario Party mini-game where you have to, you're like spin in a circle and then you have to walk around all the buttons to do different things.

That's what Mooncat is, except the entire.

Yeah, I mean, this is, but this is the, I'm going to have this game on my Steam Deck, I think, probably forever.

Because I think I have played,

I put maybe like seven or eight hours into the whole collection so far.

I still feel like there's games I haven't played yet.

I still feel like I'm in the info gathering stage of this thing.

And while there are certainly, I would say maybe

three out of every four games, I play it for a little while and I say, okay, that's not really my cup of tea.

But that still leaves, you know, a good 13.

full ass games that are in here that I genuinely really do like and want to come back to and spend more time with.

And that's crazy.

And one thing we didn't even mention is some of these games have multiplayers.

Oh, yeah.

And some of the multiplayer looks great.

Since I was not able to play it, I was doing the YouTube thing too.

And y'all, Waldorf's Journey?

I think it's what Journey slash.

The Walrus game,

the multiplayer for that game looks like a blast.

That was kind of like actually going on YouTube and watching other people discover it.

I was really realizing how much this would be the perfect game when you are a kid and you have friends coming over and you can just pick at it together.

Yeah.

Or when you're like in college and you have a dorm and you're like sharing the space.

But it would be, I think, just exponentially better discovering it with somebody in real time.

You can kind of get that.

I mean, Fresh, Jason, and I have been like talking on the side of like, hey, I saw this thing.

But it doesn't capture quite the same magic of like literally being in the same room as you discover something.

Yeah.

I think it's a really special game.

I agree that it has, I found it quite frustrating at first.

A thing that you can do if you are not the type of person who likes the surprises and you do not mind spoiling yourself is you can go on to YouTube and you can find a video that is all 50 games described in 50 minutes.

So it's like a one minute blurb for each one.

And like,

hey, that can be plenty helpful of at least just showing you like hey yeah, I know for a fact I'm gonna like six of these I'll start with those and then I'll go and hit the rest later.

Um, because there's definitely something in here for everyone, there truly is.

I guarantee there is a game in here.

I can't think of a genre that is not like there's a Mac Adventure-style first-person adventure.

There's a game that's like my favorite NES game, Rescue the Embassy Mission.

Yes, there's a game where you're having to like do sniper stuff and then do on-the-ground stuff.

It's cool, the point-and-click adventure one, yeah, it's like Shadowgate, like a modern game, yeah, what it is.

Night murder or something like that.

No, that's it's something mannering, like night mannering.

Night Mannering.

Yeah.

It's really,

it frustrates me.

It really does because it makes me feel like I'm.

This should be.

All the problems that I have with it, I feel like are like crappy brain tricks that video games have done on me for 15 years, right?

Like I want...

When I was playing the games, you guys know what I really wanted.

What I really wanted is I wanted every time I played fucking five minutes of one of these games, I wanted a little coin.

You wanted a token to unlock.

I wanted a chip.

I wanted a cookie for playing it.

I mean, there are things you got.

If you check the descriptions, you can like, there's a house with like a Tamagotchi thing.

I don't really know what the deal is.

My problem with that is you have to get too deep into the games to get a lot.

It's a very uneven time investment.

I think that would have been really smart to do for like a midpoint, sort of like

a lot of them are midpoint, like play, like beat the first level.

Yeah, some of them.

So each one gives you a gift and then a trophy.

It's like two different prizes.

There's a gold disc you can get and there's a cherry disc.

And a lot of those midpoint house gifts, though, you would need to invest several hours to get there.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

Especially because of the clunky controls and the different rights.

It's just like, I don't know if I'm going to enjoy it enough to do that.

But I wanted more of that crappy stuff.

And I don't think it should have that.

I think if you.

Yeah, I mean, I think the problem with it is that like

investing into a game is so time consuming because you have to learn the controls and learn the kind of the mechanics mechanics and the language of that game in a way that like reading 50 books or watching 50 movies would not be.

So it's a lot harder to kind of consume everything in this thing, to enjoy everything in this thing because of that barrier.

It feels like you're working.

You're like doing schoolwork trying to understand it all.

But it also feels to me like we're kind of judging this game after a couple of weeks.

And I've also been like kind of...

like of two minds on it like very frustrated at times very delighted at times um but i also it feels like this is the type of game that will be dissected and unpacked and played by people for a year, for multiple years.

I think everyone should get, like, if you like video games, I think you should get UFO 50.

I think a lot of what we're bumping up against is something that occurred to me while I was playing it, and

I'm reminded of it now: is a lot of these games feel like they were made

ambivalent as to whether or not you kept playing them.

Right.

Where like a lot of games have to be, I mean, almost every game released has to be this self-contained package of like

you want to play it for 100 hours and it's got unlockables and it's got all the different things that you could want to keep you playing, right?

They want to keep you hooked.

And I feel like this game, these games are a lot more ambivalent about like, if you don't want to keep playing this, just go play something else.

Like it doesn't, I don't care.

You know what I mean?

Which will get into that era, right?

Right.

Games now are purposefully quite friction-free because as soon as you stop enjoying a game for a second, you stop playing it, right?

But it's games of that era were not designed that way.

But also, this is a collection of 50 games.

It doesn't give a shit if you don't like one of the games.

Go play one of the other 49 games.

Like, I, I, I agree with you.

And I, I do think it's interesting that there's, and frankly, kind of rewarding that they're, they, they are not constantly trying to hook you up to the dopamine trip.

Like, there is a certain amount of grit your teeth.

I, the first time I beat one of the levels on Party House, I was like, fuck yeah.

Like, it was a sense of satisfaction.

Uh, because I'm gonna need to get some tips from you, man.

Cause I've got to rush money at the beginning.

You got to rush auctioneers.

Get four auctioneers if you can.

You got to try and cancel out your trouble members.

You do not want to get these parties busted by the cops.

Time wasted.

Justin, I think you'll appreciate this sequel, which I just heard.

Actually, Derek, you told me there's a sequel coming, and it's going to have like way more seamless gameplay, collectibles and achievements, and towers to climb.

It's called Ubisoft 50.

I think you'll really enjoy it.

Ubisoft 5.

They hit only on the budget for

five of them into M.

Oh, wait, wait, wait.

The budget kind of four now.

It's just.

Okay, okay, but guys, let me hit you with this.

What if it was this exact package, but all the games were locked inside enemy forts, okay?

And you had to go rescue the games.

You had to scan the fort.

You had to get all the weapons.

Sneak around, stab the games in the neck.

What if you had to kill the games?

Kill the games, take their skin, make a bag.

This is, no, this is the Kojima version.

Death Stranding 50 is you have to kill the game.

Hey, can I say the thing I like about this game?

There's the Quintet games, which was like a Super Nintendo-era RP action RPG.

I'm sure you're speaking my language, Griffin.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're not connected in terms of like narrative, really, but they use like the same sprites and the same sound effects.

And it is hysterical when you hear like a death sound in a game from 1984.

And then like one of the last games, you still hear them using that same fucking sound.

Like it's, it's genuinely very, very rewarding to kind of see like how the whole thing develops.

I could talk about this game for hours and hours and hours and hours.

I would.

One thing that I did kind of miss is I know that Derek, you worked on this with other people.

I would love to know, and maybe this isn't the kind of thing they wanted to know.

I think when I started reading about it, I was envisioning more like

we got a bunch of all of our indie developer friends to each kick in a game to be part of this collection, right?

It's a lot more

cogent than that.

It's about

five or six people.

But are they all working?

I guess I was curious if it was a team-based thing where everybody's kind of pitching in on everything, or if it's like more.

Yes.

From what I understand, Derek and John were like the core team at the beginning.

And then at a point, they brought in Ojiro Fumoto, who was the creator of Danwell and Point P.

Fumoto left, I think, to go work on something at Nintendo.

This is like back in 2017.

And then other people kind of were like coming on, like literally working as part of the team for a while.

And then I think that there are like a couple games that are also contribution games.

But largely the game is made by like that core team.

So some of the games, if you like, go to the wiki, you can even see it.

Like, oh, this one was made by like Derek and John together.

And this one was just Derek.

And this one was just John.

And this one was...

And they have credit.

Don't the credits at the end of the games like refer to like they have pseudonyms.

They're not their real names.

Like Benedict Chung,

Chun was, I assume, was Derek, but I'm not sure if that's a one-to-one.

Yeah, I don't know if those are one-to-one or not, but it's a good question.

But

I kind of expected the same thing where every time you played a game, it would be like, well, this is clearly the one from this person.

This is clearly the one from this person.

I'm kind of glad it doesn't go that way.

Because it's like how I, what I was talking about, the sound effects and assets being reused, like it really does feel like you are playing a whole console generations worth of output from a single, from a single developer.

And it tells an interesting story like about games and about game development of that era while you are also collecting.

moon gems or whatever in Pilot Quest.

I wasn't sure if I was going to say this, but to give you guys a little bit of an exclusive, I'm actually working on a story about a a culture of crunch at UFOSoft, and

it's going to go live in a couple of months.

Yeah, no, I'm sorry, Jason.

I'm going to say 50 games of this size over the course of a decade is actually not.

That ain't crunch.

That's fine.

You can see that.

Yeah, good management there.

Good job.

It turns out UFOSoft, some real shady stuff going on there.

Hey, should we take a break so that Jason can plug in his books some more?

Yes.

Yeah.

That's the only way for us to get some more plugs is to keep moving forward in the show.

Got to do those plugs.

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Jason, why did you decide to write a book that would make you sad?

Don't all books make you sad?

That's a good idea.

Don't write a book to make you sad.

They do.

If you want us to be happy, you would play a video game, not like like

that.

Here's what I'm going to say.

And I haven't finished yet.

I've been reading it for the last few months and I'm about two-thirds of the way through.

But I do get the sense that like there is kind of a happy theoretically for most people, for the leadership at least, a happy period of Blizzard that people kind of forget.

And then over the years.

I mean, you literally group the book this way.

Over the years, it hits this point of like diminishing returns and then like a steep drop off in happiness towards the end.

It depends who you're talking about, the level of happiness.

Like there were people at the very beginning of Blizzard, there were people who are very happy, and there were people who are not very happy, like with most companies.

And today, working at Blizzard, there are people who are very happy and people who are not happy.

I mean, it's not kind of, it's hard to kind of

sum it all up in these sweeping terms, as fun as it is from a narrative point of view.

But it does seem like I think people look on, and the book is structured this way, look on the period from like, whatever, the 90s or late 80s, early 90s to

figure like 2008, I guess, as the like heyday of Blizzard.

And then there's yeah, from a product point of view, which is different.

Like the pro people, the outside world being happy with the product is different than the people inside being happy, two kind of parallel, but different tracks.

Yeah.

From a sort of outside observer, I think the narrative at least is that Blizzard, it was making great games and wasn't the worst company in the world to work at.

And then all of a sudden, like, was still making great games, but the quality of life for the people working there started to go down.

Then the quality of the games started to go down, sort of alongside the quality of the

life for the workers.

And I don't know how they get out of that.

Yeah.

Well, so it's interesting.

Okay.

If you worked at Blizzard in the 90s, the book kind of chronicles the whole 33-year saga here, right?

And so it's got stories.

I actually, when I started working on the book, I figured it would be all modern times.

But then as I started talking to people who were there in the 90s, I heard so many wild stories and anecdotes.

that I was like, oh man,

this has to cover the first era too, the first decade or so.

And I think if you were there in the 90s uh you could say like quality of life it's interesting i don't know you could say a lot about the quality of life because on one hand you're part of this group of dudes and it was almost entirely dudes at that point who are all close friends you're going into the office every day and your sandals and your t-shirts and you don't have to wear a suit to work and you're playing video games with them during lunch and playing magic the gathering and going to barbecues at night or on the weekends and stuff so you're all hanging out together But then at the same time, your life is absorbed into work because you are just constantly at work, constantly working, especially StarCraft.

Starcraft is the game that everybody talks about as like the most legendary crunch that they ever went through, where they were spending like 18-hour days at the office for the course of a year.

And Alan Adham, who is the director and president of the time, kept being like, Oh, we're just two weeks away from shipping.

And that turned into months and months and months of just being like, Oh, two weeks away, we're two weeks away, we're two weeks away.

So, um, I think that could be like, I think people who are there, uh, they were in their 20s.

It was kind of a mix of like excruciating and exhilarating at the same time where it was like super fun, but also super awful.

And it's certainly not something people could do if they had kids and families and were older.

So that's, I mean, I don't know if you would call that like good quality of life.

It's certainly a one way of approaching work in life.

And that's what led to a lot of the kind of classics, the all-time favorites, Warcraft 2 and.

Starcraft and Warcraft 3.

And then around the time World of Warcraft came out, that's essentially what changed the company forever in all sorts of ways, both good and bad.

That's when the company started to professionalize more.

So they grew into a company from a company of hundreds to a company of thousands.

A lot more women came in.

It still wasn't like a 50-50 balance, but it grew closer to like 20% women instead of.

1% women.

And as that was happening, that's when some of the cultural issues that have been like documented more recently started to pop up because a lot of the dudes, the nerds, were getting rich and famous and women were around and that caused problems.

And

it was a long time before it felt to women who worked there like they were at a place that was equitable and treated them fairly, which to be fair is the case with a lot of video game companies or like any industry that is mostly men.

But it, again, it's kind of like its own kind of track, kind of independent from the products.

I don't really think that the two are all that connected.

I did find it interesting because you mentioned it was in a footnote, the fact that like you would talk to one person and they'd be like, oh, you already talked to my husband.

Because there was so much incestuous thing.

It was like everyone was dating everyone there, which is, is, I guess, makes sense, but it's also wild to me.

Yeah, because your life is part of your work.

Like, that is, people spend their entire life, they're wearing a Blizzard hoodies, going to Blizzard campus every day, like spending the evenings on, like doing clubs on the campus, like the fencing club or the DND club or whatever.

And of course, you meet your, you meet someone and you're going to like develop your personal life in that too.

the problem with that was um first of all it was weird how much of it was going on but also that a lot of people high up in the company were dating people below them in the company um mike moreheim ceo and co-founder wound up marrying someone below him who he met at blizzard um and the list goes on and on from like all the in all the names that you know chris medson and um frank pierce and um

pretty like pretty much everybody was at least dating at some point someone who was below them at the company which created an uncomfortable dynamic for some people i think the narrative, the gamer narrative, if you will, capital G, is that Activision ruined Blizzard.

Activision came in, the money guys, all they cared about was marketing and money and making more money and stock market prices, whatever it was, and they ruined what was a perfect video game company.

Where do you land now on that presumption?

Yeah, I mean, that's so simplified that, of course, it's not true.

I think what actually happened is that, so first of all, Blizzard, Blizzard paired up with Activision in 2007 and they merged.

And this was before that, but Blizzard had been owned by Vivendi, which had its own set of problems.

And before that, it just kept shuffling between corporate parents that were each a disaster for their own reason.

One of my favorite stories is when they were owned by a company that got investigated by the SEC for massive fraud.

And the president of the time, that company got sentenced to jail, prosecuted, of course, by Chris Christie.

Just wild, wild stories in this book.

So when that happened, things went pretty well for a while.

World Warcraft was still growing.

Blizzard was doing well.

It was working on these hick games, making a lot of money.

And then Titan happened.

And the story of Titan will be on polygon.com very shortly, and people can read it there.

But essentially, this is the game that was supposed to be the next big thing from Blizzard, the successor to WoW that everyone was waiting for, including Bobby Kodak, the CEO of Activision.

And Titan, due to a whole host of factors, mismanagement, mostly, blew up and did not happen.

It was canceled.

It cost them $80 million.

And suddenly Bobby Kodak looked over and was like, hey, what the hell, Blizzard?

Like, I give you all this trust.

I give you all this autonomy to do your own thing.

And this is what you rewarded me with, this big failure.

Now I'm going to have to get some adults in the room and take a larger role in things.

And that's what started leading to the quote-unquote Activision takeover, a Blizzard, where more and more Activision people started coming in.

The Activision from the very top started putting more pressures on Blizzard.

And that led to some conflicts.

And I think the way that I came away from this book and the reporting process thinking about this is that like on the spectrum of like on one side, games are art and we must give them as many years as they take because we can, we, we have our holy vision and it cannot be compromised.

And we must, we must take as much time as we need to to release this thing.

Um, to the other side of the spectrum, which is uh, games are commodities that must be released every single year because it's time for a new Call of Duty and it has to come out no matter whether it's ready or not.

Because we got a a commercial with Kobe Bryan in it waiting to air this fall.

So you better hit your deadline.

Um, You have these two companies that are both on complete opposite sides of that.

And they could not find a way to compromise for various reasons and strong personalities.

They cannot find a middle ground.

So instead, Activision just

dragged Blizzard kicking and screaming to their side, or at least tried to.

Didn't really accomplish what they set out to do in terms of getting Blizzard to release games or WoW expansions, most notably, more fast.

But the two companies just did not mesh.

And so

I think you could fairly, I think there will definitely be people who read this book and come away from it with a takeaway of like, oh, Activision really caused a lot of problems for this company that I loved.

But at the same time, I think the book does a lot of detailing of the internal problems of Blizzard that were not caused by Activision at all.

Yeah, I think if someone were to come away and say, oh, it was all Activision's fault, they did not read the book, or not carefully, at least, because it really makes it very clear that there was a lot of stuff going on.

And Titan is really, you're right, the tipping point of we're going to be creative forever and creativity is all that matters.

But if you have a failure and it costs $80 million, at a certain point, someone's going to need to pump the brakes.

Yeah.

And it's not just the $80 million, by the way, because like if you think about the way these publicly traded companies work, a lot of it is about like setting Wall Street expectations for the future.

So a lot of it is like Bobby being able to promise investors that he has this big new thing coming.

Like, hey, and it's going to be a subscription service and you're going to be making this revenue every single month.

I don't know if it was necessarily subscription.

That hadn't even gotten to a conversation.

Like, the game hadn't even gotten far enough to get to that point.

I think at that point, like, free to play was really starting to take over, like, 2013 or so.

But, yes, the idea was like, hey, you know, the guys who made World of Warcraft, we are making something even bigger.

They are making something even bigger.

The next big thing that's going to be the wow killer.

It's going to be, it's going to be the hottest thing.

Because World of Warcraft was one of the most lucrative games ever made.

And so Bobby wanted to see what was the next from them.

And I think you can kind of like, as much as I hate to ask people to empathize with Bobby Kodak, and I think the book details a lot of his

quirks, let's say.

I think that he was kind of sold on this promise of Titan as the next big thing.

And he felt really like Blizzard had betrayed his trust by not delivering on that.

And that was a really big deal.

Yeah.

He was good in Moneyball.

I'll give him that.

Excellent in Moneyball.

I'm surprised I'm excited to

read this book, Jason.

It is

a topic that I did not know I was as interested in until you just talked about it.

And And then I was like, oh, yeah, now I do kind of want to know what the fuck was going on.

I think, aren't you a WoW player, Griffin?

Aren't you a.

Yes, actually.

I recently started again.

Ah,

I'll give you a fun little tidbit.

So there was this whole idea within Blizzard that they wanted to release WoW expansions more quickly.

And if you go back and you look at the history, a lot of which is detailed on Joystick, actually, and like the Joystick WoW kind of

subdivision vertical that you guys had.

So a lot of history is like Blizzard and Mike Moorheim going on earnings calls and being like, we're working on getting WoW expansions out more quickly.

And that was just such a big thing for a long time.

Bobby wanted it to be annual, basically.

Yeah, but Blizzard did too.

There were people at Blizzard who were like all for like releasing them more quickly.

Maybe annual wasn't the right cadence, but at least every 18 months or something, as opposed to every two years, which was the cadence that they could deliver on.

And so there was this idea internally.

And Jay Allen Brack, who was the executive producer of WoW, he called it To the Moon

based on JFK's we're going to the moon speech.

And to the moon was this idea that we're going to release WoW expansions every single year and they tried so many ways to do that and bobby's solution was you can you guys need to hire hundreds more developers to make this happen because that's what we do at call of duty that's how the machine works is you throw people at the problem you have them make content and that's how you make it more quickly and that didn't work for blizzard for all sorts of reasons but like it was just such a funny like kind of maybe not funny but such a such a divide between the two companies in that like one just believed in math and like you just put this number of people on a game, and you will make it faster.

That is how math works.

Right.

And the other being like, no, this is not how creativity and art works.

That's not how we do things here.

And it's just such a strange divide.

But to the moon is one of my favorite corporate filters.

So good.

Well, this book is great.

When can people buy it?

Thank you.

It comes out October 8th.

So very soon.

People can pre-order it now.

It comes out in there's hardcover, digital, audiobook.

Like I said, Persona 5, Subway Announcer audiobook.

And yeah, it's I'm pretty proud of it.

I hope it resonates with folks.

Once again, it's called Play Nice.

Do you want to do a nice one now?

Don't you think it would be good?

I'm worried people will be like, oh, it's Jason calling.

He's going to be a stinker about us.

I think if you read this book, you will not find it to be like a stinker book.

I don't, I've never thought you were a stinker.

I think you're an incredible professional.

I'm saying that the people I talk to in the biz say you're kind of a stinker.

I'm saying

they said you were a press sneak fuck.

What did they say?

Press sneak fuck, yeah.

Yeah.

Hey, Justin.

Hey, Justin, why did they say that to my face, huh?

Because they're afraid of you.

That's right.

Jason, wait, Jason, were you the press sneak fuck?

Yes.

Right?

Man?

That's fucked.

I get a shout out and pray.

Yeah.

Little stinker is an upgrade, honestly.

Press sneak fuck.

That's true.

No, press sneak fuck, I like that.

I wore that with a badge of honor.

I would get, if it was me, I'd get a tattoo.

Go on.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think I would be more inclined to get a pressneaque fuck tattoo than a stinker tattoo, but I guess we'll agree to disagree.

It's not a negative book.

It's very much like a history book.

Yeah.

I would describe it.

Like it goes through so many ups and downs and so many positive and negative aspects of Blizzard that I don't really think, even the ending, I don't think it's, it's certainly, it ended on a sour note because it ends with essentially 1,900 people getting laid off when Microsoft took over,

including a bunch at Blizzard.

But like,

I don't really think it's a book that is just like going to depress people.

I think it's a book that people will find really interesting and kind of go through a roller coaster of emotional.

I found it to be like a very light, very quick read.

I am kind of a slow reader, and this like zoomed by for what it's worth.

Is it gonna get harder, you think, or is it proving harder already to do this kind of

like following of a company or like a brand or a what have you as a narrative uh thread when I feel like so many of those brands and like Blizzard, I guess, in a sense is part of this where they start to mean

such a different thing than they meant for so long, where it becomes almost sort of like a different beast.

How do you like track that without it feeling like you're just following a

you know, a logo or a brand name?

Well, that's what makes it a story, right?

Like, if it was just kind of Blizzard not changing, then it wouldn't be a very interesting story.

What made me want to do this story in the first place was when I first started hearing about the Activision influence and the kind of corporate takeover of it all, because that to me is what made it like, oh, there's some really interesting kind of people conflicting and having different motivations and desires and goals here.

And that makes it interesting.

So, I mean, if there wasn't change, it wouldn't be a very good story.

Do we want to do some honorable mentions before we wrap up?

Yeah, I have a bunch.

Okay.

So I'm going to go through mine as quickly as I can.

I'm going to start with a sorry to make this all about books, but another book.

This is a handheld history 88 to 95 from Lost in Cult.

It just came out about a month ago.

And this is a gorgeous, if you love like handheld gaming from that era, you know, you're talking about the original Game Boy and in that space, Game Gear, that era.

This is amazing, gorgeously illustrated book.

Lost in Cult makes amazing stuff.

And I was totally blown away by the production value.

This great essays in here, really insightful things on the creators of the Game Boy, for example, Gumpei Yokai and that team.

So I was really just kind of blown away.

And that book is out now if you're interested in getting it.

It's volume two.

They originally released the handheld history, which is more encompassing of all handheld history.

And this is a more narrow focus, which I actually liked.

God dang.

I'm looking at their website.

It's Lost in Call.

Oh, they got a lot of shit out there.

Stunning.

They make stunning stuff.

The two other things I want to mention.

One, if you are interested in UFO 50 and feel like we haven't fully checked the UFO 50 box in this episode,

Eggplant the Secret Lives of Games is a podcast.

They are doing a year-long series where every episode is one game.

It's hosted by a bunch of game designers.

So if you're interested in a specific game or just the whole catalog, they will be moving through.

I think the first episode goes up this week on Barbuda, which I'm definitely going to be listening to.

So I'm super excited for that.

And then the last thing I'm going to recommend is Will and Harper, which is on Netflix.

It's a documentary about Harper Steele and Will Farrell.

Harper Steele was the head writer at SNL, recently transitioned and decided, they decided to do a road trip across the United States.

And so it's incredibly funny and personal and really, really touching and insightful in terms of the trans experience.

And I was really, I thought it was fantastic.

So that's on Netflix, Will and Harper.

Yeah, you know what else is on Netflix that is touching and incredible and important is the Circle season six, baby.

It's back.

It's doing some shit from a game design perspective that sucks the moon right out of the sky.

They've added this like random element called the disruptor where you can choose to be the disruptor, but you don't know if it's going to be good or bad.

And so it's just a game without rules anymore.

Loot boxes, baby.

It's so fucked up.

This season's so messy.

People are just lying and then getting caught.

And then every time there's a group chat, people are just burning each other's asses to the ground it's fucking fire it's so good uh also i finished core keeper uh the 1.0 oh thank god i was so bored of seeing that on your what you're playing it's great though man if you like terraria play core keeper it's it is top-down terraria and it's it's good as hell it really absorbed me anyone else got stuff to talk about jason you doing anything besides writing books

uh I'm playing a game that I don't think I can talk about here because that's what I want to talk about too.

And I can't talk about that.

Yeah, Jason.

We'll talk about that later.

You can't talk about it, Jason, but I know one guy that's great at getting people to talk about stuff they're not supposed to talk about, and that's you.

Whoa.

So if you were you and I was me,

and I was you, and I needed to get to the bottom of this, let me talk to your wife or your girlfriend right now.

Which one?

Let me talk to both of them at the same time on different calls.

I kept playing Children of Morta.

It's extremely good.

If you haven't played it, you should play it.

Oh, watch the movie.

It's on Netflix also.

Sorry, Netflix.

You're really getting the business on this one, but it's called Rebel Ridge.

Oh,

yeah.

There's this Rebel Ridge part one.

No, this is the new movie by the

director of Blue Ruin and Green Room.

And yes.

Yeah, go ahead, Justin.

Yeah, it's a story about.

I don't want to give too much away because it's really one of those clockwork things that like watching it unwind is really very satisfying or wind up, I guess you'd say.

But it is about

a Marine who's currently not in active duty, whose cousin gets sent to

jail.

And if the cousin is wanted by some pretty powerful criminals, and if he gets sent to the state penitentiary, then he is worried that his cousin will be attacked so this marine is stopping um in this small town to pay his cousin's bail to get him out and basically he's got a lot of cash with him and he runs afoul of the the racist police force there run by don johnson uh and he takes the money and uh strips it from him and then basically the cousin gets transferred anyway because don johnson really screws this guy over so this guy though, what's cool about this is this guy's obviously like a very dangerous man with a lot of different, you know, he's got that whole sort of like taken magic, you know, where it's like he's a guy that can do anything.

You get it, but the movie always exists in the world of law.

So, this guy is always conscious of what he's doing and delete, like, he is in the system.

He's not outside of the system.

His like assistant helping him with stuff is she is a like

yeah, and she's like wants to be a lawyer, but she is helping him navigate the like red tape.

And he is trying to do it by the book and being ground down by a system that like

does not

about him.

I was sitting next to Justin on the plane as you watched this movie and just letting out full-blown cackles at points.

It's so like excruciating the way that they grind this guy down and like keep twist.

And Don johnson is like so good at like continuing to twist the screws that when he finally starts to like upend it it's like

it's so good but it's not a cathartic it's not like well this is solved you know what i mean it's a deep down like you see what this guy has gone through and you see what he's had to like

get over on these guys.

It's just great.

It's freaking great film.

Every scene is like great.

The star of the

The star of the movie, Aaron Pierre, is going to have a massive career.

He is like exuding like power and cool and is awesome.

If you've seen the original Rambo, First Blood, before Rambo becomes kind of a parody of itself, this is more of a true spiritual...

sequel or reboot almost of the original Rambo than all the other Rambo movies.

It's fantastic.

It's fantastic.

It's so, so good.

You got anything, Chris?

I just support that.

It's a great pick.

Cool.

It's called Rebel Ridge.

I don't love the name.

I feel like because of the Rebel Moon.

Honestly, I think I skipped it a few times.

Also, the director had a whole color scheme thing going.

That is irritating, too.

We hate that.

Thank you.

We did it.

I want to thank the following patrons for being supporters of the besties.

We have Ben, we have Elliot, we have Cathol, and we have Kazuko.

Hello.

It started getting a little weirder as we went.

Thank you for being patrons.

We have a new episode of the Resties that's up.

We talk about Dead Rising Remastered, which is an excellent, super fun remake of the original Dead Rising, which I loved, and I love the remaster as well.

So that is already up.

We have a new bracket episode coming in next month.

And so stay tuned for that.

And

Jason's book is Play Nice: the rise and fall and future of blizzard entertainment uh which is out in like two weeks very excited thank you guys for having me thank you thanks for joining us jason next week oh yeah we're next week it's a zelda game we're doing zelda the echoes of wisdom this is the new zelda game there's a new zelda game coming out yeah dude is it about zelda it is it really is whoa

Now's our time.

That's going to do it for us.

Until next time.

Be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

Besties.