What Even Is a Video Game?! (Grab Bag!)

Speaker 1 Any of you think Mom Dommy's gonna make you egg steam czar?

Speaker 2 Is that a question for me?

Speaker 1 No, dude, it's a question for Griffin because I'm an idiot

Speaker 1 because I'm a because you've known me for you've known me 20 years and I'm a huge idiot

Speaker 1 who always says the wrong stupidest thing to the at the worst times while it's being recorded

Speaker 1 because he's a fucking clown.

Speaker 1 Yes, it was to you, Russ, because you love the steam from eggs, pervert.

Speaker 3 So, this past Halloween, I was hanging out with Clock Tower Scissorman.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that was us. That was before the cold open.

Speaker 1 We started recording. What Griffin just did was the beginning of the cold open.
Before that was the coldest open.

Speaker 3 It's a strong. It's a strong premise.
What's up with Clock Tower Scissorman?

Speaker 1 What do you know? No one knows. Huh? I don't know what you're talking about.

Speaker 3 Clock Tower? Fame.

Speaker 2 I know there's a scissor man called Clock Tower.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Scissorman. There's a Scissorman on the front cover.

Speaker 3 It's a bad guy from Clock Tower. He's got a big pair of scissors.
He chases you around like,

Speaker 2 yeah, you know what's terrible to fix a clock? Is scissors. What do you, why?

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's why when I hung out with him, he was fucking bummed out.

Speaker 2 Did he talk about maybe he brought the wrong tool for the job?

Speaker 1 Maybe.

Speaker 4 I gotta go take a big doll.

Speaker 1 God damn it.

Speaker 2 We need to find a way to not integrate poop as a staple of the introduction to the ship.

Speaker 1 Is it a staple?

Speaker 3 No. It kind of feels like it.

Speaker 2 But maybe it shouldn't be.

Speaker 1 My name is Justin McRoy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McRoy.

Speaker 3 I know the best game of the week.

Speaker 4 My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know how this cold open works.

Speaker 2 My name is Ross Freshwick. I know the best game of the week.

Speaker 1 Welcome 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.

Speaker 1 This week on the video game club, it's kind of a grab bag, a potpourri, as we invented the term.

Speaker 1 Chris Plant, what is potpourri?

Speaker 4 Potpourri, often found in the bathroom, can be so many other things, a collection, a mishmash, a collage of wonderful treats.

Speaker 4 And this week, that potpourri, or pot-parie, includes Sansa Blake Manor, Power Our Simulator 2, and so many other wonderful games, including Road to Empress.

Speaker 1 Book 1?

Speaker 4 I should have mentioned that up top.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but now they're all been mentioned. There's nothing else other than those.
So we've really covered the whole gamut. And we'll be right back to talk about that right after this.

Speaker 2 This episode of the Besties is sponsored by Alienware. You know, Alienware's biggest sale of the season lets you unleash peak performance at Black Friday Savings.

Speaker 2 Save on select Alienware PCs like the groundbreaking Alienware 16 Area 51 gaming laptop, taking performance to the next level with Intel Core Ultra processors.

Speaker 2 Plus, you can save on all the latest accessories and displays like the Alienware 27 4K QD OLED gaming monitor. Visit alienware.com slash deals before those time-limited savings end.

Speaker 2 I feel like the biggest one, we have a lot of big games to talk about, but I feel like the biggest one just from a buzz standpoint these days

Speaker 2 is a little game called Seance at Blake Manor.

Speaker 1 It's the Seance of Blake Manor.

Speaker 3 The article can shift, I think, based on the user's preference, but it is.

Speaker 2 I like of

Speaker 3 is strong for me.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm extremely into seance of Blake Man. I actually, I was extremely into it.
I finished it this morning

Speaker 3 and I am the world's greatest detective. Wow.
And

Speaker 3 I think it's a fucking banger of a game.

Speaker 4 So for people who are only vaguely familiar with this, you might see a trailer for it and think, ah, I remember that. Blue Prince published by Raw Fury.
You go into a big mansion.

Speaker 4 Has that general look. Totally different game.

Speaker 4 This is a it's a narrative game, a deduction game, kind of in the style of Golden Idol, where you're piecing together the words and clues that you collect.

Speaker 4 But unlike Golden Idol, you are walking around this beautiful manor, meeting all sorts of characters.

Speaker 1 A lot, a lot of guesses. A lot of guests.

Speaker 4 You're pulling a guess who, where you're figuring out who isn't

Speaker 4 the evil one, the target. The culprit.

Speaker 4 The culprit, narrowing it down piece by piece over the course of these hour-long chunks of a weekend.

Speaker 3 That's the big suggest.

Speaker 3 I I the timetable thing is interesting to me because I see that and it was uh pretty quickly sort of a turn off.

Speaker 3 The idea is as you do things in the manor, as you are solving the disappearance of a woman named Evelyn Dean

Speaker 3 in the days leading up to this big seance event that has brought everybody to this to this manor in the the Irish countryside in around the turn of the 20th century or wait, 19th century?

Speaker 3 One of those centuries.

Speaker 3 Every time you do something, it takes a minute. And

Speaker 3 you have only a certain amount of time to solve the mystery. And also people move around the manor.
Every hour, the whole house changes. Sometimes there's events.
Sometimes people are doing speeches.

Speaker 3 Sometimes you need to go in someone's room, but you can't do that because they're fucking in there.

Speaker 3 And so like, I don't know, that, that whole system kind of stressed me out at first, but as I got a little bit further into the game and I sort of started to learn like, what was stuff I was wasting my time on and what was like actually helping me get through the cases, I, I, I started to kind of appreciate it for what it was, which is like the only kind of like tension that they can apply to this, this style of detective.

Speaker 2 So can you, I guess, whenever I hear like a time mechanic

Speaker 2 using time and time's running out,

Speaker 2 what happens if you do run out of time?

Speaker 1 Game over.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, there's fail states in the game, which is really interesting. You can hit one pretty much instantly.
And I find it really funny that they sort of allow you to do that.

Speaker 3 Like, if you go in someone's room and they're in there, they're like,

Speaker 3 hey, what the fuck? They called the hotel manager. You get kicked out of the hotel.
Game over. So like there are.

Speaker 2 It's kind of like an escalation. You could just knock.
I mean,

Speaker 2 I've gone in rooms with people before.

Speaker 1 It's the game have. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, strangers

Speaker 3 probably invited though uh what's really great is how they kind of

Speaker 3 have mechanics to sort of make all this stuff work each character has their own mystery that you have to like get into and solve in addition to these other bigger supernatural mysteries happening around the house and you have this like

Speaker 3 wild, huge web like connecting every little piece and every little detail that you have. And sometimes like your the detective will have thoughts like, I should go focus on this for a while.

Speaker 3 So like there's definitely

Speaker 3 a lot of breadcrumbs that the game leaves you to make sure that you are not going to, you know, completely blow it,

Speaker 3 which I very much appreciated, but also did take away a little bit from the

Speaker 3 actual deduction side of things, I think.

Speaker 1 They unroll a lot of tools.

Speaker 1 And I got overwhelmed by them. And I think the thing that I tell me this is correct, Griffin, because obviously you played a lot more.

Speaker 1 I mistook a lot of those as like more mechanical than supportive and a lot of it seems more like supportive rather than additional mechanics that you have to engage with.

Speaker 1 A lot of it's like mechanics to help you keep track of information rather than things you have to kind of like worry about too much if you don't feel compelled to.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no,

Speaker 3 it is a bit muddy, like what, what,

Speaker 3 what clues do what. The system that Chris was talking about with the like golden idol style, like fill in the blanks,

Speaker 3 The words you use are the clues that you found by talking to other people.

Speaker 3 When you talk to someone, you get a list of basically you can ask them about most of the pieces of evidence that you have, or you can ask them about anybody else in the house.

Speaker 3 It'll cost you a minute, right? And so you want to be smart about like what you're doing.

Speaker 3 But sometimes you'll get like a clue that will then provide you a word that you can use in the fill in the blank mystery.

Speaker 3 Sometimes it'll just be like, hey, there's this new topic you can go look up at the library. And

Speaker 3 maybe that'll get you something. Maybe that doesn't.

Speaker 3 It kind of, but then the tools that you're like saying are like you can set reminders on the timetable of like, oh, this character is going to be at this place at this time.

Speaker 3 And then when the clock changes to that next hour, it'll say, hey, don't forget, you're supposed to go to the stables to meet with so-and-so.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that is cool. I like that.

Speaker 3 It is cool. They do give you a lot of tools, but

Speaker 3 it is such a different game from Blueprints, I think. It's a wildly different game.

Speaker 1 Completely different. From Blueprints.

Speaker 4 Other than just that very superficial look.

Speaker 4 I think it has one of the toughest onboardings of a game that I've loved in a long time.

Speaker 4 And I'm glad that I stuck with it because it hammers you not just with all these systems where it's like, here is a map of this world that you haven't fully explored.

Speaker 4 Here is a list of tons and tons of people who, many of whom you haven't even met. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 That part's exhausting. Yeah, the opening.

Speaker 1 Sydney and I almost closed the computer because I had like lured her into this and she looked at, she kind of gave me a look like three-fourths of the way through the character list, which is very not well handled.

Speaker 1 It's just a

Speaker 1 laundry list of everybody there, and it's so overwhelming. It's and it's kind of panic-inducing, like, oh my god, should I be remembering all of this? This is an insane amount of exposition

Speaker 1 with all the mechanics that you're also dumping on.

Speaker 4 Absolutely, you get that web, and when you get the web, you realize that there are a certain number of things to learn about each character, so it might have like a number next to them-like 22 things that you need to learn about them.

Speaker 4 So, you see that big list, you see the big web, you see all of that. And then, when you start talking to people, it feels at first like almost impossible because you can bring up pretty much anything.

Speaker 4 When you are talking to someone, you can, you'll see all of the things that you have uncovered.

Speaker 4 You'll see all the other characters and you'll be able to analyze their clothes and find additional clues and bring up that. It allows for so much.

Speaker 4 But, well, and one other, I guess, hard part is you are hitting these fail states. It wants you early on to feel the pressure of this timetable in a way that it doesn't eye find later in the game.

Speaker 2 I guess can you just clarify what happens when you hit the fail stick?

Speaker 4 What the timetable is actually doing is there early in the game, there will be a thing like, I need this mystery solved by the end of the hour.

Speaker 4 This one part of the mystery. And if you don't do that by the end of the hour, you will game over and it will revert to an auto save with like about 15 minutes left.

Speaker 3 One thing to bring up when you do load, it lets you either load a save that you had or scour back to a time point of auto saves that it has made. So it is, it is not hard to do that.

Speaker 3 I, I, after the point that Chris is describing, it's way, way, way lighter touch on that stuff.

Speaker 3 And for what it's worth, I finished the whole thing and all of the mysteries and stuff and had like a good four hours or so left to spare.

Speaker 3 And that is like, you know, 240 actions that like speedrunning.

Speaker 4 Yeah. What it's teaching you with the game over ends up being helpful, which is it

Speaker 4 wants you to not get too distracted. There are so many things in the manner that you could be doing that the game could become unwieldy very quickly.

Speaker 4 And what it's teaching you is to pursue a mystery in a chunk, to like be focused on a thing.

Speaker 4 And then you can, you know, get a little distracted towards the end of your hour if you have extra time.

Speaker 4 But it's showing you like, don't do the thing that you will be tempted to do in so many open world games, which is, well just go talk to everybody.

Speaker 4 No, it's like decide what's the next thing that you want to solve and work towards that.

Speaker 2 And once I started to- I feel like the solve in other games for this sort of problem is to like start with a very narrow

Speaker 2 challenge and then widen out from there. Like Oprah Dan, obviously, is a good example of this, where it's like a very specific, narrow window.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 3 they have some ways of guardrailing you a little bit.

Speaker 3 Like, there's a luncheon on the second day, and if you go to attend the lunch, you'll sit down at a table with these two characters and you'll start to unpack their thing.

Speaker 3 And they're actually pretty good characters to start with because they branch out into other things. What were you going to say, Juice?

Speaker 1 I think at a certain point, it's just the kind of person you are, but it's rough for me to play a game like this and feel like every time I do any investigation, I'm spending a currency. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it feels bad. I think it feels bad because I want to be thorough.
And like, if you think about like detective and observation stuff in general, a lot of it is about like

Speaker 1 looking closer at things and like giving things a second look. Like, and, and, and I feel like if your game is about detection, it's weird to penalize for like being thorough in your investigation.

Speaker 1 That, and, and to me, it's like this, it's, it's a, it limits the pleasure of playing the game because I feel like every single

Speaker 1 thing that I look at, I'm having to make this value judgment on whether or not it is worth pressing the investigate button. And a lot of the times it's like it just isn't and it just was a waste.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? So it's like a weird, that's more my brain, but it is like, it's tough for me to get past it.

Speaker 4 That makes perfect sense. For me, I'm curious if you had the same experience, Griffin.
Similar to like other games where you get more powerful, I...

Speaker 4 felt like I was less worried about time as the game progressed because I was getting better at playing the the game and I had more and more mysteries solved.

Speaker 4 There was probably a mid-game mystery that I solved very early ahead, way ahead of schedule.

Speaker 4 And then it freed up my time for large chunks of the game because an entire chunk was already off the table. I had figured it out so I didn't need to ask a bunch of questions.

Speaker 3 The time thing I think is such a, is such a, it's a mixed bag. I think you got to have some, I understand from a mechanical design standpoint, you got to have some sort of pressure or some sort of um

Speaker 3 you know thing that you can do poorly so that when you do it correctly it feels good that's like basic sort of gaming design shit and i this is their salt for it the truth is that i think you have way more time than you need and if you blow a few minutes here and there like inspecting some towels uh like it feels bad but

Speaker 3 eventually like i honestly how i felt when I finished it is like, there are actually a lot of guardrails on this thing. There's a lot of breadcrumbs.

Speaker 3 There's a a lot of ways that like I will be talking to someone and they will just mention something off the top of their head or the detective will have a thought that will lead me in the right direction and it would be pretty hard for me to like really really fuck this up.

Speaker 3 But like if that's the case, then you know why do the time, the timing thing sort of at all? Why not handle it in sort of a different way?

Speaker 3 My bigger issue with the game was the lack of real sort of like deduction that it requires because a lot of it is like finding all the clues for this character.

Speaker 3 Like like russ said there's 22 clues for this character fuck yeah i'm gonna find them all i find them all and then it's like okay now piece together the thing he blanked his blank so that he could blank his blank and it's like that's four things that like i can kind of go through and trial and error just kind of like drop drop those it doesn't feel like aha i've solved it when you don't even have to trial and error by the time you have the 22 clues it's yeah

Speaker 3 and like this i do i do enjoy i want to finish the thought i i do think it's cool this is a huge fucking game It's a huge detective story with like a bunch of interlocking parts.

Speaker 3 I think it's really impressive the way this thing hangs together. And I really did enjoy my time with it.

Speaker 3 The vibe, the story, the writing, all the Irish mythology was like, shit I'm learning about is very, very, very cool.

Speaker 3 It just wasn't like, I don't know, I didn't have to use my brain a ton in the way that I did with Oberdin or Blue Prince or even Golden Idol some of the time.

Speaker 3 So it had more of a sort of visual novel kind of vibe for me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the atmosphere is very cool. A lot of the accents are lovely.
Like, it is set in a place in Ireland that's not represented in games a lot. So it's kind of cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Sure, yeah. What else?

Speaker 2 I'll talk about, I think, a good segue, Power Wash Simulator 2.

Speaker 1 Heck yeah.

Speaker 1 The sequel that I think everyone is demanding. Like, I mean, you know,

Speaker 1 for a lot of people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. Kind of, kind of, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I just, I want to know what limits they were running up against where the fans were like, we need this.

Speaker 1 And they were like, the engine will not, as we've said, it would require a server wipe of Power Wash One to give you all the fidelity you crave. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So they added, my save carries over.

Speaker 2 They added a hub world.

Speaker 2 So you, you can earn like furniture, but you got to clean the furniture in your hub world.

Speaker 2 There are actual, so there's some of the differences are like, as you'd expect, visual improvements, like the water effects and things like that look nicer.

Speaker 2 There are actually gameplay improvements that i found personally very smart so in the first game

Speaker 2 it sounds so silly to say in the first game soap is a big deal uh you have to buy soap with the money that you earn and it's uh consumable so if you buy a bunch of wood soap and you use it up you have to buy more to use more wood soap and soap makes you more effective at the cleaning of the thing.

Speaker 2 They've changed it wisely.

Speaker 2 And now soap is no longer a material material-specific, so you don't have to buy wood soap or whatever, plastic soap, whatever the fuck.

Speaker 2 They also set it so that it's just a on-a-cool-down thing. So if you use a bunch of soap, you just have to wait whatever, 10 minutes, and it comes back.

Speaker 2 And while you're doing that, obviously, you can just be cleaning normally with your normal powers and things like that.

Speaker 2 It's very difficult for me to explain for those that haven't gotten into this game why it feels so satisfying, but it is

Speaker 2 just like

Speaker 2 dopamine hit to the direct dome in ways that like, I think are not necessarily maybe the most healthy, just because it's like so simple, but I do find it very personally rewarding.

Speaker 2 I would also add, it's actually a good hangout game. The whole game can be played in co-op,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 I think that experience is actually the best because

Speaker 2 it's so low, like does not require a lot of coordination, obviously uh you can just sort of like chat and give it gives you something to do with your hands while you're doing it so yeah i thought that was uh really nice i like that this game's out there i like i it makes me feel good every time i see this show up on uh on on the old steam charts i see not me what

Speaker 3 not me no you want these people out there actually power washing

Speaker 1 I mean, I would love.

Speaker 1 I don't want them to.

Speaker 1 I'm telling them that they're going to play this game for a while. They won't have a clean house to look at.
They'll feel bad.

Speaker 1 If you go out with a real power washer and you power wash your shit, you'll feel good. I don't have the luxury.

Speaker 2 It's clean. Justin, I don't have the luxury.
What am I, how New York City

Speaker 1 you could clean in your home that would make you feel productive. I promise you.

Speaker 4 Think about what you just said.

Speaker 1 Picture

Speaker 4 in his apartment,

Speaker 1 spraying and power washer. It could be anything.
You just mean cleaning in general.

Speaker 4 Oh, okay. just being productive.

Speaker 1 It freaks me out, man. It's crazy.
This is not a game. This is the appeal of simulators, though, right?

Speaker 2 It's not just the simulators. Hold on one second.
It's not just the simulators. It's fucking Fortnite is the same thing.

Speaker 1 Fortnite is a gun game where you shoot people with guns. That's real Russ.
That's real difference.

Speaker 2 Okay, but that is as much of a fantasy to me as Power Wash Simulator is because I'm not going to fucking use it Power Wash.

Speaker 4 This is all a video games, though.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 People use it as a wind-down tool, and you could accuse this claim of all video games.

Speaker 2 Griffin solved a crime in a mansion, and he felt good about himself.

Speaker 1 He could have learned about Irish mythology.

Speaker 1 I learned about Irish mythology. Griffin learned about Irish mythology.
Griffin engaged parts of his brain that required deduction. You sprayed water to pretend house russ.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, Russ.

Speaker 2 Griffin punched dirt as all.

Speaker 3 I love you. You're my brother and all that stuff, but I don't want to be on your team for this one.

Speaker 1 That's fine.

Speaker 1 You can go over there if you want. That's fine.
I'm just saying.

Speaker 3 Usually I'll like definitely ride or die.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I think it's great.

Speaker 2 I think it's the same as doing a jigsaw puzzle.

Speaker 1 Hey, listen, do you want me to start on a jigsaw puzzle?

Speaker 2 Well, you better because I have another game to talk about called Strange Jigsaws.

Speaker 1 Get ready. That's good for your brain.
That's good for your brain. You're problem solving.
Okay. That's good to keep

Speaker 1 Power Wash Simulator.

Speaker 2 There's problem solving in Power Wash Simulator.

Speaker 2 I'm not, look, I'm not saying it's the headiest game imaginable, but I think at the end of a long day, you could drink a glass of whiskey or you could power wash some shit.

Speaker 2 It's probably better to power wash some shit.

Speaker 4 This is the only two options.

Speaker 1 Those are the only two options.

Speaker 1 One of our sit by yourself and drink in silence.

Speaker 3 Truly, truly one of our most unhinged discussions.

Speaker 4 Should we take a break and come back and talk about some other

Speaker 4 we do have jig sauce to talk about after the

Speaker 4 shit?

Speaker 2 I was not kidding.

Speaker 2 This episode of the Besties is sponsored by Alienware. You know, Alienware's biggest sale of the season lets you unleash peak performance at Black Friday savings.

Speaker 2 Save on select Alienware PCs like the groundbreaking Alienware 16 Area 51 gaming laptop, taking performance to the next level with Intel Core Ultra processors.

Speaker 2 Plus, you can save on all the latest accessories and displays like the Alienware 27 4K QD OLED gaming monitor. Visit alienware.com/slash deals before those time-limited savings end.

Speaker 1 Okay, the game is called the game.

Speaker 1 I want to hear about strange jigsaws. There's a perfect segue.
What is so strange about these jigsaws?

Speaker 2 These are fucking strange jigsaws. Strange jigsaws.

Speaker 1 You think you've seen some weird jigsaws in the past? Well, hold on your butt.

Speaker 2 I'm going to really struggle to describe this game, and I'm going to do my best. Strange jigsaws uses the premise of jigsaw puzzles, but approaches them in very different ways.

Speaker 2 It's a bunch of mini-puzzle challenges. The example that jumps to my mind is the easiest to explain.
So you're presented with a jigsaw puzzle. There are four missing pieces.

Speaker 2 For those four missing pieces, you have four pieces from other jigsaw puzzles. So not the puzzle that you're currently doing.

Speaker 2 Those pieces are from other jigsaw puzzles, but you can paint the pieces such that they end up fitting in this puzzle. You understand? Yes.

Speaker 2 So you're trying to basically recreate pieces that you're currently missing from the existing puzzle.

Speaker 2 In another jigsaw puzzle, you're trying to build hamburgers using like logic stuff like the meat can't be next to the lettuce and the bubba buck can't be next to the da-da-da.

Speaker 2 So it's really just like using jigsaws as a platform for

Speaker 2 like fun logic puzzles.

Speaker 1 Is it like narratively connected or is it like more like a you solve this one, do the next one?

Speaker 2 There's like an overarching, like you're using a computer, but it's very light, narratively speaking. It's like you're just trying to unlock more of these puzzles.
Essentially, it's very light.

Speaker 2 But if you like problem-solving games,

Speaker 2 this is like, there's a ton of like really interesting approaches.

Speaker 1 Is it one of those where like all the mechanics are being rolled out over time, or do you kind of have all the things at the beginning?

Speaker 2 It's like a so when you start,

Speaker 2 you're presented, you've got like a starting puzzle that's relatively simple and then you've you're given like four different puzzle options but each of the puzzles use completely different mechanics like every single one is its own very contained mechanic so you're it's not really a rollout as much as it is like hey i get to do more puzzles uh in the way that like professor layton always has like different you know puzzle mechanics to it uh one of them uh you're using

Speaker 2 uh the puzzle has gravity to it so you're having to like build build the jigsaw puzzle while like certain pieces are falling down to the bottom.

Speaker 2 So you have to figure out ways to like prop up the puzzle to hold it up and clip things in.

Speaker 3 I love that shit on Survivor when they're like, build this tower puzzle and they start from the top. It's like, come on, guys.

Speaker 2 So yeah, I thought, I mean, I found my, I felt a little dumb because there were definitely puzzles I got kind of stumped on and frustrated a little bit, but it didn't feel like it was because the puzzles were poorly designed.

Speaker 2 It just felt like my brain isn't quite there yet.

Speaker 2 But I found it really good.

Speaker 2 What? That doesn't mean you're dumb. I do want to also mention.

Speaker 1 Specialize skill. You're not dumb.
Maybe a super smart guy. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Maybe all that power wash time I spent.

Speaker 1 Don't let mysterious jigsaws do.

Speaker 2 I might be now a dullard because of the power washing.

Speaker 2 The other thing I want to mention: better colorblind settings than

Speaker 2 blue prints, insofar as they exist.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 well done. It's still kind of wild that that's

Speaker 1 so hard.

Speaker 1 It's got to be so hard. It's not even

Speaker 1 a different different game.

Speaker 2 Play it. It's fine.
I just don't play it.

Speaker 1 No, I'm saying it's, I try to think about it sometimes just as a thought experiment. It's weird.
Oh, how to do it?

Speaker 1 Just blueprints. I genuinely, unless it was a different game, I don't know how they'd do it.

Speaker 2 Here's how I would do it as a true game designer that has made a lot of games and knows how to make games.

Speaker 1 Right. Sure, the best in the biz.

Speaker 2 I have an app on my phone that I can point at things and they tell me what color the things are.

Speaker 2 So theoretically, that same logic could apply maybe to whatever whatever you're pointing at. Some ask, man.

Speaker 1 I don't know. This is on the Frostbite engine.
Are you sure? I'm not sure I can.

Speaker 3 This thing's pushing so many polygons for us.

Speaker 2 I use that app all the time when I'm clothes shopping.

Speaker 1 So I don't have to ask people what color they are. Can I hear about Road to Empress now? Okay.
Sure, yeah, if you want.

Speaker 1 I do.

Speaker 1 Road to Empress is, I gave a pretend pitch on Road to Empress last week where I gave my generic FMV pitch. But let me tell you sincerely about Road to Empress because

Speaker 1 a lot of FMV games, I know, I know, listen, I say this a lot, but the, a lot of FMV games are not very good. And here's what I will say, Road to Empress is not really

Speaker 1 a lot of game. It is very much more of a

Speaker 1 visual novel, I would say, but

Speaker 1 The way it handles things like

Speaker 1 a branching storyline that it's presenting to you

Speaker 1 is done in a very, it gets out of the way and lets you really experience this

Speaker 1 visual novel. What I would say, and a visual novel is overstating it, but it's an interactive film.

Speaker 1 I mean, these are terms that got so beaten to death when FMV games started that it's really hard to talk about these in a way that sounds like real.

Speaker 1 Basically, you are, and by the way, this is based on a real historical thing. And I am

Speaker 1 so beyond ignorant of this time period, the people in it, the nations involved.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to do my best as someone who was literally learning about this from a game they bought on Steam an hour ago. Do you understand? Please understand me.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 It is about

Speaker 1 a bunch of people that live in a very large palace looking thing and there uh uh there is a court of women who are all vying for the approval of both the emperor and different people in his court so the story is about your rise up through this core up through the ranks of courtly intrigue and

Speaker 1 that the decisions that you're making are very much about who's on your side who's against you who can you trust i'll give you an example one of the very first thing that happens in the game is you show up at this court and you're very new there and you run into a friend of yours who's like almost like a friend of the family, lifelong friend, and they're so happy to see you.

Speaker 1 And they say, here, as a gift for you, take this hairpin. My mother gave it to me.
And you're kind of hesitant at first. It's like, it's a big gift.

Speaker 1 And you have a choice whether or not you're going to take it or refuse it. And then

Speaker 1 basically, you, the woman who is in charge of all the this area of the court shows up and she sees this hairpin on the ground and asks who it belongs to because she loves it so much.

Speaker 1 And she will gift someone who has this hairpin. And then before you can say anything, one of the other girls says it's hers.

Speaker 1 And then she gets in huge trouble and they punish her because only this lady is allowed to wear peony hairpins.

Speaker 1 So then you have to look at your friend and be like, hey, did you know this? Were you trying to set me up?

Speaker 1 So you're having to, these are the kinds of decisions that you'll face. Of course,

Speaker 1 your friend insists it was innocent, right? But then you frequently die in this game you die a lot

Speaker 1 empress there's okay i'll give you an example uh

Speaker 1 there's a bit where you have to show a talent to the court and you can sing a song beautifully or you can uh play an instrument very poorly or you can do an okay job with dancing you can dance kind of good you can sing really good or you can play an instrument really bad if you play the instrument really bad they're like you're making a joke of the emperor go to jail And then when you go to jail, that's that's kind of like a game overstate, right?

Speaker 1 And then there's, and if you sing really good, people are like, wow, that was awesome. Maybe too awesome.
Go to jail.

Speaker 1 So that's the, I'm oversimplifying, but that, that is the kind of idea. Or like, you will, but because there are rules to this court that are life and death that you don't know.

Speaker 1 So it is like you're trying to like navigate an extremely life or death social situation. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And the way, and if you mess up, what's cool is like while like during a cinematic at any point, you can click a button and go back to a very well laid out story map that shows exactly the different outcomes that you've gotten to and exactly how

Speaker 1 and how you die. Yeah.
So you can see, yeah, exactly. Like you're not going to be repeating stuff.
It is, there is full control over the speed of the cinematics. You can crank them up to 2.0.

Speaker 1 You can tap the arrow keys to just like fast forward through them if you want. If it's like something that you just want to see a little bit of or you want to see how it goes.

Speaker 1 But it really does remove the idea of, and this is why game I hesitate to use because it really does remove the idea of like a fail state is really not like the end.

Speaker 1 You really just kind of scoop back and see something else, right? So it's not like there's almost no penalty to it. It's more like seeing how the story changes with your different decisions.

Speaker 1 It's hard for me to say how well performed it is because it's not in English. It's subtitled.

Speaker 1 It's very nice to look at. The costumes are beautiful.
I like that I feel like I'm learning something about it.

Speaker 1 I mean, who knows how accurate it is, but seeing as this is the only awareness of it I have, it seems like it's better than absolutely none.

Speaker 2 I know you don't speak. What is it? Is it Mandarin or do you know?

Speaker 1 I will not even

Speaker 1 understand.

Speaker 2 I know, but you could like, like, I've watched foreign language films and you could tell if they're being believable or not.

Speaker 1 You know what it is? It's the so much of it is in the court that I don't know that is like it's very

Speaker 1 arch.

Speaker 1 Yeah, very practical. Yeah, Arch is a good book for a plant.
It's very like

Speaker 1 stiff and stoic.

Speaker 1 And especially in this exact time period in this place,

Speaker 1 a stillness of movement seems to be very prized amongst the court. But I think it's really interesting.
And it is

Speaker 1 well done in the way that they like

Speaker 1 show the repercussions of your actions. And they're real, really, it's very

Speaker 1 fast fast how quickly the bottom drops out on you. So it's not like a long journey to find out that you've messed up.

Speaker 1 But seeing the different like scenes and seeing the story, I don't know how long this story goes. Apparently, this is following your character until they are the, I guess, the only

Speaker 1 female boss in the countries. I would assume Empress, right?

Speaker 3 If that's the name of this

Speaker 2 seems like a road to Empress.

Speaker 1 You can do that if you want. I just don't know.
It sounds so good when you're saying it, Griff. I hope it's Empress.
I hope that's the name of the game.

Speaker 3 I think you're probably good.

Speaker 1 I hope you're right, man.

Speaker 2 I hope you're right.

Speaker 1 It's a really interesting kind of thing.

Speaker 3 If you

Speaker 1 don't mind watching your entertainment with some light interaction,

Speaker 1 I think it's pretty neat.

Speaker 2 Chris Poyant,

Speaker 4 Mortal Combat,

Speaker 1 Mortal Kombat.

Speaker 4 That's what I have

Speaker 4 been playing, watching. I, too, like Hoops, have been on a journey of, am I playing a game or am I watching a documentary? The Mortal Kombat Collection is out.

Speaker 4 And it is yet another one of those game slash histories. You can play all the original Mortal Kombat games in pretty much every form.
You want to play Mortal Kombat 2 on the S and ES or the Game Gear?

Speaker 4 Go right ahead. You want to play the, I think it's called WaveNet unreleased version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.
Let me tell you, it's waiting right here for you.

Speaker 4 But what I did with the vast majority of my time was watch the documentaries about Mortal Kombat,

Speaker 4 which there are plenty of. The way that the game works is you can go into the Mortal Kombat play mode or you can go into this timeline.

Speaker 4 And the historical timeline will bits that are like one or two sentences with an image of like hey this at this moment they came up with the idea of mortal kombat and then out of every like two or three of those there will be assets so it might be a five to ten minute documentary clip it might be like the actual pitch documents like scanned in at ultra high resolution for you to read through.

Speaker 4 It might be the original comic book that the creators of Mortal Kombat made and then self-distributed like around the release of mortal kombat it could be the original commercial for mortal kombat where they scream in financial district um

Speaker 4 it is such a great time warp to this moment where mortal kombat truly felt like the biggest thing on the planet if you were into video games it was in escapable

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 this does such an excellent job at making you really honestly feel that. Like feel the relevance, not just be told the relevance.

Speaker 4 And the documentary work in it is a blast.

Speaker 4 Friend of the show, Mike Drucker, is in it. Jeff Gersman, a whole bunch of other folks.
It's a bunch of old heads being able to kind of relive

Speaker 4 their childhoods.

Speaker 2 It does sound, based on the reception that I'm hearing online, is that everyone is saying what you're saying, which is as a historical document, it is fantastic.

Speaker 2 They're also saying as a game has some pretty serious issues specifically.

Speaker 3 What is the game part of it?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I okay.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 4 if you are a very, very hardcore Mortal Kombat head who is worried about like the tightest details of I mean they're they're calling out input lag specifically. I know there there is

Speaker 4 If I sound hesitant, it's because this is the sort of subreddit campaign where you mention one thing about this game on the internet, and then the same like random 500 people let you know how wrong and evil you are.

Speaker 4 And then other people are saying this is completely not noticeable. This is some weird fan rage.
So I don't want to, I would not,

Speaker 4 I would not say it is. End-all be-all, these games are unplayable.
That's not even close to true. I played these games, especially in single player, and had a blast.
I was able to get through them.

Speaker 4 These are like difficult games. They still play just how I remembered them.

Speaker 1 So, just to like blast through it, there's like five Mortal Kombats, five Mortal Kombat twos, a few Mortal Kombat threes, a couple of

Speaker 1 ultimate Mortal Kombat threes. And then from PS1, they have Trilogy, Mortal Kombat Mythology Sub-Zero.
Fuck yeah.

Speaker 1 And special forces, which I think is cool. That is on there.
And then from the GBA, they have Mortal Kombat Advance, Deadly Alliance, and Mortal Kombat Terminate Edition.

Speaker 1 So that's like the, and then there's, that's the assortment. So there's like a lot of Mortal Kombat.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I would say if you are a hyper, hyper-competitive player, sure, you should avoid it.

Speaker 4 If you are literally anybody else who is curious about Mortal Kombat or the vibe or revisiting these games, you will be very happy with it.

Speaker 2 I'm a top-tier Cyrax, so I'm a little weary.

Speaker 4 That's what they do say about you. You dressed as that for Halloween, right?

Speaker 1 Every Halloween for the last 20 years, Cyrax.

Speaker 4 I mean, you spend $5,000 on that costume. You got to get your use of it.

Speaker 2 The bombs come out right out of the chest. It's so fucking cool.

Speaker 3 Can I talk about Nasses?

Speaker 1 Yeah, is that how you pronounce it? What is that?

Speaker 3 I just assume. I'm playing that.

Speaker 3 Nassess

Speaker 3 N-E-C-E-S-S-E. I just assume.
I don't know how else you could really hit that.

Speaker 1 I guess I'm not sure. I went and clicked on the store page after you, I saw you playing it.
It's so wild to see these games.

Speaker 1 It's like they've been out for seven years and a bajillion people have played them and now they're in 1.0. I've never heard of this before.

Speaker 3 No, it's funny. So I actually, this game was in early access for a long time.
I played it back when it was in early access, and I did not care for it, didn't really vibe with it.

Speaker 3 And so, I bounced off of it. Um, but then you know, it started to get more buzz with this 1.0 launch that happened, I think, mid-October.
Uh, and so I went back and checked it out.

Speaker 3 Now, I do vibe with it, now I do kind of get what it's putting down. Uh, Nescess is, uh, I've been playing it on Steam, it is

Speaker 3 a game that takes a lot

Speaker 3 of cues from Terraria, and it takes a lot of cues from Rimworld, both of which are, you know, pretty major players in the,

Speaker 3 you know, Steam indie.

Speaker 3 I mean, Terraria is on every platform ever, but I think those two games are kind of like beloved by a similar kind of audience where Terraria is kind of first in class of that open world survival craft 2D platformer sort of genre, And Rim World is very much like a settlement management sim.

Speaker 2 Rim World's like absurdly complicated, right?

Speaker 3 It's really, well, I mean, it's not, I don't think it's dwarf fortress level complicated, but it's like, it's too much for me.

Speaker 3 I've never, I've never really gotten into Rim World, and I've tried a bunch of times.

Speaker 3 When you start up Nassess, I think that it presents a lot more of those mechanics at the front, which is what scared me off a little bit because I didn't really care for Rim World.

Speaker 3 So I was like, yeah, I won't really vibe. But once you you get into the more familiar Terraria level stuff, it is,

Speaker 3 it really all starts to come together really nicely. It is a top-down sort of action sort of game when you are down in the dungeons or exploring the overworld.

Speaker 3 You're going around, you're collecting resources you take back to your base to build up your base, to build new weapons and armor and crafting stations. And that whole loop is preserved very well.

Speaker 3 Other stuff from Terraria is like, there's different classes of gear. So you can have this summoner set, which is like about summoning in little helpers and there's a magic and range and melee.

Speaker 3 And so you're like making decisions based on the loot you find of like, oh, I could go after this. There's trinkets, like stuff that it's, you have a mount equipment slot.

Speaker 3 And like, it's really very, very Terraria in all of that way, except in this sort of like top-down

Speaker 3 format instead of this 2D platformer format.

Speaker 2 The city management stuff is like, yeah, way more involved than anything Terraria had.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so Terraria did have that thing where you like had to build rooms for the NPCs that would come and live at your settlement whenever you cleared certain benchmarks or beat certain world bosses, which is a thing in Nassas.

Speaker 2 This is like, there's like a diets tab.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 I think the game gives you a lot. of freedom to do that stuff.

Speaker 3 So if you are a Rim World fan and you do want to determine who in your settlement can eat what types of food, you can get that nasty on it.

Speaker 3 I have actually really been enjoying the settlement building side of things because of how it feeds back into the terraria side of things. For example, now I have it set so that

Speaker 3 certain villagers that I have living in my place, I built them rooms and, you know, gave them the stuff that they needed.

Speaker 3 I set up like animal husbandry zones and I said, you take care of the sheep and you harvest wolf for me. And that way when I come back, I don't have to do that shit myself.

Speaker 3 I just have all these resources to build armor. This is a lumber yard.
And I've, you know, dragged and dropped a little box over it that said, this is the lumber yard.

Speaker 3 This is where you plant your trees and you cut them down. And when you bring them back, you put them in this chest.

Speaker 3 It has a lot of really good quality of life stuff, like building near a chest that has shit in it lets you just pull it straight from there.

Speaker 3 There's like simple single-click options for like dump everything in my inventory into these nearby chests.

Speaker 3 Like everything that has been sort of modded into games like Terraria and Stardew Valley and like all that shit that if you're familiar with comes bog standard in this S 1.0.

Speaker 2 Is this

Speaker 2 controller pleasant?

Speaker 3 I've been playing it. Yeah, I mean, I've been playing it on controller, but I think,

Speaker 3 again, similar to Terraria if you mouse and keyboard it. You will have a certain fidelity of control in certain parts of the game, and that will be sort of lacking.

Speaker 3 But the controller's support is really great. I've played, I think, 14 or so hours just on the Rogaly X, and it's been holding up.

Speaker 3 It's a little bit, the settlement side thing is very, very cool.

Speaker 3 It's tough playing this game that is so similar to Terraria because Terraria has been out for so long and has gotten so much content and is such a rich, exciting game to explore because you are constantly finding new shit.

Speaker 3 You're constantly escalating in power and changing your build based on all of this stuff. And the SS has a lot of that stuff, but it's not quite as dense, it feels like.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of, I don't know, stretches where I'm just not feeling like I'm getting any stronger. I haven't found any cool thing.

Speaker 3 And, you know, this world boss doesn't actually drop anything that interesting.

Speaker 3 But again, like

Speaker 3 that is comparing to a game that has been out forever and has gotten so many updates and so many releases.

Speaker 2 I mean, this game was in the first, I was scrolling back through news posts,

Speaker 2 December 2019 was when it first came out.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so they've been working on it for a while. I've really been digging it.
I've really been digging a lot. I was pulled away from it by seance,

Speaker 3 but I'm probably going to get back into it.

Speaker 3 I haven't played multiplayer, but the idea of having like a settlement that you share with other players that you are all managing is like really fucking cool.

Speaker 2 It is cool looking back at these news posts because you can see how much the game absurdly progressed over that time. It is like so raw at the beginning.
And it's pretty interesting.

Speaker 3 I love a game like this in my sort of like

Speaker 3 gaming diet. Like Corekeeper was this for me, I think either earlier this year or late last year.

Speaker 3 This game is a bit more mechanically like managerial than Corekeeper, which is much more kind of like fast-paced, action-oriented, sort of lighter on the base building stuff.

Speaker 3 But I love games like this, and I think that they've done a great job.

Speaker 3 And I think it speaks to the fact that I bounced off it so fast in early access, and now it's like I get it, and they onboard you really well, and you just get to the good stuff really fast.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 3 if you're a fan of this genre, I think it's a pretty easy recommendation.

Speaker 2 Cool,

Speaker 1 nice.

Speaker 2 Okay, I think that's the grab bag.

Speaker 2 One piece of reader mail, this goes to Griffin specifically. It's from James W.

Speaker 2 Dang, I'm so bummed Griffin wasn't here for the Pokemon episode. Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's true. I was also bummed.
I've been sick for so long, and so have most of my kids.

Speaker 3 And so I did miss last week, and I was bummed.

Speaker 3 Frankly, I don't have a ton to say

Speaker 1 about it. I think it's

Speaker 1 trouble in paradise.

Speaker 3 Man, go back and listen to the fucking Scarlet Violet episode. I was throwing heaters.

Speaker 3 I think it's got some really great ideas. I think it's got some cool ideas.
I think it has some cool moments. The big, like, rogue mega evolution, real-time battles.
Like, that's cool shit.

Speaker 3 They run a little bit long in the tube, but that's really cool.

Speaker 3 And there's some mechanics here that are really, really fucking neat and exciting for like what the promise of future Pokemon games could be. But also, how many times, man, can you...
I said this.

Speaker 3 This is the exact same shit I said with Scarlet and Violet, which is like, how many times can they they get away with like putting out this kind of like

Speaker 3 unambitious, I guess is the word I would use, game? Where like clearly parts of it are just not there. Clearly, parts of it are not,

Speaker 3 do not have the level of polish that could have been applied if it had been in development longer or more, more focused or it had more resources.

Speaker 3 It's the biggest media property fucking on the planet, and it is still so disappointing to see them kind of just like, I don't know,

Speaker 3 pitch these

Speaker 3 half-baked sort of games in that have some really cool ideas. I think Scarlet and Violet got really good with the DLC.
I think now it's on Switch 2 and it runs great.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, those are great games.

Speaker 3 They got there with that one, but I don't know that they can, I don't know that there's a salvageable sort of thing here.

Speaker 3 Henry really likes it, but we've also bounced off it. We don't really play it as much anymore.

Speaker 3 This game is competing with Roblox forever now, as are all games that are ostensibly for a kid-based audience. And like, this ain't got the staying power for it.
So,

Speaker 3 pretty, pretty disappointed

Speaker 3 again, pretty disappointed again by a Pokemon game that has really fucking cool ideas that are very exciting, but still feeling like I am waiting for the next like big, good Pokemon game, or at least like the next game that is trying to be the big, big I mean, I'll tell you what is on my list for that, and it's Pocopia, the mind.

Speaker 2 Pocopia, yeah, sure.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's its own thing.

Speaker 1 You know, it's funny, it reminds me of

Speaker 1 doctor who

Speaker 1 because disney just exited a deal that they signed with doctor with the bbc to like co-produce doctor who

Speaker 1 and the idea was that it's like a this huge property that a bunch of people like love and there's got to be more there and maybe if they like invested a bunch into it it would build it would explode and build out like a whole universe and stuff and they've just backed off of this deal because it didn't really take the way that they had had wanted to and it it reminds me of pokemon in that way where like doctor who fans are now have now returned to where they belong right in that like you guys have exactly enough we're going to give this show exactly as much buzz as it takes to keep the people who watch it watching it and i feel like that is where doctor who will return to and i feel like that's the it feels like pokemon as an outside observer and please tell me if i'm misjudging but it feels that that story seems to repeat with pokemon it feels like where the diehards like are ready for the next thing but it feels like they keep getting enough to just keep them coming back for the next one.

Speaker 2 It feels to me like they have mathematically figured out the exact dollar amount to invest in these games where they still sell really fucking well and no more than that.

Speaker 2 More so than like any other, I mean, arguably, this is not a fully Nintendo property.

Speaker 2 So in that way, I mean, these are like, I think the big difference between this and Doctor Who is Pokemon, and including this game, continues to sell like astonishingly well to huge swaths of people.

Speaker 2 I think the only game that has sold better on Switch 2 is Mario Kart World, and that in some ways is almost a pack-in.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 3 every every, this is how I would summarize the thing, and Russ is right, where it's like, it's a weird staple, it's a weird thing in the Nintendo lineup, right?

Speaker 3 But every other Nintendo property, every other one, Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Metroid, like, they have had these moments of like, oh shit, the game done changed, right?

Speaker 3 Like, Tears of the Kingdom, Breath of the Wild comes out, and it's like, holy shit, this is like the big, Mario Odyssey,

Speaker 3 the first Metroid Prime, like

Speaker 3 Kirby and the Forgotten Land, like moments where it's like, they fucking did it. Like, this is the game I've wanted for a long time now.

Speaker 2 I don't think they've ever done that with Pokemon made Tears of the Kingdom, it would have been like, and here's three more enemies.

Speaker 1 The gameplay man's games are that, right?

Speaker 4 Like, that's the era of that.

Speaker 1 Sure, for sure.

Speaker 3 But that's, like, so far, but like, that's such a long time ago.

Speaker 3 It just feels like if they

Speaker 3 I think it's different from Doctor Who insofar as the fans of this franchise are very outspoken about what they want. And it's not like.
Sorry, what? Yeah, no, I mean, it's not.

Speaker 1 That's a that dude that is. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Speaker 3 And the ideas that they have are like,

Speaker 3 pretty solid and reasonable things, I think, to be asking for.

Speaker 1 So this is, okay, to draw the parallel, which I think is a little bit different, but similar, the people who like Doctor Who don't really, they want the investment, but they don't want it to change.

Speaker 1 And I think that's the thing with Pokemon. If they were to invest more,

Speaker 1 what they would want is more people.

Speaker 1 And what that has to look like is it's not, I don't think that would look like what diehards. want Pokemon.

Speaker 1 So it does feel like a little bit of a damn if they do, damn if they don't, where if they invest more, they have to broaden the audience.

Speaker 1 And if they broaden the audience, I'm not sure it's going to be the game that people want it to.

Speaker 2 So this is actually kind of interesting.

Speaker 1 And this is, by the way, talking out of my ass. Fully, fully, fully assistant.
I think it's a great conversation through Nintendo, but I don't know. The way it will pay off if you invest it.

Speaker 2 The way Pokemon works as a franchise is there's basically stakeholders in Nintendo, in Pokemon Company, and whatever the company is that does the cards. I forget the name of the company.

Speaker 2 Game Freaks, whatever it is. And they all kind of come together and agree what the future of Pokemon is.
And I think there is this,

Speaker 2 you know, group mentality of like, well, we're all working together. We want to make money.
We want to make a successful product. I don't think that they have any interest in risk in a big way.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 Because for all the reasons that we've mentioned,

Speaker 3 if they did, they would do what I think is like the most reasonable thing, which is like invest a fucking lot into Pokemon as a platform, as Pokemon, as Pokemon by way of Fortnite, not insofar as like a Pokemon Battle Royale, but like a service, like a service.

Speaker 3 They have something called Pokemon Home, which is kind of similar. Like it's your bank of Pokemon that moves with you from game to game.
Like build something around that.

Speaker 1 Build a world around that.

Speaker 3 Build like an online, shared, easy, communal experience that folds in fucking everything that's been good that people are trying to do.

Speaker 1 You're going to date the Pokemon. I know you don't.

Speaker 4 You're just fishing, y'all.

Speaker 4 You're thinking so big, and that's never going to happen. What they want is they want something proven.
They want no risk, but they want everybody to be happy.

Speaker 4 It's sitting right there every three years just release another game boy advance game just make an old school pixel game that everybody used to love go big with it it's it's not gonna cost you as much i don't want to play those

Speaker 4 i mean they've been doing that yeah they've been doing remakes not pixel remakes but that's what i'm saying no i'm saying new not remakes i want new pixel gba style games Just give me that sweet, sweet flavor that I keep craving and I want to go back to the game.

Speaker 2 I can't keep playing those games again. It's all the same fucking game over and over again.
I'm sorry. I like the cute Pokemon, but it was all downhill since pig night.

Speaker 1 Damn.

Speaker 3 So many flaming hot takes.

Speaker 1 Is it Tombo?

Speaker 4 Who's the name of the Rhino and the game freak character? Not Tombo. That's Tombo.
He's delivery service.

Speaker 2 Shall we do honorable mentions?

Speaker 1 Let's do it.

Speaker 2 Okay, I wanted to call out a theater experience.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 2 I saw a theater experience in New York City. It's called Masquerade, and it is basically an immersive theater retelling of Phantom of the Opera.

Speaker 1 Oh, boy.

Speaker 2 I went in profoundly skeptical. I am a huge fan.

Speaker 1 As you listener, no doubt, currently are feeling.

Speaker 2 I'm a huge fan. I really, really loved Sleep No More, which is an immersive experience that Justin saw about 60 times.

Speaker 2 I went probably three or four times and loved it, like totally blown away.

Speaker 3 I love that you had to frame it, it that Justin went 60 times so that your three or four times didn't seem as buckwild.

Speaker 1 It's okay. Just a quick forearm shift riding man.
To keep on going. It's all right.

Speaker 3 Quick cold one between the shoulder blades.

Speaker 1 Just a quick cold one between the shoulder blades. It's about your business.

Speaker 2 Since then, I have not had an immersive experience in theater that is anywhere in your life. In my life.

Speaker 1 You see everything through a bubble. You're never present.

Speaker 2 I have not had a good immersive theater experience

Speaker 2 until this one. I like Phantom of the Opera okay, and and I left like fucking kind of a little bit obsessed about Phantom of the Opera.

Speaker 1 Oh, right.

Speaker 2 The closest comparison I can say is, like, it felt like I was able to be on stage with a Broadway caliber production as all of the people were up in my space, like doing their thing, singing.

Speaker 1 Many of the cast members are people who have played these roles. Have you seen it, Juice?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yes, I saw it.

Speaker 1 It's pretty phenomenal.

Speaker 1 And I'm not a big Phantom person either, but the ways in which they have rethought it to bring it closer to you is like, it feels like, oh, this is definitely a way that theater can keep going and evolve for another 50 years.

Speaker 1 Like, it's a very, it's a very interesting, bracing, like,

Speaker 1 kind of like

Speaker 1 transportative way of seeing a show. It's really, really fascinating.

Speaker 3 Do the narrative hooks hit you a little bit stronger in this than Sleep No More? Because I like Sleep No More. I went to it a few times, but I never.

Speaker 2 So this is a linear experience. So they are guiding you through.
They'll like open doors and like push you through in the way that Sleep no more is much more non-linear.

Speaker 2 You can go wherever the fuck you want, basically.

Speaker 2 That being said, you start off in a group of, I want to say like 40-ish people, 30, 40 people, something like that.

Speaker 2 And then as you're going through and you're getting led into different rooms, they'll like subdivide you without you even realizing it.

Speaker 2 So suddenly you're in a room with 12 people and you're seeing something that the other 30 people are not seeing. And it's like a different.

Speaker 3 But the story is cogent without you having to do it.

Speaker 1 You know exactly. You know exactly where it's almost literalism.

Speaker 1 i mean like you know where you're at like when you're going through the the phantom's catacombs for example you go down an escalator that leads you into them and you see like his boat going through the fog i literally as i saw that i was like amazing holy like out loud holy shit i could not it's really and see and honestly Seeing these performers perform this close is like a really rare opportunity and seeing it is kind of like incredible because you realize what a full body thing it is to like be performing at this level.

Speaker 1 It's also really to give you an example. Like

Speaker 1 there's a scene where in the show where you discover that the phantom has killed someone in the cast to take their place.

Speaker 1 And you, like, the way that information is revealed to you is like someone opens a closet and the body falls out and is like there with you.

Speaker 1 Like you are, like, that is the way the story, like, it is a very literal, like, you're not, it's not like kind of amorphous, like, sleep no more or some of the others.

Speaker 2 Like, you, you're in the scene. And from my perspective, that's not how I found that out.

Speaker 2 I found it out because because I saw the phantom kidnap the guy oh really I didn't see that scene oh that's so cool so it's a totally different scene so you're getting the same story logistically I want to read an entire article about how they pull it off multiple casts going between the it's fascinating really interesting so um yeah if you're in New York or you're visiting or something like that I really really would recommend it I think it's running right now it's been extended a few times until February so uh you might have a chance to see it so one person doesn't have to do the like kidnapping scene over and over and over again the actors actually get to have an emotional journey to

Speaker 1 well the phantom the phantom and christine stay consistent throughout your entire performance I think there are certain smaller parts that get used for all the groups you follow your phantom right like your phantom is just going through the one thing but some of the other players are like yeah doing double duty between people who are going through

Speaker 1 their version which is time delayed to yours because new shows are starting every 15 minutes.

Speaker 2 There are six phantoms and six Christines and and they rotate the Christines with a sub, like a minor part female character all at the same, all for one night.

Speaker 2 So it's really like, again, logistically like

Speaker 1 fucking fascinating. It's a really fascinating thing.

Speaker 2 Highly recommend it. It's called Masquerade.
You can try to get tickets on the website, which we'll include in the newsletter.

Speaker 3 I have a few things.

Speaker 3 One, really quick, I got in my AYN Thor, and I've been having a fucking great time setting that up and going through my DS and 3DS catalog.

Speaker 3 It works so well, and it is so fun to go back through those games. I've been playing the Stamp Rally in Clubhouse Games.

Speaker 3 Just like, I'll just keep that on there and just kind of like pick it up and play a little bit of it.

Speaker 2 I don't even remember what that game is.

Speaker 1 Clubhouse Games?

Speaker 2 No, Stamp Rally.

Speaker 3 Oh, Stamp Rally is the mode where you play the games, and if you win, you get stamps and it moves you further down the track. So you go through all the games.

Speaker 1 Got it. It's very good.

Speaker 1 I finished Outer Worlds 2.

Speaker 3 I don't know if you guys stuck with it.

Speaker 1 I haven't.

Speaker 2 I have talked about it. I was on Planet 2 when I kind of fell off.

Speaker 1 off.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I really liked it. I think that

Speaker 3 the wheels fell off a little bit, like halfway through, honestly, if I'm being completely honest. And everything after that kind of felt pretty samey.

Speaker 1 But you really liked it?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, I basically turned the difficulty all the way down once I hit that point to see it through. I honestly, I feel about it pretty much the same way I feel about Outer Worlds Worlds 1.

Speaker 3 I think that the RPG mechanics are better.

Speaker 3 I think that the way they integrate your choices into how you explore the world is better, but I also think that that trick only works a few dozen times and then

Speaker 3 it all kind of really starts to blur together. There's one entire planet that just felt like total filler.
That just felt like everything I'm doing here is so

Speaker 3 inconsequential and it just kept going and going and going and going that I was I was honestly kind of sick of of it.

Speaker 3 And it made me wish that there was like almost a conceptual change in how Obsidian makes games, which is like, I would love a much shorter, much tighter version of this experience that I feel compelled to go back and replay as a different character with different skills and a different build.

Speaker 3 Because I do not think, I just simply don't think that the experience can be sustained for a full, you know, 30 or so hour kind of thing.

Speaker 4 A pintiment, if you will.

Speaker 3 Yeah, a pentiment. Yes.
Thank you, Chris.

Speaker 1 The thing I really want to talk about is a fun pentiment. A fun pentament.

Speaker 3 The thing I want to talk about real bad is Physical Asia.

Speaker 3 If you guys have watched Physical 100, or if you haven't, it's a Korean reality competition show where 100 athletes from different disciplines get together to

Speaker 3 battle in different kind of ways to see who is the best

Speaker 3 person at athleticism.

Speaker 3 It's a great show with incredible production quality, truly, truly, truly through the roof. Physical Asia brings back a lot of contestants from the past two seasons of Physical 100.

Speaker 3 Only they are on a team of Korean contestants. And then there are seven other teams from seven other countries.

Speaker 3 And it is a team battle sort of style version of the game. There's teams from Mongolia, Japan, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines.

Speaker 3 The team from Japan has some competitors from a different Netflix reality show called Final Draft that I think I talked about on this program.

Speaker 3 That is very fun to see them back

Speaker 3 on my TV.

Speaker 3 It is, it's just a really,

Speaker 3 there's really nothing like it on television in terms of like production quality and the dramatics that they kind of like put behind these athletic competitions

Speaker 3 is really unparalleled. So I'm like four episodes in or so, and it's been really, really neat to watch.

Speaker 1 I have almost finished the second book in a series that Griffin got me started on, which is called The Shadow of the Leviathan. Is the series?

Speaker 1 The first book is called The Tainted Cup, and this one is called A Drop of Corruption.

Speaker 1 Have you talked about these in the show, Griff? I talked about the first one. I don't know if I talked about the second one.
So if you, I won't assume that you've heard anything, but basically it is

Speaker 1 fantasy mystery series. And I say fantasy only in the sense that their world is very much not like ours, but

Speaker 1 it's about two investigators. One is a like really supremely brilliant woman who has to limit some of her senses so that she doesn't get like overwhelmed by the world.

Speaker 1 And her partner who works for her is named Din. And he is

Speaker 1 sort of magically altered so that he remembers everything he experiences with perfect clarity and recall. And so she very much does not enjoy going out into the world.

Speaker 1 So it's Din that usually goes out into the world and is just acting on her wishes and observing the things that he has asked her to observe without really bringing a deductive acumen to it.

Speaker 1 So they're kind of working together, right? She's at home thinking about these things and he's out in the world experiencing them.

Speaker 1 What's cool about the series, and they are sort of police for this empire. And they, when they're like internal affairs, internal affairs is probably a better way of putting it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So they investigate when something has gone wrong within the officers of this empire. They are the ones that investigate what has happened.

Speaker 1 And so if it's, it's, they are kind of working on their own outside the empire. But what is cool about this series for me, there's a lot cool.

Speaker 1 The relationship between the two characters is cool. The effect of remembering everything.

Speaker 1 is very on den the effect of that on den is very pronounced and interesting to read about but what I I really dig about it is that this empire developed because there are these huge leviathans that wander out of the sea and would like just destroy wide swaths of land.

Speaker 1 And so people had to work together to figure out how to fight these leviathans.

Speaker 1 And then now they've figured out not only how to fight these leviathans, but how to stop and harvest them and use their magics for our own. So this is an empire that is forged from necessity.

Speaker 1 It's an empire that's forged out of countries that need to work together and societies that need to work together.

Speaker 1 And so the empire is overall a good and in almost like so rare in fantasy, sci-fi, almost anything I read and really in the world today, to have any sort of, to see an empire or government represented with anything that seems like worth protecting is really refreshing to read about.

Speaker 1 And so really, it feels nice, if a little bit escapist, to read about a

Speaker 1 sort of society, a government that is basically functional and the people people that like work to keep it functioning and what that means. And it's a complicated conversation.

Speaker 1 I think it's asking as many questions as it answers about the nature of empire and society and faith and all this stuff. But it's supremely well written.

Speaker 1 It's a really fascinating mystery, and the relationships between all the characters are really, really good.

Speaker 1 The first one you should read first is called The Tainted Cup, and the second one is called A Drop of Corruption.

Speaker 3 Robert Jackson Bennett has a bunch of different series. He's the author of these books.

Speaker 3 He's probably my favorite sort of like fantasy author. I can't recommend any of them.

Speaker 1 I read the last book. The last book you recommended,

Speaker 1 the City of Divine Cities, Divine City.

Speaker 1 That was a lot denser and drier than this. This is pulpier, and I've really enjoyed it a great deal more.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, this also being a mystery, it's just so smart. Having a magical mystery where one character gets all the clues and one character figures out the crimes, like it,

Speaker 3 it does something to the detective story format that like is very cool. It's not my genre at all.
And I've been like really, really addicted to

Speaker 1 these books. They're really good.
They're great.

Speaker 1 Play it.

Speaker 4 Very quick.

Speaker 4 King Sorrow by Joel Hill.

Speaker 4 Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King,

Speaker 4 and he has written a bunch of horror books over the years.

Speaker 1 It's funny, man. No matter how big of a success that dude is, and he's gigantic at this point, because I still think of it the same way.

Speaker 1 Stephen King's son, who's also a multi-millionaire

Speaker 1 in his own right,

Speaker 1 who also deadass looks 100% like Stephen King. It's crazy.
It's very distracting. He looks so much like Stephen King.
I feel like I'm a kid every time one of his videos pops up.

Speaker 4 It's also super relevant for this book because

Speaker 4 the title King Sorrow feels like it is a play on Stephen King himself. This is a book that is 100% in conversation with it.
This is Joe Hill doing it. It is a book that spans decades.

Speaker 1 Nice dude, it's Joe Hill doing it.

Speaker 4 Instead of a clown, it is a dragon that is conjured by these group of college friends. And then the decision to do that affects the rest of their life.

Speaker 4 And it is

Speaker 4 terrifying. It's legit, a good scary horror novel.
If you are an audiobook person, I super recommend it because the book is over 800 pages long.

Speaker 4 It's about 25 hours of audio and they have done a ton of work on the audio version. So whenever it goes.

Speaker 1 Audiobooks are really getting a lot better. They are advanced leaps and bounds.

Speaker 4 When it gets into a very tense situation, it basically becomes kind of

Speaker 4 a full showcase of the audio. You're getting new voices brought in, you're getting sound design, all sorts of things.

Speaker 4 So, when it really needs to pull you in, it makes that effort to really, really pull you close. And

Speaker 4 if you are a fan of Stephen King at all, this is such a cool read because,

Speaker 4 yeah, on top of it just being a page turner, it is in conversation with one of the most successful writers ever.

Speaker 4 It's great, really, really good.

Speaker 1 Y'all watch Welcome to Dairy?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Okay. No.
I've seen clips.

Speaker 3 It looks too scary.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's too scary.

Speaker 4 I've heard it is BAD bad.

Speaker 4 Oh.

Speaker 2 One second, I got to thank the members. Some new members to the Patreon.
We have Ollie B., we have Patrick S, we have Henry, and we have John K. Thank you for being members of the Patreon.

Speaker 2 You can go to patreon.com/slash Sebastis. We have a new bracket battles episode that is live right now.
We'll put a clip in right here in this episode so you can hear a brief clip of it.

Speaker 4 Okay, next up.

Speaker 3 Jesus, this is going to be a fucking bloodbath.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 if these next up, we have Gwent from The Witcher 3 and also from Gwent.

Speaker 4 And we have Licky Tongue Sushi, or I think it's called Sushi Go Round, maybe.

Speaker 1 Can we not say that wording? It's called Sushi Go Round.

Speaker 3 We don't have to say the name of everyone actually does need to get on the mic and say Lickitong's name.

Speaker 1 I don't want to hear it, and I don't want to say Licky Tongue. There's my one, okay, but I don't want to hear it anymore.
All right. Does Does licking tongue help?

Speaker 1 Can you? No, for now on it's sushi go round. Okay.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Sushi go round.

Speaker 3 I will say of the Pokemon Stadium mini games, I think there was a Magikarp. Wasn't there a Magikarp leap one that then actually did get spun off into its own

Speaker 3 ass mobile game? I think so.

Speaker 2 But I especially didn't involve a certain Pokemon eating a bunch of sushi. Yeah,

Speaker 1 Licky Tongue is like hungry, hungry hippos. If the pellets pellets were sushi and in a circle surrounding the hippos and you got points for the

Speaker 1 best balls to eat and you could get combos for eating similar balls in order.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I definitely played this game a lot, but that was mostly because

Speaker 3 Pokemon Stadium was kind of busted.

Speaker 3 And so sometimes I would just kind of need a break.

Speaker 1 Like mom already bought you Pokemon Stadium. So you just like, you had to play something, right? So you might as well do Licky Tongue Stadium.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and you didn't get anything for doing it, but it was a break from how busted Pokemon Stadium was at times.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 yeah, thank you for being members if you already are. Please join us if you're not already.
You can also get an ad-free feed of all of our content at the $10 tier if you're interested.

Speaker 2 But otherwise, we're happy to have you.

Speaker 2 Next week.

Speaker 1 Next week is none of your business. And I'm tired of you being so pushy about this kind of thing, okay? We'll figure it out, and then we'll tell you.
We actually already know.

Speaker 1 We just don't have to tell you everything. Back off.

Speaker 1 Wild vibe, wild vibe.

Speaker 1 Back off!

Speaker 1 That's gonna do it for this week on the besties. Be sure to join us again next time for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

Speaker 1 Besties