The Besties - A Letter to the Fall Guys Guys

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

In this episode of The Besties, the boys review the hit online multiplayer battle royale Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. Plus, pitch their own Fall Guys mini games based on other existing games shows. And answer listener-submitted questions including what other genres, specific games or franchises would they want to have a battle royale mode added to? Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

So I had this Polygon t-shirt that I've had for many, many years. And unfortunately, after probably, I guess, seven years of washing it, it has officially died. There are holes all over it, and my wife will no longer let me wear it. It makes me very sad. I would argue that Polygon died in April of 2018 when Griffin and I left the site. Cool. For being awkward, but that would be my argument. That's a neat thing to say.

Weird, that's when it actually started to succeed and become profitable. Oh, you know, it's funny, Plan. I never knew you were all about the fucking money. Do you know my job title? Mine is, that was why I was creative lead, art. Art lead. Me and Justin were both-

Big thinker. our titles were ideas guys and we made five hundred thousand dollars a month Russ did you say your shirt died it died it stopped being a shirt because it had holes in it and I keep telling her it has three holes in it that's normal I don't think a shirt stops being a shirt until it no longer has the fabric required to suspend around your body it definitely had that it was just like minor very even then you could make it a belt i think a shirt can't ever not be a shirt or like a sash where's the diagnosis here like at what point did um did y'all decide dead the shirt's dead now well it wasn't y'all it was alex my wife i would have kept it rolling i would have rolled those dice for a few more years

um yeah no it's basically i would say above a dime dime or larger sized hole in it justifies death and it needs to be in like you know potential nipple area yeah sure sure belly button zone i used to get um uh little holes in my t-shirts around the bottom middle right around where the belt buckle is and i read on the internet that you get that because the fabric rubs against the belt buckle constantly and just like wears little holes. So now at this point in my life, I am a 39-year-old man who is wearing elastic belts every day. It's I only wear elastic belts. Just for that purpose?

I won't show you, but just, yeah, because I don't want to get holes in my fucking great t-shirts again. You know, in my house, Russ, t-shirts don't die. They just become staining rags. Oh. Have you considered that? Oh, God. We're back to woodworking again, huh? It all comes back. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Frostick, and I'm going to be very erudite about this game. Oh, no. We've been Freaky Friday here on the besties. Griffin and I are interchangeable, so he didn't notice. Chris Plant, Russ Frostick, and Swap. This is the besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive inter-game-ment.

Hmm. Let that settle in. Let's explore that. Let's explore that. I'm so excited to be talking about video games today. You know, folks, I've been looking over my nephew's shoulder recently at these things, and these video games have come a long way since pac-man uh chris what game that is a significant advancement over pac-man uh are we talking about today friends let me regale you

this week we are talking about fall guys ultimate knockdown it has a title that is longer than fall guys i found out when i checked its wik Wikipedia page. It is developed by Mediatonic, published by Austin Locals, Devolver Digital. It's available on Windows and PS4, and if you subscribe to PSN, you can download it for free. Here's how the game works. It is a battle royale in which up to 60 players

compete in minigames that gradually thin the ranks. It resembles TV shows like Wipeout and Takeshi's Castle Are you even reading the wikipedia page no i wrote this ahead of time okay okay because i come prepared because i'm trying to keep it concise just making sure steamrolled by bizarro me russ frushty and how's how's that going for you how's it going yeah getting this thing out very quickly yeah it was going great until everybody joined in on the fun

keep going players race to a finish line they try to survive on a long platform big giant beam batting them off into giant pink goo maybe they play a game of tag which is the worst mini game in the game you're a little lump of clay you dress up on mascot uniforms you can jump you can dive you can grab kind of feels like Gang Beasts. That's the entire thing. There it is. Boom. I did it.

I made it through my Google Doc. I hope you're all happy. Thank you. You're welcome. I feel defeated for you because of you. Wow. Which is not a great sort of feeling to have. Wow.

Wow. We are going to get into this. We're going to talk about it, this game, and a lot more. But first, we're going to take a quick break. Fall Guys. Welcome back. We did it. Fall Guys. It's a bold idea, and I don't know why nobody has thought of it before, of what if a battle royale game, but it was fun to play, and it didn't make you feel bad most of the time,

or it didn't make you feel like you're, it didn't suspend you in states of just like running for a half an hour away from some sort of electric encroaching wall, and it didn't make you feel very, very scared constantly that somebody was going to come in your life. But instead, you just kind of tumble around and fumble and jumble, and you bumble with 59 friends, very very scared constantly that somebody was going to come in your life um but instead you just kind of tumble around and fumble and jumble and you bumble with 59 friends and then if you lose it's like who cares except for the times where you care a great deal because it's fucking

infuriating yeah i mean i i love this game until i hate this game that that is the story of fall guys for me i thought i just simply loved it all the time because wow how goofy and funny and there's kind of a lot of luck in the game and you know it's all good fun until you actually approach being the number one fall guy and somebody grabs you at the finish line and throws you into a vat of goo for no reason other than to make your life miserable have you gotten that far have you gotten like have has anyone won here yet no nope i have not i have come in say a true to my like pub g uh status i think i won solo games of pub g twice and i played that game for an unconscionable

amount of time uh but i got a lot of seconds yeah i've gotten i've gotten me i've claimed me a lot of second prizes here on Fall Guy, which is you're fired, which is a real shame. But yeah, I've made it to that final round a lot and just cannot seem to, cannot seem to clinch it. Yeah. I, the closest I got was, I got to the final round and it was like, oh, the round was like I had to chase a tail.

There was one tail among six people and whoever had the tail at the end won and that just seems so like i get running to a to a crown that like is i've had those rounds too where it's like very exciting i'm gonna run to this crown but just who has the tail that's not skill that's just who has the tail. We have spiraled out of control, I feel like, instantly. In case you have never watched Wipeout or Takeshi's Castle, is that right? I think, yeah. Yeah. Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.

Most Extreme Elimination Challenge is what it was called when it was brought to the States on Spike and made super racist. the states on spike and made like super racist but uh they the the challenge the mini games are essentially like slapstick obstacle courses for the most part there's slime climb where you're going up the aggro crag essentially uh and the first you know they they whittle down the list of people so each round you know there may be 48 people competing but only 30 slots so you can finish the first 30 to finish make it through to the next round. The others are booted. I was going to say, what was that game show that Xbox ended up getting the rights to? 1 versus 100.

1 versus 100. That's what it feels like per round. Like there's a literal like people getting knocked out like visual between the rounds. It couldn't. Yeah, I visual between the rounds it couldn't yeah i guess between rounds that's fair there is a sense of like other people have stopped it was a big crowd and then other people stopped playing i don't i don't enjoy this game and let me say up front that like i um i this is not the sort of game that would typically appeal to me. I tend to be really into like advancement in games and narrative in games. It's very much not for me, which is fine.

That's great. The thing, but I played a lot of it because I wanted to understand, you know, I wanted to know like, what is it that I'm not clicking with here? And I would say that the big problem for me is I find the early – so when you start out, there's like 60 people, and it is a stampede. It is a huge rush of people trying to get from A to B through these gaps. I found that what was really putting me off was more the feeling of being in a big crowd and not being able to make any headway. I actually found kind of like claustrophobic in a pretty unpleasant way. Like I don't like the sensation of everybody's trying to get through one door

and everybody's getting past me and like it feels bad, like it felt bad to play. past me and like it feels bad like it felt bad to play once you're past that group which is the one sort of you know tier i would say there's like different tiers depending on the size of of group that's left once you're past that initial tier uh i started to enjoy the games more there's like um for instance a a game where there's two giant soccer balls on the field and you're on two teams and you're trying to like work together to knock your soccer ball, you know, soccer balls into their goal. And at that scale, I started to enjoy this a lot more because it's like a bit more meaningful and there's a bit more thought going into it and it's not just a rush of people. And I started to enjoy those more the problem i have is that you always have to go through that initial rush of people and sometimes like you don't even make it through that because it's very like you said very luck

dependent um i did appreciate that by and large it was easy to get back into a game after i'd been knocked out at that level but um i don't know, the sense of like having a big crush of people and trying to get past them was just not, I found really off the map. It's funny that you had issue, because I kind of had the reverse issue to a certain extent. The first round is a crapshoot. You know, the rounds are like you running for like multiple very small doors and as you said there's this crush of people and sometimes you

get through and sometimes you don't and sometimes that has nothing to do with your skill or how you played the first round is i would say a dice roll more than anything else and there's something like very low stakes about that that like i sort of like when I lose those first rounds, I'm like, yeah, I mean, it was funny to look at. It wasn't like I don't feel like I screwed up. So like that was fine to me. It was more the later round, specifically the team rounds that you talked about. And I had a really good match of that soccer game as well, where it was back and forth and really intense. But I've also had team rounds where like I feel like I did so well and i scored all sorts of points and crushed it but my team absolutely shit the bed and losing

in those rounds is like fuck that is terrible and something that i think they honestly will change very quickly um because the the team arbitrary like you have no communication there's no way to talk to anyone else which is a good thing but it also means like you losing has no like in like you did nothing to lose or win those matches i i would push back against the idea of it being like uh especially random in the early rounds especially because i feel like the first round is almost always an obstacle course of some sort uh because there are a lot of, I don't know the exact count of the mini games, but there's a lot of variety.

Like you guys are talking about like the team rounds, the soccer ball rounds. There's like a downhill jam where you're just trying to get your ball down this hill as fast as possible, but you can run over and, you know, knock around your opponents and try and get in their way.

There's this memory game where they flash these different like fruits on the tiles on the ground and you have to memorize like which fruit is where because then one of the fruits will be safe and everybody has to try and hop on those. There's a lot of variety, but the early rounds are essentially usually obstacle courses. And there is a layer of like map knowledge that is like incredibly valuable uh there is a one of the common early maps is there are seesaws like a series of seesaws that you can run across and uh oftentimes you have to sort of chain them one seesaw right into another and but there's like a physics model in this game that can be very punishing if you jump you know too high onto a seesaw that's too tilted you're just gonna go right off of it uh and i found that i've like

learned the like what to look for like what seesaw not to hop on when it's hit a certain angle and if you can do that like i i find myself very rarely being eliminated those early rounds because i know kind of like there's one called Gate Crash where, and this is straight from Takeshi's Castle, like there's five doors in front of you and maybe one or two of them doesn't open and the others will just smash as you jump through them. And as long as you aren't in the front of the pack

of that game, you'll almost always qualify. Like you don't have to be first in those early rounds so i finally i i i don't i i uh i don't feel like it is uh that sort of punishing and random early on because there is like there are sort of tricks and shortcuts and best practices for most of the maps yeah i i um i love this game and i'll talk about that more but i'll also want to go to griffin's point just to show you how like every how the game positions you when you play this game is going to completely shape your experience so the example that griffin gave there's this stage where it's point a to point b and you have to run across all these seesaws if you routinely start at the beginning of the pack and that, that stage, great.

It's a very, feels very fair. You have to actually use balance. If you start in the back and everybody in front of you has triggered all these seesaws, you're effectively just out of luck from the beginning. You might as well just like turn around and throw yourself off an edge. Because it's so much more difficult from literally the starting line to get across that stage. That said, I like it.

I like that somebody made a game that is just fun, that they had the nerve to make a thing that is not particularly well-balanced, and I think intentionally so. It's almost balanced through in-balance. Yes. It's balanced because it's shitty. Not shittybound yes it's like it's balanced because

it's shitty not shitty but like everyone gets fucked yeah everyone gets fucked sometimes that's the balance is like like much like life everyone just gets boned sometimes the other thing that i really love about this game is pretty regularly it's doing things i just feel like i haven't done before in a video game which you're lucky if you get like one moment like that and in a game let alone many and then the stuff that sticks out to me is just i know that you mentioned not liking the surge uh at the beginning of some of those races but i don't know i found it very um warm and comforting human to just be surrounded by all these people who are just clamoring over you and knowing each of them is a real person and my favorite thing is to let them get a little bit ahead of me then jump and then

dive on top of it and try to just ride the wave like a jerome bettis situation yes the other one that really stuck out to me is um it doesn't i don't know what else to call it other than the normandy level of like so many video games tried to do that, you know, rush the beach while things are flying at you sort of thing, whether it's an actual World War II game or something else. And in this game, there's a stage where you have to climb a hill in these humongous pieces of fruit. That look like the Fruit Ninja fruits.

I don't know if that was intentional or not, but they look exactly like the Fruit Ninja fruits. But they're like the size of like semi trucks just hurling down this hill as you try to work your way upwards and that felt amazing and it's something that um i think this game can do because it has this kind of lo-fi aesthetic um it's able to do things that something with i don't know a really fancy uh visual graphic setting would maybe not be able to pull off let alone with um so many players on the screen so yeah it's it's an imperfect game there's like a million things that you can point out that don't work but at the same time it almost like defies the kind of critical rubric that i i would use for most other things

because i feel like it's so intentionally is chill with the things it does not do as well yeah i do want to mention also like i've watched a bit of this on twitch and in case you haven't seen like it is currently dominating literally every game on twitch it's beating fortnite it's being right cs go all the big ones are being dominated by fall guys right now part of it is because it is tremendously watchable um like it's very easy to parse what you're looking at even if you don't play video games you can see there's this creature you know dressed as a milkshake and he falls off a seesaw and it's funny like that's a very easy thing to parse but also so streamers do this thing where they'll like post how proud they are of how many uh games in a row of battle royale they've won so they'll have like a streak four

wins in a row or something like that at the bottom of their screen all of the streamers that i've seen right now have been like zero out of 25 and it's really funny to see like very very skilled video game players just totally beefing it on various obstacles because it is genuinely like you know there is an element obviously there is an element of luck at play and i think over time they will probably find ways to not remove it certainly but diminish it in somewhat just to make it a little more um a little more skill-based but it's funny right now just to see people like totally not being a little more skill-based but it's funny right now just to see people like totally not being able to cruise in the way they can like headshot all

the guys in fortnite or whatever there's something about making the format digestible that is like my favorite thing about the game like i was on a really bad streak like the first day that i got the game or maybe the second day and i was like editing a podcast and it is like it's surprisingly a very very easy game to kind of just like play idly even though it's like a battle royale which is historically like the most buttoned up like you have to be on your shit genre that there is but just playing it while i was editing and like not really having to i don't know be all the way in it there is something like i but just playing it while i was editing and like not really having to i don't know be all the way in it there is something like i found myself playing it like all day because it's just it has a one more time sort of aesthetic to it that like apex i feel like

doesn't have that that fortnite or pub g like i even when i lost even when i came in second as many times as i did it never felt like soul crushing uh which i for me is then like the game has its cake and eats it too because the battle royale genre is such a like obvious like cool idea uh but the problem is that you know there's only one winner so typically 99 or in this case 59 people feel like shit when they don't win but i never felt i never felt defeated i never felt like uh i'm done i'm done i can't after that i'm done which is uh i think a pretty like incredible uh like design achievement for for fall guys when the games are short right like that helps i mean you can play through you can make it to the final round in like what maybe six or seven minutes like right it's pretty

quick speaking of pretty quick i think this discussion of fall guys should be pretty quick by which i mean we should begin to wrap it up and is that because i have a disinterest in it no i don't even know why you'd say that justin who what's your favorite costume real quick the wolf mask. Wow. That's pretty exciting. I see a lot of that going around. Yeah. Okay, so that'll do it for us. Let's, anything else?

Any closing thoughts? Y'all want to see more games? They're going to add more games? That's it. That'd be a good thing to add. What's got me excited is like, I feel like this is an infinitely expandable experience. And hopefully it will be,

considering how wildly successful it has been in the first week that it's been out. But it's got, I would say, a decent chunk of minigames in there, but I also feel like I have seen all of them at this point. And I just, I don don't know it doesn't take long you don't have to play it for very long to start like spinning up your own ideas for like what a good minigame could be i think there's they have a lot of runway yeah i honestly just

want solo only like i don't want any team modes no thank you just solo only and i'd be thrilled that's all i want i want i want i want some fucking guns cool yeah how about it fall guys you have the guts to give me a gun and break the mold and i would love to do orange juice boy dance i would love to do orange juice boy i would love to do backpack man i would love to do uh the prince brother the prince brother dance um yeah man the new cousin i guess she's like a duke is the prince's cousin a duke duke carlton let's take a break you know we were talking about how easy it would be to spin up our your own fall guy minigames and we thought we'd do a little bit of that just pro bono right now um based on other game shows take taking a little snippet from those little tweak and then uh turn it into a fall guys minigame yeah um you know i'll start it off uh one

of the things i think that's missing here um you know, in Legends of the Hidden Temple, I don't know if you remember, large adult men would pop out of closets and grab children. Is there a way to integrate that in just a smart way that's not, like, inappropriate? You're saying larger Fall Guys that grab the small Fall Guys. That could be good, and there could be a very, very, very, very, very, very large fog high that quizzes everybody about some piece of folklore or sort of traditional tale from a certain civilization throughout history.

Chris Plant is clicking the thumbs up emoji. None of us have ever done this in Skype, ever. Chris Plant has come from nowhere to silently quit the thumbs up reaction it was like a full screen so much he had animated thumbs up private for not for the show he just wants us to privately know that this is a good idea. What else? Deal or no deal. Briefcases. The fall guys are all standing on a briefcase.

Some of the briefcases are open to reveal a ladder that lets you climb up. And some of the briefcases just pop open real fast and fling you into nothingness. So it's like you're guessing as to where you think the the good suitcase is the stand on so you're integrating just it's just the suitcase part of a deal or no deal well what you want the howie mandel part you absolute maniac honestly howie mandel has fine there's a large bald fall guy in it that original mandel is some serious fall guys energy howie mandel blowing up a plastic uh glove and putting it on his head that's a fall guy costume he was he was also the voice of gizmo

the gremlin so if ever there was a proto fall guy it's gizmo people listening to the show know who harry mandel is so bobby's world let me start there. Because that would be the most applicable to this discussion. So, I mean, they're going to do minions at some point. It seems unavoidable. Because, hey, come here. Come in close. It's your pal Griffin. He's a straight shooter.

He doesn't beat around the bush. They're fucking minions. The Fall Guys. The Fall Guys is minions. I'm sure somebody figured out how to put some overalls on them and make them yellow. And this is minions. This one's minions.

So that's not even a good idea I had. That's a, I'm seeing like next May the Minions DLC drops when Despicable Me 4 drops in, well not, the home theaters. Okay, this is a billion dollar idea for nickelodeon literally do put the aggro crag in there like work with their engineers or whatever and make the aggro crag a level that this game feels like even more than fortnite pretty ripe for brand partnerships you can tell the brands are already thirsty for it like i think kentucky fried chicken was already begging to get a chicken put into the game on twitter like they're ready i i mean i i i would have respected fall guys more honestly if they had just replied

and been like three million dollars man just like you just send it to us in unmarked bills uh you know what'd be fun is like a double dare. Like as long as we're talking about brand partnerships. Imagine 20 Fall Guys all jumping into a giant slime-filled waffle trying to find a flag. That'd be dope. Picking a nose. That'd be good. Everybody's climbing in the nose. Yeah, exactly.

I'm mad that this isn't even funny. These are just all fucking good ideas that we're giving away for free. You're welcome, Fall Guys guys. Sheesh. All right, listen. Let's talk about reader mail because I feel like we're giving away the shop right now and I hate this feeling of giving away free ideas.

Okay, we got some questions. This one's from Elliot. What are your fave minigames and any least faves? Do you think next season they might remove some of the less liked games like the matching do y'all hate the tail game as much as i do which is a lot yeah there's multiple tail games and they're all terrible it's terrible explain what the tail game is because you we have referenced it yeah so there's a few variants of it but the first one that i played was a team-based tail

game where there were four teams and split among those four teams some people have uh like raccoon tails effectively and the idea is to run around this map if you don't have a tail and try to grab the tails off other people kind of like a flag football situation so that your team has the most tails out of all of the teams and if you have the least tails you get automatically knocked out this would be kind of fine if it was just a solo version of it where everyone's like kind of a free-for-all um and they do have that there is that there is that and it happens later but the team-based version is infuriating because again i spent entire round running around with a tail i was very proud of

myself that i avoided everyone still got eliminated because the rest of my team was dog shit so like boo on the tail games um i think people have said i you know i really like the the obstacle course like i i think the seesaw one is excellent anyone that has like an unspoken social contract yeah like the seesaw one where if you know if 20 people are in a cluster and you're in that cluster and they all jump on one side of the seesaw and you look at the other 19 people like, you guys know how the fuck this is gonna go, right? If 20 of us are on one side of a seesaw, we're about to eat shit all together.

And you guys are, it's just me on the other side of the seesaw. Let me see, let me see, let me see. Yeah, I don't weigh as much as 19 of you. So, oh, we're all dead? That makes sense, cool. Thank you, good job, everybody. Anything like that is so infuriating,

but so, I don't know, I feel like there is a sociological study that you do five times a round, just like, oh, huh, everyone's just fucking lost their minds and wants to lose. Good, good, good, cool, cool, cool. I do want to mention,

there's another one that's, there's like fake platforms. And you basically, it's like Indiana Jones 3, where there's these like invisible platforms. There's these visible platforms, but some of them are hollow or just fall out when you step on them. And you can tell which ones are fake, not by knowing Latin, but by just standing in place and waiting for them to rattle. not by knowing Latin, but by just standing in place and waiting for them to rattle. So you get to these situations where like 16 people are grouped up

on the same platform, waiting for some indication as to which of the platforms around them are real. All holding on to each other. All holding on and like there's some jostling and then at the end, someone just makes like a last ditch, like sprint for life,

hoping that they actually land on legit platforms that one is also excellent yeah my favorite is uh there's like a zigzagging hill uh full of obstacles and the pink bubblegum slime slowly rises and if you touch the slime you're you're a goner and especially when you have a ton of people playing it. I don't know. It is maybe Justin's nightmare in terms of claustrophobia or just getting caught in the mess. But having tons of people trying to run up this really narrow zigzag, knowing that if you get left behind, you are going to get swallowed by bubblegum goo. It is so good. It is like that right level of tense where when you cross the finish line you feel like

you accomplish something another question for you this one it's from dan what other genres do you want to see you have a battle royale mode added i'm going to expand that question genres or specific games or franchises uh i've got one yes a little called Spelunky would be really great with 60 people. That'd be good. Just jam everyone into this tiny little cave situation. They already have a multiplayer mode. I think it supports up to four, and it's a lot of fun, but it's very goofy. And I think the only thing that would make it goofier is adding 56 more people.

Yeah, I like that. God, this is a physical impossibility, I feel like. the only thing that would make it goofier is adding 56 more people yeah i like that god this is a this is a physical impossibility i feel like because of it's the year 2020 but i feel like there could have been a really good rock band like instrument like rhythm game amp versus amp battle royale thing that could have existed maybe it would have been maybe the worst one oh okay cool all right the craziest possible thing that makes no sense that's actually a bad idea there are no bad ideas but that's a bad idea i think it'd be great i think i think okay it wouldn't be 100 people right it'd be like you know 30 bands four no no it's not local

multiplayer it's like every it's an online, so it's like band versus band. And there's like solos that you have to shred, and everybody has to shred the same solos. And it knocked people out. Oh, Chris Plant thumbed up that one too. He liked it. Thank you. I like it, Kevin.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Russ. I like you, Kevin. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Russ. I like you. Only you. I got another question for everybody. See, let me answer Sea of Thieves, Giant Boat, 60 Pirates, Walk the Plank with your Haters Walk the Plank in this Battle Royale. So from Joshy, with the popularity in mind,

how likely is it that we will eventually see a competitive Fall Guys scene? Like we see competitive Fortnite and Apex. I hope not. It's there, man. I hope not. I don't think it's there, man. No, I mean, I think, yeah, I agree. I think it's there, and I don't think it's a reach.

I realize right now it seems like a total like crapshoot but i think the games like even if you started at 12 i think the games kind of work and are immensely watchable um doing a 60 person thing as fortnite has sort of implied is very messy and not as watchable because you're switching from so many different perspectives but like if it's just 12 people what? Not every game needs to be an eSport just have fun. I can't tell that you didn't like that idea because there was

no emoji to indicate that you didn't like it. I did and there was no thumbs down in Skype so I did a real life thumbs down. There's a crying man. What about crying man? Oh that's good thank you there is a crying person. The only like e-sport i ever really like got into and like watched a decent amount of was uh uh pub g especially around like the big events like the big tournaments and uh like worldwide events and stuff back when those

were a thing that still happened this game is watchable because it's like silly and non-stop and there's very little lull but there is something to be said about that lull lending itself to like wild amounts of tension and that being like the thing that kept me watching like seeing a very very tense firefight between two teams the the tension there is what made it so enjoyable and that just simply does not exist i feel like in fall guys there is no tension i never ever ever spectate like if i get knocked out i done. I don't give a shit, like, what the rest of the round looks like because I don't find it a... I think it's a super fun game to play and it is very digestible to play

and I do not think it is very fun to watch. But, you know, apparently I'm in the minority because it's so, so, so huge on Twitch. Can we talk about other games? Anything else anybody else is playing? I'm still playing Terraria because of fucking rest fresh yeah dig those blocks griffin that's wild man it's a it's a that's a good-ass game i get

it now yeah it's a good-ass nine-year-old game it is uh yeah it's it's very cool um it is like a legit rpg people sort of don't realize it because it doesn't show its hand very well or early. But once you get into it, it is like a legit RPG. Russ, you've been playing CrossCode, which I think is on the Switch, I'm assuming. Okay, so we've talked about CrossCode a few times. And always whenever we talk about it, we're like, well, there's the it's broken now. Don't play it. It's broken. So they did release a patch. And I've been playing it. And and while it's broken uh so they did release a patch um and i've been playing it and and while it's not it doesn't run as well as the game should run because the game is a 2d like it looks like uh zelda nes snes game um so it doesn't run completely smooth but it's smooth enough and they remove like

the bigger issues like crashing and like the fact that you had to wait five seconds for the menu to load. That's all I cared about. Yeah. So that stuff is out of the way. And honestly, the first like few hours of that game didn't grab me because I was like, they just throw so many story things and mechanics at you. And I was just super overwhelmed. last night I was playing and it finally finally started to like oh I know where to look to like

where to look for quest information and like how to complete these things and what these random ass items I'm picking up have any purpose for and it's sort of like the matrix just fell in front of me and then I was able to appreciate things like because it's a game that is set in a video

game it's it's like an imaginary MMO effectively. The writing sort of plays this up where you're talking with people and they're all like, yeah, when's that patch gonna come out? Which is surprisingly meta and funny and not something you see all the time.

So I don't know, I kind of really dug it. Yeah, I'm still sticking with it. It's weird. It's a weird Trojan horse where it kind of makes it seem at the outset like it's going to be sort of a meta commentary on MMOs, and then you discover that it is actually just kind of replicating a lot of MMO stuff, especially in a quest design.

There's a lot of go-kill four of these things, and then come back to me. But it's still interesting. I think it's cool. And there's actually some surprisingly good dungeons and puzzle-solving stuff that you don't necessarily expect. I wanted to give a quick plug for the game that I've been playing the most in the past couple weeks.

It's Griftlands, which as much as I like Monster Train, this is another deck-building building rogue-like kind of thing um that it's by clay yeah uh who did oh god don't starve and market the ninja yeah yeah uh but grift lands is so cool uh it is a rogue like so it's different you know each time narrative game where you're a deck building game where you play a grifter which is just kind of like a in this world a grifter is like a someone who takes odd jobs things that need doing uh and you're a grifter who has and as you proceed through the story which is different each time you play and because you can make big different choices or you know you run into different people or whatever as you play through there are two different modes that you can play uh there is battle which is like

deck building where you're playing cards to defeat the other person's cards, and you have your health and you're attacking and doing damage and all this stuff. But there's also negotiation, which is similar, except you're dismantling. It's much more abstract. You're dismantling parts of someone's argument, and the cards are like rhetoric or asking rapid rapid fire questions or being obstinate or hostile or whatever and you're like using those and they've gamified the entire negotiation process to where you're like removing some parts of someone's argument there's negotiations before battles where you're like trying to eliminate parts of someone's faith in something so you're

trying to like erode their confidence before the battle um and there's different tacks you can take for each one and then each of the grifters have very different mechanics um the for for there's like three different ones i think currently you start off with a grifter named sal uh the one i have right now that i'm doing a run with is named rook uh and rook's big thing is in negotiations uh he's got a coin that he flips and that it has a whether it's heads or snails it has a different effect on the cards that you have there are some cards that are more powerful if you have a heads up there's some cards that are better if you have a snails up you can get cards that let you rig the systems um there's one other thing that i have to talk about uh it's got a really really great system for uh

relationships when you make choices in it it's a self-contained world right and when you play through there's maybe i don't know 40 50 people in your story when you make a decision like you make a decision to like work with somebody or turn against somebody or attack somebody or not you can get them to like you which will make things a little easier you'll become friends you can get them to love you which will actually give you a like permanent boost you can also get them to hate you uh in which case um you can uh you'll get a permanent negative thing so their hatred of you is like a permanent concrete gameplay thing where they're like like in negotiations they'll say something negative about you and that will be added to your enemies. Like repertoire of things.

Because they've heard bad shit about you. From this other person. Which is like so cool and smart. But when you beat someone in battle. You have the option to let them surrender. Or to kill them. And if you kill them. Their hatred negative thing goes away.

Because if they're dead. They can't hate you. So there's like. You're having to can't hate you so there's like you're having to run a calculus pretty frequently of like well if i just kill this guy the hatred he has for me is not going to continue to affect me but if you kill them they may have a friend that will hate you as a result of that um there's so much going on it's so cool uh every run feels very neat I've done like four or five runs with each of the first two characters I haven't unlocked the third yet

if you like those kind of deck building it's on PC I think right now but if you like that kind of deck building thing if like Monster Train Slay the Spire that kind of stuff I think you will really really dig Griftlands I want you guys to play it Shank it's Justin, Shank.

It's called Shank. Shank 1 and 2. Thank you, Shank. That's the game that we were thinking about. Shank. Quickly, Blaseball is on a hiatus for a week, maybe two weeks, which is a perfect time for you to learn more about Blaseball. I know I spoke about it last week but uh blazeball really is a story

and you can uh learn that story by reading the blazeball wiki uh i also just think this is great that they took a break like this game is not made by a lot of people and it was heated hitting this kind of frenzy and rather than make everybody crunch and take something that I assume was like fun for these creators, they like put it on pause and are figuring it out and making sure that the servers work and figuring out whatever the hell they want to do with the game. So I think, you know, the commissioner of Blaseball is doing a great job. And I think now is like a great time to learn about it. That way, when it does restart, you can hop on because honestly for me it will unquestionably be one of my favorite games this year i i think it is just endlessly fascinating and again like you can find that on your browser just google blazeball actually don't

google blazeball because if you google blazeball what will happen is it will assume you mean baseball so actually just go to blazeball.com that is baseball with an l after the b the first b uh two l's after the second b i you know what i mean there's an a anyway what are we doing next week what are we doing next week what are we doing next week what are we doing next week we're doing rogue legacy 2 which is going to be available in early access on steam and yeah it's actually early access on august 18th um so you will be able to follow along with us the That episode's going to be released on August 21st, so you'll have some experience with the game, and you could offer questions or thoughts.

Where, Chris Plant? You can do that on Twitter, at TheBestiesPod. And here's what I recommend you also do, because that's not going to be a ton of time to play that game. Go back, play Rogue Legacy. Go back, play some other rogue-likes. And shoot us some questions that you have about that genre over uh at twitter because y'all it is going to be a time for this genre not only

do we have rogue legacy 2 we have the uh full release of noita we have spelunky 2 uh coming in what a month almost oh wow you're kidding me justin just icing me with the board the board look i'm sorry that we're talking about good games spur clunky more like oh justin you could take another break for that episode what i missed last time i don't remember good must have been choice choice up without the j man oh it was uh it was bad it was good mechanics and bad games but don't worry i talked about dark sector for you i did a great justin impression thank you justin where can people listen to the show besties.fan boy wow not besties out fan boy that's different that's our fan site no, besties.fan will give you the link where you can follow and listen for free on Spotify.

Mail at besties.fan is our email address. And please share the show and let people know that we're talking about video games over here. Because if no one's listening, it's just me talking to these guys for no reason. And that's very pleasant, but it's also kind of sad. So please share besties.fan with anyone that you think enjoys a video game from time to time. Well, that's gonna do it

for us. So be sure to join us again next week on The Besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!