The Besties - Animal Crossing: New Horizons will save us all!

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

This week, the Besties discuss the highly anticipated Animal Crossing: New Horizons! Is this the most important game possibly in the history of humanity? Will this be the biggest game release on the Nintendo Switch of all time? Together they explore the game play, bug curation and how important the opportunity to virtually go outside is in the this time of the coronavirus. 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!

okay so i want to get i want to get this we're going to have a lot of new listeners um because this is the animal crossing it's going to be a big show so i was thinking we should sort of in the cold open here we don't normally address the audience it's kind of just like a fun time for friends and i hate to violate that secret thing but i think we should like all sort of introduce ourselves and like who we are so like i'm justin i'm kind of the would you guys you guys are about to all say bad boy at the same time but i'll the bad i'm kind of the bad boy uh-huh uh griffin you can't find me not on my skateboard so it kind of sounds like a bad boy thing well it does kind of sound like that huh and that's sort of a thing that me and justin have

going on is a friction of who's the baddest boy uh every episode chris and russ will vote on who they think the baddest boy is and the other one usually it's pretty tight it's tight and the loser has to wear a big baby bonnet and suck their thumb the whole time chris what's your thing oh i'm i'm the one who uh does the solo album but doesn't find success but shows up at state fairs for the next 20 years. And you're like, wait, what band was he in? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They were pretty good. Chris is Dustin Timberlake.

I'm the one that makes it all happen, to be perfectly honest. I know you all think you are making it happen. It's all coming from me. So it's two bad boys, a failure, and the puppeteer. Can I switch to the sexy one? You just put on gunner glasses. You can never use that adjective ever again, Justin. I want to be the shark.

My mouth can't form the word. The gunners. They're blocking blue light and my ability to say sexy. Oh my God. You look like gamer Bono. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the pandemic. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I am a turnip man. My name is Christopher Plant, and I live on Sweet Boy Island. My name is Russ Frudging, and I should have cleared my throat before I said that.

Hello and welcome to the besties where we discuss the latest and greatest in video gaming entertainment. It is a video game book club. It is a game of the year show that goes all year long. And this week we're going to talk about animal crossing now new horizons here's my thesis statement i made no small amount of noise about not being as excited about animal crossing as everybody else was you gotta take those gunners off i can't i'm just gonna take well i was about to take off in a dramatic moment but now i'll just take them off in the course of action just be careful with the strain the eye strain is deadly it's yeah i'm already having a migraine so thank you griffin so i wasn't

very excited about animal crossing new horizon and that was a few weeks ago and now i think it may be the most like in a sense important video game to ever be released in the history of humanity correct yes this is not an exaggeration no i'm literally i literally think this could end up being the most important game important is a very loaded term obviously i'm not talking about in the course of like video game development right it's not gonna change the world the way like a wolfenstein or like the beatles rock band for example or the beatles rock band you absolute mad lad mr mosquito like that we're talking about the big milestone irritating stick yeah no but this game is gonna save lives literally again save lives animal crossing new horizons is the most important video game possibly in the history of humanity and i would like to

talk with you about it now that's all i have to say about it i like catching bugs whatever but that's that's kind of that where i wanted to leave from Yeah, I think it's worth just the thing that Animal Crossing provides, and we're going to talk a lot about the game today, but the thing it provides is a quasi-facsimile of going outside, which you, for a lot of people, cannot do right now.

And it's pretty nice. And control. Oh yeah. You know what I mean? We are in a moment now where I think people have the least amount of control they've ever had over their general situation. And this is a game that lets you control nearly everything in the world to make it the world that you want it to in a way that, like, for a lot of people is impossible right now and i think that that the balm of the the sensation of being in a world that was pleasant and under my control is it was unlike anything i have experienced like the relief i felt just getting in i have no comparison for um plant do you want to like just like do a quick rundown of what this game even is

for people that aren't familiar with Animal Crossing? For the four people listening who don't know. The long history of Animal Crossing is you move to a city. In this case, you move to an island. You get a new house and a mortgage. The mortgage is generously provided to you with zero interest.

You pay it off whenever you want. As you pay it off, you grow that house. You do things like decorating the house. In this game, you can decorate the entire island, effectively. Doing these things and cleaning makes you more money, which allows you to get more stuff to decorate the island and the house.

It's very, very, very simple. It's basically chores, the video game. Oh my god. Plants. is it is but that's so no i think i think that's very i think that is part of what justin is talking about and why it's so fulfilling because all the things that you do in this game are things you do in real life but without any reward in this game i mean that's not true in this game you pick weeds and you get paid for it and i know but you're you're fishing ocean fish

and you're cutting trees like it's yeah that's my day-to-day dude yeah but i mean you know why i'm not going to cut down trees because uh if i cut down trees in the real world i probably get hurt and i get nothing for it but a cut down tree i cut down trees here i did some great landscaping it was doable without like serious harm to myself or my friends or family you you get wood to make a table i got wood so that i could make you know a video game console out of wood because like apparently that's how you make video game consoles duh duh so so that's that's the the basics new horizons i as i have been looking forward to this game for the better part of a decade. And I was a little bit worried about some of the things.

Like I was not sure how the crafting system was going to play out. That is like a new major focus in this installment that's never been in the games before. The, you know, the island aesthetic. I was a little bit worried about sort of coloring the game in a way that I was not going to be a huge fan of. You don't like islands? Well, no, it's just, you know, islands is a sometime food. You know what I mean? I'm a landlubber.

Yeah, that's fair. I am blown away, like, every day that I play this game, how just smart the things that they have added in New Horizons is. Like the crafting system, the sort of extra effort that you have to put in to get people to move to your, to get new villagers to move to your island, having to like not only build the houses, but kind of furnish them using the crafting system. Like the crafting stuff, I think specifically you could talk on and on and on about about how just sort of intelligently it the the rest of the game has kind of been designed around it in a way that i find really really satisfying yeah i mean it to boil it down like now granted you now have to like go out and collect

wood and rocks and various other things to like make the things that you want, you know, you have the recipes for. But by introducing this crafting system, it basically removes this mechanic, which was totally random previously, which was I'm going to show up in the store and hope they have the thing that I really want. Maybe I need like a wooden bookcase and I have all the other wooden stuff. And now I can either make it myself if I know the recipe, or I can rely on other people that have the recipe with multiplayer. So it like really puts a lot more control, I think, in players' hands, whereas previously it was RNG, which I think that core idea of removing a lot of the randomness

is the like main thesis of what they were trying to design for with this game. And it ties into not only the crafting, but also just island creation, how you set up everything. You really are given every tool imaginable to make this game your own. Yeah, I think what's surprising to me about the game is it is the culmination

of a whole bunch of Animal crossing games i didn't like like it was a happy home designer i think oh yeah come on no one like no no but these are important like happy home designer uh really just focused on all of like the design stuff without the actual i would say pleasure uh and cycle of animal crossing there was the mobile game that allowed you to do more decoration outdoors um sure But the game itself was not great. And now it feels like in hindsight, oh, well, I didn't like either of those games. That experimentation fed into this game, which now is the core Animal Crossing loop, but with just an incredible amount of design features. And now the entire island is yours to decorate so you

can make it a theme park or you can make it really a mall you can make it whatever you want one question though for uh hoops because griffin said island life is a sometime food now when i think of justin mcelroy the first thing i think is that's a man who likes a nice trip to margaritaville yeah i love that island life. I did build myself a beach house right there on the beach. That real estate wasn't taken out by anybody. I'm going to go ahead and move there. Move my beautiful daughter next door. She lives in a tent because she won't go catch any bugs.

My daughter lives in a shameful tent, and I'm next door in a beautiful, beautiful mansion. But Daddy leaves her gifts. Daddy got her a hamster today, left that outside her house, got her a fun ring toss game. That's been a really cool aspect of this is like, because connection is at a premium right now

in our species, being able to like share things with people, visit people virtually, like go to people's island is like weirdly profound in a way that i don't want to overanalyze but it's like it's nice to go to someone's island and be like just look around and see their stuff um and to speak the design aspects um and i know that this is again part of that culmination but like the ability to download um uh designs that people have created and put them up that is when I decided that I would care

about design. I've never cared about like decor in an Animal Crossing before. I just throw my shit wherever and like what, you know, but as soon as I found that someone had recreated a vintage Epcot shirt, t-shirt that I could download, I was like, okay, I care very much because I can make a reasonable simulcra uh you come into my bedroom i got pictures of the magic kingdom i got a twin peaks poster up that somebody made i got wallpaper from the haunted mansion it's fantastic the process to do it is unbelievably draconian and just absolute madness i i was trying here's how bad it was. You need three devices to do it.

And I was literally trying to figure out a way to get my Switch onto the internet through a backdoor so I could download the thing because my daughter was using the computer and I needed to take a picture with my phone to put it back onto the Switch. Of a QR code. It's wild. They have made it, for what it's worth, a easier uh once you get to a point later in the game with the there's a

store that unlocks that makes it a lot easier to share designs for what it's worth but oh that's not that's good to know it is weird it's a weird animal crossing thing that yeah there's a lot of like hey good news you've upgraded and now we've removed our own bullshit. There's a tool ring that you get for 800 miles, which is like a sort of side currency in the game. And it lets you press up on the D-pad and get to a tool wheel that makes it much easier to select your tools. It's wild that you, it's like a thing that you get.

And it is equally wild that I was so stoked to pay money to unlock this UIi thing that should have been in there uh so that was that was pretty wild combining two of your points you said uh human connection at a premium and also uh typical nintendo bullshit how much do you think we would be complaining about the online issues with this game if it were any other time on the planet yeah because having to wait for people to join your island griffin can you explain how yes the process let's explain how online works i have uh right before the game came out i put my switch code up on my my facebook page because i'm mostly just like buds with actual like people i know there and so i i got a bunch of new sort of switch friends of people

that I know and just kind of know and so I was like yeah hell yeah let's go and got Animal Crossing New Horizons went to the airport turned it on I was like let's party baby and then I went into the in-game friend list and it was empty because before you can have somebody in your in-game friend list you have to have played with them. So just to really reiterate that, there's no way of sending messages to people from switch to switch, right? There's no way the switch, you know, user interface doesn't have a send message to switch friends thing. So I could text Justin, hey, idiot, open your gate so I can come over. I could fly to Justin's island,

and then we would have ourselves on our in-game friends list, or we can register each other as best friends, and if you register somebody as best friends, you can see whenever they come online, and you can send messages to them at any time in the game, right? And you can dig up shit on their island. Things went very smooth there. You assumed that you could just fly to his island yes he happens to be checking his in-game phone at the moment we decide to fly to his island if you're if you're talking to anybody even yeah just the process of even if the gate is open and i'm ready

to fly you have to like okay you have to walk to the airport which okay i have to walk to the airport when i want to fly somewhere. Fair. And there's a dodo there who's like, hey, what's up? This is like every one of these is a menu with slow talking, right? Hey, what's going on? I thought I'd fly somewhere. Okay. You want to fly to Harv's Island?

You want to fly to a friend's island or just some random place? A friend's island. Okay. Do you want to do that locally or do you want to do that online? Okay. Online. Okay. If you want to go online, I have you want to do that online? Okay. Online. Okay. If you want to go online, I have to put the on the internet.

Is that okay? What have you been doing? Why have you not been? You should be hooking me into the internet. I'm already on the internet. What do you mean? A Google sheet is really all they need. You could bang all these questions out in one go, but for whatever reason, Nintendo loves to just like, are you okay? Is this okay if i do this little thing and and the thing is you're up against

a timer because if your friend switch is just like lying there so you go over to their partner's island and sell some fucking turnips the time the time the clock is ticking okay i have to get over there and this dota is like um do you want like a cushy middle seat or kind of like an aisle on the fake plane? Or do you give a shit about this? Like teleport me. So we should contextualize this. We're not going to go into detail on like how turnips work

because it's very complicated. Suffice it to say, all three of the other people on the show visited my wife's island yesterday because their turnip prices are very good. So I shared this code and Plant, 45 minutes after I shared the code, Plant DMs me.

He's like, I can't get in. I'm like, my dog, you need to be on top of it. There's no, like, leaving the switch passive. That is not an option. You really are on the clock the second the code goes in, and if you don't jump in, you're totally screwed. I need a pager. You need a pager.

Just for animal testing. Yes. I joined a rush of people going to Russ's wife's island. Yeah, it was a march. Which is the name of it. There was a bunch of people. And what made it bad is she was standing there. I've met her once in real life.

But I had to do this like slow walk past. I did not know the protocol of like, hey, I'm just here to sell turnips. You've got a wild price but hey this is such a cool island i'm not going to take a lot of time to stop and look around right now but now we're pals so i'll definitely be back whenever this you know what's really funny is that she definitely wasn't looking at the screen it was just sitting on the couch so everyone's having i know that made it worse because she was just standing still like well hey this is weird hey a friend a visit from a

friend the night before that i went to fresh's island and just completely fleeced it of every apple i could find so i could finally pay off my mortgage and then i walked over to the airport and fresh is just waiting there like passing judgment so i like look in my inventory and the only thing i have as a gift is called the mama bear, which is a six foot tall teddy bear with floral print on it. And I just dump it at its feet. Talk about wild power plays. You can go to your friend's island, shake their tree, take their fruit. That's delightful and irritating.

I have no idea the etiquette, by the way, unlike every island has like one of five different fruits so if you try to sell your local fruit at a different island you get better money for it or if you take someone's foreign fruit back to your island and grow it then you can sell it on your island for a pretty penny so it makes sense to get people's fruit and then uh grow it on your island i don't know what the protocol is for taking things i do know that it is bad form to uh animal crossing makes it possible to eat a fruit get super strong for a second and just dig up a whole tree and put it in your pocket that i'm sure is that's that is not i am fairly certain i think that the coolest thing about the multiplayer and this goes back to like this this this moment this like uh strange comfort zeitgeist that we are all in with this game right now.

I'm Switch friends with a lot of people who I don't know all that well, like other games industry people and other folks I follow on Twitter, but that I'm not like, I'm not actual real life. I've never met in real life. And one of the sort of bad things about the online in this game is like, if you want to go to a friend's island, you go to the dodo and say, hey, I want to go to a friend's island. And then if somebody has their gates open, it'll say like, okay, well, it looks like Ferngill is open. That's the name of the island, not the name of an actual friend. And so like, you have to know what your friend's island is named if you want to fly to the right island. Or like some nights when I don't really have much else to do, I will just go to the airport and see what's open and fly there. And it'll be one of these people that I don't actually know very well.

And we are all playing, like we are both playing Animal Crossing. We're both playing it for the same reason. And we are both sort of going through the same shit right now and both sort of escaping that shit with the same sort of game. And it is this really profound rainbow connection thing that is at a scale. I had 20 people online playing this game last night. I had 20 friends, like 20 Switch friends, all playing Animal Crossing, and I have never seen a game launch like that in my life. Like, I've never seen

a game launch with that many people I know, that many, like, online friends, all doing the same thing for the same reason, and it has been genuinely helpful for my mental well-being during all this.

It's worth noting that this thing is going to be a mammoth, mammoth hit. Oh, yeah. Some of the early information coming out today is that Animal Crossing is going to do 2.5 million units in Japan alone in its first three days, which makes it the biggest Switch game ever surpassing the Zelda and Pokemon and... Smash and everything. I mean, like... Everything.

Bigger, yeah. Yeah, Smash. Like, all of it. Bigger than all of it. And that's in Japan alone, 2.5 million copies. Yeah, it's gonna be i mean i know people that are just buying switches just because they heard about this and

they need an outlet i just i want to mention so it's we're recording this on march 25th i started playing on february 28th because i was reviewing it for polygon so i got a code early which we've discussed on the podcast griffin was very upset about it and it should be noted that like there's an element when you start playing this game, when you wake up and you're like, oh, I'm excited to see what the next day has for me. Maybe a new villager shows up. Maybe you upgraded a building.

Maybe there's a museum, whatever. So I'm almost a full 30 days at this point into the game. And every single one of those 30 days, I have still maintained that excitement. Now, granted, it's not always, hey, I'm going to get a new building. A lot of the major, major upgrades happen in the first, let's say, two weeks of the game. But even after that, I'm excited like, oh, my fruit is coming in today. I'm going to harvest it and get a bunch of money. Oh, I've been trying to move my rocks around so i can get all the rocks in like a little clump well i wonder where the new rock is i'm collecting fossils

every day like it literally has this element of here's a little like drip feed excitement moment for you each day and it's not a lot like you know argument uh the argument is basically maybe there's an hour's worth of gameplay a day. That hasn't stopped me from playing six hours a day or whatever it is. Well, yeah, you were right. Let's talk about Russ's- Someone actually the other day told me, they looked at my profile and it said 140 hours. Yowza!

I was like, I had no idea. If someone were to ask me, I would have said maybe 50, maybe. And it just like every single day becomes like, this is the thing and it's like a release. It's like a total, like, every single day becomes like, this is the thing. And it's like a release. It's like a total I'm removed from reality release, which I realize can be a little unhealthy. But you know what? It's kind of okay.

What's unhealthy is your great wall of bugs that you have built. Russ, tell me about the wall of bugs, Russ. Sure. So last night I tweeted a video about a wall of bugs. Last night I tweeted a video about a wall of bugs. Now, for some of you might know that there's a vendor that occasionally shows up in your town that buys bugs at a 20% premium. There are bugs in the game that are worth a whole bunch of money. But I also ran out of storage space in my house. So I was like, maybe I'll just stack them on the beach until the guy shows up.

You couldn't do that in previous Animal Crossing games because you couldn't put furniture out. So now I just have 46 containers of the same emperor butterfly just chilling on a long wall of bugs. And I'm just waiting for this guy to show up, and it's only growing. Last night I collected 38 tarantulas on a random island that I visited. They're getting added to the wall of bugs. It's just going to be walls of bugs from now on. Imagine going to

Russ's island. Like, hey, welcome. We got a lot of cool trees and over here is my wall of bugs. You want to peruse it? I should mention I work with someone who is deathly, deathly afraid of spiders and I have a deep-seated fear that she's going to show up one day and not tell me

and walk over there and have a total fucking meltdown. Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. Does anybody have any final thoughts? I feel like we need to close this segment. I have one more question that's specifically for Griffin

because I don't know how music works. And I would like to know how music works. The music in this game is a cure for me. It brings me so much joy. And I don't know how music works. The music in this game is a cure for me. It brings me so much joy. And I don't know how it works because it should be repetitive. Like, it's not like some, you know, massive collection of music. It's kind of the same thing over and over and over again. Oh, it's a massive collection of music.

They have new, I mean, if it's like other Animal Crossing games, I haven't really dove in, but the most recent couple Animal Crossing games, there's new themes for every hour. Yeah. and then variations on those themes based on the weather so like there's a rainy 5 p.m theme right you have to actually i should mention you have to unlock that that's something that comes along like a little bit later yes of course so the music that you're hearing right now plant is something that will get more complex as you play okay well it reminds me of like those lo-fi chill uh study hall youtube videos yeah and like a monastic chant where it's just repeating the same thing over and over and that like lulls me into a state of tranquility and i'm i'm curious one how how does this get made the only other comparison i could think of is tiny wings on ios where i like that i don't

know if y'all remember that game but like i could just listen to that tune forever and it would bring me peace well i mean to be uh to do like a more sort of uh mainstream example of that like the minecraft music is yeah that to like the extreme of just like extremely, extremely thematic, listenable music to underscore like a, you know, simulation based experience like that. It's obviously two different sort of musical schools that they are composing from, but it is, I think, the same the same idea and serving the same purpose. Yeah, it's music to work to essentially. the same idea and serving the same purpose. Yeah. It's music to work to essentially. And,

and I should mention if you're a fan, but you are also working at this time, there's a Chrome app that you can install called animal crossing music that actually will play different hourly music depending on the day and weather in your life at present, which is spectacular. I, I am going to be curious.

I'm not, curiosity is not the right word. I feel pretty confident, and this goes back to, like, Justin's thesis, that, you know, a year from now, five years from now, like, we're gonna look back on Animal Crossing New Horizons with a, like, a feeling about it that I don't know, uh, okay, I'll speak personally, I will look back at New Horizons with a feeling that, like, I don't know that I have about any other game, and I've been playing games my whole life, and I'm certainly nostalgic about a lot of them, and a lot of them have filled, like, important needs in my life, or, like, you know, important social needs in my life,

especially once, like, online games became a thing. But everybody is doing that with New Horizons. And I genuinely do think it's going to be a very sort of special game in the pantheon of all games ever made just because of what it is doing for us right now. It is bizarre. Yeah. So we're going to take a break,

and then we will be right back with even more great content on our show. There is a lot you can capture of your day-to-day existence in Animal Crossing, but there are some parts of your day-to-day life that aren't modeled. And I wanted to talk to you guys about what bits of your life do you wish you could include in your Animal Crossing experience? I think my biggest problem with Animal Crossing New Horizons isn't the online multiplayer hurdles, isn't the fact that the tools break after you use them half of one time. It's that there's really just one bag of medicine

and you get hit by a wasp in your eyeball every time. The wasps are like, we know which eyeball we like. it's that one and we're gonna get it um and then you have to go eat a bag of medicine which isn't like timmy and tommy aren't licensed pharmacists so we can start there and you can also make it yourself with uh a wasp's nest and 10 clumps of weeds that I guess you just quomp down in a mortar and pestle and then eat that instead. Well, it's a hair of the dog situation. Is it?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think it would be nice to just like get some more kinds of medicine in there. Like say I eat a particularly spicy peach and then i do need to get some imodium from the store and maybe that can maybe that can be like 10 clumps of weeds and a spicy peach and then that will fix my my stomach issues or if i'm feeling kind of, you know, anxious or depressed, 10 clumps of weeds and, I don't know, a clam or something. And then, you know, I make a little, I make some Animal Crossing Zoloft or something like that. That would be a welcome addition.

Griffin, what is wrong? It's a panacea, right? That's what they call these medicines that cure literally everything on the planet. Yeah. And it seems like Timmy and Tommy have found this because I found a very depressed villager who was like, I'm feeling kind of out of it. Do you have any medicine? And bam, medicine did the trick.

I have not found a moment in Animal Crossing where medicine has not done the trick. It's generic medicine, sure. But it's working, man. Did that villager have a wasp sting on their eyeball? Well, then that was irresponsible partitioning that you did, Russ. It worked out. Okay.

All right. Justin, what would you want in the game from your day-to-day life? I just want to be able to use the bathroom. You can. And here's the problem I have. Today I walked into the No nooks cranny the store and they had a large standing toilet and i was like wait the toilet is standing or you're supposed

to use it while standing no it's like a big like floor floor length urinal got it yes you call it you know what i mean and i was i looked at i was like absolutely I would that is hilarious I want to put one in the middle of my house that's too good so I bought it and I took it home and I realized like I can't use the bathroom in this game what is this in the context of my experience does it make sense to set up a bathroom in a game I would love to have a bathroom does it make sense to set up a bathroom in a game i would love to have a bathroom does it make sense to set up a bathroom in a game where you can't use the bathroom no great news great news justin you can use the bathroom in this game how do you guys not know about this no russ you don't know about this i've been playing for a month and i still don't know okay so here's the thing day one i eat a bunch of fruit and get so strong that i break all the rocks on my island which sucks

because now like i can't get the iron nuggets and valuable resources i'm saying like man this is kind of a bummer i wish there was a way instead of going around and digging up trees to like get rid of my my fruit power shut and then it has come out that if you sit on a toilet with fruit meter it will go away the fruit meter will slowly deplete and then it says well that's well that's all there is to that well done with that so you can poop your fruit power out so justin your wish is granted next one great moving on this is the best game ever uh i i want to own or not own take care of a puppy like I do in real life. I love my dog.

But the problem that I realize is the animals are the people. That's some Island of Dr. Moreau type of shit. So, like, what would I do if I had a puppy? Would they be like, you have captured one of us and refused to let him leave your house? Damn, that's... I've not thought about that. I have, from balloon drops, I have a little kitty corner in my room

where I have a cat tower and a litter box. One of these days, a cat villager is gonna come into my house and be like, yo, I love this corner, bud. I like what you've done here. Do you have that and not a cat, Griffin? I mean, yeah, I don't have a cat. There's no little cat.

So you're just an absolute lunatic in this game. Like, you go to Griffin's house, like, what's that for? Like, I don't know. I haven't tried to dump my cherry power in the litter box yet. I don't know if that's a possibility. It also sort of begs the question about the fish. Like, you can catch 80 different kinds of fish and then place them in a tank that is exactly the size of the fish like you can catch 80 different kinds of fish and then place them in a tank that is

exactly the size of the fish like maybe they have an inch on either side right so if these fish are sentient and on the same level maybe they have like an undersea version of your animal crossing village it's a goofy pluto scenario right like we have to imagine that's how this world works there are goofies and there are plutos that like goofy is the sentient dog pluto is the like right but what is the dividing line like how do you make that like are they chosen from childhood to become like i think part of high society right like fish are just entirely different there's animals and then there are fish and bugs i considered this philosophical question on a stream and decided that it's thick legs. If you have thick

legs, you get to wear shirts and live in houses like the rest of us and be large. If you have no legs or skinny, weird, segmented legs, I'm sorry, but here's a small box you can live in or this big, dope museum.

Those are your options. I know Chris Plant and Griffin want to take care of sweet little animals. All I want to do is fend off animals that keep encroaching. Now, in my real life, I've talked a little bit in the past, I have a pigeon problem on my balcony. Now, right now, my balcony is a true respite from the horrors of having to be stuck inside. So I really want to be out on my balcony is a true respite from the horrors of having to be stuck inside. So I really want to be out on my balcony. The pigeons know that and they internalize it and they camp out. And all I want to do with an animal crossing is create a similar level of defenses to ensure that no such

critters like centipedes and shit like that, that I don't want anywhere near my house have no chance of approaching. It has not happened yet. I i've tried building walls they cut through the walls i've tried uh i found some iron bars they cut through that there's nothing i can do you've already stumbled on the answer what the bug wall bug wall you create a bug wall as a warning it both it both is a you know a barrier but also a signal if you come past the bug wall, you get put into the bug wall. You become bug wall. I'm absolutely off my nut.

You will go into this wall. No question. Genius. I love it. You guys been playing anything else? Of course not. Yeah, I'm feeling the same. I couldn't even finish.

Griffin, did I get to tell you about murder by uh no amanda turned me on to it uh on on the joko cruise but i i was very fascinated by it but i did not dip in we talked about it last week when griffin was yeah we didn't talk about last week but i'll catch you up it's a it's a pit cross i never mind It's a Picross murder game. I started playing this game called Nier Automata. Oh, Jesus God. It's pretty good. I think a few of us have been

playing Half-Life Alyx, which... I think we're going to talk about it next week. Next week episode. If people are excited about that. I'm very excited to try it. I haven't tried it yet. Oh, and Ori Will-O-The-Wisp. I finally got past that first hour, which is a real pain,

as I whined about last week, and I apologize for being a real whiny baby. Who has played... Oh, I guess you guys... I was not on the Doom episode last week. Did you do an extended Ori bit? We just talked about it a little bit, about how the beginning's a little rough,

but then it gets really good. He doesn't like emotions. I really liked it. I mean, I think I've played about the same amount. I streamed about like an hour and a half of it or so, and I'm into it. I feel like it starts off with kind of a bang in a way that I'm a fan of.

I did not realize they re-released Saints Row 4 on Switch last week. Yeah, I think the port is terrible now. Have you tried it? No, I've not tried it. If it's think the port is terrible, no? I mean... Have you tried it? No, I've not tried it. If it's on the level of Saints Row 3, like Saints Row 3 for Switch

wasn't like amazing, but it was totally playable. And I like Saints Row 4 a lot more than I like Saints Row 3. I think Persona's out next week? Persona 5 Royal? Oh, yeah. Won't be playing that.

Too much reading. It's very good. Do you have it, Chris? It's very good. Aw, dang. Aw, beans. is there anything else i feel like there's like infinite things but but you know we'll we'll be diving into these over the next few weeks and months there's there's yeah it's extremely busy right now in the world

of video games yeah it's true yeah good do we have time to do some reader thoughts we can sneak in some reader for their ask people for their thoughts. I would say it's like, it's so, looking over the emails, we got a ton of them about Animal Crossing, and it's just like, very positive. It's like an outpouring of love.

I'll give you a couple. Kate said, my sibling and I had a very troubled childhood, but playing Animal Crossing on GameCube was a crucial escape for us. Getting to build a kind, colorful, and overall charming community together

provided a comfort we didn't have otherwise. So it's fitting this new Animal Crossing entered our lives at a time we desperately needed it, just as before. That's from Kate. Anna said, A-C-N-H has been the absolute highlight of the past few weeks for me.

Yesterday, I visited my boyfriend. We've all been quarantined separately for a week, and his 11-year-old son got really into watching me play AC, ac so he brought the game for himself and my boyfriend's son just visited my island for the first time and he was so proud of his custom design for his little shirt he made so my friends complimented him on it and it was just so pure and sweet oh we're gonna be locking down completely soon so i won't be able to see my boyfriend or son for a while but we can still visit each other's islands and i can show my love for them by giving them apples and other presents this is from at lars on twitter uh i pretended to be sick for a week to get off school just so i

could make sure that frobert the frog wouldn't leave me i sent him so many love letters it was heartbroken that i he didn't recognize me in another town oh um oh i've had that was sprocket is in two of my friends towns he was my og villager and every time i see sprocket he's like oh hi i'm sprocket i'm like i grab him by the face each time like sprocket i know it's me sprocket it's like a metaverse situation it's terrifying uh from at bite shark yum i got the ladder in new horizons before my brother so when i went to visit his weed-free town i climbed up to the second level which still had weeds and picked him a bunch of them then replanted them right in front of his house it happened by and proceeded to hit me with an axe that's very funny i will admit i did uh take the opportunity to visit a lot of newbie towns take my ladder climb up uh to the upper level and steal any fossils that were

up on the upper levels that newbies couldn't actually access which was pretty great yeah abby emailed about and it's it i mainly want to read it to remind us to talk about like one of the best parts of the game the museum is obviously gorgeous and i adore everything about it but what is up with the part of the fossil exhibit with all the animal silhouettes and then just a blank space that shines a light on you oh yeah i can talk to that i actually wrote a little story about that um so the museum specifically the fossil part of the museum and animal crossing the new one is all about evolution so you walk into this first opening room and there's like a single cell on the ground effectively. And from that cell are lines.

And if you follow the lines, you can actually see the progression of species as they evolve through time. So eventually when you get to the final room, there's like a giant saber-toothed tiger skeleton. And above that, there's a line leading up to a normal cat silhouette showing that this is

the final evolution of cats, essentially. And the blank space right below it is a human skull because you evolved from this early human skull. And you're supposed to stand there and a light shines on you. I just want to correct you, Russ.

You said the final evolution of cats. You mean the current evolution of cats. That's fair. We all know, like year 30,000, Cats 2 is going to be off the fucking chain. or the final evolution of cats you mean the current evolution of cats that's we all know like year 30 000 cats too is gonna be angelical cats for the final evolution are you telling me there's a chance i will at one point dig my beautiful cartoon shovel in the ground and come up with a fucking human skull uh it's actually a australopithecus i believe so it's like a caveman situation but yes got it. But he did have dreams

and hopes and wishes and was capable of love. I wonder what happened to him. Oh, wait. I've just been bitten by 35 different spiders, so I bet. I know. Sorry, I'm checking the notes and quick fact check. The final evolution of cats is Meowth.

Meowth. Oh. Okay, good. I to clear that up. I mean, technically, version is the final illusion of meowth, so nice part. Hey, Chris, nice joke. Maybe think about it next time

before you make a joke. Well, I cried reading an email about Animal Crossing, so we're pretty much done. Thank you for listening to our program. We would ask you to make sure to follow us

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