The Besties - Cyberpunking with Ron Funches

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

We're a bit late to the Cyberpunk 2077 party, but better late than never! Chris Plante will be back soon, but the world-renowned @RonFunches has stepped in to fill his shoes this week. Is Cyberpunk truly that heinous, or is it all a ruse? And can we possibly find a way to make hacking minigames fun? All will be revealed. 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!

one two three four five six seven eight oh that was smoother than when we do it with chris who has been on the show for uh forever well maybe he doesn't care anymore you know with me i was like i gotta be there for this i gotta start off on a good foot i don't want them to think that i can't count that's actually the first test if you mess that up it just we hang up the call like listen we can't there's too much to walk through here this guy can't count we gotta go um so that was good and now like let's here comes the show. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. That's not even close to accurate.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I played a game last year that we were about to talk about because people keep asking us about it my name is ross farsheck and i know the best game of the week welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment folks they have come a long way since pac-man i was looking over my nephew's shoulder last week and he was you wouldn't believe some of this stuff some of it i'm gonna say a little violent i thought for him his i talked to his mom about it griffin you know her victoria i said victoria i think it's a little much yeah but i you can't deny these things that come a long way since pac-man and we're going to talk about a new game every week from now until the end of end of time uh and uh except for this episode

where we're talking about a game that i think you could just rightly say is kind of old at this point i saw i just saw a new story it's half off on pc so if you're moved if the spirit moves you after this episode. But with the level of patches this thing's gotten, it's constantly being reborn like a phoenix. That's true. We're going to talk about Cyberpunk 2077. But first, we're going to talk about our guest.

You know him from... Ron, what projects would you like me to highlight at this point? Last time it was your Quibi show. So I'm not... I don't think that's appropriate. Stick with that one. Okay, you know him from quibi it's ron funchess coming soon to your roku device he's a he's a twitch streamer he's the host of getting better with ron funchess he's an actor he's a comedian he's a friend uh he's a a companion he's everything to me he's my dad this is ron funchess welcome to the show ron welcome thank you all for having me i appreciate it to talk about this game that everyone has already

talked about but now ron i do want to mention before we got into this we were you know making sure that we had like a legit guest chris plan is out again this week he'll be back soon we promise but we wanted to make sure we had a legit guest and the way we confirm that is that you are one of six people and there's a few others on this uh recording that have done this you played astrobot rescue mission on the playstation vr and we're like that's that was enough for us to um yeah i don't know russ i guess has been spying on you i don't know how russ yes how do you know that i don't remember giving that out as public information. You wrote an article on Giant Bomb about your 10 favorite games of 2018.

Oh, and it made it? And it made the cut. Oh man, well, wow, it's a franchise now. It is a full on dynasty because in my 20, spoiler alert, but for my 2020, Astro Bot made the cut again. Mine too. I'm sorry, Ron. I didn't know Russ was

going to do this level of deep throat style investigation on you before we had you on. I just had you on because I think you're a great person, but Russ apparently wanted to test your bona fides. I don't know. It's pretty intense.

So we weren't originally going to skip this one. Russ was really pushing for it because he didn't want to talk negatively for an extended period of time. But Griffin and I played this entire thing, and we thought, yeah, we are not going to let that time be wasted. Chris Plant, actually, I don't know if he's touched it or not yeah i don't think he has forget where he was on this debate i'll set it up real quick uh cyberpunk 2077 is from cd project they did uh they did witcher games and this one's been in development for a long time delayed several times, just not enough times.

Apparently, it was released, and it had, I would say, probably the most calamitous launch of any video game in history. I still think Fallout 76 keeps that title. What with their bag whoopsies? I have to disagree. I think that...

What do you think, Ron? I'm going to go with Cyberpunk. And here is the reason why, above all, I can go with Fallout because they both were highly sought after. We both thought they were going to be great. We both, from developers that we thought at the time, were like, oh, I mean, sometimes it's a a little janky but they know what they're doing story-wise it should be amazing yeah i think the main difference though is this pandemic and the fact that we were all like we need this to we i'm gonna this is what's gonna get me through the winter i'm so excited for this this is my december my january all people are saying 175 hours oh okay i might just live in night city until they tell me i can come outside again and then you go in there and you're like

wait a minute i i i didn't last longer than three hours personally that was my limit for the game and so it was very disappointing for me um my son was a little bit more forgiving uh and he wouldn't let me return it otherwise i would have returned it uh well ron let's let's start there like in start in in the sense of like first impressions when you first encounter encounter this thing we'll talk on a little deeper level uh what did you encounter in the first like three hours that made you say like i'm actually good on this like i'm not actually gonna spend more minutes on this okay well i mean if okay we'll go since you asked that question because normally i like to start off positive but i will go with what i didn't like my initial negative reaction was like this is too much red everywhere why is it why is there so much red I don't I don't need all this red and then for me

I mean a lot of these are gonna be personal but then I was like oh why why aren't there any African-American hairstyles that I can wear why are there more pubic hairstyles than African-American styles for their head? And so that was a negative. And then I started playing it a little bit. And I was playing it on Series X. It's a good-looking game, but I don't really like the art direction. I think it's like overall to me, it looks ugly. Like the character models look ugly to me.

The children look like abominations to me. Well, it should be noted the children are just have adult faces. They're just short adult face children. With children voices. With children voices. Unless you're playing on an original PlayStation 4, in which case they're just sort of cube entities, just hovering cube entities that don't move.

So that scared the crap out of me when I saw the children. The children really bothered me emotionally. And then just that, you know, buggy, crashing. And then I met a character. There was like the first two black characters I met. The first was the boxing guy, right? And then I was like, well, he sounds like a boxing guy.

It's fine. And then the second one was Rick Ross. And I was like, oh, you know what? I think I'm good on this if everybody you know it's like am i watching a black exploitation movie like i don't know what this is but i don't none of it hooked me the story didn't hook me it was just like oh i could just keep playing this because i like games but is or i could just go play yakuza and i was like i think i'll go do that. Now, I want to know.

You've chosen wisely. Ron, you mentioned that you'd like to start off positively. Where would you have started if we had started there? I would have started with, it's cool that you could get yourself a big penis. That's fun. It's fun how it flops when you switch i think that's a nice feature when it slips through your pants yeah um i liked the first mission where it felt kind of like fallout ish vibes were like okay once i started in there i'm like okay it's not anything like revolutionary

but it is kind of like a like a new fallout type game and i like those type of things i really liked outer worlds i thought that was a really good game um and so i was like i can just give it a pass on that but then this the story never got interesting and one of my least favorite things in writing and entertainment is when they're you you mistake mature with being like overly sexual and just everyone cursing all the time and it's like you can make a mature story and not have a single curse word in it and you can have a bunch of curse words throughout your whole thing and be the most juvenile thing in the planet and i feel like a game just full of dildos and people cursing at me i was like well i don't think i'm i'm 37 i don't think i might be the market for this you know yeah it's it's trying

to have its cake and eat it too in a weird way where it it uh on like virtually every kind of social issue they're like yeah but we're we're doing it we're we're doing it nasty for everybody there's dildos there's dildos aplenty so don't take us too seriously in a way that is like trying to ape how grand theft auto does it or maybe even saints row but like it doesn't get to that grand theft auto level and it doesn't approach saints row because saints row is fully like about that like it's like hey we're in on the joke too and cyberpunk 27 77 with like its story and its writing does not give itself that that freedom of saying like hey don't take it too seriously it wants you to take

it very seriously yeah the localization is so strange and you And I actually made me think about the localization on Witcher. If they maybe got a little bit of leeway there because it's like a fantasy setting. So if people talk in a stilted fashion or a very bizarre way, it's not necessarily going to like, Ugh, what was that? Why did you phrase it like that? Nobody talks like that nobody talks like that um but cyberpunk is full of these like very strange turns of phrase that like nobody actually uses like it's just not you hear it it's just like wait that's not actually i remember you know it reminds me of in 50 cent blood on the sand uh that was made by us again you

always want to be compared to yeah it's made by a british developer i think it was sore fish is that was that the name of the i don't uh there's a british developer and they they had uh apparently not taken the localization very hard because um there's this bit where wiz khalifa who's your psychic is like it's safe as house is 50. Like, safe as houses? Are you sure? Is that what Wiz Khalifa just said? The safest houses?

You sure? That's what this feels like, where they're like, they got it into English, the language, but didn't like, none of all the dialogue feels like so bizarre you can feel the voice actors like straining against it which is especially painful and kind of cringy for me when you bring in an actual actor like Keanu Reeves I kept having this sense of embarrassment like I'm sorry Keanu it's not always like this video games sometimes you came in things are so messy here I'm sorry it's not always like this. Come back for like a really good one. Come back for like a Fulbright game or something like that. We usually like, those are better, but like, it's not always this bad.

I would say, cause you mentioned it. Like, I actually think the performances themselves are quite good. I think people in like, in a way that like. I would say actually heroic is what I would say. Heroic. That's a good description. Like they are definitely struggling with the source material,

but I think, yeah, I don't know. I think Keanu does a great job. It takes a while for him to show up, like a few hours for him to show up. And then once he's there. Never got to him.

Never even got to Keanu. Yeah. All the major, I would say pretty much all the major characters are like really well acted. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's tough to pull that off.

How like well versed with like cyberpunk sort of that genre or aesthetic are y'all? Because that's where it like kind of failed me is it felt like they went with that like gritty, everything is owned by corporations and so everything, but like we're getting by with our non-stop dildo burgers or whatever and then they stopped there without getting into like

the rest of what is really kind of rad about cyberpunk as a as a as a genre and i did just sound like julia styles from um fucking ghostwriter just then and i apologize for that that was uh unintentional no i know what you mean i'm not uh very well versed in cyberpunk but i'm enough to know that like it kind of has this more of that like that meme of like hello fellow children type of yeah a vibe to it where it's like you you're supposed to be the cyberpunk outlaw thing, but then you get reputation and respect for helping cops. And as far as I know about the grander scenes of cyberpunk, that's the exact opposite of the type of vibe that you would want to pull in any type of cyberpunk writing.

It's just like a lot of big AAA games right now. in any type of cyberpunk writing. It just, I mean, it just, like a lot of big AAA games right now, it just seems like there's a lot of different masters to serve. I don't remember which game exactly, but you'll lean into these like, oh, this story is going to be crazy. Something like Watchdog Legion even, where you're like,

they're going to really go in on what this, and then they like, you're like in this room where people are harvesting organs and then they're just cracking jokes the whole time. And you're like, well, what which one is this? A lot of games. I mean, it's not a particular issue with cyberpunk by itself. A lot of big games are kind of getting stuck in this. Like, well well what are

we right i think i would like to put this forth as a rule i don't think anything that costs over 10 million dollars can be punk as an aesthetic right you you are always that sounds like a joke but i'm dead serious like you're always gonna have to play it too safe and serve too many people and like not offend anyone when you're in a project that scale and that to me is what feels like hugely disingenuous about this it's like mature in the sense of like ron was talking about where it's like this isn't for kids but it's not mature in the sense of it's like ideas yeah or anything it's like doing really until much much much later in the game and that's

what i'd like to address briefly although i feel like we haven't talked about mechanics enough um it's i mean we talked about the kind of games it is like right like the bethesda games i would say they're doing a deus ex thing which is the most sort of apt one because deus ex is also sort of approaching that that genre but with a way more straight-laced take on it and more fun and way more fun i think the big difference between deus ex and this is that it takes about 10 hours before you feel like you are making meaningful progression with your character in this game the progression stuff sucks like you get skill points and the skills are so underwhelming it's like three percent extra pistol damage one of

the perks that they keep getting sort of uh ragged on for is uh one where enemies don't uh notice you or won't hear you when you're swimming and people saw that like i can i can swim like there's never any occasion to actually swim but it's like one of those like here's a here's a building and there's a bunch of armed guards and it's up to you to figure out how to get around it do you hack do you just run in and shoot do you jump double jump on top of the building and keep going from there um it's just that those options aren't particularly i mean they are not inventive at all and they are also not particularly fun most of the time what i what i would say is the weird thing that i didn't expect with cyberpunk and i don't and this is what i'd like to like dig in on a little bit i kept playing What I would say is the weird thing that I didn't expect with Cyberpunk,

and this is what I'd like to dig in on a little bit. I kept playing it, and it was just fine. It was fine. It was fine. I mean, it's not fine in the sense of it's got a lot of pretty rough choices, as Ron was alluding to. It's got a lot of real bad bugs, like my game crashed literally every half hour.

This is on PS5. It crashed every half hour at minimum. I had so many the mission wouldn't complete because I was stuck in a dialogue with somebody. There's so many bizarre things. You can get a dialogue with somebody.

There's so many bizarre things. Like you can get a call from somebody to give you a mission and you're like talking to them, but you can get those calls in the middle of talking to somebody else who's giving you a mission. And it's like so rude because you're literally talking to two people at the same time. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm going to do that for sure. Hey, oh, as you were saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. I'll go steal it or burn it or whatever. No, you want me to steal. You want me to blow it up. Okay, got it. Sorry, I got confused for a second.

Griffin said he got three at once. Yeah, I was. Is that accurate? I was like doing a, one of the billion walk and talks that you have to do with this game, which are such a fucking snooze fest. You're walking very, very slowly towards an elevator

and talking and talking. And then you very very slowly towards an elevator and talking and talking and then you walk very slowly to a car uh while i was doing that i got a call for a mission uh that automatically answered and so i was like doing that and also i then got confronted like by a police officer like on the street so i was essentially having three conversations at the same time it was it was madness and there's other there's bizarre stuff like there's you get side missions like literal like filling up your journal side missions about going to buy cars like here's all the cars you can buy people are calling you like you gotta come by this car please come by this car you have like text like've got cars. The best, fastest car you can get in the game is in a cave in a box. You walk into the cave, and in the cave there's a box,

and there's where the fastest car in the game is. And you just walk it, you get it, and then you drive out. You're like, well, I never need to think about cars ever again. And there's, like, how much time, design time was spent on, like, designing cars and, you know, cars all this stuff there's just a car i mean it's just a car in a box i gotta tell you justin it doesn't feel like much time was spent on balancing and designing the car that's fair well they design the other cars though i guess there's other cars they're trying to get what if i was showed up to buy them and they're like, you actually probably shouldn't do this

because this car is in a box in a cave. The hacking was really disappointing for me because that's where I sort of specced into with my character. And in training, there's like a tutorial part where they're showing you how to sneak through a room and there's like somebody doing like lifting weights and you can hack the weight bench to like drop it on them and kill

them. And that that was shown in trailers too. And then, you know, 20 hours into the game, maybe I actually reached a room that was like a gym where there was a robot training robot that was boxing somebody and weight benches. And I walked in there like, Oh, let's cause some trouble. And I couldn't like do those do those things like hacking is essentially relegated to hacking cameras to see where people are or basically doing you know magic doing like mass effect attacks on people to blind them or you know make their grenades explode or anything like that it's like not and coming off of watchdogs where you can do fucking anything man like you can make cars drive forward into somebody and you know

hack a drone to do this and then drop a crane on somebody and hack a crawling robot like that shit is so much like leagues ahead of of cyberpunk which is supposed to be about that shit and there's there's like very little like internet hacking like cyberspace like things there's one mission where you kind of do it and but you don't really have a lot of control and it's not very novel and that's like that is so integral to to like uh cyberpunk fiction and it's just a whole thing they left out in my initial small reactions in my little bit of time that's one of the things that struck me right away is that i went up to the first computer terminal i saw because I was like, this is a cyberpunk game and there must be some cool thing for me to read. And it was just this

like two page thing of nonsense. And I was just like, well, I'm never going to want to look at another one of these terminals again. Like, why did I just read all of that? It took two minutes and I'm just sitting here and it was nothing and i think at that point i was like i don't think i'm gonna like this game and i had did the same thing with the mission i received the the i think it's the initial call from the lady who tells you to come and get a car and then i got five more calls from her before i even got the first thing and i was like lady i never told you yes or no on this like don't don't give me five more because i didn't do the first one leave me alone you keep getting these calls from people even if you ignore them you keep getting calls of

texts that get increasingly familiar like you've always been there for me like i haven't ghosted you since the jump like every moment every moment, I ignore you. Like, you're like a father to me now. The biggest problem, though, the glitches and all this technical stuff, they can probably, will maybe fix eventually. The big thing for me is just, like, every mission, almost every mission, I should say,

almost every mission is so boring. It's like, Griffin talked about the walk and talks. I have a request for game designers please don't make me justin stand in an elevator and wait for your fucking pile of ones and zeros to shamble its way down the path and into the elevator i am going to die one day. I am mortal. Do not make me wait in an elevator. Just let me hit the fucking button. I get it. They're walking to the elevator.

There is so much stuff like that where the person's like, come with me. I'll explain on the way. And every time I was like, oh God, Jesus. No, I have cyber legs. Please, you follow me, okay?

I'll put you on my back and I'll carry you because it's so boring and there's so many missions that break down to that like following people and listening to people talk while they walk to another place or driving somebody and they'll talk to you the whole time i know that sounds like um every video game but uh well no in in their defense it should be mentioned that like you can skip dialogue. There is a button you can hit B for a lot of the dialogue and skip over it. But if you're in a walk and talk with someone and you hit B, they fast forward ahead of you. But you stay in the same place.

So you still have to chase them to get back to where they fast forwarded to. So the fast forward also doesn't work sometimes, which is like not kind of not what you that that i i think that is my biggest problem with the game is that and and this is largely the bug's fault which i am not so quick to forgive is there would be things like that or there would be things like uh i would go do this mission and sink a decent amount of time into it. And then the NPC that I have to like talk to or find doesn't exist, like just isn't there. That happened to me twice. And so at that point I was like, I'm done doing side missions

because I have lost faith in this game to like actually achieve that stuff. On one main mission, there was a point where a character was like outside of a building talking to somebody on the street that was supposed to be like sitting in the chair next to me talking and they weren't anywhere and i was like what the fuck finally i found them out on the street and started to talk to them and i zipped through the walls of the building to the chair where like he still wasn't

there uh but i managed to like brute force my way through that mission but at that point i was like i'm just going to get to the end of the game because this this sucks like not knowing whether or not i will actually be able to complete the shit will i be able to complete the game or this storyline that i'm following i don't know i i will say once you make the decision to critical path it like just say like i'm not doing any more side stuff a lot of that is junk or i'm just doing the side stuff that interests me and i'm gonna blow through it and not really pay that close attention. I did get into a rhythm where it wasn't bothering me. Like, the performances are good,

and I think that that's one of the few things you can hang on it. Like, I was interested to see, like, how some of these storylines would complete. And also, once you get a smart pistol that you don't have to aim um and you can just sort of like start randomly pulling the trigger you can find this weird gun that does automatic headshots and talks to you about them um and and once you get that like i've i found combat was like it's not fun but it's like it's fine um and i feel like i just i want to say this is like maybe down the road if you can you know they fixed a lot of the stuff and you can get it cheap it's like not it's not as painful as a lot

of people made it out to be it's like a lot of it is mostly fine um but like you can you can squeeze some some enjoyment out of it i think yeah ron i was curious had you stuck with it like if you sunk 30 40 hours into it, what would your character be now? Like what were you thinking you were going to build towards? And I can tell you if that's even possible. I probably would. I mean, it seemed like people liked the blades and stuff,

so I was probably going to make him a very stealthy ninja who can also be charismatic and talk. I didn't notice a lot of talk on your way out of anything really no i don't think i have i don't i mean most of the things are related to your life path or whatever which is another wild thing i chose like a corporate background where you get basically turned on in the first half hour uh and then they never come back to that story like never ever ever uh there was one side mission where i talked to like one character who used to work at the company i was at but they do not like let you get revenge for getting turned like it's just like that was the beginning of the game and

then and then we are moving on um but stealth i never invested a point in stealth and i also never got spotted it didn't seem to make much of a difference sometimes they spotted me through boxes i don't know i don't know that yeah there isn't a lot of fast talking opportunity and the stealth opportunities were like inconsistent so you might have had a tough time i think you were i think because i like one of my favorite games of all time is like fallout 3 and i like fallout new vegas and i even like going into fallout 4 i was upset about the lack of options of being able to talk my way out of things or make friends with people. And I'm always just kind of looking for that.

And again, the closest I've gotten to it recently was Outer Worlds, which I really liked. It was a little bit not as, I say, defined story-wise, but I still enjoyed it. I enjoyed the sense of humor to it. And this is like, it was, you know, just not what I look for mostly in games. I like a little,

I like a great story. I like a little fun, little sense of humor, some fun side stories. I was really mostly giving this a shot because I did, I bounced off the Witcher as well

because I'm not really into a fantasy setting that much like i played maybe half or definitely not half a little skyrim but i never like i prefer fallout to like skyrim or elder scrolls and things like that and so i was like oh this is gonna be for me this is coming in with the sci-fi and the cyberpunk and the things and all the good things that people were saying about the witcher i hoped all the fun side quests all all that and then i was like oh this doesn't seem like it right yeah it's hugely disappointing i don't know what i don't really know what else we are not adding no sexy guy taking a bath at all i didn't see that once no i was in a bath at one point an ice bath

but it wasn't a sexy ice bath, so big fail. Let's take a break. We're going to reboot. For ads that don't exist, and then we'll come back after those ads that don't exist. They might. Unless you're listening to the Farfung Future. There you go.

Yeah. In which they might exist. Who knows? Arasaka sponsored the podcast. When we've finally been picked up by ABC Family, which is who we've been pitching to hard. And we're back! Thanks for, uh,

hope you like the ads that we don't have yet, but we may have someday. Or maybe you just have them. If you're going back into the back catalog and you're like, what was the deal with Cyberpunk? 60 years ago,

Cyberpunk was a big release and it caused quite a fear. Ron, have you ever liked hacking? Any hacking in any game? Maybe a little bit. I think, I can't remember which game, but I liked some of the ones

that do the little hexagonal turning to kind of hack where you have these different tiles and it's more i guess it's kind of like you're building a circuit or something like that oh so like bioshock had yeah dream minigame yeah like that yeah similar to that i think what jsex had a good hacking in it um but i can't i mean i can't off the top of my i want to ask me what's on my head no most of it just seems like you just press a button and it hacks what you're supposed to hack that's the real question is like do we think it needs to go in the like more realistic i don't even know what

realistic hacking is but the more realistic route or is it better to just do like hit a to hack it's better to do hit a to hack because it's like what's that there for the hacking minigame in cyberpunk is like there's a grid of uh hexadecimal codes or whatever and you have to pick one in the vertical and then see if you can get the next part of the code in the horizontal and then pick the next one in the vertical it's like it's it's not you do it a thousand times and it's like not engaging or like entertaining in any way and it doesn't feel like a challenge that when you did it like oh i i'm glad that i was able to beat that mini game so i could open this door without needing

the key uh i think that that stuff has always been really shitty and that's what i like about watchdogs is that uh watchdogs doesn't have anything like that right like if you want to open a door you just you're part of you know you've been doing it for i guess maybe some of them are just grandmas so maybe some of them should have to learn what would grandma's hacking technique i think they would use like little needle points to to get in there I think they would use like little needle points to get in there. That's right. I think they call me is what happens because my mom calls me every other day to remember her password. So didn't you all ever play Uplink?

Juice, you did. I think Justin told me that. Yeah, a little bit. It's a game about hacking, like where you are like looking at a fake computer screen and you have to like hack into different things in a way that is like, there's nothing else in the game. Like that's it. But it's not like mini games. It's like tracking who is watching you and being safe about your cookies or whatever.

But that's, I don't think you can just inject that into a cyberpunk. You know, I tell you the kind of hacking that I think would be a good example of hacking is, oh, man. Okay. The game, Griffin, help. You got Quadrilateral Cowboy, even though that is a very good. Oh, shit.

What was it? Yeah. Quadrilateral Cowboy is very good. Hyperspace Outlaw. Outlaw something. Hyperspace Outlaw? Hypno. Hyperspace Outlaw.

Hypnospace. Hypnospace Out outlaw hypnospace outlaw there we go that that kind of game where it's like less of a actual like tech hacking more of almost like social engineering where you're like getting information from other places and bringing that to here and like using that to break through stuff that kind of hacking if you want to call it hacking i find pretty cool i think that's think that's a smart way of doing it. I just want to circle back to Quadrilateral Cowboy because I forgot about that game. That's the best fucking hacking that's ever been in a game. That's the one where you had your laptop as an item in this first-person game that you could type commands in, but you had to time them out.

Because sometimes you'd have to leave your laptop behind. So you'd code, like, open this door for five five seconds turn off this alarm for three seconds and then open the vents for four seconds and then you set your thing down and say go and then you try and get through there like using the commands that you you've typed in that is that's rad making it physical making it like oh oh man that's blend-o uh it's pretty it's it's a little old it's a few years older at this point but like all the Blendo games are like 30 Flights of Lovin' and the other ones are very, very good. Gravity Bones is the other one.

But Quadrilateral Cowboy is like a fantastic sort of hacking type thing. I do want to shout out Bioshock 2 as my absolute favorite hacking game. Bioshock 2 got rid of the pipes. I'm sorry, Ron. Got rid of the pipes in favor of just a meter that went back and forth and if you hit a when the meter was in the red yeah you hacked the thing and as you got better at hacking the meter got bigger the hour got slower and that instant gratification that took like six seconds to complete that is exactly how long it should take like that is perfect i

played that game for the first time on switch which had like those ports were fine but also they had like a little bit of input lag that made that hacking mini game an absolute nightmare every time it came up can i say one thing before we go on and just that not about an individual game but an activity is that i i know you can hack lots of different items but i think that one of my favorite things in games in general is when you can hack a turret and turn it against your enemies. That's just a great feeling. It's the best. It's the best. You know, the only time it's bad is when you do it and it's not as powerful as you want it to be.

Because I want that to be game over for everybody. If I have a giant gun from the ceiling shooting at you, I want to be able to walk away and just kind of watch. I mean, that feeling that really i'm broken inside i like that uh okay so we've got some reader uh mail of suggestions on how to fix hacking uh games and culture on twitter suggest uh said hacking idea tetris the higher your hacking skill, the more long, straight pieces you get, the tougher the encryption, the more junk is built up at the bottom when you start. That sounds dope. I'm into that. That's a smart

idea. It's like literally manifested through ice, right? Like it's like those layers of ice is the junk at the bottom. That's a really good idea. Is there any ice? Is there ice in? Whoa, it's signed Ken Levine. What? I like the uh i like somebody uh patrick dimsey brings up uh gunpoint i like i think that hacking is rewiring like in gunpoint is a pretty elegant system i don't know if that's the same thing at that point but uh that was a really

successful like way of of handling hacking uh yeah that one was great uh not quite as good as uh terminator resistance hacking uh this was mentioned by cosmic collector terminator resistors hacking was just frogger i'm on board games just do that yeah i haven't played that game probably better than the game yeah ron uh what have you uh did you play anything else recently any other video games that have been uh taking up your time always yeah always but nothing new i've been playing i'm waiting for hitman 3 to come out i'm gonna play that um i guess i have been trying to finish like a dragon i'm trying to collect three million yen at this point uh and is that an achievement why are you going for three

million yen i don't want to bring i mean if i don't want to spoil it but at some point you just need a lot of money also i feel like two million is not that much it's not that much but you're a homeless man okay fair yeah fair so you're a homeless man that runs a cookie shop you don't got three million dollars no it's gonna take a while and then you know on Twitch I've been playing a lot of we've been going back

and playing Overwatch which has been fun just Call of Duty Mario Kart Sundays so just a little bit of everything NFL how do you feel about

Overwatch 2 I'm interested now just because i'm getting back into it a bit and i think it needs a refreshing for sure um but i mean i don't think it'll ever get back to where i mean overwatch for me was like i i remember i went to like london and i was like well i need to buy a monitor and bring a thing because i'm not not gonna not play overwatch and so like i was hooked for a solid year me and like a had a group of like six to eight friends who always played overwatch for a good year and a half but i don't see that coming back but i'm excited i mean i'm excited to play more i mean i, I think I mentioned I've been streaming Persona 5 Royal off PS5 to my phone.

I think I talked about that last week and how, like, well, it worked. I picked up a controller that I've been evangelizing now called the Backbone 1 that just snaps into my – they have, like, an Android version and an iOS version, and it works even with my – I have the iPhone 12 mini mini still works like with it um but it actually uh you slide it out and then it connects into the thunderbolt port um and so there's no like bluetooth which i feel like a lot of the games i've played have used bluetooth and at that point you're introducing sort of two points of potential lag this just plugs right in and feel like really good build quality i think it's like 100 bucks

so it's like nothing to nothing to sneeze at but uh it's like it is honestly like playing persona 5 royal like on a switch like it is that sort of uh smooth and nearly lagless in a way that is like the best sort of game streaming stuff i've ever asked you some questions about remote play and things like that on the ps5 because i haven't looked into that and i would love to do that that's actually um i bought a copy persona 5 royale but i beat persona 5 and i'm like i don't see myself sitting around the house and yeah but maybe if i was in the bathroom or if i was on a set for a little bit i would want want to play. Where are you playing? Do you have to be in your house?

Can you be anywhere? Tell me more. Well, if you play, I'm playing, I think it connects through the local network if you are playing and it's able to do that. I haven't tried playing on PS5 over Wi-Fi, like being, you know, touring or whatever. you know us touring or whatever um but i my ps5 is up in my office and i you know usually will play down in my living room like opposite end of the house uh and yeah it works just fine i can take it i can take it anywhere you used to dial into destiny though didn't you to like pick up a new like zero gun or something like yeah i mean never never to like actually play although i genuinely think i could do that like on on on have it feel pretty good because of this backbone controller.

I'm playing on my desktop downstairs, which is hardwired into the PS5 upstairs, and I have no discernible lag. It's way better on PS5, and I did it a lot on PS4, too. But you can get the app on your phone for free. It's just PlayStation Remote Play. Or if you have a Vita, you can do it that way, too. I do have a Vita. I have a couple Vitas hanging around. Hell yeah.

Yeah, it works good. And Persona is sort of great for it, because it's not super twitchy or anything like that. So you can play it just with virtual controls. I tried farming souls in uh demon souls over on my touch screen which was a total nightmare but it worked yeah i would not recommend it you should get a controller but it did technically work uh so yeah definitely worth checking out juice can you can you talk about uh the monster hunter demo mostly because i want to hear your thoughts about it yeah uh i

played the monster hunter rise demo um it is uh here's what i will say just for background i have i've tried to get a monster hunter it didn't work till i got into world and then i got into world a lot uh very much so um there is it is overwhelming the amount of controls and stuff. It's been a long time since I played. Probably at least a year since I played Monster Hunter World. So it doesn't hold your hand a lot. But there was enough in there to where... I mean, it literally just drops you in the hunt in this demo.

It just drops you in a hunt and says, go get this thing. There is an arrow pointing you towards the thing is, which I'm loving. There's a grappling hook that makes getting around a lot more fun. And you got, you know, a lot of it is like the menu navigation was like really inscrutable, but I'm sure like

once you did it a few dozen times, you know, you would get it. I kept hitting the wrong button to use items and stuff like that. Because I don't have the muscle memory. i hadn't walked through a tutorial it's literally just like drops you in but um i don't know it felt good i mean it felt like monster hunter um and it and it was not there wasn't the weird stuff with like the really irritating throw a paintball at the guy to track him yeah that's a big thing for this one is that uh the hunt you don't have to look for clues you don't have to look for clues. You don't have to look for shit.

Like you have a map as soon as you load into the world and there are big question marks on the map that are the monsters. So you just run to those and start fighting, which is great because... It was cool that I pre-ordered. I mean, it got to the end. I was like, you want to pre-order? It was like, actually, yes, I do.

It's a really pretty Switch game. It's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Ron, did you play the demo as well i played a little bit yeah not not too much of it um i also um i and i have a little i have less uh experience in monster so the controls were a bit obtuse for me but i thought it was very pretty very enjoyable yeah i i still haven't really gotten into the franchise this might be

the one because i could sit on my couch and play it. Now, Russ, this was one of the demos for, this is a demo for one of your, let me look at the list from last week's show. Your most anticipated games of 2021. And you didn't quite manage to dip into the demo. Is that correct? I want to play the final perfect version that comes out. I'm in the same way.

I don't watch trailers or movies either. All right, Russ. I know you guys did it, but can you tell me a couple of your most anticipated? I mentioned Zelda 2,

but there's some question as to whether that's actually going to come out this year. Damn me. I said Fable and nobody believes that's coming out,

including myself. God, I forget. I mean, Monster Hunter is up there for me but I think Russ did claim that one before I oh Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight yeah Hollow Knight Silk Song the new Hollow Knight game is I'm very excited for and the new Heart Machine game

the folks who made Hyper Light Drifter have a new game coming out this year that new God of War if that comes out that'd be cool Ratchet and Clank

is the one I'm most excited about. I'm a big fan of the Tom and Anne. That is going to do it for us for this week. Ron, where can people find your work if they want to find more Ron Funches?

Oh, please do. I would love it if you did. I have a TV show on TruTV called Top Secret Videos with myself, Brian Posehn, and Allie Colbert.

I have a website called roundfunches.com where you can just keep track on me. I'm on Twitter and Instagram. If you search my name, you can find me easily. I'm on Twitch playing games, growing the Funch Bunch every day. We're trying to grow bigger and stronger as an army to overthrow the government.

Don't tell me. Too soon. Too soon. don't tell me too soon is it too soon timely too and that's just a twitch Ron underscore Funches that's pretty much it for me that is going to do it

for us thank you so much for joining us please again as we're trying to like get get this show and now that we're independent trying to like uh get get get this show uh and now that we're independent trying to grow it if you could help us do that by sharing a link it's just besties.fan you can also send us email mail at besties.fan uh rest do we know what we're doing next week yet uh i believe actually we kind of infinite wisdom we mentioned some of the titles but i think we're going to talk about some more titles of like deeper cut games that uh maybe you missed during the holiday season maybe uh just

came out in the last couple weeks but we're going to be highlighting some games that you probably missed and might enjoy hitman is out next week but we would be coming in a little bit too hot to uh actually play it before recording so that'll probably be the week after right two weeks for hitman but uh should be some good deep cuts coming next week all right well that'll be good you're really slow time here i don't know i guess justin's saying you can skip next week's episode skip next week but make sure you remember for after that because it's gonna get real good i can tell you uh thank you so much for joining us 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? Besties!