The Besties - Honey, We Shrunk the Us in Grounded

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

This week, we're playing Obsidian's miniaturized survival sim Grounded, and mostly talking about stripping Rick Moranis of his science license. Also, ROCK AND STONE! By which we mean: We're also talking about Deep Rock Galactic, now that we've all actually played it!Also discussed: Binding of Isaac, RogueJack, Mars First Logistics, Near Dark, Q: The Winged Serpent 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!

Griff, what are you going to do without internet? I'd probably just have a pretty chill day, man. Probably just have a pretty chill day. I had a big day planned. I was going to get on Twitter, and I was going to get back on Twitter in a big way. And I had some big thoughts I've been saving up for the last four fucking years

that I'm ready to unleash. If our internet goes out, we're basically unemployed. I mean, we are just immediately, the labor statistics should shift when the internet goes out at your house because you're an unemployed. I mean, we are just immediately, the labor statistics should shift when the internet goes out at your house because you're an unemployed person. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You don't need Twitter.

You have the podcast. I think you should give us kind of a David Letterman. Oh, baby. A top five tweets that you're ready to put. I know you've been sitting on some good, empty out the drafts. Okay, here comes a big one. A big one.

Number five. This is a new segment. This is a new segment. It's getting a little drafty in here, and it's about Griffin telling us the drafts of tweets that he... And it's just all the stuff I've missed out on. So you guys heard about these... Hey, guys.

Just let me Google things that have happened in the last four years. I have no internet. Seems like everyone's pretty upset about, so what's up with this dude, Elon Musk? Yeah. Because I heard that, I thought that this was the Rockets guy, but all of a sudden he's naming his kid like numbers.

Yeah, you tell him. And it's like, I didn't even know that was allowed. Wait, was that a tweet or was this a blog post? Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. That was the first, this is a thread. So if I had a number kid, I'd definitely do a 420 or 69 pretty funny stuff okay okay now wait now you're saying pretty funny stuff there was that in the tweet or was that you

just say like commenting letting us know where the funny parts are that's how i cap off all of my tweet threads so um is there an exclamation point at the end of that or just straight? Every time exclamation point is people, you know, how excited I am about my great jokes. So. So, hey, I heard I heard about Adam Levine sending some messages that were like pretty cringe, guys, pretty funny stuff. Yeah. Uh huh. Now, is that. guys pretty funny stuff yeah uh-huh now is that a tweet is that a tweet you might do just letting people know this is just a monologue this is just a late night monologue no it's not because i don't

have any like thoughts or anything to add i just want everyone to know about like you heard about it i heard about it in case you missed it adam levine said some stuff that was pretty pretty cringe if you ask me and i also if i may add pretty funny stuff is is there one more thing griffin that you've heard about recently one more thing that i heard about recently well this is a big one and this one might get me in a little bit of hot water. Uh-oh. But have you all been following this? Do you all know even about Gungam Style? What?

Gungam Style from 10 years ago? Yeah, I feel like I didn't know. You were tweeting when Gungam Style came out, just to be clear. Yeah, but I haven't really gotten a hand on the, I didn't get a hand on the ball then. yeah i feel like you were tweeting when gungam style came out just to be clear but i but i had i haven't really gotten a hand on the i didn't get a hand on the ball then and so for like basically the day after i stopped using twitter i was like oh i got a good gungam style one but i was like it's not worth coming back for it so uh i just think i guess i think it's pretty funny it's pretty funny stuff i don't even like pretending to tweet. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I'm coming at you Alexander Graham Bell style from the phone lines, baby. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and today I'm going to rock and stone as we talk about little shrunken people hopping around rock and stone. My name is Ross Froschek 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. It is a video game club and just by listening my friend you have joined our hallowed ranks and today we're going to be talking about an electronic entertainment that is both new and old. Chris Plant, what is Grounded and how is it both new and old? Grounded is the, I mean, it's been in development forever by Obsidian, the developer that made Fallout New Vegas, which is what you probably know them for.

And it's nothing like that is the long story short it is a open world survival multiplayer exploration game where you're basically honey i shrunk the kids the video game that's i mean that's what yeah yeah that's pretty much i mean that's what it is you're just little guys there's more detail believe it or not and we're going to talk about it right after this so uh grounded is i mean it for people of a certain generation by which i mean ours i mean it is a honey i shrunk the kids video game i mean it's it it almost made me a little sad that they didn't have the license because it would be so great to get messages from dr wayne zielinski like can you name another i almost he has definitely had his license stripped at this at this point yeah in his career science

sorry his science license i'm just yeah i guess that i don't know how it works exactly but i think whoever did award him his phd can uh-huh can rescind it when they find out. Did that happen after he shrunk the kids or after he blew up the kid? I think it's after Honey, I Blew Up the Baby that, um, I mean, you can't blow up, you just can't blow up a baby. Also, they couldn't,

you couldn't have come up with a better way to say that. Like, you walk in the room and you say you blew up the baby and she's gonna know you mean like symbolically blew up and yeah realistically that would be a terrible thing to yell from especially if your husband's dr wayne's right who like let's be honest blew up an apple in the last film right like yeah i would assume he blew up. Yes. Like explode. Reasonable. For sure. He's gone. This.

So it is a survival game. It is a, you know, one of those where hunger and thirst can be as big or as small of an inconvenience as you want them to. But what really is the coolest thing about this and the thing that you'll notice immediately is the sense of scale is so cool i mean it is every little corner of this game has been rendered in a way that like really makes you feel like you are this size and in a way that's very chris you said it like very tactile like when we were when when especially when you were in the third-person camera, like, you really get a sense of, like, how these pieces fit together in the world. It's not just reducing. A lot of these games reduce, you know, all of the things on the Earth to, like, glass, rock. Yeah.

I had two concerns going in. One, that it would do the thing that lots of video games do, where it's like, yeah, sure, you're small, but really this is just any other open world game where the ground is flat and we used a dirt texture, but the dirt's a little bigger to make it look like you're a little smaller. Big dirt. I know exactly what you mean of like, I don't know, there's something about kind of the way the environment rolls that it's very uneven that

makes it feel like oh yeah i am itty bitty but yet the other thing is i do not like most survival games because of the thing that you said justin which is like there are these static objects in the world and then they're labeled rock or diamonds or whatever and then you punch them enough and then stuff gets added to your inventory which which is not how it feels here. It feels like you are chopping down grass and getting huge pillars of glass to turn into walls. It's like grass. I didn't super click with the vampire. What was the name of the vampire one that we played recently?

V Rising. V Rising. I didn't super click with it because it felt there was like a remove to it. And some of that is just the camera because you're, you know, kind of an isometric for the most part. But some of it is just like it felt like I was just like, oh, I needed this very obscure part to build this thing. And here it's like, oh, you need sap. Go to that tree and there's some sap like dripping out of the tree. Or, oh, you need dry grass.

Literally cut down this giant straw, like thing of grass, and then physically carry the pieces back to your base. There's like a direct one-to-one of like the things you're doing in the game and them existing, how you would expect them to exist in the real world if you were tiny. Even so far as like, if you're assembling,

you have to assemble a lot of different, you know, workstations basically. There's a grinder for mushrooms and meat. There's a jerky rack. There's cooking workbench, all that stuff. And you have to load different components. Each has a bunch of different components from the world, grass, animal parts, leather made out of berry skin, whatever. And when you add those parts to the blueprint that you put out,

you can actually like see them in the thing. Like each one has been specifically rendered to like, here's where those berry leather pieces that you just got, here's where those go in the thing. And you can actually see them in the thing that you have. It makes all the resources seem more valuable because you can like actually see how they're being used uh in the world and i feel like the thing that really sets this game apart from other i've played so many of these like survival sim style games the thing that really

sets this apart and you can really feel like obsidian's lineage sort of shining through is that the kind of progression hooks the like rpg mechanics are really fleshed out and really really compelling which is like not so novel because all these survival games have the same uh through line which is like you are a weak baby in this world that wants to kill you and everything that you are doing is about eking out some kind of advantage or streamlining some like necessary process like oh i'm building this net out of spider webs that catches dew every morning so i can drink that instead of having to hunt it down myself to keep my thirst meter topped off um but on top of that, there's stuff like armor with different perks on it. And

if you complete the whole set of armor, you get like super perks. And then there are mutations that you earn just by playing the game. Like if you get poisoned a bunch of times by bugs, you get a mutation that allows you to resist poison more. Or if you fall a whole bunch, you get one that helps you resist fall damage. there are there are teeth that you can find and shatter and gain their incredible tooth powers that you can then use to like increase your health and stamina or you can slow down the speed with which your hunger and thirst meter falls down uh that on top of like well if we want to get to the bottom of the pond to find what's down there we have to build you know a breathing reed and some swimming

fins and there's just there is so so so much to do and unlock all to all to sort of progress you through the game what's what's cool is it's i don't know if you would attribute this to balance or just good design, but there are so many little – like nothing ever felt like a boring resource run. Like, well, I need to go collect a bunch of grass, so I'm going to go out there and collect grass. They make the individual things enjoyable. Like it looks cool. And I'll give you an example. I needed berry leather and there's a resource scanner where you can say like, okay, I need berries. Where are the berries?

And I'll show you on the map where berries are. So, you know, it's not a bunch of like guessing about where you need to head. But once I went out there, the berries were hanging in the bush quite a ways above me. So I had this bow and arrow that I had made out of yeah I forget gnat fuzz I think it's mother stuff and I used the bow and arrow to knock berries out of the tree and then when they land on the ground they squish because they had fallen so far and then I had to hit it with my axe which is like not the not the wildest or most thrilling thing but it was this very satisfying little loop of like here's an interesting thing I haven't done before. And I'm doing that. There's a lot of like, uh, there was a, there's a lab, uh, that's buried within a pond. And there's like a lot of steps you have to take to like

build the gear you need to swim for long distances underwater. You can make yourself a little hat that keeps a bubble in it that you can breathe out of and make yourself fins from different animal parts. And like it, that felt very different from the other things that i had done like it felt like a very specific uh uh sort of quest or mission that i was on that that didn't make it feel like just that normal survival grind where you're just getting basic resources and taking them back so i was surprised that the like you guys didn't pay for a server, right? No.

Yeah. So you can, so you guys had started a game basically, and you invited me and I jumped in and you had a base and all that stuff. And we played for a while and then we all broke apart. And then the other day I signed on, I DM Justin. I was like,

Hey, do you need to be online when i joined the base and he was like no you can just join whatever so i joined and you know in the few days since we had last played you guys had made a lot of progress on the base and seeing this base that you can just sort of jump in and jump out of was extremely cool and the fact that like i know in certain circumstances you have to pay for a server and and stuff like that but here it just seems like included right in it's it's why i stopped playing v rising is i didn't want to keep paying for the server but it's so clever i don't know if any other games have done this before but it's completely peer-to-peer where you can share access

to to this multiplayer save, and then... Yeah, it's not actually a server. It's more like you're hosting the world. Whoever joins first is hosting it, and then other people get in, but the data from the world is saved, so it's just like pulling it down to whoever gets in. That's why fresh when you sign in, it's a little confusing

because you don't sign in to the shared game that we have through single player. You go to multiplayer, see that the server is not currently active, and then you start a multiplayer game. Yeah, I was able to figure that out. It worked extremely fluidly, and I might have burned the house down a little bit. It's fine. Okay, so let's talk about that. Because the second floor of the house is fucking gone

what happened to the second floor russ i mean did we need a second floor oh so this was intentional you made it you made like a architectural i thought you know we needed a little more light like a drop top kind of house russ i went griffin is having a lot of fun now i wish you'd been here we actually discovered i actually no joke i have no idea like i did not mess with the second floor i have no idea what happened to it uh-huh okay well my basketball court that i built in the back and like that's that's i don't do cosmetic stuff in games like i like that sense of like uh you know feeling like you're you're advancing in in some way but the the little things that you can do to this shared world because you do know other people will like log in and see what you've done and there are so many

weird little ancillary items i literally like made i saw basketball hoop pop up and i was like well i'm doing this we need a. And you can't play on it. You can't do anything with it. It's pointless. But in our little home, when you go out one door, there is a basketball court that just looks neat. It was just a fun way to

spend time even though there was no advancement going along with it. Yeah, it's incredibly cool the number of options. You could change the color temperature of lamps that you put in your house there's like an astonishing number of options and also just the freedom of like where you can put bases i remember you initially placed your base like in a spider hole which is a bad idea when you're tiny shitty yeah it was just like all spiders Then we built it like above the ground between two sticks, but then getting up to it was kind of annoying.

So Justin just built a trampoline that you can bounce up. Like it's really, really well done. Especially the like quality of life stuff is really great. Like you can drop chests in your base to like store shit in and you can just like, you can hot drop stuff, which means like you can drop chests in your base to like store shit in and you can just like you can hot drop stuff which means like you just look at the chest and hold a button and all this stuff that's in your inventory that matches the stuff in the chest you just immediately dump in there and then if you have crafting stations nearby those chests it will pull the materials

that you need from the chest instead of you having to like go through and like pick shit out and and get the stuff that you need in your inventory before you can do anything like it it it does so many things that so many other games like this like fuck up uh and it does them it does them really really really well which i guess is what you get when you when the game is in development as long as grounded has been in development yeah boy howdy it was worth it let's talk about that because i think the early access thing here is interesting there's so many reasons to do early access for a game and i think a big publisher like xbox doing early access is a little strange and different than most i mean we talked about deep rock galactic we're going to talk about it more in this episode. But a studio that size, they benefit from early access because they

need money. Like, I mean, I don't know about them specifically, but that's why a lot of people do early accesses. It gets the game out there, even if it's in a rough shape, it gets them some money and they can pay their bills and they can keep making things. And then yeah, there's the added benefit of your hearing from the fans and the player base about what they want changed, etc., etc. What's interesting about Microsoft doing this is, one, they don't need the money. And two, the AAA system is built around a marketing cycle where you know when to build all of your hype over the course of maybe multiple years to get everybody to play it the opening weekend. And like, that's the model and it's interesting probably with game pass that that doesn't seem necessary anymore for certain

types of games you still want to do that with like a star field but i i wonder how much um the success of sea of thieves kind of showed them the way here where it's like hey sea of thieves we tried to do it the old-fashioned way and that was a bad idea and like we've spent years getting it up to being the thing that we want it to be grounded feels very similar um in terms of its approach yeah and i also think you know i think they're also following the nintendo model of like nintendo even though their games sell very well at launch doesn't really care because long term those sales are just going to keep coming and coming and coming and coming so it's when you don't even need sales at this point for them right if it's just a game pass thing that keeps people on game pass yeah great um i i do have one critique though is when i signed on when i joined y'all's game the one that you could play

as four characters they're like teens essentially and there are specific characters. They're like teens, essentially. And they're specific characters. They're not like player-made characters. And the one character that looked exactly like me was already taken, and I greatly resent that. But he did look exactly like young Griffin. I mean, I don't know what to tell you. Griffin looked like Minkus, too. Do we?

Are we both? Do we be guys with glasses? Yeah, very much so. Also, that stuff is not locked in. You can, like, next time you are on the server, if I'm not there, you can have Pete. It's not a big deal. You don't have to make a big deal about it.

I mean, I'm just saying. I really, a couple other things that I think work about this game that don't work about others in the genre. One is there's a very clear, and I don't know how they square this with something that's supposed to be, you know, endlessly playable, but there is a goal.

Like you're working towards a goal. Like you are small and you need to get big. And there are like very clear narrative hooks that are pulling you towards being able to re enlarge yourself, which makes the all of the survival stuff feel a lot more consequential because you are directed like there is a goal you could be working towards right now it's not just sort of like i don't know do whatever um the other thing that's very wait can you re-enlarge yourself can you actually do that i mean that's what i'm saying like i don't

know right this is where the narrative like the game would just end at that point i don't know i mean i have no idea how they and i'm i'm not really seeking it out because yeah i'm i don't know, right? This is where the narrative is going. Seems like the game would just end at that point. I don't know. I mean, I have no idea how they, and I'm not really seeking it out because I don't really know how that works. The other thing that I wanted to say is really cool about this. It works equally well. We should be clear,

four is the maximum that you can have playing in a world at a given time. There are four preteens and each one of you can be one of those people. You'd have other people who the server is shared with, but you can only have four playing at one time. What's cool is that I find this game equally enjoyable in different ways

if I'm by myself or if I'm with other people. It is really fun to get four people. We had four of us trying to take on a wolf spider that was much too difficult for us. But having like four people running at it and and and being able to like supply people with stuff that they didn't have and and and all that stuff was like very, very fun. But it's also great there's a great sense of like isolation when you're by yourself and it's dark and there's like a bunch of insects and and freaking birds and stuff everywhere um it works both ways i think equally well when when people log off it wasn't like that well i'm gonna stop playing too because it's no fun with without other people so i wanted

to mention an accessibility feature since you mentioned the spiders. I've never seen this before in a game. I've seen it modded into games, but never like officially supported. So some people have issues with spiders. I count myself one of them. I am not paralyzed by fear about spiders, but they make me feel icky and I don't care for them. there's a setting there's an accessibility setting if you have arachnophobia or they creep you out or whatever it is there's a setting and it's actually on a slider which i was not expecting i figured it be an on or an off kind of thing but the higher you put the setting the less spidery the spiders appear so at a base level normal creepy huge spider not good as you creep it up they like remove some of the legs of the spiders eventually they remove all the legs of the spiders and they just are like floating bodies and then they make the bodies less specific to the point where if you max it out they're just two floating circles with like a smiley face on the front of them which granted is not very immersive but if you have issues with spiders it's totally not a

problem because in the game they are not creepy at all if you turn that setting on in that case it's more immersive because you're still able to play the game i suppose it's just not as convincing yes no no i know i know exactly what you mean which is very cool i have i'm very into this game it is uh when i found out my internet was down, I was bummed out because it also meant that I couldn't play Grounded Online with y'all. Or I guess access that shared world, which is a bummer. But man, I can't stop. I can't stop thinking about like the projects that I keep taking on. Like, oh man, our house needs a roof because we have a real

b problem uh and then just sort of single-mindedly trying to focus on that until it's done uh it it man this game does that so so so well and you you are you are also very much incentivized to support the other people in the world like i i find myself doing stuff that i don't need just because i know that like ah this will be useful like today i build a jerky rack just because like i thought i think this would be nice to make some jerky uh when the guys come in they're gonna see a bunch of jerky hanging on there won't that be nice they won't have to worry about food or anything like it's it but it engenders that spirit much like the other multiplayer game it is

very good at cultivating that cooperative spirit there are these big teeth that Griffin mentioned where you can smash them with a rock and get upgrades why? I don't know but those points are shared between everybody in the world

so Plant and Russ when you guys log on, you can go into the menu and use those molars to increase your stamina and your health and that kind of stuff. Someone had a real problem in this backyard. Yeah, somebody's having a very bad issue. It's very bad. You really should get that looked at. Yeah.

Grounded's great. Grounded's great. Grounded's great. Please play Grounded. And when we come back, we're going to talk about more from the world of multiplayer gaming. So thrilled that you guys finally checked out Deep Rock Galactic. I mean, finally. It's been a week, Justin. It's not like it was months and months later.

It felt like, how long has the game been out, Russ? Fair. I mean, to be fair, not like it was months and months later. It felt like, how long has the game been out, Russ? Fair. I mean, to be fair, nobody told us we should play this game. Oh, no, don't do that to the fans. The fans have been asking. Yeah, Justin was very kind and introduced. I know my first game of Deep Rock was with Justin sort of walking me through, with Griffin, walking me through some of the details of it.

And then I used that sort of introduction to it to sort of introduce Plant to it a little bit. And that's been great. It is definitely, I think it is a game that benefits a little bit of hand-holding, just like a buddy of someone else playing. But then once you understand the beat-to- beat it's uh incredibly satisfying and super fun yeah i mean there's just so much to do in this game i i did a tutorial and i was like i think i know how this works and then i hopped in

with fresh and it's like oh now i think i know how this works and then every game after that i felt like i was discovering something and somehow felt like an expert at what I was doing for that 30 minutes, only to then the next time I play realize I knew absolutely nothing, which is kind of awesome in that it feels so great as a beginner. And yet I also see people like hopping around in mech suits, which looks super fun, and I'm jealous of it. But it doesn't do that thing where so many multiplayer games have a power curve where the game is not even fun until you get to

a certain point and I didn't get that vibe at all I feel like I was having a blast moment one yeah I do want to mention the mech suit thing they do a good job of siloing off the individual the classes to where you can be helpful I mean even if you're the scout

and you have a big flare gun we should mention in case you didn't listen last week there it's about it's a game about four dwarves going into the core of a planet to mine it for everything it's worth while they fend off uh like attacker bugs yeah they're mostly bugs yeah mostly bugs um the uh like and there it's class based so each class has very different skill set the scout can shoot these big flares that stick to ceilings even if you just go in and do that the first time you ever play you will probably be i mean you'll be helping the team like you're you are pitching in by by making it a lot more visible it's like a very important thing you can do and you can do it right away i mean you can be helpful it's the thing i love in multiplayer games where

i'm not a big like i'm not great with like shooting but i love being able to like support a team uh and and this game is is great for that yeah it's it's been super good i i wanted to mention on the plant mentioned like the mech suits and customization stuff like that uh there are like a ton of cosmetics and i remember justin was like showing us around the lobby at the different monitors and it's like oh you can unlock all this stuff and while he was showing us that i was like oh there's probably some sort of like you know in-app purchase like monetization currency that you could like use to unlock some of this stuff and it turns out there isn't at all so there are uh dlc packs that like include some cosmetics for like five dollars you can get like a suit or whatever but that stuff's

obviously totally optional but the 99 of the cosmetics in this game are all earned through just playing the game there's even a battle pass that happens every six months, there's a new battle pass. You don't buy the battle pass. It's included for everyone. And it progresses like a normal battle pass. We're unlocking new cosmetics, whatever it is. But it's all free for the people that are into the game. And it's incredibly generous with the amount of content they're providing.

And so I really understand why the fans are so diehard about it because it seems like this studio has just been like constantly heaping more and more stuff for for people to enjoy on top of the already good really good like core content yeah i mean in terms of the game itself earlier i mentioned with grounded that i don't like games where you just bash a weapon against an object and then you pick up little items and it says it's this type of stone and that is this game to a t you do do a lot of yet here's a great example of if it feels good and it's fun it doesn't matter because it just feels so good it just everything about this game feels so polished. I mean, what a triumphant of art direction.

Like, the game is, I think, like, four gigs, five gigs. Very small. And at no point did it feel any lesser or, I guess, diminished by that. It felt like it could hold its own next to, like, AAA games. Yeah, it uses, like like a low poly aesthetic um both for the characters and for the environments that i'm sure well a looks really good but also i'm sure is like a pretty light load in terms of performance and file size um and it just scales really well for a lot of different variety and you know mission types environments stuff like that um

it's a really smart way to build the game can you talk about the pipe level that you that you were telling me yeah i've done a couple of those and those are i got dropped into i was playing just like random with strangers essentially and i got dropped into a mission where there's like a refinery in the center of the mission and you have to effectively build these pipes these like long tubes to connect uh these like i guess it's oil or whatever you're pumping in variety in like a various parts of the map and eventually you connect all the pipes which is like a fun little like side project and you can build them anywhere you want it's not like there's like a really cool like guaranteed path right so you can bend them and all sorts of stuff.

And then once they're placed, you basically turn on the refinery, and then the bugs start attacking it, so you have to defend the refinery. And they were incredibly smart about it, because once the pipes are down, you can grind on the pipes. It's like a Tony Hawk game to get your mobility increased so you can explore the pipes a lot faster and like defend different parts and repair different parts much faster like really smart way to twist the core like normal missions of like hey collect this stuff into more of like a base defend thing

without totally revamping the way the game plays um griffin what were your i think uh thoughts on this yeah it has not i'll be honest it has not grabbed me as much as i thought it was going to um because i i i the the progression hooks just have not really hooked me quite as much i think maybe it's uh i think this game requires a bit more of an investment like a time investment to feel bought into it than I was expecting because I've played quite a few rounds now and I do not feel like any of my different character classes

are like much better equipped to take on the challenges that the game throws at you but again that's also like you you get out of it what you put into it because there are so many ways that they escalate the difficulty and uh rewards and it's kind of up to you to uh you know stick with it in order to discover all that stuff um so honestly honestly grounded has cannibalized i feel like all of the time that i was intending to spend playing yeah because it's i feel like it does kind of the opposite where from the jump it's like you're a weak tiny baby um but every single thing that you do is going to make you feel stronger.

And Deep Rock Galactic is very much a game about like that. It's just the pacing is not quite what I want it to be. Yeah, it's interesting. I enjoy playing it though. I enjoy playing it, especially in a group with you all. But I think that's kind of the only way that I enjoy playing it. Yeah, the approach is very different, obviously, from Grounded,

because you're right. Effectively, the power curve is such a small percentage of what this game is about. It's more about the minute-to-minute. And this approach, Deep Rock Galactic's approach, is close to a game like Fortnite,

where it's like, when you start, effectively, you are on level playing ground with people that are much, much higher level than you. And that allows for people to, like, not feel, like, totally left behind, where, like, oh, I'm getting, you know, this guy is, like, so much more powerful because he's spent 60 hours playing. I can play with people that have been playing for five years or however long the game's been out and feel like I can contribute and like be a part of it. And I get those hook the hooks that I get. And again, this is just a personal thing. I like the customization stuff that feels like a meaningful hook to me.

Even the visual, I should say, like the cosmetics, even if it doesn't improve my skills much. Yeah, I still get that draw. Yeah, I think it's really what you're looking for both these games absolutely rule and they offer two very different things yeah i i had kind of a similar problem in reverse for grounded in that the save my my single player save character didn't transfer to your multiplayer world so when i joined that later i felt very behind and like not not like a real ownership of the shared space and i could i'm sure i can eventually get there i'm not worried about that but but that was the opposite i i felt like completely intimidated where deep rock galactic i honestly haven't even looked into what changes i can make

to my character because i just hop in at the end of the day for 30 minutes i do a session i see an entirely different approach to how they do levels blow some stuff up and i like call it a time um yeah so yeah i think i think it's just kind of what you're jonesing for at any given point. I also, the mission-based structure does not fit in my current sort of life and the amount of time that I have to play games these days. Where, you know, in Grounded, if I'm having a 20-minute lunch break or whatever, that's enough time for me to at least go around, chop down some husky weeds and, you know, 20 minute lunch break or whatever, that's enough time for me to at least go around, chop down some husky weeds and, you know, come back, bring them all back home and build some shit. Whereas in Deep Rock Galactic, like it is before I start any mission, I have to ask myself like, well, am I going to have enough time to actually knock this out? Because I've

done missions that have taken me 10 minutes and I've had missions that have taken me much longer than that and not really knowing what I'm getting myself into when I don't have a ton of time to commit to it is not ideal. Which like at this point, I recognize I'm raising umbrage with, taking umbrage with like the entire structure of the game. So maybe that's just not for me.

It just doesn't line up with your life right now which is like yeah but i don't get me wrong like if i did have lots and lots of time to play games i think i'd be spending it all playing deep rock galactic y'all video games they're pretty good i think that's a pretty you know solid takeaway from this episode do you want to do some reader mail let's do it i it. I love that, actually, Glenn. I love that. This one is from James. Got any favorite games you used to play on sick days as a kid?

For me, it's not like, you know, what is it, Price is Right, which was like the go-to, you're sick and you're going to watch it on TV. I feel like, you know, it was what you were playing at the time. I don't know. Do you guys gravitate to a specific game when you're sick and you're gonna watch it on tv i feel like you know it was what you were playing at the time i i don't know do you guys gravitate to a specific game when you're sick uh i remember when animal crossing the original one came out on gamecube that was a that was a big one for me uh i i would go long stretches of time without playing that game. And then, you know, it was just kind of comfort food when I had one of my various ailments. I actually remember when I was in town in Huntington

staying with Juice for when we were making the MBM TV show, I was like horribly ill when I got there. I had some like terrible stomach bug and the GameCube was all plugged in, ready to go in the guest room. I booted up, booted up Animal Crossing and it was right, right there for me. And your town was just like destroyed. Yeah.

Yeah. We were all like, it's been 15 years, motherfucker. Why? I thought, I thought this meant something. I had to go to the doctors a lot as a kid. So that's not quite the same, but I would always bring my game gear and a backpack full of rechargeable batteries and play Sonic the Hedgehog and World Series Baseball 95, where I could pitch as David Cohn. And it got me through a lot of shitty times, so I have way too much fondness for a game nobody played. Any other ones before I go to the next question

that question was from james by the way yeah this one's from daniel when you create your avatar in a video game do you make it look like yourself i'm having trouble choosing my baldness or my residual self-image lately i love yeah that's a good question. I usually don't because I think it's boring to play as yourself. I mean, whatever. I don't judge people who do. But I find it boring, and I guess I consider myself boring in a video game. I play a wide range, I would say. It kind of depends on the mood.

Sometimes I want to be an old lady. Sometimes I want to be like a grisly. I play a lot of old characters because i feel like old characters not represented in video games very often as like protagonists um yeah kind of kind of runs the gamut i i usually do for me i um i will if i have the ability to change body shape in a way that i feel like represents my body uh I will often choose to make it look like myself just because that's such a rarity to be able to like make a body that looks like mine and and like the the novelty of exploring a world you know with a character that looks like

me like in Saints Row uh that that is something that I really enjoy uh But if I can't do that, I will typically go to just something completely different for myself just to have the experience. I will admit, and this is kind of embarrassing, but I do have a fantasy stock character that I will – just because I – so I don't have to think about it right I found an aesthetic for fantasy characters that I like with like sort of like the witcher but a little more elven and that's like that's I don't want to think about it anymore that's what I decided or I don't think about this anymore so like this is my dude if I can make a dude in a fancy game this is the dude I will does that character have a? And every game becomes the continuing adventures of that dude. Who's that dude? What's that dude's name?

What? I mean, I don't want to. Oh, yeah. That's private information. Is that too personal? Very personal. Yeah. I mean, well, and also, you've got to write the memoir for that dude at some point.

I mean, what a life. Yeah. What a life he's lived. One exception is that whenever whenever i play a from soft game i for whatever reason i almost always make anthony stewart head i don't know why that's what what i default to i feel like in bloodborne that's the default like you don't even need i guess when you boot up bloodborne anthony stewart head is just like waiting for you I guess when you boot up Bloodborne,

Anthony Stewart Head is just waiting for you. Yeah, I mean, I play as myself if it's an Avatar-like thing where the old Xbox dashboard where it was like, hey, it looks like you, or if it's like a Wii Sports. Otherwise, I never play as someone who looks like me. This one is from Glenn. Are digital versions of board games ever a good idea? Yeah, I think so. Sure, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, do you all play the VR kind? No. I mean, we've talked about, what was that game that was like a- Desktop or tabletop simulator? No, it was like Demio or something like that. It was like a desktop or tabletop no it was like dim dimio or something like that it was like its own game it was like its own vr uh sort of tabletop role-playing game thing we did we i think we did an episode on it uh a while ago and that that was pretty cool i've messed around with some of that stuff there was a while where like me and my friends were really into Catan and I got Catan on the phone and would play it.

I played a lot of, I think the one I probably have the most affinity for was Risk Factions when it came out on Xbox Live Arcade. Played that one a lot because they put a ton of like work into making that like its own standalone thing. The concern though is that like, I don't think the servers for a lot of those games are still up. I remember reading something recently about how somebody downloaded some version of Risk. It may have even been like an iOS version or something like that.

And now just you can't play it online anymore. And that's a pretty big bummer. But it really depends on the game because they are not all created equal at all. Splendor is another really good iOS version where they have lots of AI challenges and different stuff. I used to play a lot of Small World. It's a cool board game on the iPad that's fun with kids. I also downloaded and will sometimes play the Ticket to Ride iPad game.

That's a pretty good pass it around on road trips or whatever. So yeah, absolutely, it makes sense to do board games. I think it just needs to be the right game and the right people. Okay, last question. And this is a tricky one. It's from Snapdragon Sindh.

What is the smartest way to give someone a video game these days? Everyone already has free access to most games I want to give them through Game Pass. For others, there are so many options, PlayStation, PC, Xbox, Switch. Which gen console, physical or digital, does it depend on the game?

In my house house we have literally every platform option all hooked up in the living room so the question i wonder about now for gifts or otherwise is which option for buying this game is most likely to give you reliable long-term access to it oh that's a good question that's tricky because i don't know how to buy games for people it i mean i know how but will they like it yeah i wouldn't i yeah i would never buy a specific i it would be very rare for me to buy a very specific game for someone because either a they have it already or b it's like not for them um right i feel like a steam code a steam like gift certificate would probably be the move, right?

Well, you can also gift games on Steam very, very easily whenever you purchase them. I know that because I've almost gifted games that I meant to buy for myself a lot of times. I feel like the Steam library feels so permanent. It feels so stable because I've been playing games out of the same steam library for my entire adult life and also like if you are getting a game that is like built around multiplayer a lot of the time you can get like a pretty good deal on a bundle of you know four codes or or whatever so so most of the time that that is what i will uh opt opt for do you think it's all all that stuff is stored under Gabe's desk,

and if there was a flood and everything just sailed away, we'd lose everything? Yeah, if he spilled his coffee, it would just be like, there goes everyone. It's probably Faygo, because he is actually... He's a huge juggalo. I didn't know that. A lot of people know that.

Yeah, it was in one of the commentaries for Half-Life 2, I think. He makes you call him a hatchet game, which is wild. It's really weird. It's really weird. Any other questions? Anything else we need to touch on? No, I mean, I think it's time for honorable mentions real quick, and then we can wrap up.

Okay. Frosh, tell us about this game that I've never heard of. Oh, my God. Do I really have to do... Here, okay, go ahead. I've been tell us about this game that i've never heard do i really have to do here okay go ahead i've been playing a game it's called the binding of isaac wait wait wait let me write this down okay write it down right no there's a reason i'm bringing this up so the binding of isaac rebirth i'd love to clown on him right now but like the longer we clown oh no that's true here's what i'm gonna say i've talked a lot about binding of is's true i'm just gonna draw it out here's what i'm

gonna say i've talked a lot about binding of isaac i'm not gonna bore you too much but i'm gonna say this the one issue with binding of isaac the big gap that people have in getting into that game is because there are literally 800 items in the game and they all have a massive impact on your character and the game does not tell you what each item is you have to like learn through playing and they'll give you like little hints but it's really vague there is a steam workshop mod called external item descriptions it has 27 000 ratings on it and if you are playing binding of isaac on steam or like a steam deck which i am now doing it basically imports all of the data that you would need to understand like what each pickup is in the game it just

shows up as a pop-up on the game itself dang that might be enough that sounds good to get me yeah it's extremely good to to the point where where i took the time i had like a big save on the switch i had hundreds of hours on switch i took the time, I had like a big save on the Switch. I had hundreds of hours on Switch. I took the time to port over my progress, essentially by hand. There's no like really great way to do this so that I could just like continue playing on Steam Deck because this item description thing

takes so much of the hassle of like remembering everything out of the game such that you're just like making cool decisions about your character. It's fantastic. I strongly recommend it um the person who made it i want to give credit is named their username is waf sauj like sausage i guess but waf uh and uh there's like also you can uh bulgarian turkish all sorts of languages are supported. It's amazing. Wow. That might be enough to actually make me play that again. I don't think Pineapple Guy is a bad game. I was so overwhelmed.

It's incredibly overwhelming. Can I get that for Stardew, please? What? Can I get that exact thing for Stardew Valley? Oh, I guarantee that. I'm sure that exists. So there is a way to import your progress from one platform to another?

Because that's the, that would be the thing that would hold me back. It's like, I've spent so much time playing on Switch. Here's what I did. And it didn't take that long, but you can, I basically used debug codes on the PC version

to like teleport me to the various bosses that I had already beaten on specific characters and just like insta-killed them using debug codes. It took, I had hundreds of hours again on Switch. It took probably an hour, all told. It wasn't that bad. So if you have the time, that's what I would recommend. Hoops, how about you?

Yeah, I played a neat little one on iOS called Rogue Jack, Yeah, I played a neat little one on iOS called Rogue Jack, which is a rogue-like ASCII art dungeon crawler where the fights that you get into are conducted through blackjack. So the enemy has two cards and you get two cards and you play basically a hand of blackjack against them and whoever wins the hand of blackjack damages the other person um which is very a very quick uh you know it's a quick way of doing combat so it doesn't lose a lot of momentum um as you go through though you unlock other classes that have different abilities that make it easier to win. So, like, there's a monk that can always see one card but not the other and get to choose which one they pick up. Or, you know, eventually your classes have, like, you can see two cards or whatever.

And you can pick up gear that does more damage or augments that in some way. you can pick up gear that does more damage or, or augments that in some way. And it's basically just like trying to get to the bottom of, you know, this, this dungeon while you are playing blackjack, a bunch of against a bunch of monsters. It's,

it's fairly thin, but it is neat. It's a neat concept. And it's interesting to see how they implement it with, with different there's, there's some monsters that like uh always went on ties right so that's something you need to be aware of or like will always hit on a 17 or whatever so you can kind of push them closer to busting whatever

um but push them closer to what like i said push them close to busting. Anyway. In a game where you edge monster, that sounds gross, dude. The secret is to peek and back off because if you push them too hard, they're going to bust.

Yeah. How is that represented in ASCII art? Would you say busting makes you feel good? It certainly makes them feel good, it sounds like. Makes them feel real good.

Frysh, you have another thing that you're going to talk about. I saw you just add another game. Anything else? Anything else? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Riding of Isaac 2. I have one other game to talk about.

It's not out yet, but there is a free demo on Steam as part of Steam Next Fest. The game is called Mars First Logistics. And basically, you are building little physics based cars on mars to accomplish very simple tasks like pick up a watering can or move a box but it uses um kind of like a lego style design system and where you have limited parts and you have to like accomplish these tasks like you know as i mentioned relatively simple i know there's been a lot of games like this kerbal space program being one of the biggest ones um i this i found to be like way more approachable and like easy to grok like

oh if i add this you know one piece to the back of the car it'll like balance the weight a little better um such that i found it like incredibly satisfying the demo is quick it only takes about a half hour to finish but given that it's free um i think people really dig it it has like really cool uh cel-shaded art like sable and um i found it really satisfying y'all i'm i'm gonna get you all to try Criterion Channel for one month. I finally found out how to do it, and here's the plan. There's an 80s, 1980s horror collection for Halloween this month. Number one reason you need to check it out is Near Dark is available to stream, which basically is impossible to stream anywhere outside of this. And it is Catherine Bigelow's 80s vampire western starring bill paxton oh and it is cool

as absolute hell um yeah it's a fucking great it's a great flick i i love that one here's here's the one i'm going to sell you on have you ever heard of q the winged serpent no okay you've probably seen the poster if you google, I think you'll recognize it. It is a movie. Really two movies happening at once. Set in 1980s New York, in which Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god serpent creature, is straight up just murdering people in New York. Just scooping down and picking off sunbathers off the top of their buildings and then there's also a movie about a uh a really awful driver for the mob who's in trouble with the mob so you get this mashup of gabagool mafia movie with out of nowhere

a like dragon creature just murdering people on the streets of new york with on location shoots wow it is absolutely bonkers it is bonkers you you have to see it i i've never seen anything as like good slash absolutely stupid as this movie and i i want to talk about it. With a young David Carradine. Yeah, he's like not great in it, but in like a compelling way it's strange. Drag him. He feels like he doesn't know where he is

at times, but then again if you read the script, I don't think I would know where I was at all. Cool. Stuff we talked about this week. We talked about Grounded stuff we talked about this week we talked about grounded and we talked about deep rock galactic and next week we're going to talk about persona 5 royal it's back and now it's portable what did you know is that really what we're doing no i mean is that really what we're doing next week i think we're, I think the intention was to do like a recap,

looking back at the Persona franchise in general, using the release of Persona 5 Royal as a news peg. It's on Steam Deck and Switch. More people are going to play it than ever before. Yeah, I do like that. Yeah, and Frush is going to be gone. So we're going to have a special guest. Yes.

Frush just happened to leave during the JRPG episode. Yeah, it's definitely not a coincidence that I am skipping this episode. I look, I like reading like the next guy. Two guests. Just two guests. All right. Hey now. Hey now.

Now I love. Now listen, I put in my persona time. You know that I'm a fan. That is going to do it for us for this week. Until next time, be sure to I put in my persona time. You know that I'm a fan. Um, that is going to do it for us for this week. Until next time, uh, be sure to join us again next week for the besties.

Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!