The Besties - Loops and Loots with Loop Hero

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Just one more loop? The boys jump into the indie darling that's got the nation abuzz: Loop Hero. They also dive into some more review songs and explore whether Griffin and his computer are best friends. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

So I have some concerns. Okay. I saw a video on the internet of a small child singing the theme song to the besties podcast. Oh, it has words? No, no, no. Just like singing the melody to it. And then I guess at the end of the, you know, end of episodes, we say besties, right? Right.

So she said that at the end. So I guess that is the one word. I'm worried that the show might not be as friendly as it could be to children well children like uh i can handle this oh okay okay guys today we're going to be opening some paw patrol toys this is my favorite this is rough rider rough is on the roll this one over here is barker oh he's wrapped up in slime this is what kids like your kids watch a lot of asmr no my six-year-old does watch it okay my six-year-old does watch asmr videos and when i hear them from across the room i like literally i'm up on my feet storming over like i just i don't know like

i'm gonna make her smoke an entire carton of asmr videos i will not have you descend into this madness well that's a very much a do as i say not as i do situation huh i learned it from watching you dad yeah but i keep that secret from my children. Like a healthy parent. Right. Normal stuff. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

Uh-oh. It's a loop. It's a loop! Oh, yeah. It's like, guess what? My name is... It's a little raspy today. My name is Russ Rastanian. Rev it up!

Rev it up! You gotta warm up your instrument, Russ. Bah, bah, bah, bah. Welcome to the Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a video game club with four friends that want to talk about the best video games around and it has been a a uh pretty slow period in the game release i think specifically i think covid is starting to catch up with some development cycles uh so it's slow and i think it'll continue to be a slow year but that doesn't

mean that games stop in fact there are little gems what's that underneath this rock? It's a little gem. And this week's little gem that we want to talk about is called... Little Gem. And he's a little guy, and you got to make little gem bounce around all the mushrooms. It's Loop Hero is the name of the game. Originally, we were going to do Valheim this week. That got punted down the road because I think Justin, Russ, and Chris wanted to play Loop Hero and not Valheim this week. That got punted down the road because I think Justin, Russ, and Chris wanted to play Loop Hero and not Valheim, which is cool because I played a lot of Valheim,

and then they were like, we're not playing Valheim. And I was like, oh, cool. I just wasted that time on video games. I know. But it's fine because now I've spent an unconscionable amount of time playing Loop Hero. Russ asked for everybody to show their time played uh their

their their play log on steam which would be uh folly for me because i've more or less just left it on yeah and then i've been just sort of dipping in on the old like ipad from the couch doing a little uh doing a little steam steam link remote play it works it's a perfect game according to my steam i got on here to check my log it says one friend playing it it is griffin mackerel yeah i do i do have it open right now uh yeah we may even want to close it out just for the recording well i am in the middle of a pretty juicy loop but i swear uh uh it's paused it's paused i would never do that who wants to attempt loop hero i'm gonna give it i'm gonna give it a stab okay okay okay loop hero is a rogue like uh roguelike where basically everyone

you're more or less starting from zero you um are this little rpg character that runs along a 2d loop of a road um and as you progress you might run into enemies and different things on that road but largely speaking you have no control over what your little hero does he'll run ahead or she'll run ahead and fight things and you'll get experience and maybe items but they are doing their own thing the way you interact with the game is basically you place cards around the road that helps populate it. So imagine it like a strategy game where you're going to place a town or you're going to place a graveyard or you're going to place a spider cave.

And those will determine what your character, as they loop around the world encounters, as they go around. That is like the core of the game and then there's like a lot of meta stuff going there's like 50 more sort of like rpg it is an extremely rpge yeah experience because then you're also earning equipment uh during your loops that you are tossing on and then you're also earning resources that you take back to a camp which is sort of the main um through line progression system where you can build onto this this camp to add a warehouse here or add a an herbalist's

hut to unlock things that will assist you in back in the loops yeah permanent upgrades that will make you better at doing loops i've said this to a lot of people, and I think it's funny that we're doing a podcast because there's no elevator pitch for this game that makes it sound fun or good. I don't know how you guys feel, but I really tried, and I do not think that there is a short... I think I can get there.

Okay. Let's do the elevator. I'm in the elevator. Boop. For me, it is... And Justin will probably be able to speak to this a little bit more. I know he has kind of mixed feelings about the the elevator oh i see okay okay uh it's it's sort of the next step i feel like in what um an idle game could can be uh if it's it's one step of interactivity above what idle games i

got it i feel like it's the breath of the wild of idle games of idle games sure yeah there we go there we go it's the breath of the wild of idle games boom i mean the box it's the same issue that auto chess had right like but both of you just did a terrible job pitching the game. Thank you. I'm sorry. I can't do it either. It's the same.

You know, Auto Chess was this big phenomenon and there is no good way to explain it without having people try it. I think there is still a demo available for what it's worth. It's on Steam. If people want to just like try it out at home. But it is a very hard game to summarize.

And yet, it does grab you pretty viciously yeah yeah there's there's not that many sort of mechanics going on uh it's just i don't actually think idle game is a good definition for this game because if you are idle you are going to not make it very long at all um where the game really kind of takes off is understanding how all these different cards which represent the the tiles you can place on the map like mountains or uh you know spider cocoons or rivers or all of these have effects um that occasionally will interact with one another. So for instance, there's a card called a grove. And when you put a grove on the map, every two days it spawns a wolf enemy,

which sounds bad, but you have to have enemies on the map in order to get better equipment and more cards to like more fully flesh your stuff out. Then there's an additional card called a blood grove that you can only place next to a grove on the map that will, any tile it's touching, if you get in a fight on that tile, it'll automatically kill whatever monster you're fighting once it gets down to 15% health. And that includes bosses, too. So you want to make sure you have a Blood Grove close to the camp tile since that's where the bosses are. But if you put two Blood Groves together, it'll make a hungry grove,

which will kill enemies at 20% health, but it'll also attack you sometimes. That's bad. That is, that's the, I mean, I like a hungry grove, but it's, it's like, that's the level of complexity that I feel like the game

very, very quickly dives into. And it only branches out from there as you upgrade your camp and therefore unlock new cards with which to to drop down on the map there's also a lot of fun risk reward type stuff um wait actually to touch on what griffin said it also doesn't tell you a lot of this stuff no this isn't like handholding like so i noticed that you can set down meadows that will heal you every loop and then i noticed that some of my meadows were uh like had flowers in them and were healing for more uh and what you realize is that if you put

a meadow next to another object it becomes a blooming meadow and that heals you for more but this isn't like explicitly stated to you so like things happen and you don't exactly know why and that's part of the fun the other thing is this fun risk reward of um there's a couple layers of it one is how many bad things am i going to put down to make my run profitable but not kill myself right because if you put too much bad stuff down or i got in this a lot early where i'm like would put several bad things next to each other and they'd all decide to hang out together yeah so i'd wander a room full of like seven people ready to like uh take me to town uh but there's also this question of when do you bail

on a run so you can so you uh if you get back to town you can quit a run with 100% of the stuff that you found. If you die, you get 30% of the stuff that you found. If you just run away at any other point. Just stop mid-run, it's 60%. Yeah. So you do have to run some math in your head of like, I'm not going to make it around again. There's no way I'm going to get through. I am terrible.

I'm going to bail right now. I am terrible at making that call i don't know about you guys but i have made that call the worst possible decision in that scenario every single time i'm like no i can make it and i never fucking do russ can can i get in the the pitch elevator really quickly oh yeah bing pitch elevator oh so it's a role-playing game where you play as the dungeon master oh oh interesting i like that good work chris thank you i like that i mean because it's so much of it is about balancing the game for a character that you have no control of it's yeah mixing pain and pleasure

and then deciding when the game ends or else the character dies so i i we've talked we've talked about the the the broad strokes sort of stuff um and i i i genuinely do really like it but i i think that i really have a place in my life for a game like this right now like i like i said like having this on my ipad like on my lap while i'm like watching tv it is kind of perfect for that um because you can sort of build a loop in a way where you can be a little bit more hands off especially if you're going at like an earlier difficulty when you're a little bit stronger just because you want to try and eke out some resources here and there like the game is very clever in how it kind of lets you go for different objectives with each loop like most loops i'm not sure there's a boss

once you place enough cards you spawn the boss of that act right uh so far i've made it to act three i don't know what act you guys have made it to um and but most of the time like i'm not going for that because i you know maybe i don't know that I'm strong enough. I don't have enough upgrades to my camp to, like, even realistically achieve that. So sometimes I'll just, you know, say, well, this loop I really need to farm for some food resources because I need those to upgrade my, you know, X, Y, or Z back at home. x y or z back at home so what the game lets you do is it lets you go there's a deck building aspect where you go into all of these tiles that you've unlocked and you can select which ones you're going to bring into your your expedition so maybe you bring in a maybe you don't bring any groves and blood groves and instead you just focus on meadows and things to make those meadows bloom

like justin said because that will get you more rations, which will, you know, help you upgrade what you need to upgrade back home. Yeah, there was- And that's a very cool angle for me. Yeah, with that specifically, in addition to just like normal resources, like, oh, I need more wood or whatever, there are some like weird resources

that you can only get in certain scenarios. One of them is the Orb of Expansion, I think it's called, where you have to fight at least five enemies in a single fight in order to have a chance to get one i was like well i need this new upgrade the only way to get it is orb of expansion so i built a deck entirely about i'm going to make it so i can survive fights with five or more people and that makes those fights like super intense but i can also like oh i'm gonna put this tower down that does like aoe damage while we're doing the fight and stuff

like that so it's kind of it like each run you do can have a lot of different purposes which i find like really interesting um and like i was constantly like chasing different things, which, yeah, it was dope. So that gets into my personal barrier to the game. I don't think this is a problem with the game. I think this is just a problem with me because I really enjoyed this game at the beginning. But the deeper I get into it, the more it feels like math homework.

It's like, oh, the goal of this game is for me to figure out the guide, the strategy guide for this game. And I need to undo all that puzzle. And then once I figure it out, I need to put it into like a 1970s supercomputer and let it slowly parse that equation by doing the loops over and over again.

And this is a problem I have just with idle games in general as much as i can like really let myself get lost in them i don't feel good after i play them and with this game i have that same thing happening where i'll leave it on like on the side while listening to a podcast and i'll be like well i certainly made progress in this but i never felt involved in it um and it doesn't help that i don't think the writing in this game is very good i think the writing's great i think you're out of your mind i can't tell if it's intentional or not the tutorial writing at the beginning where it's like it did it starts on a sour note for me because it does that thing of like well well, that was stupid.

Can you believe you had to do that? Stupid tutorials. Like that type of writing in games immediately turns me off. And then the rest of the game, I just can't tell. I would feel better if I knew for certain that the main character was just a total idiot. And like, that's the joke. character was just a total idiot and like that's the joke or if like he's or if this is supposed to be like actually grim and he's like batman it's it's uh it i think that it rides that line really well i'm i'm genuinely shocked to hear you say this because the the game is all about basically like everything has been erased not just like in a you know dark cloud

style way where it's like oh no our towns are gone it's like memories of everything are gone and are erased every time you defeat a boss and come back home you're like guys i saved the day everybody's like what the fuck are you talking about so this it's like a world where information has been obliterated and you are now like going on these loops to figure out why and each boss kind of like reveals a little bit more about what is happening in this world it is it is a pretty huge sort of um like erasure style thing that is that is going on and i i think the way that they kind of talk about that is genuinely pretty radical. A caveat to what I said. Well, I don't know about radical, but the stuff when you're in the loop and you're talking to enemies, I enjoy that.

And I especially enjoy just the design of the enemies. I think the art in this game is fantastic. Yeah. It's when I go back into the village, which is where I want something that is like hooking me and pulling me into this world and maybe that's just the nature of a story in which the world is like vacant and missing and again i i am just struggling with like what is the mood here is this like extremely dark and depressing or is this all a goof undertale type of stuff or what is it justin do you have a thought of like where it lands for you for me there's just too many gaps between stuff that feels substantive like if you've played isle games before like you know like we've been out here like this is not

like as revolutionary as a lot of people have sort of like framed it to be i think it does a lot of things that are interesting but a lot of the ideas are very idle game um i think that like the problem for me uh and i have i have a lot of problems because i put a lot of time in this game and i think that it's very interesting i think it goes to what you're describing is that feeling of like badness that you get with an idle game is someone who's like that is the feeling of like badness that you get with an idle game is someone who's like that is the feeling of like seeing an addiction cycle and like realizing like i'm not necessarily having fun what's happening is i'm just on like a next run next run next run next run incremental growth incremental growth that serotonin hit and i think there's a way to have that part of a game where it's not like the entire you know know, destiny is a good example,

right? Where you're on the serotonin loop. Cause it's like new gun, new gun, new gun, new gun. But the other half of that is fun fire, like genuinely fun skill-based encounters and shooting.

Right. I think loop hero is very close. If it had a few more things that were genuinely fun and not just like mechanical and power fantasy based. And there's a lot of stuff that feels like cruft and it's just not fun when you have to do it for the millionth time. Like placing your meadows and your rocks and stuff like that is not a huge decision. You get a kind of an idea of what you want to do and then you do it and having to take time to keep stopping to like,

okay, let me drag those into there. I'm like, okay, let me drag these into, okay, I got new gear. So let me just drag the new gear in to swap out the good stuff for the bad

stuff. Like there's like decisions to be made in there, but they're very small and they're not. They're not in line with the amount of time it takes to do the boring stuff that doesn't matter at all. I want to I want to hop in here and say that I I think even that little stuff evolves into more consequential decisions the further you get into the game. I've reached a point now in Act 3 where I've unlocked a tile called the river. And all that the river does is it doubles the effect of tiles

that you place alongside the river. And like Justin was saying, you have a lot of those basic resource cards like rocks and there's like a desert card and there's a forest card. They have upgraded versions that you can also draw sometimes. And again, once you place enough tiles on the map,

the boss spawns. So there's actually a question of, do I want to place this weaker version of the rock, or do I want to place down the mountain, which is twice as effective? Because if I put that rock down, I get a little bonus, but it's going to get me closer to that boss.

So even those little decisions become more complex when you're like, well, do I want to just burn this card? Do I want to wait? And there's a tile called the bookery that lets you exchange your cards. So maybe I hang on to those weak cards and trade them in for the strong cards.

And then do I have a river I can put them down on to really maximize the effect? Like it really gets, there are no small decisions the further you get into the game and that for me that's the point i'm at and it's where it's really got its hooks in me because if you do not take advantage of those things you don't leverage those things which again the game does not explain it especially well uh you're just not gonna succeed you're just not gonna they just have to move that

stuff fast yeah i think it's my point because i i it took me probably six hours to get through the first boss to be the first boss and then i i don't know do the math 25 hours since then yeah in act two and i've never i have yet to spawn the second boss right it's just like it feels like such a huge grind and there's shit like i mean shame on me this is my fault but like the next advance i needed to make in town was the um was wood and i kept doing run after run after run and not getting wood and then eventually i was like wait there's gotta be something wrong here and i needed to have the grove which is like a forest basically um to get wood and which like that makes sense and once i made that connection like um i i started thinking more critically about the stuff i was putting in my deck depending on what i needed to get but nothing in the game i had to like get on

a polygon.com to make that connection it's like and i've already you're you're welcome i clicked on all the ads while i was there cool um i got 50 pounds of boner pills there is but like it doesn't it doesn't walk you through that it doesn't help you with that and like it doesn't indicate to you and it's just like i spent 10 hours like not really making progress because it's kind of mad just to be for what it's worth and i'm not saying that this is a justification of that because you do need to unlock it but there is an encyclopedia that you can unlock in the game that basically details everywhere every enemy you fight every card every building and tells you what you get that's beyond even where i am now like i still

haven't gotten it's like and you need a lot of wood to get there it takes too long to get there it's a really cool mechanic though once you do get to it because then you start collecting resources that are basically books of knowledge that you can spend at that intel center to unlock chapters of the encyclopedia to learn more about like the arcane interactions between i'm still like finding new yeah interactions that are like really wild like if you put a there's a card called a vampire mansion that when you put it down on the map it adds a vampire to any fights on the tiles that it's touching and if that vampire mansion is touching the bookery which is like the library you get a different kind of smart vampire who's like reading the book and

says all kinds of wild shit about like the apocalypse that's going on right now that's the best yeah if you put one next to a uh if you put one next to a village have you done that yeah yeah it it yeah if you get put next to a village it turns into a ransacked village that's just full of zombies and vampires uh which is great because there's always more than four of them so it helps to get your orb of expansion but also it turns into something valuable after uh a few loops so it's like even that has a um ramification can i can i alley you yeah so you and fresh can get underneath that get by the hoop because i'm i'm throwing it up i don't i haven't said what are we soccer this is soccer no this is classic alley-oop stuff so so classic alley-oop um i when

i i was starting to kind of fade on it yesterday evening and i had made it very very far resisting a thing that uh mr s rushick had told us to do very early but being a real jerk i refused to do probably because he recommended it which is unlocking the rogue yeah and the rogue is very good yeah so there's three classes that are unlockable in the game you start as a warrior which is like a pretty typical like hit stuff with a shield and sword uh class the second class you unlock you can unlock very early it does not require very many resources but is a rogue i generally don't play as rogues in games i don't like that play style but um in loop hero it completely changes the structure of the game uh whereas before you

were like constantly getting loot as you walked around the loop um with the rogue you collect uh trophies and basically these will turn into loot once you get to the end of the loop uh or the campfire so you'll end up like 30 trophies and then you hit the campfire and your entire inventory fills pot with like a ton of shit. And so what that does is completely make you re-envision like instead of, okay, throughout this entire loop, I'm constantly changing out my inventory and it's taking forever.

Instead I'm like, okay, what setup is going to make me survive this entire loop with no other resources? Right. So it really like reimagines it. And also there's some fun stuff with like how their stats work. They're much more focused on dodging and damage than they are like regening health. It like really does re-envision the game.

I haven't unlocked the... The third class is the Necromancer and it is tough. I cannot crack that. It's really weird. The Necromancer and it is it is tough i cannot crack that it's really weird the necromancer feels broken not in a good way where the necromancer the idea is that rather than you doing direct attacks um it sort of it's like the um uh russ you played monster train right yeah somebody here played monster train like the uh i think they call it the melting remnant is that the that that where it's like more about uh sending out uh lots of minions it's like a minion basically you're summoning skeletons and they're fighting for you right and then the skeletons die you summon more skeletons and they the you don't

have a weapon you don't have a shield you don't have armor it's just about the magic that you bring in to make your skeletons more powerful that's what i say it feels broken it feels like it needs a patch because like you get into a bad place with your skeletons where they're relatively weak and if you hit it find an enemy that's hitting hard you could get up against the enemy that's just like one shotting your skeleton as it's as you're summoning it and it comes out of nowhere yeah but don't you just like run run run run dead don't you think you could build a deck that would basically prevent that from happening not really i mean with that level no yeah that's the problem i've also because you run into a situation because you'll it's just a hard it's like a math it's like a scaling question right it's sort of like

to what plant was talking about like it's not about like well if i just do this and this and this it's like oh no i've hit an encounter that the scale of the damage that is being output that beats the rate at which my guys read able to stay alive and there's just no i mean it's just not gonna happen i mean i i'm realizing could i've made better decisions going into that that would make me a better all well-rounded i mean i don't know probably but yeah i i i think we should probably wrap up just because we could get infinitely granular there is so there are so many other little mechanics in this game well i i recommend i'm curious what y'all think for our listeners is like i think you could get this game now and you would enjoy it oh for sure i've been loving it oh yeah for sure i i also think

this is a game that like with maybe five to six months of updates is going to be fantastic i i plan on revisiting this game hardcore before the end of the year because I think it'll definitely be a piece of the Gotti conversation. Yeah. I do want to put one corollary on some of my complaints, and I would like to hear you guys discuss this. Like, I've been treating this very much as like a second browser window. Like, have it over here while I'm doing something else over here. And I think that I probably am playing it wrong in that sense where I should have more runs where I'm actually focused on the game. I've been taking much more of a like, I'll grind it out, see how the run goes. If I die, no big deal.

I'll just start a new run. And I think that's part of why my progress has been so slow. Because I haven't really been like paying attention and like focusing on individual runs. And I think I would probably be getting more out of it if I was, I am making progress a little bit faster. If I was really, if it's an idol,

if it's an idol game, it is the most active idol game I've ever played by like, it requires constant supervision to the point of like, you really like every few minutes i'm sorry every few seconds you really need to be making a call and if you're not you're probably fucking up in some way so i agree i don't think you can play passively i also for what it's worth on plant's point of like waiting i think this would be better if it was natively on something like an iphone or a switch or something like that that you could pick up and put down.

Right now, I don't think you can save in the middle of a loop and loops can last like 30 minutes. So it's kind of a commitment that you're making. You could just minimize it. The game's 40 megs. It's not going to kill your computer, but it is what encourages

the way that Justin has played, I think. I think by not having that, you're just like, well, whatever, I'll put it on the background. I think it will definitely hit some sort of mobile platform at some point in the future especially given how insanely well it's done um but yeah for the time i mean it's you know even if you have like a macbook air i think it runs on mac and yeah it's again 40 megs it'll run on anything that you throw at it so i think it's a good pickup yep cool well let's

take a quick break and we'll get right back into all this great video game discussion and just basic friendship. Just good times. Yeah. Be right back. Okay.

Russ, it says here, okay, segment B, I love to sing. I have a passion for music. Yeah. I want to be a famous singer pop star. I, Russ Freshdick, have to share my art, and this is my platform. My body is my instrument.

Okay, that's a little graphic. And take it away. um and uh take it away well i i wanted to do a special uh reader reviews edition of uh our singing reader reviews so i thought we'd do a zelda edition given the uh fact that uh we just did that zelda special where okay i linked to the past one so uh you guys there's a few other reviews in here if you want to take one but i'll do the first one. This is a review from Trifo3652. Do we have to do Zelda music? No. Oh, it's music from the Zelda franchise?

I'm going to, but you don't have to. Okay, let me think about some bops. Great podcast, always a joy to listen to these episodes. I've always picked up a number of games based on their recommendations even though even if you don't play games

their chemistry and goofs are always a good lesson usually I can pick out what song it is that you're doing and that time I definitely could not what song would is that you're doing. And that time I definitely could not. What song would you say that was, Russ? I don't plan.

What do you think? I have no idea. What was that, man? It was a Snoopy song. I thought you were doing a Zelda song. Snoopy. What? You told us you were going to do a Zelda song.

It says that. You just said it 30 seconds ago i'm going to do a zelda song i did you can't call an audible like that you can't say i'm doing zelda and then do snoopy you especially can't say the words announce some zelda shit and then do was the ending supposed to be that yeah wowda-da-da? Yeah. Wow. Why did you do it in a minor key? It sounded ominous. I wouldn't have guessed it

if you said here's some Snoopy shit. The best you can at least give me that. Curveball. Griffin, do you have one? I mean, I can try. Griffin, do you have one? I mean, I can try. I've started listening to this podcast during my commute to my miserable job. And it makes my day a little brighter.

I laugh a lot and learn a ton. It's a wonderfully approachable show. And I enjoy all the episodes even if i've never played the game they're disgusting there's no gatekeeping and the humor brings people in instead of cutting people out it's one of my new favorites and i will definitely be adding it to my regular rotation and that was doug from zelda why did you say yes doug from the zelda from the zelda games let us guess i would have got we should also mention And that was Doug from Zelda. No, I knew it. Why did you say it? Yes, Doug. From the Zelda games. You gotta let us guess.

I would have got it. We should also mention the reviewer. That was Elizabeth Movius. Right there. Yeah. Thanks, Elizabeth. I just feel like I was really spinning my wheels. Like, what's the Gerudo Fortress music sound like?

And how can I turn that into music? And Russ fucking ruined it. turn that into music and russ fucking ruined it i hopped on for the best zelda episodes and even though my respect for three-fourths of the podcast donald win i learned they think b-o-t-U doesn't look good. I still think this is good. And great podcast. That was from Zelda. That was a good one from Zelda. That's the link to the past theme from Zelda,

which doesn't get enough credit for being better than the theme to original Zelda. I didn't recognize it. Hey, well, let's just listen to it real quick. He did the rupee sound. Can you sing along with this? I mean, that's great. Yeah, okay. Anybody play anything else that's good?

Oh, let me hop in. I'm sliding in. First off, I've been playing Solitaire Cube, which is, did you know, have you guys heard of Skills? Yeah. I've been interested in it. You guys heard of Skills? Not Skills like we all have. Skills with a Z?

Oh, no. I was very interested in this because I thought it was interesting. It is a service where you can, you basically like, bet on your game of Solitaire that you're going to have, like, very small stakes, right? Like, a quarter?

And then the winner gets twice as much. Like you earn, you get the money for winning the thing. What? Yeah, right? It's weird that this exists. I didn't quite believe it. But nope, there it is. You can play Tetris against people or Solitaire

or whatever, and you just make, you get the money if you beat them. That sounds... Basically, like for example, there's like a dollar game, right, where each person bids in 60 cents and then the winner gets a dollar that's it oh and then the cut site gets the remainder yeah there you go and there's and it's the weird thing is it's being built in like skills as a platform is being built into mobile games um and which is interesting because it's weird but also is interesting because it's like part of it is because discoverability so like if you integrate this into your platform then skills can direct people towards your game and help to like

this is a thing you could do to set your game apart from the rest of the um uh the crowd as far as that goes but i was interested in it because it sounds like wild that that it seems like it would be something that you could easily abuse with some sort of hacking something i would i think if i was doing this that would be the first thing i'd figure out but i'm sure i'm sure if you want to black hat it you could you could uh break through i mean somehow bungee has not cracked that big mystery in terms of making their game hack free so but it is it's interesting i just thought it was an interesting thing i'm not endorsing you go out and play fucking four cash solitaire even though it does make solitaire more

interesting if you got if you got uh uh 25 cents on the line to get somebody's uncle from paducah but listen here's the other thing that i actually did want to highlight is called not for broadcast anybody else play this no oh oh my god yes good yeah not for broadcast and i know that you're gonna i get it uh it's on steam uh and basically the the game of not not for broadcasts is you are a television news producer that has a live feed of four different cameras and you are producing a live news broadcast everything from like uh basic stuff like cutting between different camera shots to loading up the ads,

to queuing the ads when it's time to play them to choosing which images you're going to use for like a certain story to accompany it. And censoring, there's a huge like sensor button to take out like bad language, all FMV for different shots. And you'll run into situations like um there are these protesters that are streaking through this sports competition and you have to like choose your shots so you're not getting the uh the naked people in your shots uh or else you start losing viewers which it absolutely would not be that's all freaking great fantastic uh what what

is actually a cool other layer on top of that is that there is a sort of like anti-authoritarian storyline sort of layered over it where there is a new government party that has come to come into power and you are making choices in your broadcast not just on what makes the best tv but how much you're gonna push against this interesting authority so you've got people calling you like make sure you run this ad for them in the second ad spot. You know, they're really, and then there's like outside of the news broadcast parts, there's like story segments where you're making choice,

just text-based where you're making choices and seeing how the story develops for your personal life. And the choices you make during the broadcast affect that. So kind of a Papers, Please vibe. It sounds. Yeah. That kind of a papers, please. Vibe. It sounds that, yeah, that kind of ish, not quite that.

Like it's, it's, it's more in the background. The produce, the new segments are actually the best. And then the new segments are, they're really genuinely pretty funny. And choosing between the two of them is exciting.

And you really do get to like a cook serve delicious kind of point where it's like okay I gotta bleep his curse word and now I gotta switch the camera over because that person isn't talking and also if you linger on a certain shot for more than 10 seconds you start losing viewers because they want to be entertained so you gotta switch to a different edit and you gotta play the music

and then you know you're fading in and out stuff and queuing the ads and it's really cool. And they just released the second big chunk of it. They call it the second episode, but it's very cool. It's called not for broadcast. That sounds very cool.

I do want to, before we forget, a case dearly wrote the review that Justin sang. And I don't think we call that case dearly. So probably someone else yeah i just i can do it real quick i was uh sort of interested in picking up breath of the wild again just to sort of kill some time before mostly before monster hunter gets here uh although i'll have a newborn baby when monster hunter gets here so i'm gonna be late to that a different form of

monster hunter right um but i it's it is rare that i can get henry my son who's four years old interested in in a game he's a real jock uh and he bullies me all the time uh but i find that i have the most success with games like breath of the wild and i don't know why i hadn't thought of like showing it to him where you can just kind of do wild shit yeah and he is very into that like the first time we saw a robot chris has said meconium hunter thank you i don't know why you couldn't didn't want to say that out loud you gotta be brave i didn't want it to be somebody's text message um uh the first time we came across uh one of the little ancient robot enemies, like the smaller ones. And I had just gotten the magnet powers, which he had just had me lift shit up and throw it around for a while.

And he's like, drop a box on him. So I did. And the thing exploded. And I saw that look on his face of just like, hey, this thing that I thought of that was kind of stupid worked and like achieved the thing, which is which was so amazing to me on so many levels because it's the thing that i love about breath of the wild but also the thing i love about games sometimes and to see that really click with him was was uh genuinely a very very nice moment um and i also think it's been just long enough since my last playthrough of that game i probably haven't played it since 2018 uh that i

there's a lot of stuff that i'm coming at sort of uh it seems seems very fresh to me so i'm i'm loving it yeah when i was a kid i had a typing game uh featuring the berenstain bears and uh at one point you could fill in the blank for what you wanted papa bear to do and one of the you know we would basically have him jump off the roof of the barn. And that blew my mind. So I feel like this is the new generation of that. Of the Berenstain Bears text-based adventure game. Yeah, I agree.

And I think I remember seeing a lot of reviews to that effect when Breath of the Wild first came out. This obviously is derivative of the Berenstain Bears text-based adventure game. Yeah. Frush, what else have you been playing besides Berenstein bears i've been playing some game pass stuff uh obviously people probably know that all of like a ton of bethesda games got added to game pass this week uh as part of bethesda getting bought by microsoft and so one of them was mororrowind, which is a Elder Scrolls game that I never played. Really?

Yeah, I never played it. And Morrowind came out in 2002. And it was, you know, I was sort of bracing myself for something that was just going to be like, you know, a 3D game from 2002 is going to look fucking heinous. And it does. Well, okay, so it starts out and you're in first person and it's fine and like yeah you know the the character models look a little goofy but it's very sharp because the xbox like does all this like upscaling stuff so it looks not bad and then i switched in the third person and my monstrosity like monstrosity of a cat man

was just like lumbering across the fields looking like a total like disaster that shouldn't exist so maybe hasn't aged the best i i think you're probably better off sticking with like the skyrim re-release that they put on there as well but uh that's been very good i've also been playing minecraft dungeons which a game i sort of wrote off when it first came out that's a pretty damn fun diablo like uh game i'd highly recommend it especially if you're looking for something fun to play with kids uh in multiplayer it's very pick up and play um there's a lot of like fun physics stuff where like the enemies go flying through the screen and there's like

some light rpg customization stuff uh and it's free on Game Pass. So if you have Game Pass, definitely check that out. Did you see what else came out on Game Pass PC? No. No? A little game called Nier Automata. I'm not sure if you saw that. It came out. Oh, that's a good game.

Hey, here is a thing I've been playing that I recommend for everybody, and I wish I had played more last year. It's called Cloud Gardens. Did any of you play this game uh some of us haven't even heard of it cloud gardens is delightful um it has kind of like a ps1 style 3d aesthetic and it's a puzzle game what justin only likes new fresh top of the line i thought i was i thought i was muted it's before k it it's like a it's a puzzle game but also kind of like maintaining a bonsai tree sort of thing

it's more about relaxing and it's just these like little 3d puzzles of uh i don't know i assume an abandoned world like imagine low res uh last of those two biomes, and then you throw seeds on them and then you add trash and the seeds sprout and they grow vines around that trash. And your goal is to cover the entire environment in foliage, like deciding where you place the plants and where you place the trash. And it is so, so delightful and pretty and nice what platform

is that on it's on pc i might be on other things but i that's where i'm playing it and i strongly recommend it i have a pc i have i have computers i love computers cool what's your favorite part of computers griffin well you can talk to them can't you you can have like a sometimes when i have a lonely feeling i'll open up the like microsoft sam and i'll be like how are you today sam and i can type in like good griffin i'm your friend forever and i'll never leave you have you done that it makes the lonely feelings not so lonely and i like that about computers sam's your friend next week macbook doesn't have a sam so i can't be friends with that can i that's true that's why i'm a pc next week we got it justin long hold on now god hold on me and justin

long are also best friends because he's because he is also a computer next week we got it takes two it's a mini episode with just two of them yeah chris and i are going to be playing it takes two uh which is a game about a couple getting a divorce so we thought we'd play that together it's like a multi-part centric holy shit a way out and i uh yeah I can't wait to hear this one. Yeah, I'll be looking forward to that. But it's also a comedy. A fun divorce comedy. Like This Is Us. More of a Mrs. Doubtfire.

With Meg Ryan and Bruce Willis. For crying out loud. Directed by Rob Reiner. They don't get divorced in the end. It'll be okay it's funny they get back together so this has been

the besties please subscribe to the show against against all odds please subscribe to this show we think

we've got a lot more great games in the future we bet down a little bit in the future but we'll be here

every week talking about these gems listen you're looking for the new games to come but we'll be here every week talking about these gems. Listen, you're looking for the new games to come out. We're here. We're going to help find the gems for you. We're renaming the show to Gem Hunters International. So please rate and review.

Subscribe to the show on your platform of choice. If you want to keep up with the show, at the Besties Pod is a great way to do it. So thanks for that, for all of it, up with the show at the besties pod it's a great way to do it um and uh so thanks for that for all of it for you

for being here we appreciate it really hit the bottom of the tank tune in for tune in for Russ and Chris getting a divorce

next week that's it for the besties be sure to join us again next time for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best

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