The Besties - Rusted Moss's grappling hook rules [Resties]

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Yes, it's Zelda week, but we still need some time to play Link's new adventure before we share our opinions. In the meantime, we want to spotlight a delightful new game that most folks missed. Rusted Moss gives the Metroidvania genre the one thing it needs: a killer grappling hook. We also talk about the Asus ROG Ally, the first legitimate Steam Deck competitor. Honorable mentions: PHoop Dreams, Blackberry, and Breath of the Wild. 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!

My name is Christopher Thomas Glant. My name is Russ Frushtick. Welcome to The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week we're talking about Rusted Moss, which is a Metroidvania about a young woman, fairy, halfling? Yeah? That doesn't matter, because this person has two absolutely crucial things that make most games better. A giant-ass sci-fi weapon, and a grappling hook. But before we get into that, I mean, we're gonna get deep into it, we're also to talk about the asus rog rog ally the new steam duck steam duck the new steam deck competitor before we do all of that you have something well before we even do that i would

also say like we're recording this before zelda has come out so yeah that's probably worth mentioning if you're listening and you're like why the fuck are they not talking about tears of the kingdom just to wait the next besties which is scheduled for uh may 19th we'll talk about tears of the kingdom a whole heck of a lot but for now you're just gonna have to wait we are blissfully ignorant about the future here at the Resties. And yeah, before we jump into things, I've had some plumbing issues in my house and I thought I'd share. Uh-huh. Well, basically, if you've lived in New York for any period of time, you might know that buildings, people live in buildings.

Oh, okay. might know that buildings people live in buildings oh okay and many people and frequently with these buildings if something needs to be fixed with regards to the water and it impacts the entire building they shut the entire building's water off first point i know you went to school in new york you lived in new york yeah i know about all this i'm familiar you're familiar now are you familiar with what happens after the water gets turned back on uh is it like goop water you have to like let it run for a while and it kind of looks like water ectoplasm it's basically i'm glad you mentioned ectoplasm because it's basically the scene in ghostbusters 2 where the tub tries to eat oscar it's essentially that and especially fitting because the tub tries to eat Oscar. It's essentially that. And especially fitting because the tub that in question was my son's tub and he's very wee.

And thankfully he was not in the tub when this happened. But I turned the tap on after the water had been out for 24 hours and the unholy little just creation that spewed forth was not even something i envisioned within my eye range can you give me some colors and textures well brown we're just going to start with brown start with brown okay and a thick soupy brown okay like diarrhea almost like diarrhea but like if you mix some diarrhea with some melted like chocolate ice cream like that consistency a diary with ice yeah we're not gonna go deeper on the gross out factor thing suffice to say i had no idea how to address this problem because after

it all happened even when the water started coming out clear it was all still messed up and i had to bring some experts in to solve the problem and nothing makes me feel like more of a dumbass than a plumber in my house i don't know which way to take this one he was so friendly i feel bad but i just like it was just very humbling for someone else to be like well the problem here is the cartridge and the cartridge has got to be replaced and see right there you gotta you gotta do hickey with the thing is be be honest with me did you worry did you worry at any point that maybe they had switched the pipes so like the poop pipe oh was had been replaced or like switched with your swapped with your your your baby's bathtub there was a definitely a moment where i was like is this sewage

because it certainly had the consistency it didn't stink like sewage so i so like i was kind of sure that it wasn't it was probably like dirt i want to say but like how is dirt just because the pipes were off like the pipes have been been on? Yeah. You know, the dirt, where did it come from? Yeah, no, that's like what unsettles me about when that happens, right? Is that I assume, I assume, and somebody who knows much more about plumbing should let us know. I assume that's like the sediment inside the pipes, right? For sure. Like on the bottom of a bottle of wine or kombucha or something yeah

yeah yeah and that when the pipes are off and there's not a lot of water pushing through that that settled the sediment is like getting into the water right and then wouldn't it always be getting into the water well see but if like the water just if it's zipping on by then yes but it's moving so fast it's not having time for it to like stew up in there so so it's in the water you just don't see yeah you're just seeing a little little bit of it you're not seeing it at all but that's what's creepy right because then like does that mean you're always drinking a little bit of the light wait i just witnessed, that was just 24 hours worth of like horror that came out? And the difference is you got it, what if it like accumulates and then you got 24 hours of pure.

There's no way. Where does it come from? There's, I don't know, but please, if you're listening. You think there's like a separate pipe that they like, they're like, you know. I don't think it's a separate pipe. I'm sure, there's no way that was 24 hours of whatever please i think it is no no experts please write into the twitter account uh title it like plumbing answer and tell us when the water gets shut off and then turn back on like where is that stuff coming from i cannot think of any possible

better segue to transition us into a video game called rusted moss oh yeah it did have the consistency of rusted moss exactly so let's take a break and then come back and talk about that game. Cool. Okay, Rusted Moss. I'm going to throw it to you, but I think we should maybe give the listeners some context of the decision to play this game. Sure, and you can tell your context, and I'm going to correct the statement on that context. So go ahead.

I'm not going to do that. No. The truth is I have been recommending a lot of great games that's true to my my dearest friend russell frushick lately and one of those games may or may not have been rusted moss but we'll never know for sure i mean i'll know for sure and the listeners will know for sure because it doesn't it doesn't even matter what What matters is you fell in love with this game. I did. And you pulled a real crisp plant.

You came into our best use Slack room and you said, listen up, buds. This is going to be in my top 10 games of the year. Yep. And I was like, hey, as someone who makes that mistake a lot, I've got a lot of experience in this. Be careful. Be careful. There's a lot, I've got a lot of experience in this. Be careful. Be careful. There's a lot more year left. Multiverse.

Multiverses. And you were like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It really is that good. We should do a Resties on it. And I said, I'm trusting you. This is the game I'm going to play right before Zelda. It has a lot hinging on it. And I did.

And I liked it. Well, yeah, let me also just say let me just say i did specify that it was like a very rust frustrated kind of game i did not necessarily think other people would like it as much as i liked it that that is true and and the other the other word of warning i will give to our listeners is this game feels like an actual indie game, which is to say it feels kind of rough around the edges. Yeah, it's a little rough. And that's totally chill. I think we've played a number of Devolver indie games on the Besties and Rusties lately, or that caliber of quote indie game where, yeah, it's an indie game, but like it has a whole apparatus around it.

Yeah, Cult of the Lamb is an example of one that is like a higher tier, higher budget indie game, like in terms of level of polish and just overall production value. Yeah, okay. So I've set the table setting here. Tell us what the game actually is. Sure.

So it's a metroidvania uh you are a fae uh as in like the fairy people um and you basically i'm not gonna like dive too deep into the narrative because i only halfway sort of picked it up but basically it's a big open world that you're exploring as your character and where it differentiates from other metroidvanias is in twofold so fold a you have 360 degree aiming at all times so while you're moving or running or jumping or whatever you can aim in any direction you can fire in any direction so that's thing a which is rare general a lot of metroidvanias do not have that maybe a direction aiming but this is full 360 aiming the other big thing and plant alluded to this in besties previously you've got this grappling hook and the grappling hook is like one of the most unique grappling hooks i think i've

ever used in a video game do you think that's fair to say plant yeah it's a bungee cord it's a bungee grappling hook really which is really like i cannot think of too many games whose grappling hooks work like this usually grappling hooks in games are either like it's just like you shoot like a hook shot where you like shoot it out and it like zips you immediately to that location or like uh like a slack rope like indiana jones where you like swing around on it but this has like an elasticity to it so that if you i guess attach at a certain moment you can use the tautness of the rope to essentially launch yourself over gaps or over walls and stuff like that and that's like a

big part of the game is using that functionality yeah so an example would be you come across a really large gap, right? And you could just do the traditional pendulum style swing, like that would be one puzzle solve, right? You know, there's a thing hanging in the middle and you grappling hook onto it and you just pendulum swing across traditional grappling hook. In this game, I found a number of puzzles where it was like actually we don't need you to go horizontal we need you to go vertical so what you would do is there's a big gap and there's a little you know like thing above you that you could grappling hook onto but there's also a cliff so you would jump off the cliff to get some momentum downwards grappling hook up at the ceiling use the kind of like

i guess the springiness of the bungee or the tension to then send you back up into space and then like flying up higher into the screen does that make sense yeah we're not hard to describe physics experts yeah we're not physicians is that what you call a physics expert uh i'm gonna guess now i'm gonna guess that that's a doctor yeah um but if you've played portal i think it works in kind of a similar way in in the terms that like it it considers your existing momentum and yeah you're using gravity graph gravity you're using gravity and momentum to kind of solve physics puzzles in a weird way yeah and i would say like they're very smart insofar as the game uh approaches that mentality for all the different areas so there's one area that's like uh underwater and you use that same

like physics methodology but you're underwater so obviously your jumps are higher and maybe you don't get as much tautness on the rope you have to account for that and all the areas each of the areas has kind of its own little rule that um you know affects the level design uh another area has like wind blowing so you can now make jumps that previously would be like too far for you to jump but only if the wind is blowing at that very moment. So it's very clever. And I'm really super into it. So the grappling hook is really cool.

But honestly, what impressed me maybe more was the way that they handled guns in like combat in this game. Yeah. Which is really clever. And i don't can you think of anything quite like this well what specifically so and you basically have a range uh for for your bullets your bullets don't go you know forever or off the screen they actually go a very short distance and you can get upgrades for them to go longer. But I never got to a point where I was shooting across the screen. Yeah, no, you won't. You're right.

And the types of enemies that you come across also have different ranges for their weapons. So it's not like they're shooting things across the screen. kind of Rochambeau effect to combat where you're thinking of like, how do I want to upgrade my weapon to counter the strengths and distances of an enemy's weapon? So for example, you could have an enemy that's really, really, really tough,

but it's slow and it only shoots a very short distance, but those shots are like extremely powerful. Well, you could just maintain distance away from it upgrade your bullets to go a little bit further and you can stand just out of range of it and it can just never really hit you so suddenly this enemy that was really daunting is like not a threat really at all as long as you come with the right upgrade for your weapon and there were a number of times where I felt like I was having to

think about really spacing in the game in terms of the combat rather than, I guess, a traditional idea of like shooter action game skill combat. And the grappling hook comes into effect there too because there are a number of boss fights throughout the game where positioning yourself, whether that's like hanging from the grappling hook or getting really, really close to the ceiling so that you can kind of skirt things that are gliding underneath you or dangling off an edge. Using the grappling hook to get positioned and then having yourself just in range to be able to pull off the shots became like the entire way i was playing the game by by the time i i stopped yeah and you were you were talking about the the upgrade system if you've played hollow knight before obviously people that are fans of metroidvanias and fans of the besties are familiar with hollow knight

but uh they have similar systems where you're essentially attaching perks and you have a number of perk slots that you upgrade over the course of the game. And then at any time when you're at a save point, you can basically slot in, hey, I want more range or hey, I want maybe some extra health or something like that. So you can constantly tweak your build depending on like the boss fight that you're in and stuff like that. You can also just switch weapons totally on the fly in the middle of combat, which is very helpful, not only from a range perspective, but also some of the weapons, and this is like mid to late game, but some of the weapons will directly impact your physics. So if you, the rocket launcher is like an obvious example. If you fire at your feet and do a very traditional rocket jump,

it will launch you into the air and you're capable of now doing jumps that were like previously totally impossible. And you can kind of imagine how you would pair that with the physics of the rope into doing these like really acrobatic, amazing things in the game. so i don't want to like go too deep into the messiness but i think it's worth talking about not as like a dig but as more of a heads up yeah let me let me let me set it up and then you can speak to your experience okay so um rusted moss is different from a lot of Metroidvanias, especially newer Metroidvanias, insofar as you can go to a lot of different places very, very early on. So much of the map is open to you. If you think of it like Dark Souls, like arguably in Dark Souls, you could go to the cemetery or the catacombs within the first like 10 minutes of gameplay. You absolutely shouldn't do that. You will get rocked,

but you can do that. And in rusted moss, that is true as well. Maybe not to that extreme, but very early on, you are able to access areas that are much, much higher level. I get there aren't levels,

but like areas that you really shouldn't be in because you're not quite at a proper power level yet but you can access those and for someone that maybe doesn't play a ton of metroidvanias i i could see it being very confusing because you feel like oh i'm here this must be the only way i can go and because i've played them i knew oh, this is like super fucking hard. There's no way they want me to go this way. And like went exploring in other locations. So what was your experience?

I agree with that. Your framing of like this being an old fashioned type of Metroidvania is really helpful. And I wish I had gone into it with that in mind because i think i think i was picturing something more modern because it's doing a lot of interesting things and it feels like a modern video game in a lot of ways yeah um but you know the worst experience i had and i was like texting you in a rage over it um was i got to some point relatively early in the game but like i don't know after the second or third boss or some something like that and a character was like hey you know what here's a teleport you can now teleport back to all these different spots that you visited in the environment

um and you need to go like far westward um that's where whatever you need is and i was like great i can go get the macguffin in the far West. So I teleported to the far West and I pressed Westward and I was just getting, uh, just destroyed. I mean, totally obliterated. And I was making, I made some progress and then I made a little bit more and then like suddenly an hour had passed and I was just repeating the same thing over and over again, making my way further and further, but not getting anywhere close to, I think, where I needed to be.

So then I texted you and basically was just honestly like venting about it because I was getting so frustrated. And you pointed out that where I was was a late game spot, maybe even an optional spot. I mean, it's definitely optional yeah you can basically beat the game when you beat a boss you get like a body part effectively that's what you're collecting to like get to the end and you can beat the game with like five of them but there were like 12 in total so so like a ton of the game is optional. It's kind of staggering how much the game is optional. I wouldn't recommend doing that if only because, you know, your power ups and that make the game a lot easier when you go through every area. But yeah, yeah, you do need to be mindful of like, is this area too much for me at that given time?

Yeah. And that's what I found frustrating because in my head I was thinking Metroidvania, if I can, as long as I can move forward, I am in a place that I can and should be. Like a Metroidvania, especially a modern one, would kind of gear gate me out of this place for the time being if I shouldn't be here. And that was not the case. Like I technically could exist there i technically could kind of make progress but it felt all wrong and once you said that i it just changed how we played it from that point on yeah i came to a number of other places where i that would have happened to me again had i not talked to you and just gotten that that encouragement of like if

you are annoyed keep going there there are other places for you to look because at the time it felt like oh well surely this is the right path and then i would i would just be wasting my time going around the environment when no the exact opposite like you said there are so many directions to go that if i got irritated or bored with one thing i just would go look for another open slot on the um the the map screen and the way that the map works is it's like a little block like graph paper almost and there's openings um between each i guess square representing like i don't know a part of the level and if there's an opening that's opening to just nothingness that means that like hey that's that's another block that you could go fill

in um so as long as i saw openings that were not connected to anything where i you know any part of the map that i had unlocked then there was more for me to explore yeah it's actually you know the openness of this game is very weird for the genre, because traditionally, and you've played enough of Metroidvanias in like the last couple years that you kind of know, you know, think of Axiom Verge 2, for example, or Metroid Dread. flow is you fight this boss after beating the boss you get like a double jump and then because you have the double jump you can now access this other part of the map but in this game there are very few of those there's like three and you get them all very early in the game and once you have those three that's all you need to explore basically the entire rest of the map and i mean it can be a little intimidating but yeah plant plants methodology is right you're really just looking for new areas you haven't been yet and um and it'll be very clear because once you enter like

a new biome like the new mechanics start showing up with the wind that i talked about and stuff like that so it's it's always very obvious when you're like oh this is a brand new thing i should explore more here um yeah i i really was like completely smitten by this game in ways that i was not fully expecting uh just because it's like so kind of under under the radar and didn't get a ton of attention but i hope more people play it because there just aren't a ton of like really really good indie metroidvanias it's a tough genre to tackle as an indie um and i thought they did just a really terrific job but before we before we move on i wanted to give you some time to talk about the kind of like look oh yeah uh yeah the look is it looks like a really crunchy

pixelated game i'm trying to think of like an analog but it just it it just looks like from like the mid 90s era 2d games but more stylized than that a little more yeah i would almost say celeste in a weird way yeah it's not as clean as celeste but it is in the same ballpark colorful um but it has that that i don't know there's a shape to those characters where it's it's almost like 8-bit art um yeah it's like 8-bit art but it's modernized such that it doesn't feel it doesn't look like any nes game but it does kind of look like games that came out maybe on pc in that era yeah if you if you're listening in 8-bit art is kind of a strange description google mario 8-bit versus mario 16-bit and that'll give you a really clear idea of what the visual differences

are in terms of like how a pixel character is drawn but yeah like or mario on the nes versus mario on the super nes for example yeah mario has eyeballs in one of them and then uh the other one mario just has a dot yeah it is symbolizing part of the space um cool yeah i i really like this i i actually think i will probably go back to it and play a little bit more i don't think i will see the end because i don't see the end of most games um but it's been kind of like a nice chill out game especially on the asus rog ally oh yeah which we can talk about right after the break okay we're back i've been playing a new video game handheld and we mentioned this i think at the end of the last besties too um the asus rog ally is that really how it's pronounced i asus or rog rog i believe it is because it is an acronym for the republic of gamers oh my god i know i know i know it's so did you need a visa to enter

the republic of gamers uh you do need a visa or a master card american express is also accepted baby um here's what it is the Asus ROG ally I'm just going to call it the ally yeah just call it the ally it picture a Steam Deck and now blur it in your head with the

aesthetic of a Nintendo Switch and throw windows on it and it's got windows and that's basically what it is. Instead of the Steam Deck, which runs Linux with a proton shell, is that what it's called? I don't know.

It's basically the way that the Steam Deck works. Yes, it has SteamOS on it, which runs on top of Linux, and SteamOS translates, basically. Whatever. It makes it possible to run Windows games on Linux. So you don't actually have to have Windows on the device, even though all the games that it's playing, or the vast majority of them, are actually designed for Windows. This is kind of just an astonishing feat.

I have, to this day day no real understanding of how they pulled it off i've watched technical videos about it they make my nose bleed um but it's really cool and honestly it works like the vast majority of the time at launch for steam deck there were some games that didn't work like persona 4 golden was i think one of the biggies um and every now and then i still have some headaches with it rusted moss actually was one of the few i've had a headaches with um i had the wrong version of proton running oh interesting i didn't know you figured it out i guess at some point i had turned on experimental because you needed it to run like i don't know persona 4

something a long time ago it had worked perfectly fine until this and then i had to like delete the proton shell off the game i don't know anyway it was it was a whole thing um the flip side of that is on the ally it just runs windows so if you want to play anything that runs on Windows and meets the hardware specs, it should just work the way it works on any other Windows PC, which is great. It's really, really cool. And that's especially good if you want to more easily play stuff that's outside of Steam. If you're a person who plays a lot of indie games on itch.io, or if you play a lot of old games on good old games, or the Epic Games Store, or any of those things, Xbox, downloading off Xbox Game Pass, those are really positive reasons to consider the ally over the Steam Deck.

That doesn't mean you can't play many of those themes on the Steam Deck it's a pain in the ass it's a pain in the ass yeah it's annoying you know it requires going to desktop mode and setting things up and it's not impossible but it does add layers and steps that in theory the the uh ally would not have yes but the ally is running windows which is designed for mouse and keyboard and and it has some ways that it tries to fix that which i'll get to but at the end of the day it it is windows so you are navigating windows with effectively what feels like a better version of the switch controller and a touch screen um and that's not horrible it's not impossible by any means but it certainly is not ideal and that's why asus has added i think it's called armory crate or armory crate se which is trying to do for the ally what the steam os did

for for the steam deck which is hey hey, this is more of a menu system where you can pick from all the games that you want to play in the similar way to how you'd pick from games on your Xbox or on your PlayStation 5 or on your Switch. There's a whole bunch of icons and tiles. You can easily navigate between them. If you've used Steam Big Picture mode, it's basically like that.

Yes, and i did not like it i found it very buggy and unreliable and at a certain point i was just getting so frustrated that i would exit out of it um the thing though is you could just run steam big picture mode on this yeah so you can kind of recreate the Steam setup pretty well and the Steam Deck experience pretty well on this device. That said, it's more expensive than the Steam Deck. I think the version that is currently available for pre-order I think is $50, about $50 more expensive

than the most expensive steam deck on the market and the reason for that is well one they have a windows license on it uh it's a little bit more powerful or at least it is on paper i i was yeah it's a more modern chip uh the the um screen is 1080p instead of 800p and um yeah i mean it is certainly more powerful but while it is more powerful i wasn't playing games on it that i can't play on the steam deck right so like we couldn't get um you know jedi survivor to run on the steam deck i couldn't get it to run on the ally either yeah um you might it's not a generational step forward. If you're playing Elden Ring, which runs on both,

you might see a 5 to 10 frame rate jump on the ally. That's a very good way of putting it. Yeah, overall, I really, really like it, and I really, really like that there are just some competitors coming out for the steam deck yeah it's interesting i'm curious in the hand if you were to compare the two which would you rather hold obviously the steam deck's very large but i have sort of taken to its form factor from just from a comfort comfort standpoint i've spent so much time with it

that is a great question because when the Steam Deck came out, I remember a lot of people dunked on it. It was like, wow, it's massive. But I adore the Steam Deck. It feels like an actual video game controller and it feels really like, I don't know, like serious. Yeah.

I don't know a better way of saying it. Like it feels expensive and sturdy. And I was really worried about the ally because it is very slim. It's not totally flat. It has some, like, curve to it for your palms and a little bit of grip on the back. But it is closer to the OLED switch kind of design, right? Yeah. And that does not feel very great in the hand.

But twist, i like it quite a bit i actually liked playing um rusted moss on it more on on on the ally than i did on the steam deck interesting um i something like um uh octopath traveler 2 I've been really enjoying on it because it just has a really beautiful, bright screen. I run it like Octopath at max settings. Beautiful, bright, bright screen. You can run it at like 120 hertz. So, I mean, just a ridiculous frame rate that is completely unnecessary. And it's a little bit lighter.

So, you know, when I'm playing an RPG like that, that I'm actually going to sit down and play for an hour or more, that's great. That said, I don't know. If I like playing something that's more hardcore, like a shooter or something, I think Steam Deck is more where I want to go. I was playing some Forza Horizon 5 on the Ally,

and it's good, but I did feel like i was missing maybe a little bit of the precision in a 3d space sure which again is weird because rusted moss is also about precision but for some reason it clicked differently i guess it's to say like a lot of these things are just toss-ups I don't really think like one is inherently better than the other. I don't think you can really go wrong. And I think which one you get might just be like which one's available. I mean, the Steam Deck at this point is available for anyone, right?

Yes, but you do have to order it online. And that's a barrier, especially for like if you – I don't know. I could see somebody asking for this. I mean it's a hell of an expensive Christmas gift. Maybe it's a Christmas birthday gift combined. But in theory, this is going to be sold like Best Buy, right? So I think that there is still among some people a market where it's like oh i i'm gonna go and i'm gonna

actually go buy this thing i it's available right now i i've been able to test it in person maybe at at a retailer um versus you know the steam deck where you just kind of have to go on everybody else's word yeah um yeah it's it's it's pretty it's pretty great um i don't think you need to buy one fresh i have a feeling that that Griffin's going to get one. I'm sure he will. He's hardcore. Griffin will definitely get one. Obsessive.

I certainly was like, this seems neat. It certainly seems like something that I would use. But having a Steam Deck and loving the Steam Deck as much as I do, this seems like the sort of thing that especially, I mean, i'm glad the competitors are moving into this space because now i know almost for sure that there's going to be an equivalent one of these from all of the major hardware manufacturers probably annually i wonder if anybody had had that idea maybe in a rusty's prediction i can't i can't recall but we'll have to check at the end of the year it does sound familiar it does sound familiar uh i know we have one last year but i don't know if we have one this year we'll see yeah we'll see you might have looked it up already i i don't know i

honestly don't know i think i think it is cool but if you already have a steam deck it's probably not worthwhile as i'm sure plant can attest yeah i also think that if you're thinking of dipping your toe into this world of like handheld pc gaming as it were i think the steam deck is much more welcoming not only from a price point standpoint but also because it's um just very instantly tied in with your Steam library, which obviously the ally can be as well. But it just seems like more of a console experience. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I guess I would say if you are tied into PC gaming, you should probably get this one. Like if you've been tied into it, especially if you've been PC gaming for like a decade or whatnot right and you have probably have your multiple accounts across like a number of different storefronts and you're familiar with how like how to monitor windows pc gaming in general yeah um but if you are coming from the switch and you are yeah at that point like a hundred percent i think you are better served by going to the Steam Deck first.

I think the Steam Deck is like the kind of ideal entry point into the world of PC gaming because PC gaming, I mean, that's the joke, is like it doesn't just work. And somehow the Steam Deck does. And the best guess I have for why that is is people design to it almost like it is a console. Exactly right. The specs and Valve has their system for verifying games.

So you know not only that it runs because the performance is right, but also that you can read all the HUD elements and the text isn't too small and stuff like that. And Valve controls the store, like the store on pc gaming and people want to keep them happy so making sure that your game can run on steam deck i won't say that like people feel like they absolutely have to do it but i i imagine it certainly runs through their head that they would like it to run well on the device named after the storefront that's going to make them most of their money. Yeah. One other thing. So this is a little bit more powerful than the Steam Deck for sure,

but it's not like a new generation of these. And I've been trying to figure out will we get something actually more powerful than the Steam Deck anytime soon? Will even the next iteration of the Steam Deck be more powerful than the steam deck anytime soon will even the next iteration of the steam deck be more powerful and like my best guess is no and i'm curious one what you think and what kind of your your reasoning is okay well here's the thing i don't think i know the answer to this question okay valve has already talked about it they already said that if they release another

steam deck the two areas that they would look to improve this is going off a memory so i'm just but i'm pretty sure it was both battery life and the screen so maybe they'd improve the screen to like an oled screen or whatever or maybe they would improve the battery life to like double the amount you can play, but they would not change the specs. And the reason for that is what we were just talking about. They don't want to have to go through and re-verify everything. And they don't want to start making distinctions of, well, it runs on the Steam Deck one, but it doesn't run on the steam deck two and i think we are three at least three years away from a like pretty significant spec overhaul on the steam deck and it might even be like four to five years away i think they like this being the standard

and yeah we'll see what like competitors like the ally do for that but it might like expedite that thinking but i don't think it's going to happen in the next two years certainly i i think i think two years is right i i agree i mean i i remember that report too also the idea of a steam deck with an oled screen and a better battery life is nirvana yeah i was playing let me just say i i've been i'll talk about it in a little bit of uh other stuff but i've been replaying Breath of the Wild in anticipation for Tears in the Kingdom. Oh, yeah. And I've been playing so much Steam Deck before that, and then I switched back to the OLED Switch.

Yeah. And fuck, that screen looks so good. It's- And I'm colorblind, and I can see how dramatically different it is. I know. It's it's and I'm colorblind and I could see how dramatically difference is. It is unreal to the point of like, yeah, I kind of want more consoles that use that screen. Yeah, I agree. And on your point, I agree. That's all true about Valve.

The threat would be another company coming around and doing it. I don't think that'll happen either, though, because Valve doesn't seem interested in making money off the Steam Deck. I mean, they are in the back end, right? They're making money because people are plugged into the ecosystem. Exactly, exactly. But off the hardware itself. Yeah, I agree. They stand to benefit just by having more people playing Steam and by normalizing gaming handheld PCs, because that means there will be more competition. And that competition will just have steam on it anyway. So the more of these that are out there, the better.

They don't, I imagine, feel like a need to force somebody to outdo them. And I can't imagine they want to just keep outdoing the market with that advantage because they want people to participate in this market. They want the ally to exist. I have no doubt. Like, this seems like a huge win for them. But because of that, because they don't need to make a lot of money off the device itself, again, they can sell it at these ridiculously low prices for what they're actually selling. And everyone else doesn't have that

advantage you know like you're not going and buying your games off aces's website or web you know storefront so they need to make a profit off of off of each of these allies or any other handheld devices that they make which means they're always working from behind against the Steam Deck. And so it'll be a few years before, I guess, you know, whatever chips are being used to, like, make a more powerful portable gaming PC before those prices drop and they can put something out there that is, you know, noticeably better than the Steam Deck versus right now where it's, again, it is better. I don't want to undersell that.

It's just not, again, it's it's again it is better i don't want to undersell that um it's just not again it's not playing some of the games that are are now brand new to pc gaming yeah and that that's the part that makes me wonder yeah is it more like two years for steam or for um valve to get back in the ring because i imagine they'll want to have some steam deck out there that can play practically everything that's available yeah i don't know i don't think i don't think that they need everything to be playable at high quality i think they're very okay with everything being playable at low um but i i do think it has to be a little weird to them to have their device now start to have more and more games that just aren't going to run on it.

Yeah, I think Starfield's going to be a big moment for them. And I'm sure people will mod it to the point of getting it to work on a Steam Deck. And that's sort of what I was talking about in terms of the community basis. I think, at least for right now, you're going to see a ton of YouTube videos, how to get Starfield running on Steam Deck. You won't necessarily see that amount of support for Ally, at least for now. So if you're looking for like a lot of support on how to run your games, yeah, Steam Deck, again, a bit of a safer bet.

But you're right. If you want, you know, the best of the best in terms of stats and and get the most versatility the ally is probably the way to go um i think that's it do you want to do some honorable mentions before we wrap up yeah this is going to be my last hurrah talking about breath of the wild because i know oh wow but tears of the kingdom is going to come out and it's just going to destroy and it's out already i'm talking to future everybody in the planet who was already playing it and loving it. But as a last hurrah for breath of the wild,

I was like, I, you know, I don't know when I'm going to play this game next. It could be 10 years. So I attempted to finish the trials of the sword, which were these like insanely difficult challenges that you only access like towards the very end of the game they released this dlc and i felt like it

would be like a really good last hurrah to like okay i did it and like finished all the quests in the game and and got that satisfaction and i really super tried. I made it through halfway through the final challenge, which just getting halfway took like an hour of me like really playing carefully and just like creeping my way along. And then I got fully smoked by like five guardians in one of the challenge rooms. And I was like, okay, this is not happening. There's no way I'm going to like throw myself at this with the game coming out so soon, the sequel. And so I decided on another objective, which I was very close to, but I hadn't fully done.

And I went around and I finished my compendium in Breath of the Wild, which was, if you recall, you had like an in-game camera and you can take pictures of like every item and enemy and boss and whatever in the game and kind of like pokemon snap if you will and whenever you like do one of them it like fills a little thing in your book and whatever and i was missing probably like 30 of them and over the last like week or so i've just been like picking away at it and uh it is done i finished my compendium and it was

a nice little send off to Breath of the Wild I'm proud of you it's a feat I'm like jealous that I can't do that I mean you can but no I can't my brain does not work that way I could try so

hard to be like I'm going to sit down I'm going to savor this game I'm going to set a goal like this and I'm going to sit down. I'm going to savor this game. I'm going to set a goal like this, and I'm going to go out and do it. And I won't. I just, I like, my brain doesn't work that way. That's okay. But it sounds nice. It was nice.

It sounds very nice. It was a nice little heartwarming thing. That sounds so good. Too bad we'll never play that game again. Never ever. It sucks now yeah what hey it's future me this certainly not when switch 2 comes out and it's running at 8k and 120 hertz cool uh my stuff uh i watched hoop dreams last night have you ever seen that dreams

yeah that movie's great uh it's a three-hour pbs documentary i believe it was pbs um uh about two high school basketball players in chicago in the late 80s early 90s and it's about so much more than basketball it is it's absolutely fantastic um itads up if you decide to stream it. It is shot in that square old school TV format. Oh, yeah. And shot on, you know, like old school, I believe, whatever that digital is a digital film. I think it's digital. Like TV.

Yeah. Very, very, very early TV camera. So it looks rough. Like it looks of its time um and that's just how it's supposed to look so if you turn it on you're like wow amazon has the bad version of it no that's just that's just it um you kind of adapt to it pretty quickly and at a certain point it almost feels like an aesthetic choice because the time period um so there's that and then just a heads up for everybody if you like me are somebody who loves uh the we shop wednesday video i have no idea what that is the they're not so do you know nirvana the band the show

yes and you know that they have the we shop wednesday song no super mario rpg no i just saw that really you don't know that i know that i know there's e-shop music but i didn't oh my gosh well yeah okay we don't have the rights with you afterwards it's like only the most important video game song ever written this is weird um but the one of the co-stars of nirvana the band the show is an indie film director and he's finally getting his big break and it is a movie about the origins of blackberry the phone and it stars Glenn Howerton. Right, right, right. It's Always Sunny, and he has heads shaved. Yeah. And Jay Baruchel, and Carrie Ewells, and this guy from Nirvana, the band, the show.

And I really want this movie to do well because I like them. I like his stuff in general. I think he makes really interesting indie movies. And I like the Canadian film industry succeeding. And most importantly, the word is that this movie is expected to do well, and he wants to

turn that success into a Nirvana, the band, the show movie. Oh, wow. Which is a great way to burn all of it for basically an audience of me. Is it funny? Blackberry? It looks very funny.

I mean, the cast is funny. You haven't seen it? I haven't seen it. It comes out like, well, okay, it's actually out now.

I probably have seen it. I'm sure I've written something very wonderful and letterboxed about it. So, all of you can go read that. Yeah, I've heard it's funny the trailer looked very very fun but also tragic and better than the tetris movie i mean yeah low bar low bar um cool that's it do we did it we did it okay the games that we mentioned uh today we talked about rusted moss we talked about the

asus rog ally uh we talked about the film hoop dreams and blackberry and of course we said goodbye we'll never ever talk about it ever again to the legend of Zelda breath of the wild rest in peace to a real, a real one. Pour one out. Bye-bye breath of the wild. Pour some Viking on the ground in honor of breath. Dorks. That's it.

We did it. Next, next resties. We're going to talk about, I'm going to guess we're going to talk about Breath. No, I'm going to guess that we're going to talk about Tears of the Kingdom in some capacity, but probably something else, because that's going to be a little while away from now. And maybe maybe people will be all Tears of the Kingdom now. But I don't want you running away if you feel overwhelmed by what is going to be this absolutely bonkers deluge of Zelda content over the next few weeks. So we'll keep you posted.

You can always find out more on our Twitter, at thebestiespod. And that's it. That's it for the resties. I am Christopher Thomas Plant. You are... Brass Froshtick. That's right. Christopher Thomas Plant. You are Ross Forstic.

That's right. And we are the Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. Resties!